Kristine
and John Bushnell
Russian
Press Service, Inc.
1805
Crain St.
Evanston,
Illinois 60202 USA
Tel:
847-491-9851
Fax:
847-491-1440
e-mail:
rps@russianpress.com
www.russianpress.com
RUSSIAN
PUBLISHING, 2000-2001: THREATS TO FREEDOM OF INFORMATION, BUT A RECORD YEAR FOR
BOOKS. A Report to the 2001 Summer Slavic Librarians' Workshop
A spectre is haunting Russia--the spectre
of Communism. Or at least the spectre
haunts Russian intellectuals and Western observers.[1] Gazprom's
April 2001 takeover of NTV, the only national TV station not owned by the
government, was the culmination of a long campaign against Media-Most, Vladimir
Gusinsky's press and TV empire. Police,
sometimes in ski masks and waving semi-automatic rifles, raided Media-Most
offices 27 times between May 2000 and January 2001. Though purportedly looking for evidence of criminal activity, the
police never filed charges against Media-Most; prosecutors did file, then drop,
then file charges against Gusinsky himself, eventually driving him from the
country. As observers concluded, the
authorities were sending a message:
"Don't mess with politics."[2] When NTV
proved impervious to threats, Gazprom called in loans that Media-Most could not
repay, and the courts awarded Gazprom controlling shares of Media-Most. In early April, Gazprom appointed new
management for both Media-Most and NTV.
After a brief stand-off by NTV staffers, and a demonstration of support
by thousands of Muscovites, the station was taken over by force in the middle
of the night on April 14. Other
Media-Most outlets were also crushed:
financing for the newspaper Segodnia was cut off, while the
entire staff of the popular newsweekly Itogi was replaced.
The government, ignoring criticism of its
indirect takeover of Media-Most (the government controls Gazprom, which
controls Media-Most), said that the only reason Gusinsky lost control was
because of Media-Most's bad management and debts. To be sure, NTV was in debt.
But, as Russian commentators pointed out, so too are the other broadcast
stations. And as Masha Lipman, fomerly
deputy editor of Itogi, pointed out, the pre-takeover Itogi was
making money.[3]
Media-Most's correspondents, particulary those at NTV and Itogi,
had been critical of the government's war in Chechnia and of civil rights
abuses. It was also NTV that broke the
story, embarrassing to Putin, that a dead submariner's letter indicated that
the Kursk had not been hit by a foreign vessel and that some of the crew might
have been rescued had the navy made the attempt in time. NTV was the only nationwide voice that
consistently refused to accept the government's versions of events, and it
helped shape the national political debate.
The NTV affair seemed the more ominous
given the simultaneous arrest of both Westerners and Russian scholars for
alleged espionage, and new rules imposed by the Academy of Sciences that seemed
designed to reduce an imagined threat to Russian security by reestablishing
controls over contacts between Russians and foreigners.[4] The Academy
rules, as summarized in the Chronicle of Higher Education, included the
following:
"Scientists
should report the intent to apply for foreign grants and provide copies of all
relevant paperwork, inform institutional administrators of all visits by
foreigners, provide copies of all articles before publishing them abroad, and
give accounts of their trips abroad."[5]
George
Soros pronounced these rules "basically a return to the Soviet
system," and said he might end his philanthropic activities and
investments in Russia if his fears were borne out.[6]
Reporters sans Frontieres has declared Russia
an enemy of press freedom, and has called Media Minister Mikhail Lesin one of
the worst enemies of the press.[7] Lesin and
his ministry harassed NTV through much of 2000, and played a messy role in the
effort to force Gusinsky to sell his shares in Media-Most to Gazprom. Lesin's deputy, Vladimir Grigor'ev,
suggested that the ministry ought to police the internet to ensure that only
"accurate" information--and certainly not unfavorable news about the
war in Chechnia--is purveyed. It is clearly
the case that Russian publishers are deeply suspicious of Lesin: because of his frequent assertions that
order must be restored to the book market, his past as head of the Video
Interneshnl (the largest Russian advertising agency), his heavy-handed
manipulation of TV news during the 1999 Duma elections, the many instances in
which he has reenforced the near monopoly that Video Interneshnl enjoys in
placing ads on TV, and his refusal to discuss his continuing relationship with
Video Interneshnl.[8]
However, the Putin government will
probably not manage to impose the kind of order on the media that it would
like, at least without reverting to the direct censorship that it wants to
avoid. For one thing, the original staff
of Media-Most outlets have refused the part of graceful losers. Evgenii Kiselev, the fired former director
of NTV who was also NTV's leading political commentator, moved much of his
staff to TV-6, a local Moscow station owned by Boris Berezovsky, and is trying
to patch together a new national network of local stations. While the government immediately began to
harass TV-6, the viewing audience clearly hopes that Kiselev succeeds. Between early April and the end of May,
while the percentage of Muscovites watching TV dropped by 10 percent, the
percentage watching TV-6 rose from 7.4 to 10.9, and the percentage watching NTV
fell from 19 to 13.[9] The former
staff of Itogi have set up an internet news site that they call
"Nastoiashchie Itogi--eto my" (www.itogi.lenta.ru) and have
apparently secured financing to launch a new newsweekly in September (at which
point we will advise all of our customers to switch their subscriptions from Itogi
to the new magazine).[10] The Segodnia
staff have failed to keep their newspaper afloat, but are still trying to
resurrect it under a new name.
