I happened to be in the Ren-TV studio last week, watching a debate between Eduard Limonov, leader of the National Bolsheviks, and United Russia MP Valery Galchenko for the programme Nedelya. At one point, Limonov leaned forward and declared: “The 2003 Duma election results were completely falsified. That’s the only reason you’re sitting there. But the will of the people isn’t with United Russia. It’s with us!”

I was amazed. This appeared to be… real political debate on Russian TV. After the angry confrontation, I stood in the lift with Galchenko and the presenter. “That wasn’t pretty”, muttered Galchenko to his assistant. “That wasn’t pretty at all.”

Ren-TV has managed to forge a niche for itself as a small voice of liberal journalism in the otherwise Kremlin-controlled TV news market. It is mainly Moscow-based, though its programmes are also sold to many regional TV companies, giving the channel something like 8% of the national TV audience.

The channel was, until last week, 70% owned by UES, which is controlled by SPS politician Anatoly Chubais. The wily Chubais has so far managed to protect Ren-TV from the Kremlin, so that the channel has escaped the fate of Vladimir Gusinsky’s NTV, which was taken over by Gazprom-Media in 2002, and Boris Berezovsky’s ORT, which Berezovsky claims he was forced to sell to Roman Abramovich in 2000. Abramovich reportedly than gave the channel to the Kremlin as a gift. It’s since turned into Channel One, probably the most mindless and pro-Kremlin of the main channels.

This year, however, the Kremlin appears to have decided that Ren-TV must be taken out of the hands of Chubais, who is perceived by some in the Kremlin as a potential political rival in the 2008 presidential race.

That Chubais or his SPS political party could conceivably be seen as a rival to the United Russia faction is further evidence of the strange paranoia and control freakery of the Kremlin. Chubais is regularly cited as the most unpopular person in Russia, while SPS barely managed to attract 3% of the votes in the 2003 Duma elections.

Nonetheless, it was decided that Ren-TV with its 7% of viewers and SPS with its 3% of voters were a combined threat to the order and stability of Putin’s Russia.

It was announced last week that the buyer will be Alexei Mordashov’s Severstal holding group, which will buy UES’ stake for $100 million. German media company RTL will buy out the other 30% from Ren-TV founders Irena Lesnevskaya and Dmitry Lesnevsky.

The sale was greeted pessimistically by most media commentators, with the Financial Times, for example, saying the sale provoked fears that media freedom in Russia was being further eroded. Market analysts, by contrast, were much more upbeat about the sale. Financial brokerage UFG, for example, said the sale marked a “thaw” in the Kremlin’s media policy, and that it could herald other moves to relax state control of TV, such as the sale of NTV to a foreign investor like News Corp. Pigs might fly, is the comment that springs to mind.

How should we take the sale? It could certainly have been worse. Rumours have persisted throughout the year that Ren-TV would be bought by the state-owned Eurofinance Bank, which is controlled by the Kovalchuk brothers, two associates of president Putin’s from his St Petersburg days. Eurofinance have also been negotiating to take over Gazprom-Media’s large media holdings, though so far it appears no deal has gone through. If Ren-TV had been taken over by the shadowy Eurofinance, it would certainly have been a blow to Ren-TV’s chances of providing independent news coverage.

The aspect of the sale that gives me most room for optimism is the presence of RTL, which will be in charge of programming at the company. This will be the first time foreigners have been in control of Russian programming since Boris Jordan ran NTV in 2000.

The circumstances of the state’s takeover of NTV are quite similar. The Kremlin wanted to silence a political opponent by taking over his TV channel. But it did it together with a foreign partner – Jordan himself – in order to provide some measure of legitimacy to the proceeding.

Jordan proved much more difficult to control than the Kremlin thought. I talked to Jordan earlier this year, at the Russian Economic Forum in London. I asked him whether the Kremlin had tried to control editorial content. He says: “After the Dubrovka crisis [when NTV had annoyed the Kremlin by showing footage of troops entering the theatre, though not live, as the Kremlin would later claim], the Kremlin told me I could redeem myself by firing certain journalists. I told them to f*ck off. I could have compromised, but I had my international reputation on the line. The international media wouldn’t delve into the details, they would simply say I had caved into Putin.”

RTL will be in a similar position to Jordan. It, like he, will have its international reputation on the line and will be subject to strong criticism if it is seen to be collaborating with the government’s silencing of opposition. We can take the example of another German company, Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, which exposed its reputation to similar risks by working with the government on the sale of Yuganskneftegaz last year. Because it was so worried about its reputation, Dresdner managed to introduce a degree of transparency to the otherwise very murky proceedings.

The consortium may even shake up the rigidly controlled TV market. Jordan told me it was his attempts to make NTV genuinely competitive which really lost him his job. He says: “The media club today is exactly what they [the controllers of Rossiya and Channel One] wanted. I was an impediment to it. There’s no competition, no transparency. No one is interested in market capitalization or profitability. The market is there merely to enrich a few guys. They used to divide up the international movie sales market between them, then I turned up and started to outbid them. We actually made it into a business.”

RTL may find working in this closed shop the greater challenge than preserving Ren-TV’s editorial independence. If it succeeds, it would be a great improvement for Russian TV. If I see another of Channel One’s moronic evening song-and-dance shows I think I will go mad.

Julian Evans is a British freelance journalist based in Moscow. The article is written specially for "Eurasian Home".

July 5, 2005