The Compatriots

by Andrei Soldatov

  A few hours later, the glass doors under the entrance’s concrete canopy opened. A tall, chubby-cheeked man in an impeccable suit appeared outside. He approached the crowd of journalists and TV cameras that had gathered there. He began speaking with a slight American accent.

  “Today I’m so busy with the affairs of the TV company because of the very difficult situation the company found itself in after the departure of some of the employees that I had no time to look into personnel issues. But I think first thing we need is that people take a rest from all this, all of them,” he ended cheerfully.11

  Boris Jordan had every reason to smile. He was quite pleased with himself and the way the operation had been implemented, especially since, at the end of the day, it was his special project.

  With Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin, the quest for success became focused on politics and control over society. Boris Jordan, offspring of an aristocratic Russian émigré family in the United States, had been called upon to help the Kremlin take over the rebellious TV channel. He had played his family history card and used his American citizenship. The day Jordan was appointed, Nemtsov said of him, “It was a very smart decision by the government to appoint Boris Jordan. Why? He is an American citizen; his ancestor was a minister of education under Tsar Alexander I. His father studied at the Cadets Corps in Belgrade; he himself has a very good noble pedigree. And I cannot imagine how the US State Department would criticize Russia for suppressing press freedom with an American citizen, formally or informally, heading this company.”12

  Now Jordan was standing proudly at the steps of Ostankino before the flashbulbs of dozens of cameras. He had gotten rid of troublemakers by using the methods practiced by Russian oligarchs in their wars for plants and factories. The security guards in dark suits who had taken over the premises of NTV in the early hours were employees of his investment company. This phase of the operation had gone well.

  It was time for the second phase: to prove his usefulness in running the television channel. It was, essentially, his first day at his new job. Very soon that job was to include fighting for the hearts and minds of Russian Americans, as NTV happened to be the most popular Russian-speaking channel beyond Russian borders.

  CHAPTER 22

  GETTING OUT THE MESSAGE

  Vladimir Gusinsky, once the most powerful media tycoon in Russia, was now forced out and in exile and didn’t want to give up so easily. He wanted to stay in the game. The only option he saw open to him was to launch a television channel for Russians abroad, primarily those in America. So he did, investing his money and energy into a new project. But Boris Jordan’s NTV would follow him, and the fight for the hearts and minds of the emigrant compatriots began.

  The night of September 27, 2001, Russians in Europe, Israel, and the United States watching the Russian-speaking TV channel NTV International saw their TV sets suddenly go dark. This was no technical error. The channel’s broadcasting system in the technical center in Ostankino had been shut down.1

  After taking over the station in April, Jordan had spent the summer seizing control of Gusinsky’s numerous other companies. Those he couldn’t lay his hands on, he tried to kill. By September, NTV International was the last remnant of NTV still under Gusinsky’s control. The oligarch had launched the channel, an extension of the NTV brand, five years earlier to reach out to the Russian diaspora. NTV news and shows launched first in Israel and Europe and then, in 1999, in the United States. By the fall of 2001, NTV International was the most popular Russian-speaking TV channel in the world.

  As a company registered overseas, NTV International was out of reach of both the Russian authorities and Boris Jordan. But because it was broadcast from Ostankino, the station was vulnerable.

  In the end, the September 27 blackout lasted only a few hours. Jordan’s argument that Gusinsky’s company was switched off because of outstanding debts was easily dismissed by Gusinsky’s lawyers, and broadcasting resumed. It was a failure for Jordan and a first, modest victory for Gusinsky. Stripped of all his media assets and having fled Russia, the oligarch was nonetheless still resourceful. NTV International, he believed, could serve as a launching pad to start a counteroffensive against Putin.

  But there was a problem. NTV International didn’t create any original content. Gusinsky had to fill his airtime with old shows, series, and movies. He had a way to reach out to Russians abroad but almost nothing to broadcast. Boris Jordan, on the other hand, had content generated by NTV but no way of reaching international audiences. Gusinsky understood that the blackout was a preemptive attack and that Jordan was already building a direct competitor to his international channel.

