I'd like to have some

I'd like to have some respect for Vladmir Putin. He seems to be getting the Russian economy back on track, and his policies have been much less antagonistic toward the West than we could have possibly expected. (He hasn't been particularly upset about National Missile Defence, and I have much more confidence in Putin supporting an Iraqi invasion than, say, Jacques Chirac.) But stories like this keep worrying me:

The liberal Russian newspaper Noviye Izvestia was closed temporarily yesterday after the Kremlin was outraged by an article lampooning President Vladimir Putin's growing personality cult, journalists said.

Staff arrived to find the security guards had all been replaced. The editor-in-chief, Igor Golembiovskiy, and several leading journalists were told they had been suspended and were turned away.

Noviye Izvestia has been a thorn in the Kremlin's side since it was set up five years ago by Mr Putin's arch-rival, the businessman Boris Berezovsky. It is seen as a political mouthpiece in his battle with the president.

The last straw was an article on Wednesday detailing bizarre examples of a personality cult extolling the president entitled the "Putinisation of the whole country".

Valery Yakov, the deputy editor, said: "We were discussing whether to put this article in Wednesday's edition as we already had a series of controversial editions recently and were afraid of irritating the authorities.

When the newspapers are worried about "irritating the authorities," it's not really a "free press" anymore, is it?

Posted by damian at February 22, 2003 09:39 AM