Walking into the J-School to finish a project or two, I got glued to the screen: Vladimir Putin announced a new name for a previously unnamed mountain in the Caucases region: Peak of Russian Counterintelligence Agents.

Wow.

The peak is in North Ossetia, right around Georgia and its nifamous breakaway region of South Ossetia. Gazeta.Ru reports the idea has been around since last October, when the named agents celebrated the 90th birthday of the ancestor agency. As a celebratory act, a few agents went climbing in the mountains together with local alpinists, right in the area where the new Peak of THEM now lies. Local authorities requested the naming.

None of this is reported in the U.S. media, but makes a bit more sense of the act.

Callers raised a few issues in their questions to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Here are a few hot-topic ones and the summary of Putin’s answers:

Economy

Putin said the crisis spread from the United States, sending the entire world economy tumbling. In the numbers he presented:

• Russian economic growth: planned: 7.5 percent; expected: 6.8-6.9 percent
• Inflation: Planned: 12 percent; expected: 13 percent
• Real wage increase: 12.6 percent
• Real pension increase: approximately 12 percent

“It will be a hard period in the world economy and ours as well. … But, you know, Russia has lived through problems even worth than this; it’s more than a thousand years old. Very recently, we remember, in the beginning of the 90s, we faced even problems of protecting our country’s territorial unity, complete disintegration of industries, social sphere. Today the country is in a completely different position.”

To the question of a laid-off worker, Putin spoke about his plan to raise unemployment stipend and encouraged municipalities to work to establish migration and requalification projects.

A question came up about forwarding more funding to the banks as opposed to the needy small and middle-sized businesses. Putin replied that apart from the funds going into the banking support systems, some money is handed to the banks with the hopes to be used for supporting those kinds of businesses through long-term loans.

“We will not allow for sudden jumps in economy and sudden jumps of the national currency value. For that, … we will, if necessary, – and we’ve done that before – carefully use both the gold and monetary assets and other assets the Parliament has.”

Paying out loans

A new Agency on Housing Morgage Loans will serve as a middleman between private custormers and banks, serving as the government’s guarantor.

Gas prices

Oil and gas profits has been allowing Russia obtain quite a bit of gold and monetary assets. This has allowed the country to build up a cusion which might help smoothen the transition during the crisis. Putin, however, never really answered what developement gas prices in Russia will undergo.

Ukraine

Putin said Ukraine owns Russia $2.5 billion in debt for gas provided. He said they are asking to retain last year’s prices, which means Russia continues to transport gas to Ukraine for the price twice cheaper than to the rest of Europe.

“We hope we will reach an understanding with our partners. … But if our partners won’t comply with our agreements or, as in years prior, allow themselves to illegally obtain our resources from the transit pipe, we will be forced to limit the supply.”

The USA

Putin said the election of Barack Obama may lead to more construcation realtions. He said he could see positive signals, including the rejection of Ukraine and Georgia’s pleading to join NATO, refraining from provoking Russia, considering Russia’s interests and slowing down on the military initiatives in Poland and Czech Republic.

The military

The length of the required service will remain 12 months. Putin also said the Defense Ministry will receive 21 billion rubles to buy approximately 10,000 apartments for the families of those in the military. Positions of warrant officers will be eliminated, but Putin said no serving ones will lose jobs.

Europe

Putin called Europe the largest partner for Russia. More than 53 percent of Russia’s commodities’ turnover is through Europe. Most of it is, of course, in the area of energy and oil and gas. Many European investors are allowed into the sectors of energy and elctricity.

“Unfortunately, there is a lot of extraneousness, a lot brought in from the past, a lot of fobias, especially among the so-called “young europeans. But I think, over time these countries … will realize on should look into the future and not linger in the past.”

He started doing this in December of 2001. Then continued in 2002, 2003, 2005, 2006 and 2007. Today he did it again.

Vladimir Putin held his seventh live television call-in show today, the first prime minister to do so in the history of Russia.

Live “conversations” with Putin, now leader of the United Russia party, has become a tradition during his presidency. Live TV time allocated to the occasion has been growing with every year and more questions have been coming in. People can submit their questions through political public consultation offices, the Internet or a free phone line. Last year, according to BBC, more than a million questions came in, of which Putin answered approximately 70.