  Jordan had registered a US branch of his NTV. Gusinsky, motivated by profit, had launched his first oversees broadcasting in Israel because that country had the biggest Russian-speaking audience outside Russia. Jordan made a different choice: his first move was to rent luxury offices in North Bergen, New Jersey, just across the river from upper Manhattan, for NTV’s American branch. It was absolutely clear that Jordan wanted to reach out first to the Russian audience in the United States. He claimed it was all business. But was it really?

  Two months later, in November 2001, Vladimir Putin visited the United States. From Moscow, he flew to Washington, DC, where the Bush administration ensured that he was hosted in grand style. Among other events, Putin met with the US Congress and received a confidential White House briefing from the head of the CIA. It was a time of the thaw between Russia and the United States, and Putin exploited to the full the fact that he had turned out to be the first foreign leader to express condolences when he called Bush on September 11 after the al-Qaeda attack on the World Trade Center.

  From Washington, Putin flew to Houston, where he gave a speech at Rice University. From there, it was just a short trip to the Bushes’ ranch outside Waco. Putin was the first foreign leader ever to visit the sixteen-hundred-acre Prairie Chapel Ranch. “I want to show him some of my favorite spots,” Bush said. When he did meet Putin, he called him “a leader of a new kind, a reformer.”2 After enjoying a few days with the Bushes, Putin flew to New York. He visited Ground Zero, gave an interview on NPR, and attended a sermon at the Russian Orthodox Church mourning the Russian victims of 9/11.

  During the US trip, Putin was accompanied, unsurprisingly, by high-level Russian officials. More surprising was another of his companions. As the Washington Post noted, “Shadowing Putin across the country was Boris Jordan, a Russian American financier given control of NTV when the country’s only major independent television network was taken over by a state-controlled company.”3

  Indeed, Jordan’s presence was highly unusual. Normally, a Russian American who didn’t hold any official position would not mix with the Russian foreign minister, the head of Putin’s personal security service, and the secretary of the Russian Security Council at all, let alone on a diplomatic trip abroad. But there he was. In fact, Boris Jordan was following along right behind Putin when Rudy Giuliani showed the Russian president around the ruins of the World Trade Center.

  Did Jordan accompany Putin to help him sell the takeover of NTV? His bright American smile and constant talk about future Western investment that would ensure both the channel’s integrity and financial sustainability made him well suited to the job. And selling the takeover was surely one of his main tasks.

  In early December 2001, the New York Times published a letter to the editor written in response to a story exposing the Kremlin’s efforts to place Russian TV under government control.

  “There will not be ‘virtual government control over national television’ in Russia,” the letter asserted. “An objective review of news reporting in the eight months since Gazprom took control of NTV after prior management defaulted on its loans would show the network provides Russia’s most thorough and hard-hitting news coverage.” The letter was signed by Boris Jordan, chief executive, NTV.4

  Jordan kept proving his usefulness to the Kremlin, but he also worked on his
image in the United States. A month after he had taken control over NTV, Jordan hired another Russian emigrant. Savik Shuster had the reputation of a true cold warrior but from the American side. Born in the Soviet Baltics, he had emigrated along with his parents to Canada in the early 1970s. He had initially considered a career as a physician, but then the war in Afghanistan started, and soon he found himself in Afghanistan helping local mujahedeen. He was twenty-eight years old. He started freelancing for international media and that kicked off a journalistic career, but he also was involved in propaganda operations organized by Bukovsky’s Resistance International—he helped smuggle the mock-up Red Star issue into Kabul in January 1984.5 Since 1988 he had worked for Radio Liberty in Munich. He had helped build the Moscow office from scratch and been head of the office from 1996 to 2001. Jordan made Shuster NTV’s leading anchorman and gave him the flagship show, Svoboda Slova (Freedom of Speech), obviously intending to show his critics abroad that such freedom did exist on his channel.

