Leonid Brezhnev, center, poses with
other commanders on a street in Moscow
after W.W. II, 1945.

American newspaper editor William Allen White once said that a “newspaper is as good as the town it serves.” Today, one need only look at Russia’s press to understand the country. About 30 years ago during the Cold War, the differences between the U.S. and Russia (then the Soviet Union) were at their starkest. But it was the press – both print and broadcast – that showed citizens and foreigners alike the chasm between their societies and their political systems.

Towards the end of Leonid Brezhnev’s long rule (18 years as General Secretary of the Communist Party), a sclerotic old man was the dominant image on Russian TV. Russians, always good at the offhand political joke, had one in which somebody flipped through four television channels: the first had Brezhnev talking; the second was the same; the third was the same. The fourth had a soldier with a gun pointed at the camera, barking, “What’s the matter, you didn’t like the other three?”

For decades, Gosteleradio, the “U.S.S.R. State Committee for Television and Radio,” had thoroughly flooded the airwaves with state-induced propaganda preaching loyalty and duty to the Communist Party. It was not until Nikita Khrushchev that the Soviet Union admitted the reality of Joseph Stalin and his purges of nearly 20 million. And it was not until Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika that the press gained some semblance of freedom of speech and the public, some access to uncensored information.

In the meantime the United States was undergoing its own sea change. Social taboos were shattered when the TV show “All in the Family” debuted in 1971. Gone were the days of Ozzie and Harriet and few things were beyond bounds: racism, homosexuality, women’s liberation, rape, miscarriage, breast cancer, or impotence. This allowed American TV to become what it is today, diverse and, in some cases, unavoidably crass.

Demonstrators hold a Freedom of
Speech banner during a rally of democratic
forces at the monument to great Russian
poet Alexander Pushkin, in downtown
Moscow Wednesday, May 17, 2000.

A few years earlier it had been Walter Cronkite, “the most trusted man in America,” who departed from the past by reporting on Vietnam War atrocities and proclaiming the war unwinnable. His front-line perspective and his war criticism led President Lyndon Johnson to admit, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost America.” Suddenly, America’s media found the power to critique – to raise national security issues before the American public. Skeptical and cynical journalism was born and has flourished ever since.

When Boris Yeltsin took over Russia in early 1992, the press went through the same privatization as the oil industry, with many of the same oligarchs controlling the media. Billionaires such as Vladimir Potanin and Vladimir Gusinsky, Russia’s answer to Rupert Murdoch, gained a near-monopoly of the industry.

That control came to a screeching halt under President Vladimir Putin, in a weird, almost insidious way. Today, TV and game shows in Russia can be as silly or as racy as in America. And while sex and pornography are equally available there, political coverage has reverted to much the same as it was during the Brezhnev era.

In fact, the International Press Institute’s watch list recently named Russia as one of five countries becoming increasingly repressive. The Committee to Protect Journalists cited Putin in its list of ten Worst Enemies of the Press, which also includes Ayatollah Khomeini, Charles Taylor, Fidel Castro, and Robert Mugabe.

A police dog handler passes by
liberal and radical party activists who rally in
Moscow, on Sunday, May 22, 2005, demanding greater press
freedom and more access to the country’s
state-dominated television networks.

During Putin’s tenure, nearly two dozen journalists were assassinated. None of the cases was ever solved. All major national and regional networks are now owned by the government or those in bed with the Kremlin. Gusinsky’s media empire was taken over and he was forced into exile. Gazprom seized Gusinsky’s NTV, valued at $1 billion. Gazprom subsequently also took control and closed Gusinsky’s first newspaper Sevodnya and fired and locked out the staff of news magazine Igoti.

The often whimsical, turned awkward, turned deadly habits honed during the Soviet times are back. Mikhail Delyagin, a well-known political scientist, recently appeared in a TV panel discussion making several comments critical of Putin. But before the program aired, Delyagin had mysteriously disappeared, digitally erased from the screen. In a photo of the discussion, Delyagin’s seat at the panel was empty – except for his legs!

But new president Dmitri Medvedev likes what he sees. He recently said, “In terms of quality and production, our television is among the best in the world and, to my mind, it is worth watching.” Brezhnev himself couldn’t have said it any better.