Even if the efforts to create Segodnia-2
fail, there are still a number of quite respectable, independent newspapers,
among them Izvestiia, Vremia-MN, Obshchaia gazeta, and Literaturnaia
gazeta. (But not, sad to say, Knizhnoe obozrenie, whose new
management--the former editor was forced out by Media Minister Lesin in August
2000--entirely ignored the assault on media independence.) In addition, there are reports that
Norwegian and Swedish firms are about to invest in--and thus buttress the
economic and political independence of--Izvestiia, Komsomol'skaia
pravda and other periodicals.[11] However,
since TV is the major source of news and commentary for most Russians, the
greater or lesser independence of the print media is not nearly so important as
the continued existence of independent television.
The government-media conflict in Russia
is immediately relevant to Western academics and libraries. The variety and quality of Russian
periodicals is at stake, and if the media are constrained, publishers of books
are likely to experience restrictions, too.
However, the difficulties the government has in controlling the press
are a measure of how much Russia has changed since 1991 (or 1985, to give
Gorbachev his due); the habit of
criticism, private ownership, and foreign investment do make a difference. So does Russia's wholesale immersion in the
international world: the Department of
Border Control announced that 17 million foreigners and 10 million Russians
crossed Russia's borders in the first five months of 2001.[12] With that
volume of international traffic, the government cannot keep subversive thoughts
out of Russian heads.
A
New Record in Russian Book Publishing
The book market is as good an indicator
as any that Russia is thriving economically and culturally. One commentator thought that the most
positive thing he could say about the publishing industry is that it is second
only to the alcohol industry in its vitality.[13] In fact, in
the year 2000 books fared much better than booze: vodka production fell by 9 percent, book production (to use the
most convenient measure, officially registered titles) rose by 18 percent.[14] The vodka
industry aside, 2000 was a good year for the economy: GDP rose 7.6 percent (as against 3.2 percent in 1999), real
income rose 9.1 percent, agricultural production rose 5 percent, industrial
production rose 9 percent (light industry,
which
includes printing, rose 22 percent).[15]
KNIZHNAIA PALATA STATISTICS ON TITLES
PUBLISHED
(Pre-1992 statistics are for the Russian
Republic only.)[16]
1977 55, 657
1988 49,603
1989 46,023
1990 41,234
1991 34,050
1992 28,716
1993 29,017
1994 30,390
1995 33,623
1996 36,273
1997 45,026
1998 46,156
1999 47,733
2000 56,180
The 18 percent jump in the number of
titles registered by Knizhnaia Palata pushed the total for 2000 past the
previous official record of 55,657 titles in 1977. There are commentators who treat this as evidence that Russia has
crossed an important threshold and can claim a place among the top dozen
publishing countries.[17] However, the
50,000-title threshold was passed well before the year 2000. As Boris Lenskii, Director of Knizhnaia
Palata, has acknowledged, the Knizhnaia Palata count is incomplete; he
estimates the real number of titles published in 2000, for
instance,
was somewhere between 66,000 and 76,000.[18] The
undercount is due to the fact that Knizhnaia Palata counts titles that
publishers deposit, but not all publishers observe the deposit
requirement. It is not just stray books
that go uncounted, but the entire annual output of hundreds of publishers.[19] Production
over the entire decade was greater than Knizhnaia Palata's count suggests, and
the undercount has probably increased every year as private firms have taken
over more and more of the market.
