Multitasking in Moscow
The assignment came from a prominent magazine. My only qualification for it was that, as a New Yorker, I had eaten at a few of the old-school beef palaces this particular establishment sought to reference. I shrugged and accepted the free dinner; it was, as far as I could tell, perfectly good steak. I did my meager best to describe it. Then again, I’m not a food critic.
Luckily, neither is anyone else. Or, more precisely, so is everyone else: Russian media can’t afford narrow specialization. The country's total population hovers around 145 million – a shockingly low figure considering its eleven-time-zone expanse – and it naturally follows that its chattering classes, confined largely to Moscow with an ever-shrinking subset in St. Petersburg, are equally scarce. Russian journalists are thus furious multitaskers one and all. Simply put, it’s assumed that if you can write about one thing, you can write about all others. One of the more colorful examples is Sergei Mostovschikov, a prominent writer-editor who, at one point, published an absurdist humor magazine, kept a political column in another publication, and reviewed cars, of all things, for yet another. This approach reaches truly comical proportions in the service sector – where travel, food, music, film, and books are considered to be, roughly speaking, facets of the same area of expertise. And how could they not be? Any food or wine writer on the payroll at any of the city’s many lavishly funded glossies is either a rank amateur or 20 years old, for the obvious reason that 20 years ago he or she would be limited to discoursing on the texture of Doktorskaya sausage and the nose and finish of Khvanchkara wine. What many of them are, though, is talented writers, and that's all that counts: better a clean slate with a quick wit than decades of useless Soviet “experience.” (This is why Russian newsrooms and even boardrooms sometimes look like an episode of Kid Nation. Filipp Dzyadko, the editor-in-chief of the influential Bolshoi Gorod, is 25, as is Pyotr Mansilya-Kruz, his exotically named counterpart at the glossy Afisha-Mir. His background is, naturally, in radio, TV, print and documentary filmmaking.)
Russian media can’t afford narrow specialization.
The arrangement gets a tad less cute when writers’ critical subjects begin to intersect with their other jobs. My good friend Boris Barabanov, for instance, manages Zemfira – the country's preeminent female pop star – and even stars in one of her videos; he also sees nothing wrong with reviewing her shows and reporting on her last record’s novel distribution strategies (strategies he himself co-authored) for a leading business daily that happens to be his other full-time employer.
I naively told Boris that inserting a simple parenthetical “full disclosure” into his Zemfira coverage would have helped him save face. (For instance: full disclosure. I have written for both Bolshoi Gorod and Afisha Mir. Mr. Barabanov curated a music festival that underwrote one of my visits to Moscow. There! Easy!) Halfway through the tirade, I realized I was talking arrogant Accidentalist nonsense. If the Russian media adopted this ritual, most domestic news items would be so densely crammed with disclaimers you would lose your mind trying to follow the criss-crossing chains of influence and ownership. Most of which would inevitably meet at the top anyway.
The arrangement gets a tad less cute when writers’ critical subjects begin to intersect with their other jobs.
Take the morning of March 3, 2008. Hours after the election that ushered in Dmitry Medvedev’s presidency, the NTV network fawningly reported on the president-elect’s morning routine. It followed that item with one about Gazprom, the country’s natural-gas monopoly, cutting deliveries to Ukraine by 25 percent. Here is how a proper disclaimer to that particular story would have looked.
Two hours ago, Gazprom has cut gas deliveries to Ukraine by 25 percent. Gazprom, of course, is NTV’s corporate parent. Dmitry Medvedev, whom we just mentioned, in addition to being the president-elect, is also the chairman of the Gazprom board of directors and thus our boss. Mr. Medvedev is also in charge of the Kremlin's Ukraine policy, which directly affects the terms of Russian-Ukrainian gas trade, which are set by Gazprom, whose board of directors Mr. Medvedev chairs and which also is, as we believe we already said, NTV’s corporate parent. Well, I’m just getting word now that I should clear out my desk, so this will be my last newscast at this network, or any network, since they’re all owned by the same government of which Mr. Medvedev is the president-elect. And now, the weather. Vasya?
The only U.S. equivalent of this I can imagine would involve Bloomberg News hailing Michael Bloomberg's re-election as the mayor of New York City before announcing that, in a totally unrelated item, New York City now requires all financial institutions to purchase Bloomberg terminals. Except they would also use a different name each time.
If it's all an illusion anyway, why not give a rave review to your own book?
How do Russians deal with the nagging nightmare of the same few faces popping up in different, often mutually exclusive, capacities – private and public, corporate and governmental – as if the Kremlin were playing peek-a-boo with a 2-year-old? By playing along, to an extent. By clutching their ears and going la-la-la (TV watching, and indeed any interest in news, among the educated “elites” has dropped off precipitously in the last few years). By compartmentalizing. By gradually imbibing the zero-sum logic. If it's all an illusion anyway, why not give a rave review to your own book?
So let’s not frown at the multi-hyphenates that populate the Moscow media. Modern Russia, with its nine-digit fortunes snapped up in no-bid auctions or surrendered as loyalty pledges, with its epidemic cronyism and its de facto nationalization of every industry that matters, is one giant conflict of interest. Full disclosure? I don’t think we could handle the full disclosure.