  Gusinsky knew that if he wanted to fight back, he needed to be running exclusively original content on NTV International. For that, he needed a new TV channel. In early 2002 he started a project he called RTVI (Russian TV International), a Russian-speaking channel geared toward the Russian diaspora. Although based in Russia and the United States, the channel would not reach the Russian audience at home. The Kremlin made it crystal clear that there was no way for Gusinsky’s channel to get a license to broadcast in Russia.

  Gusinsky, like Jordan, chose New York for RTVI’s headquarters. He rented a ground-floor studio at 304 Hudson Street in Lower Manhattan and equipped it with the best TV technology he could buy. He was involved in the smallest details of his new project, weighing questions like the design of the news anchorman’s table for days.

  Gusinsky invited journalists he had worked with in the 1990s at NTV to join RTVI. Not all of them agreed to take part in his overseas enterprise. In March 2002, a group of oligarchs loyal to the Kremlin launched a new TV channel. This channel, TVS, appealed to journalists for several reasons. For one thing, it was based in Moscow, not far-away New York. For another, the new channel seemed to offer journalists a chance to keep working for the Russian audience. It also held out the promise that in Putin’s Russia, there was space for an independent-minded TV channel. Unlike Jordan’s NTV, which was under full control of a state-owned corporation, TVS was not owned by the government. The oligarchs provided at least some distance from the Kremlin.

  Many of the journalists who had been expelled from NTV went to work at TVS, including Vladimir Kara-Murza. He was given three programs: a nightly news show, a daily review along the lines of Meet the Press but with no guests invited, and a satirical show.

  Meanwhile, in April 2002, RTVI went on the air, televising five newscasts daily. Gusinsky promoted it as a Russian CNN, but in truth, RTVI lacked the people and resources needed to make good television. Because RTVI couldn’t broadcast in Russia, Russian newsmakers and experts were often reluctant to be interviewed; to them, it seemed like a waste of time. Despite these handicaps, RTVI was a Russian TV channel that was totally independent from the Kremlin, and this made it interesting to Russian-speaking viewers abroad. In less than a year, RTVI was seen in two hundred thousand homes in the New York metropolitan area. It counted an additional thirty thousand subscribers on Dish Network in the United States.6

  Competition between Jordan and Gusinsky was fierce for the rest of that year. In September, Jordan also signed a contract with Dish Network, and his brainchild—NTV America, backed by the might of the NTV in Russia—finally appeared in American homes. But NTV America had fewer than thirty thousand subscribers.

  Still, it was a start. As usual, Boris Jordan had a plan for how to proceed. What he did not know was that, just a month later, a devastating terrorist attack in Moscow would finish off Jordan’s career in Russian TV.

  CHAPTER 23

  THE CRISIS

  The crisis began on Wednesday, October 23, 2002. That day, the theater on Dubrovka Street—a large concrete building built in the 1970s as a cultural center to give the local factory youth something to do—was performing Russia’s first Broadway-style musical, a show called Nord-Ost. The first act was coming to a close when three minivans approached the main entrance. In a few seconds, a large group of Chechens armed with Kalashnikovs and pistols rushed into the theater, shooting into the air. The entire audience—almost a thousand people, sixty-seven foreigners among them—was taken hostage. The terrorists ordered the captives to call their relatives and tell them to organize a demonstration against the Chechen war.

  The hostage crisis lasted for three days before special forces troops stormed the theater and put an end to it. The price was high: 130 hostages died, most of them poisoned by a gas that these same special forces pumped into the theater. That fact didn’t prevent Putin from calling the operation a victory.1

  Both NTV America and RTVI drew the attention of mainstream US media, as their coverage of the tense standoff during the crisis was picked up by CNN and CBS. In New Jersey, NTV America managers quickly made use of this, pointing to their coverage of the terrorist attack as a sign that the station was not censored by the Russian government.