Since Knizhnaia Palata's statistics on
total printings are utterly misleading, we hide them in a footnote.[20] Knizhnaia
Palata, now as always, compiles gross tirage only of the books that
publishers deposit. However, since
publishers no longer feel the need to state in the colophon the number of
copies printed, Knizhnaia Palata cannot total up the tirage even of
those books it has in hand. Statistics
on gross tirage are a fraud, and it is a continuing intellectual scandal
that commentators on the book trade cite these meaningless statistics as
evidence of a continued crisis in the book market, smaller average printing,
limited consumer demand, a frail distribution system, or indeed anything
else. Judging by what some individual
publishers say, tirage is rising in step with the number of titles. For instance, Drofa, the private textbook
publisher, reports that it has increased the average printing of its
books. Oleg Novikov, the general
director of EKSMO, reports that his house produced roughly 30 percent more
titles in 2000 than in 1999, and increased gross tirage by roughly 20
percent.[21] It appears
that large publishers with their own distribution networks are increasing tirage,
but many smaller publishers are doing the same thing. Even though there are still academic titles that sell out
overnight, the supply even of these books has been increasing at least for the
last three years.
EKSMO and Drofa are among the small
number of publishers that dominate the book market. (In 2000, EKSMO published on the order of 3000 new titles.) Other leaders are AST, Prosveshchenie,
Drofa, Olma-Press, Terra, Rosmen and Tsentropoligraf, publishing from 300 to
2000 new titles per year.[22] All of them,
with the exception of the state-owned textbook publisher Prosveshchenie, are
private companies that are only a decade old.
They have their own distribution systems, and some--EKSMO, Terra and
Olma-Press--own printing plants and are conglomerates in their own right.
What
is being published?
As
is the Russian tradition, in 2000 publishers helped to maintain Russia's
literary and historical canon by offering titles celebrating various
anniversaries. Some stragglers were
devoted to the 1999 bicentennial of Pushkin's birth, but many others marked the
jubilees of 2000: the 200th anniversary
of the first publication of the "Igor Tale"; the 120th year since the
birth of Aleksandr Blok; the 55th anniversary of the end of WWII. 2001 has brought more landmark dates,
including the 110th birthday of Il'ia Erenburg, Daniil Kharms' 95th birthday,
and Konstanin Leont'ev's 170th birthday (marked by commencement of the
publication of his complete works and letters in 12 volumes).
While this reverence for jubilees is
distinctively Russian, actual book sales generally conform to the common
international pattern. The two most
popular genres in Russia today are detective novels and romance novels written
by Russian authors. Masters in these
genres--Marinina, Poliakova, Golovachev, Neznanskii, et al.--can virtually
guarantee a publisher a bestseller, much the way that the names Tom Clancy,
Stephen King, Michael Crichton catapult sales in the U.S. It is no accident that the firms that did
well last year landed one or more of these bestsellers: EKSMO had 7, Olma-Press 5, AST and Neva 3
each (Neva is one of those publishers Knizhnaia Palata does not count), Vagrius
2.[23] Boris
Akunin's name must also be added to the list of bestselling Russian
authors. He is the author of
sophisticated, engaging detective novels in which his star detective, Fandorin,
is confronted by most curious crimes.
All eight of the Anti-Booker Prize laureate's novels were republished or
newly published over the past year or so; Akunin singlehandedly dominated
bestseller lists month after month.
The third most popular genre of the past
year, on the other hand, is more distinctively Russian: encyclopedic dictionaries.[24] Almost every
possible subject has its encyclopedia: the occult, massage, cocktails, medals
and more. While the quality is
generally beneath academic library standards, some are quite good. For example, Otechestvo: istoriia, liudi,
regiony Rossii (Bol'shaia rossiiskaia entsiklopediia, published late 1999,
sold mostly in 2000), is a solid reference work. So is Russkie pisateli 20 veka: biograficheskii slovar'
(Bol'shaia rossiiskaia entsiklopediia, 2000), the first comprehensive
dictionary of 20th-century Russian writers, including emigres.
