The Chechen War in Russian Print Media

With the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991, a number of regions managed to break away and gain independence. The Chechen leadership- under former Soviet air force General Dzokhar Dudaev declared their republic independent. The history of the Chechen people is one of repeated conflict with Russian state. Recognized as a distinct people since the 17th century, Chechens, predominantly Sunni Muslims were active opponents of the Russian conquest of the Caucasus during the period 1818-1917. After the 1917 Russian Revolution, a declaration of independence by the Chechens was met with occupation from the Bolsheviks who later established the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Region in 1924. In the mid-1930s, it became an autonomous republic. Even when firmly part of the Soviet Union, Stalin felt that the Chechens were not to be trusted at the end of the Second World War, and so organised the brutal forced displacement of the entire Chechen people to Central Asia. It was not until the 1950s that the Chechens returned to their homeland.

The newly elected Russian President, Boris Yeltsin, while actively encouraging the union republics, including his own to secede from the Soviet Union , was determined that Russia itself would not break up. He declared a state of emergency in Chechnya and insisted that it remain within Russia.Tensions between the Russian government and that of Chechen president Dzhokhar Dudayev escalated into warfare in late 1994. When Russia invaded Chechnya, a bloody war ensued killing approximately 80 thousand mostly Chechen civilians and devastated Grozny. Burning his finger, Russia made to withdraw from the region in 1996.

In August 1999, Shamil Basayev began an unsuccessful incursion into the neighbouring Russian republic of Dagestan . In September the following year a series of apartment bombings took place in several Russian cities, including Moscow. In response, after a prolonged air campaign of retaliatory strikes against the Ichkerian regime (who was officially seen as the culprit of both the bombings and the incursion) a ground offensive began in October 1999. Much better organised and planned than the first Chechen War, the Russian Federal forces were able to quickly re-establish control over most regions and installed a pro-Moscow Chechen regime in 2000 by eliminating the most prominent separatist leaders including former President Aslan Maskhadov and terrorist leader Shamil Basayev.

In the post-Soviet era, the media have played a central role in forming public opinion toward critical national concerns, including the Chechnya conflict. In the environment of freewheeling expression of opinion, public figures such as Boris Yeltsin and government actions such as the Chechnya campaign have received ruthless criticism. However, the national and local governments have exerted heavy pressure on the print media to alter coverage of certain issues. Because most media enterprises continue to depend on government support, such pressure often has been effective. During the Chechnya crisis - the Russian media looked far more robust. It was unable to impose a total news blackout and was constantly confronted by journalists who refused to accept the official version of events. So it can be said that the Chechen crisis became the "first real test of journalists' freedoms" since the end of the Soviet Union.

Getting almost no information from the official sources, State media that had voluntarily supported Yeltsin, "the reformer" found it very difficult to ignore the real events and their alternative coverage. Newspapers like Izvestia, Komsomolskaya Pravda, Argumenty I Fakty, Moskovsky Komsomolets changed their loyal attitude to the president to one of sharp opposition. However, what the media did is only to turn public opinion against the State, but they could not make the State to take this opinion into consideration in its decisions. The Russian media began to receive international attention when during the first war in Chechnya (1994-1996) it provided unbiased reports that covered both sides of the fighting and thus played a major role in bringing the Russian public to favour an end to the Russian military campaign.

In order to prevent correspondents from gathering and reporting information that contradicted official statements about the Chechen crisis, the authorities tightly controlled movement of journalists in Chechnya and imposed special accreditation requirements. The ordeal of the Radio Liberty correspondent Andrei Babitskii in early 2000 discouraged journalists from seeking to evade those restrictions. Babitskii was kidnapped in January 2000 and was later exchanged for Russian prisoners held captive by Chechen fighters, but in fact Russian officials handed him over to pro Moscow Chechen fighters. He was freed in neighbouring Dagestan in February 2000, only to be arrested on charges of carrying a forged passport. In a similar fashion a Novaya gazeta correspondent Anna Politkovskaya, was detained by Russian officers in February 2001 while trying to cover the impact the impact of the war on the civilian's population. They accused her of using falsified accreditation documents and expelled her from Chechnya. As she later recounted, journalists could avoid trouble with military officers only by reporting exclusively on the lives of the Russian soldiers serving in Chechnya. Sadly Politkovskaya was found shot dead in the elevator of her apartment block in central Moscow on October 7th 2006.

Having failed to shape the news agenda during the first war in Chechnya, the Russian authorities managed to minimize criticism of the second military campaign of the breakaway republic. As a result of which, a comprehensive system was introduced to limit the access of journalists to Chechnya and shape their coverage. Most Russian journalists were favorably disposed toward the 'anti terrorist operation' when fighting resumed in1999, because numerous kidnappings of journalists in Chechnya during the late 1990s almost entirely destroyed sympathy for the Chechen cause. Additionally, in order to prevent correspondents from gathering and reporting information that contradicted official statements about the fighting, the authorities tightly controlled journalist's movements in Chechnya and imposed special accreditation requirements.

From late 1996 when the fighting finally stopped, Chechnya was no longer covered on a daily basis. Though it was never completely silenced, the reports were occasional and scattered; they did not provide a big picture of the situation. Most information about events between the wars appeared in the media not earlier than 1999.

The Chechen war the emergence of critical representations that marked the coming of age of the independent and privately owned Russian mass media. The Chechen conflict was a powerful catalyst that allowed Russian media to develop its own .post-Cold War habits, definitively shattering the sealed and carefully controlled informational space of the Soviet Union, in which the prestige of the state and of the armed forces was assumed to be paramount and identical to those of the nation as a whole.

Journalists brought the brutalities of the war into most Russian households, and a clear divergence between official reports and other representations of the war was soon perceived. This ideological pluralism, seen most strikingly in the evident contrast between the often clumsily conceived disinformation circulated by the Russian government and the open pacifism professed by much of the Russian press and echoed to a large extent by opinion polls, can be seen as a watershed in the evolution of a post-Soviet civil society.

The Chechen conflict also accelerated the approximation of the Russian media to global patterns of news coverage. To the West, the new candour of the Russian press, however negatively it reflected on the government, provided some paradoxical reassurance of Russia's place in the globalizing world economy, in which Chechen independence, and even the final rout of the Russian military, mattered less than the continuing marketization of Russia's resources, including the media.

To the Chechens, the war's media visibility compensated for its geographical remoteness, allowing them to make their case to a national and global audience at a time when their military triumph was by no means assured. To Russians, the spectacle of the war confirmed the disarray of the government and the military, even as it confirmed an iconography of Russian victim hood that separated the Russian people from the actions of the state.

-Bishal Das & Maitreya Buddha Samantaray