Prominent Russian journalists have been recently leaving the country with increasing frequency. Lately it has become known that Oleg PANFILOV, a professional journalist and head of the Extreme Journalism Center, has moved to live and work in Georgia. In Tbilisi Panfilov is going to host an analytical TV program on the Caucasian Channel and will also be lecturing at the Journalism Department at the Ilia Chavchavadze University. In the near future he plans to found a school of journalism and write a book on information campaign held during the Russo-Georgian war. The Day has called the journalist at his new residence and learned first hand about the reasons for his move to Tbilisi as well as why talented journalists are leaving Russia.
Mr. Panfilov, what are the reasons behind your move to Georgia for permanent residence — a new job offer or lack of prospects in Russia?
“The main thing I want to note is that I have never had Russian citizenship, and a year ago I became a citizen of Georgia (Panfilov is also a citizen of Tajikistan. — Editor). I am a free person, therefore I decided to go. The thing is that it becomes impossible to live and work in Russia. I used to work in Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan previously, and I have edited a Swedish journal for a while. At the moment Georgia is a very attractive country to me, and I think that it has great prospects. Political and media life is intense here.”
Professional journalists are leaving, but what is the life of those who stay like? In the interview given to the Website www.grani.ru you stated that “the Russian mass media are being used to spread lies.” Are the Russian mass media simply doomed to serve the interests of power, rather than people?
“Not only those who work in the state-run television companies and in newspapers, but most of private newspapers have adopted a fairly official stance, and the saddest thing is that those are newspapers with big press run — Komsomolskaya pravda or Moskovskiy komsomolets, whose press run totals several million copies. Those journalists who don’t want to live under these conditions are leaving. According to some data (nobody has dealt with this problem in a proper way), nearly a thousand journalists have left for political reasons.
“At the same time, they made statements about legal prosecution, restriction of rights, and offences. As you might know, Russian journalists choose not only Western countries, or the US, but Ukraine as well. You must know Alexandr Kosvintsev, Russian political refugee who is working in Ukraine. My Ukrainian colleagues also tell me that many Russian journalists have moved to Ukraine, and nearly one-third or half of Ukrainian periodicals employ Russian immigrants.
“There is one more category of journalists — it is hard to estimate its size, but I think it makes several hundred people. These are journalists seeking work in European Russian-language periodicals, TV, or radio programs, and move there quietly, without making any statements, possibly considering it nonsensical.
“Finally, the third category consists of journalists who change their profession and leave the country. This is also a huge loss for the Russian journalism, because honest people and professionals leave the country. These are consequences of what has been going on in the country in the past decade.”
Doesn’t the Russian government need professionals and objective presentation of information if it lets this happen?
“Mind you, the way you put this question is far from being Russian. It is no secret that the Russian government treats independent journalists badly. We started to get used to this in a serious way already nine or ten years ago, i.e., when Vladimir Putin came to power and introduced changes to the state’s information policy by signing the Information Security Doctrine in 2000. This is a program and a decree in the best traditions of Soviet propaganda. Of course, the power is totally disinterested in free journalism; it has made everything possible in order to take entire national television under its overall control. Now only Ren-TV is somehow trying to provide alternative information, but the state-controlled television is everywhere, and nearly 90-95 percent of Russians watch it. Correspondingly, one can estimate the extent to which the Russian populace is deceived by the official propaganda.”
Does Russian society protests against restrictions of the freedom of expression?
“Apparently, the official propaganda is building its information policy in such a way as to distract the population from urgent problems. I mean the renewal of the Soviet traditions of propaganda, when the populace has two enemies that must be constantly hated, and this hatred is every day reinforced by the news, newspapers, and radio channels. The West is the usual external enemy. Georgia and Ukraine have been recently added to this list. Islamic fundamentalism is the external enemy at the moment.
“To the problem of two enemies one should add the imperialist mentality of the Russian population, which still believes that all the countries of the former USSR are ever indebted to Russia. People have no possibility of coping with internal problems, the population has no traditions of the freedom of speech at all, and now it is silent, I don’t know whether it is suffering, but no serious actions to protect the freedom of speech have taken place yet, and there will be none.”