According to the Russian Newspaper, the number of questions answered last year was 72. His 2007 call-in time lasted three hours and five minutes. This year he answered 80 questions in three hours and eight minutes. The questions came from 13 cities as well as other towns in eight regions of Russia.

Discussions of the topics to be addressed in the live show floated around the media days before the show itself. Even though most of them were the general ever-green, ever-important issues of economy, demographics and education, some specific details mentioned in a few stories seemed to show at least a few questions were known ahead of time. Yet, Putin’s elloquancy and knowledge of detailed data about various areas of Russia’s development have also long become a characteristic recognized by many political scientists and observers.

I will discuss specific problems mentioned during the live call-in show in my next blog.

My father owns a medium-sized business in Samara, Russia, (some sort of an industrial technological company… I’ve been so detached from his development that I am no more up-to-date on his business ventures) and whenever I ask him about the current economic crisis, he gets confused and confuses everybody.

At first he says the crisis is drastic. Two weeks ago he canceled my parents’ long-planned trip to Cuba, because he “only had theoretical money.” Basically, he’d started a few projects and had to halt them, because no down payments were coming in. Last week he scrambled and did find money for the vacation, saying the crisis is really blown out of proportion by the media – just like it was some time earlier in the U.S. Yesterday, however, I sensed fright and despair in his voice again.

After my first conversation with dad, I called my friend Mike in Moscow. He’s an American citizen, working for a U.S. company in Russia’s capital. I asked him how bad the crisis in Russia really was. Mike said the Russian government had so many assets under its control, it wouldn’t allow any dramatic drop in the power of a ruble. Besides, he said, he got paid in dollars, which made him richer every day the dollar gained strength compared to the Russian currency.

My parents started changing rubles into dollars and puttin them into all sorts of bank accounts in August. “In case something goes wrong,” they said. It appears, Russians altogether bought $6 billion in September alone, a month before the rouble’s liquidity crisis peaked, according to Gazeta.Ru. Russia’s Central Bank hasn’t published the statistics for October or November, but the amounts are predicted to be even higher. Such high dollar purchases haven’t been observed since 1999 at least. That was the first year the Central Bank started publishing it – a year after the greatest default in Russian modern history.

Russian Central Bank has been restraining the ruble’s devaluation process, but reports not being able to continue the effort as successfully anymore. Experts predict a slow but continuous depreciation of the currency. Right now a dollar costs 27.47 rubles, almost 4 rubles up since last month.

A Russian movie got a “not recommended for showing” label in the American market.

A new movie by a Russian director Yuri Grymov, “Strangers,” will not be on the screens in the USA because of its “anti-American appeal,” online newspaper Dni.Ru reports. The movie’s Web site says Grymov wanted to shoot a movie about “the collision of cultures.”

Set in a Middle-Eastern internal conflict zone, “Strangers” is a story about a U.S. charity group of doctors who come to the area to vaccinate children. Dni.Ru reports, in the film, the doctors fail to establish a good relationship with the locals yet continue to believe they are “bringing a third-world country to their own, progressive, level.” In the end, they are revealed as testing new vaccines on the local population.

Quoting the official synopsis:

“Viewers will see how American nation tries to instill its morals in another world but at the same time it doesn’t understand one simple thing – there is no such thing as one’s “own” morals”

“Strangers” cast is a combination of Russian and American actors. The plot includes several Russian soldiers, working to neutralize mines in the surrounding territory. In one of the scenes, according to Dni.Ru, a POW Russian military doctor saves one of the Americans and ends up killed by the local rebels.

Responding to the ban in the U.S., Yuri Grymov told Dni.Ru:

“…the USA has recently been taking any form of criticism very painfully. And I have expressed my position about the U.S. politics of supremacy very clearly in the movie.”

The movie should be a limited release in the U.S. in the beginning of 2009.

Chechnya is puttin’ Putin back on its streets.

A person who was Prime Minister of Russia when its troops crushed a separatist rebellion in the republic (a region of Russia technically) in 1999, is now on the Chechen map permanently.