Librarians and vendors deal with books
that represent only a small segment of total production. While we know from our own experience that
academic publication is thriving, we have discovered no way to quantify that
segment, or its growth, directly. We
offer two different, overlapping measures.
One is admittedly presumptuous, the total number of books we have
carried, by imprint date.[25]
RPS titles with imprint date
1995 2,523
1996 2,767
1997 3,504
1998 4,025
1999 4,972
2000 4,562 and counting
Keeping
in mind that academic interests are remarkably varied, that we carry only books
in the humanities and social sciences, and that we do not carry many academic
books of interest to Russians but not to our customers, the figures suggest
that the number of books of academic interest is large and growing quite
rapidly. The other measure is the
number of books we have carried (which approximates the total) that have been
published by Academy of Science social science and humanities institutes and
affiliated publishers (Nauka, Bulanin, Indrik, Nasledie, Academia), again by
imprint date:
1997 994
1998 1,050
1999 1,129
2000 1,120 and counting
Restructuring
the State Sector
Commentators on the book trade have paid
a great deal of attention in the last three years to government plans to
restructure the state sector and to create a government-sponsored wholesale and
retail infrastructure in the provinces.
The book press devotes much attention to it, because it is a subject
dear to Media Minister Lesin's heart.
To help in this endeavor, Lesin brought in as Deputy Minister Vladimir
Grigor'ev, one of the three founders of Vagrius. (Grigor'ev is the GRI in
Vagrius, which he cofounded with Messrs. VAsil'ev and USpenskii.) Grigor'ev in turn brought on board another
successful publisher from the private sector, Nina Litvinets of Raduga.
Moscow's state-owned bookstores. Restructuring began in 1999 when the City of
Moscow announced, with approval of the Ministry of the Press (as it was then
called), that it intended to consolidate a number of its flagging state-owned
bookstores to create the Dom Knigi Association. Thirty-seven state-owned stores and 40-odd kiosks were placed
under the management of Moscow's Dom Knigi.
The stores were computerized and remodeled to include self-service
sections. The press has had only good
things to say about the results. The
new stores are said to be profitable, and have a much larger assortment of
books--two and a half times as many titles--with uniform prices.[26]
State-owned publishing houses. Lesin began a campaign against
"inefficient" state publishers almost two years ago, announcing at
public meetings, for example, the names of state publishers who had not
published anything in the preceding months.
Furthermore, he asserted that 50 of the remaining 64 state publishing
houses under the authority of the Media Ministry were completely useless. In April 2000, Lesin announced that over the
next three to five years some state publishers would be merged, others
auctioned off and privatized: the
government would not continue to support failing enterprises. Nina Litvinets explained that the Ministry
wanted to create a bloc of state publishers to insure they would produce
technical works, children's books, and works in literature and the humanities
(all but the first of which the private sector was in fact producing in
abundance). She named four state houses
that would remain: Prosveshchenie,
Vysshaia shkola, Russkii iazyk, and Bol'shaia rossiiskaia entsiklopediia. The fates of Respublika, Mysl', Panorama,
and Khudozhestvennaia literatura, she said, would be determined later.[27] Since then
new directors have been appointed to head Mir, Detskaia literatura, and
Izobrazitel'noe iskusstvo. Aleksandr
Lebedev, the new head of Mir, is from the private sector, the Drofa publishing
house. Mir has been designated the
single publisher of technical literature, and a number of smaller publishers
(including Kolos, Transport, Khimiia, Metallurgiia) have been consolidated
under Mir's management. Detskaia
literatura will continue publishing children's literature; Izobrazitel'noe
iskusstvo, books on art.[28]
State printing establishments. The ministry recently announced that the
number of works printed in Russia grew significantly in 2000, a reflection of
the fact that printing is now less expensive in Russia than abroad. Nonetheless, according to Grigor'ev,
$300-500 million is being lost each year on books printed abroad instead of in
Russia. The government has announced
that, to insure the competitiveness of the state sector, it is undertaking a
restructuring of the 65 remaining state printing establishments. As Grigor'ev
told a group of printers, print shops need new management because most current
directors are 60 years old and older.
