A ‘Creeping Coup’ Alarms Ex-NTV Staff

Management insisted that it was a normal, “very orderly” corporate takeover. But journalists who resigned en masse Saturday from Russia’s NTV network saw the change at the top as a naked power play by the Kremlin to muzzle the country’s most outspoken news broadcaster.

After months of legal wrangling, the state-run utility giant Gazprom finally got control of Russia’s only private nationwide television network. Without warning, the new management deployed its own security force before dawn and confronted shocked editors, correspondents and technical staff with a choice as they arrived for work: Sign on or sign out.

“As of today, we have three national channels all run by the government. And this is what is most disgusting,” said Vadim Takmenyov, an NTV journalist who resigned rather than work for Gazprom-Media, a subsidiary of the natural-gas monopoly, whose president is in turn a state official loyal to President Vladimir V. Putin.

“A creeping coup is taking place in the country,” declared Igor Y. Malashenko, a co-founder of the network who had earlier been removed from its board.

The network’s new director, American investment banker Boris Jordan, said he had managed to retain most of the editorial staff. But the journalists who left NTV and decamped across the street to a smaller sister station called TNT disputed the claim. They said Jordan can expect an avalanche of resignation letters in coming days.

“He’s too disgusting to even listen to,” one former NTV staffer said as she watched Jordan on a TV monitor promising that the station would be independent in its reporting.

Meanwhile, a chaotic battle of the airwaves took place Saturday. NTV technicians, not wanting to be deprived of their station’s nationwide reach, rigged a relay to broadcast over NTV’s frequency from the TNT offices.

For viewers in Moscow, the NTV news began on schedule shortly after 8 a.m., presented by the familiar staff. But at 8:06, anchor Andrei Norkin was cut off in midsentence while discussing what was happening at the station.

Technicians loyal to new management had located and disabled the relay from TNT. NTV went off the air briefly, and by the 10 a.m. news show, Gazprom-Media’s management had full editorial control.

At that point, the former NTV journalists began airing the news bulletins every two hours on TNT, a thinly watched station specializing in light entertainment and not known for news.

But by late Saturday, TV6, a station controlled by exiled Russian oligarch Boris A. Berezovsky, had offered a new home to the NTV staff and to Yevgeny Kiselyov, the NTV director who has led resistance to the takeover. TV6 appointed Kiselyov its acting director.

Kiselyov declared himself ready to build a new station, blending the old NTV with the existing journalists at TV6, but he said it would take a month to finalize details.

“We are now in a crisis situation, and we need to find a way out of it without losing our human or professional dignity,” he said.

Kiselyov said there was no question of going back to NTV and dismissed promises of editorial independence put forth by new management.

“They have come to NTV with an utterly different objective,” he said.

The seizure capped a 10-month-long campaign by prosecutors and tax police against businessman Vladimir A. Gusinsky’s media empire, of which NTV was the crown jewel. Gusinsky is a onetime political backer of former President Boris N. Yeltsin who has run afoul of Putin. He fled Russia last year and now lives on the Spanish Riviera, fighting extradition to face financial charges that he says are political. Russian prosecutors say Gusinsky fraudulently inflated the value of his assets to secure from Gazprom massive loans that he now cannot repay.

On Saturday afternoon at NTV, security men hired by the new management loitered in the hallways, oblivious to the photographs on the walls of many of the award-winning journalists who had already departed. Doors to some offices had paper seals to prevent unauthorized entry.

Apologizing for his weariness--”I haven’t slept in three days”--Jordan allowed a small group of Western journalists into Kiselyov’s old office to explain why he had sent in a new security service at 2:45 a.m. He said he had no choice but to act when he learned of what he said were plans by the staff to dismantle the station’s property.

Jordan said that, out of 1,200 employees, he had received resignations from only 42 and that not all of those individuals worked in the news department. The majority who remained, he said, were showing “tremendous enthusiasm to rebuild an independent television company.” He also said he intended to contact all of those who had tendered resignations to ask them to reconsider.

Jordan disputed any interpretation that Gazprom’s takeover of NTV was an attack on broadcast freedom.

The old NTV was “hardly independent,” he said. “It was highly dependent on one shareholder who used it for personal and professional gains. . . . I want to build a really independent TV station.”

He said he hopes to create programming that is “edgy, curious [and] aggressive.”

Across the street at TNT, a station still owned by what is left of Gusinsky’s Media-Most empire, the NTV staffers who had decided to fight on milled about in offices and corridors, smoking cigarettes and gulping tea while figuring out their next steps. The staffers claimed that more than 100 people had opted to resign.

Kiselyov indicated that TNT was a temporary solution and that his ultimate goal was to join with the news department of TV6, which claims that its signals reach 120 million viewers across Russia and other former Soviet republics.

“As for the audience, they vote by switching from one program to another. It is a question of time, of course. Time and popularity rating will be our arbiters,” Kiselyov said.

He also acknowledged that the plan was dependent on political developments.

“If the situation develops toward strengthening the authoritarian tendencies and infringing upon democratic freedoms for the sake of some ephemeral objectives of strengthening the state, then free and independent journalism . . . will become impossible in Russia,” he warned.

Journalist Takmenyov said there had been scenes of anguish at NTV Saturday morning when staffers arriving at work were confronted with having either to sign papers declaring themselves loyal to the new management or to resign.

“People were torn to pieces,” he said. “Many simply did not have any [financial] choice but to stay on, especially the technical staff. . . . Unlike journalists, who can launch their own projects . . . the technical personnel were stuck.”

He said it was heart-wrenching to see their eyes “well with tears” as they signed on to stay. “I cannot blame them, but there is no doubt that those people committed a vile and base act,” he said.

Emotions were running high as well at Echo of Moscow, a radio station also operated by Media-Most. There, NTV commentator Andrei Cherkizov called Putin “Pontius Pilate” for publicly labeling the NTV controversy a legal dispute over which he had no control. Liberal lawmaker Grigory A. Yavlinsky said the takeover amounted to a “putsch.”

Yevgeny Kirichenko, an NTV correspondent famous for his war coverage in the separatist republic of Chechnya, suggested that the new management’s actions meant dashing Gazprom’s hopes for a capital infusion from a foreign investor such as Ted Turner, the founder of CNN, who previously offered to buy a stake in the network.

“Now that the best journalists and the best people have left,” said Kirichenko, “they will not have anything left to sell--just an empty brand name.”

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Alexei V. Kuznetsov of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.