"People say that the Russian media have gone back to the Soviet times," said Vyacheslav Lukyanov. "They forget what the media were like in the Soviet times." Mr Lukyanov, who edits a bi-monthly called Russia in Global Policy, is right. People, in and out of Russia, do say that about Russian media. He is also right that they are wrong: whatever Russian media are like, they are not like Soviet television.
In a battered, out-of-Moscow hotel room before Christmas, I turned on my television with 16 channels to catch DTV, which ran raunchy Playboy film-ettes followed by a JerrySpringer show, dubbed in Russian. The main state channel was showing The Fog of War,a documentary based on the second thoughts of Robert McNamara, the Vietnam-era former US defence secretary - which, a Russian friend told me next morning, had caused him to reflect on the mess Russia had made of Chechnya. In the morning, the same channel carried a travel programme in which a bronzed and handsome commentator dilated, to a shivering Russia, on the joy of being in Capri in the late spring.
