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Of the entire gamut of reforms proposed by Gorbachev, glasnost really did work and rapidly changed everything. Unlike everything else, to achieve it, you didn't have to do anything; you had only not to do anything. You hade to not prohibit, not censor, not dismiss journalists for articles they wrote. Stories began appearing in the press that made you wonder how they ever got published. It soon became clear that writing the truth was actually profitable: you were not kicked out of your job, no "administrative conclusions" were drawn, you became wildly popular, and the circulations of publications you worked for went through the roof. The ideological dam had begun to crack, and although the Soviet leaders tried desperately to shore it up, they couldn't. The news that a program had been removed from the national television channel's schedule provoked instant fury, as if these very protesters had not been living a year previously in a country where censorship was total...From 1987 onward the U.S.S.R. moved rapidly toward winning the world championship for free speech. The realization that you no longer went to prison for anything you said so delighted everyone that people tried to make up for the preceding seventy years lost to censorship.
In October 1987 the national channel began airing Vzglyad (Viewpoint), which came to mean everything to me....Young presenters, also unlike the standard officious old codgers, covered a wide variety of news stories and discussed them in the studio. From time to time this was interrupted by videos of bands like DDT, Alisa, Kino, and Nautilus Pompilius. Seeing rock musicians with their socially relevant and often anti-Soviet songs on national television was fantastic. This was no longer a crack in the dam of censorship, but more like seeing it under fire from heavy artillery....For four years, Vzglyad was unquestionably the most popular broadcast in the Soviet Union. Its journalists and presenters became superstars who determined the way television developed. Their subsequent fates have been strikingly different.
Vladislav Listyev, the mainstay of Vzglyad, was shot dead in the entrance to his apartment complex. Artyom Borovik, who had become one of the top investigative journalists, died in an airplane accident in 2000; my daughter went to a school named after him. Alexander Lyubimov, the Vzglyad journalist I most adored, now roams the state-run television and radio studios as a diligent Putinite. In 2007, when Putin's censorship was in full bloom, he invited me on his talk show on a radio station run by the state-owned gas company Gazprom. He was as smart as ever, had the same intonations I remembered so well from my childhood, but now was pushing the official line and had a clear understanding of what could be said and what was banned. I looked at him and the whole time felt such an urge to say, "For heaven's sake, Alexander, I became who I am thanks to you and your colleagues. For some reason, you betrayed all that."
After Vzglyad, Konstantin Ernst hosted Matador, a program about the movies, every broadcast of which I watched. He now heads Channel One of state television and is a major Putin propagandist. The most repulsive, deceitful reports, including the infamous lie about a little Russian boy allegedly crucified by Ukrainian soldiers in front of his mother, aired on his watch...
It seems incredible to believe that most of these people, who were at the wellspring of free speech in Russia, did not just hold their tongues after giving in to the temptation of easy money, but brought the same energy and initiative of their early days to bear as active propagandists of the new regime, foaming at the mouth as they defended acts of injustice and corruption.
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