Almost a mile-long central street of Grozny, Chechnya’s capital, now holds the name of Putin Avenue, or Проспект Путина (pros-PEKT Putina) in Russian.

The street used to be the Victory Street, a very common Soviet-era name in memory of the Great Patriotic War (WWII) victory. Now, according to Chechnya’s president Ramzan Kadyrov (rahm-ZAHN kah-DI-rof), it commemorates the “person, who’s done so much for the country and all of us.”

The street’s re-opening after reconstruction began a month-long celebration of 420 years since the “establishment of a good-neighborly relationship between the people of Russia and Chechnya,” RIA Novosti reports.

The New York Times article on the event (interestingly enough) omits this fact, but briefly outlines the latest events in the “good-neighborly relationship.”

The First Chechen War of 1994-1996 was a reaction to the shattering of the Soviet Union in 1991 and Chechnya’s declaration of independence and a small-scale civil war of 1992 (quite similar to recent Kosovo and South Ossetia affairs). Russian troops went in to “restore constitutional order,” but were driven out by the extremist and separatist groups. After the war, the republic was in chaos, with abounding internal disputes among warlords, terrorist attacks, assasinations and kidnappings. Russia, in the meantime, received hundreds of refugees and lost some 300 people in apartment building bombings.

1999 was a scary year. I was a middle-schooler at the time, and very vividly remember crying at night, because I lived in a large 9-floor apartment block, just like those blown up one after another in Moscow and around Russia. The Russian government blamed Chechen extremist leaders for the attacks on civilians. The leaders denied their involvement. People were scared.

Vladimir Putin became Prime Minister in 1999 and declared the Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov (us-LAHN mahs-KHA-dof) and his parliament illegitimate. The developing air war became a full-fledged land war, continuing until Russian troops seized Grozny and took over the mountains. In the spring of 2000, Putin (already Russia’s president by then) declared direct rule of Chechnya. In March 2003, Chechnya adopted a new Constitution in a referendum (deemed illegitimate by some international observers). In 2005, a pro-Moscow leader Ramzan Kadyrov started functioning as a de-facto ruler, becoming the official president in 2007.

But back to the street-naming. Komsomolskaya Pravda quotes Kadyrov’s statement:

“In 2003, the Chechen people once more affirmed that they want to be a part of Russia. That is not surprising, because we all remember what happened and what took place when the so-called Ichkerian (a historic Turkic name of Chechnya) independence was declared. Those were years of anarchy and poverty in the republic. This celebration shows and proves well our people’s attitude to Russia. The Chechens have always been seeking normal relations with all peoples living in Russia.”

RIA Novosti also adds Kadyrov’s quote where he calls Putin the “national leader.”
Oh, but wait, doesn’t Russia have a new president?..

Being a journalism student with a whole lot of curious journalism students around me, I often hear questions about the freedom of speech in Russia. Just a few minutes ago I submitted an essay to a study/internship program about the issue. And I thought this blog would be a nice new home for the piece.

The sound of my heels echoes in a long corridor lined with doors. Behind those doors the magic happens, the every day magic of television production. It’s a local TV station in my home country, Russia, with 50 some employees and a label of “one of the first independent channels in the region.” I came here as a 14-year-old intern and left as a 17-year-old full-timer. Now, two more years later, I am back to visit.

After the “It’s so great to see you!” hoo-ha, I ask the inevitable:

How’s news reporting going?

The managing news editor sighs, shakes her head and frowns.

It’s gotten worse, I find out. The new regional officials issued a list of topics reporters can either cover in a positive light or not at all. Sometimes the administration calls to check what stories are planned, sometimes requests to approve scripts, and sometimes sends in its own.

It’s not that Russia doesn’t have freedom of speech. It’s just that “free media” seems to be a loose concept here.

Four Russian networks top the list of the most popular channels in the country: Channel One, Russia TV, NTV and STS. Channel One is the wealthiest, largest and widest in reception area; the government is the company’s major shareholder. Russia TV is an official governmentally owned channel, prefixed with ВГТРК, meaning All-Russia State Television and Radio Company. STS advertises itself as the first entertainment network and doesn’t report news. NTV started as a prominent independent television channel but in 2002 underwent a complete change of staff and ownership – from a private holding to the infamous government’s Gazprom.