  NTV’s coverage was good indeed, much better than anything else done by Moscow-based TV channels, and the channel’s managers would have been correct if their coverage had no repercussions. But it did. The furious Kremlin went on the offensive against the journalists who had covered the attack. Authorities accused the media of having sabotaged the rescue operation, justified terror, disclosed crucial details to the enemy, and so forth. (We reported the siege and experienced the pressure firsthand—the FSB raided our newspaper editorial office, seized our computers, and interrogated us, along with our colleagues, for hours in the FSB’s Lefortovo prison.)

  Jordan’s Russia-based NTV came under huge government pressure. Before long, Jordan was told by the Kremlin’s officials to fire several journalists, including Savik Shuster, who had angered the Kremlin by interviewing hostages’ relatives.2 If Jordan failed to comply, the Kremlin advised, it could find another manager.

  Jordan rushed to Washington, DC; he needed help. He wasn’t ready to give up Shuster. It would affect his reputation in the United States badly. Besides, NTV was a precious asset, and he had personally invested a lot into it. He didn’t want to destroy it.

  Jordan arranged a talk at the National Press Club regarding the situation. At the club, he praised the NTV coverage of the crisis. He also defended his journalists’ work and said the Kremlin had most harshly condemned the channel’s decision during the crisis to bring relatives of the hostages on air, where they pleaded with the special forces not to storm the theater.3 The Kremlin had wanted to downplay the terror attack, but Russian journalists hadn’t let them. As part of his defense strategy, Jordan brought Shuster with him to Washington. Jordan had Shuster interview President George W. Bush, who was about to visit Russia. The anchorman was well received, and the American president declared himself a supporter of the freedom of speech. “The more freedom of speech, the better the world would be. Don’t you think?” said Bush at the beginning of the interview.4

  But it was November 2002, not November 2001. Enlisting Bush’s support didn’t count anymore in Moscow.

  A week after Jordan’s trip to Washington and a month after the Nord-Ost tragedy, Vladimir Putin gathered the editors of Russia’s major media outlets at the Kremlin. The editors tried to calm Putin down and presented him with a conciliatory joint letter. “Some actions of journalists and the media during the last terrorist act in Moscow were wrong,” the editors admitted, but “these were just mistakes.”

  Putin said sharply that he didn’t agree. The broadcasting of special forces actions by “a national TV channel” was, he said, “a deliberate act of neglect of the agreements signed with the Press Ministry.”5 He was singling out NTV. An able manipulator, Putin accused the channel of airing information about the movements of the specia
l forces just minutes before they stormed the theater, which had not been the case. This showed, Putin concluded, that the TV channel had acted in the interest of higher TV ratings and, ultimately, a desire to make more money. He stressed that it was unacceptable to “make money with the blood of our citizens, if, of course, those who do it identify themselves with our citizens.”6

  With this statement, it was clear: Putin was talking about Boris Jordan personally. The moment had come for Jordan to pay the price for his American passport.

  Jordan was hardly in a position to complain. He had fallen into a trap of his own making. Two years earlier, when interviewed by PBS, Jordan had said of Putin and the concept of economic fair play, “I do believe that he will, from time to time, probably violate international codes of operation because he has to roll back a little bit the chaos created by Yeltsin. That’s not to criticize Yeltsin. I think he had to do it. But Putin has to rein that in a little bit.”7

  Now Putin had violated the rules regarding Jordan’s channel. And he had made it personal.

  In January 2003, Jordan resigned and left television for good. Two years later, Shuster left NTV, and Russia, for Ukraine and relaunched his Freedom of Speech on a Ukrainian TV channel.

  Late on the night of June 21, 2003, a young man with high cheekbones framed by a beard and mustache finally opened the door to his room in a cozy, five-story Holiday Inn set in the woods just outside Moscow. He shut the door behind him and sighed with relief. The hotel was filled with members, like him, of the Union of Right Forces, a liberal opposition party led by Boris Nemtsov. They had spent the day planning their campaign for the upcoming elections for the Russian parliament, and the young bearded man was one of the candidates.