He also said that the Ministry plans to select two or three printing
plants that can be used by the state sector and equip them with Western
printing presses. These changes are now under way; new directors have been
named to 20 of the existing state printing establishments.[29]
Distribution: ROSKNIGA. Rossiiskaia Kniga, a distribution network
still in the planning stage, was described in March 2001 by Oleg Bartenev, its
newly appointed Deputy Director.
According to Bartenev, Roskniga will be a "holding company" of
state book stores in different outlying regions. Each store will be equipped with a computer data base of newly
published titles, allowing residents in the regions access to information about
titles published elsewhere. The stores
themselves will be stocked regularly by private distributors, such as Master
Kniga or Top-kniga, and individuals will be able to order additional titles from
publishers. In this way, according to
Bartenev, Roskniga will restore the remnants of the state bookstore network:
the plan is to begin by stocking seven large regional stores, open 20 by the
end of 2001, 60-80 by the end of 2002.[30]
What Bartenev described is indeed an
ambitious project, especially since no complete electronic data base of
published titles--a national books-in-print--presently exists. Under the auspices of Roskniga, a
computer-accessible new data base is to be created in which all titles
published in Russia will be recorded in electronic format. The Ministry, critical of Knizhnaia Palata's
Knigi v nalichie i v pechati, an earlier attempt to create a national
books-in-print, recently assigned the chore of establishing a new electronic
format and bibliographic standards, not to Knizhnaia Palata, but to the
research institute "Ekonomika", headed by Natalia Gushchnaia.[31] Much about
this plan is unclear, but it would appear that publishers will be required to
enter bibliographic information in the data base for all new publications. Will they also pay a fee for this service,
or will it be financed by the government?
How will Top-Kniga or Master Kniga be paid for their services? Though this is the biggest step taken by the
government in the book market since the collapse of the wholesale distribution
network a decade ago, publishers fear they will be called upon to finance a
costly program that might not work.
Indeed, after years of urging the government to establish a distribution
program, publishers are leery of government interference.
Prices
Overall inflation in the Russian economy
in 2000 was 20.2 percent. Book prices
rose somewhat more than that: 24.6
percent at the Olympic Stadium wholesale market.[32] Meanwhile,
the dollar to ruble exchange rate increased by only 3 percent. That means that the dollar cost of books in
Russia rose 20.4 percent in 2000. And
both in Russia and the United States, the cost of postage and shipping jumped
by anywhere from 30 to 150 percent, depending upon category and distance. Our prices rose, too, but only by 3 percent:
Average RPS price per book[33]
January-March 2000 $15.94
January-March 2001 $16.41
Our
current average price is now at about the level of early 1998 ($16.25), and
still far below the high of $20.78 in early 1997, when the exchange rate was
distorted and the dollar undervalued.
Book prices so far this year have continued to rise faster than the
dollar-ruble exchange rate, and since postage rates are set to go up in July,
we expect that the prices we charge will also continue to rise over the course
of 2001.
[15]These and
other economic statistics can be found in RFE/RL, January 3, 2001; January 4,
2001; January 8, 2001; January 25, 2001; January 26, 2001; February 9,
2001. They suggest trends but are far
from exact measures. The Russian
Interior Ministry
estimates that as much as 45 percent of all goods and
services are distributed in the "shadow economy," i.e., beyond the
purview of banks, tax collectors, and other official counters. That estimate seems only slightly
inflated. Government economists and
statisticians do include estimates of shadow economy performance in the official
statistics, but do not explain their methodology.
[16]The figures
are available in the annual Pechat' Rossiiskoi Federatsii, published by
Knizhnaia Palata. We took the summary
figures through 1997 from Knizhnyi biznes, no. 2, February 1999, p. 29.
Figures for 1998-2000 are from Poligrafist i izdatel', no. 3,
[33]Only for
books priced at $30 and under, which excludes most art albums, most
multi-volume sets sold as sets rather than one volume at a time, and
particularly expensive reference works such as those produced by Panorama.