Being an opposition medium is a doable but dire task, it seems. Overwhelmingly patriotic and subliminally anti-European or anti-American framing of news sneaks even into media sources traditionally considered oppositional (mostly, print, on-line or radio).

People who grow up watching, reading and hearing news like this may never realize they are deprived of a diversity of views. With government’s oversight and smart news-making techniques, generation after generation of Russians gives in to the media’s influence only to have the “preferred,” the “proper” stances ingrained in their minds.

Something has to be off, it seems, when a student of the most prominent journalism school in Russia, Moscow State University’s, blogs about how she despises BBC, CNN and a number of other foreign media for their “complete biasness and anti-Russia-nism.”

Potential solutions to the problem that by-pass Russian government are several.

One is creating more foreign exchange programs for journalism students, professionals or teachers. Visiting foreign journalism schools, interning or observing how news coverage is handled in another country could help expose Russian journalists – past, current or future – to diverse reporting approaches and opinions.

Making “outsider” media accessible to Russian citizens is another option, and the Internet can accomplish that. Watching other countries’ news reports about Russia and the rest of the world could be a good reality check for Russian citizens, a way to break their bubbles. An obstacle, though, is a very small number of foreign outlets offering news coverage in Russian. Those few that do exist, including BBC, aren’t widely known and need better advertising.

After all, the first step toward solving a problem is recognizing it, not just behind closed doors but en masse.

The Federal Commission unanimously voted to prolong the channel’s license.
2×2 is keeping its frequency and, according to their Web site, their policy.
“We only show what we watch ourselves,” that is.

Around 35,000 people submitted their signatures in the past week to support the cartoon channel.
The channel’s Web site was down a lot, with hundreds of visitors hitting links from on-line news stories and blogs, trying to jump onto 2×2’s page.

Federal Contest Commission on Frequencies bows.
Youth channel advocates gloomily wander off stage to search for another funding source.
Heads of Protestant Churches of Russia think of a different way to attract attention to their organization
Prosecutors and investigators close the case and go home…quite possibly to watch “The Simpsons”
2×2 celebrates, tosses hats up in the air, high-fives its supporters…
…and probably disappears from the public eye again into its television cartoon world.

What I read today on Gazeta.ru made me realize the future of the cartoon channel 2×2 really might already be pre-determined, but not by the Christian groups.

While the Federal Commission on Frequencies decides today what to do with 2×2 (“Hmmm..do we take away their licence or not yet?..”), several “youth channel” projects are already on their tables. Pavel Tarakanov of the Federal Committee on Youth Issues decided not to wait until the Commission’s decision and mentioned that the channel’s frequences might be given to a youth television channel instead. He said that in a radio show this weekend. Several crews from Samara and Ulyanovsk jumped at the idea and contacted him immediately. No wonder: Any independent (especially regional) youth project is highly underfinanced in Russia. These guys couldn’t even dream of an opportunity to broadcast to Moscow and St. Petersburg.

With everyone in the government and regions and cultural circles excited about a potential youth-oriented educational channel, I wonder whether this is the real reason why the prosecution was so quick to come out with warnings to the contraversial cartoon network.

Around 300 people in Saint-Petersburg and another 200 in Moscow took their support of the Channel 2×2 to the streets Sept. 21 (barely yesterday), information agency Interfax reports.

The St.Pete’s crowd gathered in one of the gardens, carrying posters and banners depicting South Park, the Simpsons and other cartoon caracters. They set up four televisions around the central flower bed and started playing those cartoons. Later, four guys in black (supposed to represent federal agents) showed up and covered the screens with signs “Signal Coded.” A dozen of police quietly observed the unfolding protest.

Protesters also call to make April 2 the day of adult cartoons.

Channel’s administration says they had nothing to do with the action.

2×2 has appealed both the warning General Prosecutor issued to the channel and the current lawsuit against South Park’s episode it ran.