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Putin's opponents are made to vanish from TV

by Rob Walker | June 3, 2008 at 10:23 am

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Talking about Putin's poor decision making skills or even making jokes about it could get you banned from television in Russia and literally wiped from the screen.

Expanding on an unofficial stance to censor any harsh remarks against Putin and the government, lately political analysts and even chess masters have been digitally removed and their remarks cut from airing.

It's a shift from the old 'make the person disappear', where it's much easier for a tech to just go in and digitall wipe them off the screen. Unfortunately in at least one case, the Russian's technology isn't all that up to par, as a speaker's disembodied legs were left in the shot and other glaring mistakes were made.

On a talk show last autumn, a prominent political analyst named Mikhail Delyagin offered some tart words about Vladimir Putin. When the program was televised, Delyagin was not.
His remarks were cut and he was digitally erased from the show, like a disgraced comrade airbrushed from an old Soviet photo. (The technicians may have worked a bit hastily; they left his disembodied legs in one shot.)

Delyagin, it turned out, has for some time resided on the so-called stop list, a roster of political opponents and other critics of the government who have been barred from television news and political talk shows by the Kremlin.

The stop list is, as Delyagin put it, "an excellent way to stifle dissent."

Opponents who were on television a year or two ago all but vanished during the campaigns, as Putin won a parliamentary landslide for his party and then installed his protégé, Dmitri Medvedev, as his successor. Putin is now prime minister but is still widely considered Russia's leader.

Onetime Putin allies such as Mikhail Kasyanov, his former prime minister, and Andrei Illarionov, his former chief economic adviser, disappeared from view. Garry Kasparov, the former chess champion and leader of the Other Russia opposition coalition, was banned, as were members of other parties. Even the Communist Party, the only remaining opposition party in Parliament, says its leaders are kept off television.