Troubling News for Izvestia Paper

It has been seven years since journalists in Russia won liberty from Soviet censorship. But many liberals fear that free speech might be facing new--and, perhaps, unanticipated--fetters today, when Igor N. Golembiovsky is expected to walk away from his job as editor in chief of Izvestia, the grand dame of Russian newspapers.

Golembiovsky, outmaneuvered, may have no other choice. Two big investors from this nation’s new corporate elite--Lukoil, Russia’s biggest petroleum company, and Uneximbank--have taken control of Izvestia from the journalists who have struggled to keep their independence.

While, ostensibly, there is to be an election to decide who will be the Russian institution’s chief, Golembiovsky, 61, has not been invited to take part.

His struggle has laid bare the conflict in post-Soviet politics between the defenders of democracy and the builders of capitalism. Journalists say they are now being squeezed, but not by Communists who abandoned media control with a 1990 law liberalizing the press. Instead, the new problems are coming from authoritarian capitalists with links to government.

Media freedom in Russia, critics contend, has been steadily whittled away since the early 1990s. Now, much of Russia’s media is owned by fewer than a dozen people. The owners’ influence can be seen in the editorial content.

“To influence politics, you need the media,” Sergei Markov, analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center, explained.

The willingness of media outlets to be compromised by their own interests was shown last summer, when journalists threw themselves behind President Boris N. Yeltsin’s reelection bid.

The lines between the media and business and government interests have been further blurred since as at least two key executives of Russian banks or conglomerates with media holdings have taken public office.

Izvestia had abstained from outside associations--until recently. Employees kept 51% of shares in the newspaper company, at least until last fall. Rising costs and an ambitious modernization plan then sent Golembiovsky out seeking investors.

He found Lukoil. It bought just under 20% of the shares in the paper last year and pledged in turn to pay for its planned expansion. As a condition of the deal, the oil giant also promised that it would not interfere in Izvestia’s editorial policy. But this spring, the interests of journalists and investors clashed when the paper carried a story from the French newspaper Le Monde, suggesting that Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin was worth $5 billion.

Chernomyrdin denied the story, which Le Monde later withdrew. The premier has since said his assets are less than $50,000.

Meanwhile, Vagit Alekperov--who is Lukoil’s boss and had been close to Chernomyrdin when the premier worked in the energy sector--turned on Golembiovsky, criticizing him and threatening to dump Lukoil’s shares in the paper. Izvestia staffers believe that Alekperov, fearing Chernomyrdin would personally blame him for Izvestia’s allegations, did everything he could to get rid of Golembiovsky.

“Chernomyrdin cannot give a direct order to fire me, but he can do it indirectly: He can get Lukoil to have me fired,” Golembiovsky said.

But instead of dumping shares, Alekperov bought more. Lukoil’s stake in Izvestia--and alliances with other shareholders--grew to 51.3% by late April.

Searching for a new backer to help him fight Lukoil, Golembiovsky invited Uneximbank to buy stock in the paper. But Uneximbank later changed sides, making a deal with Lukoil to squeeze out Golembiovsky.

He admitted that he had bungled the takeover battle but said it had become too expensive to keep 51% of stock in journalists’ hands when the price of an Izvestia share had rocketed from 2 to 5,700 rubles.

The conflicts of interest, he told a news conference, were inevitable: Izvestia’s corporate masters eventually would have found another pretext to show their strength. “For this not to have happened, we would have had to change a lot in the newspaper’s policy,” he said.