Once-collegial ties between the Russian government and foreign correspondents have frayed under Russian President Vladimir Putin
Since the late-Soviet period, the Kremlin has maintained a mercurial relationship with the foreign press. Foreign correspondents were required to notify the Soviet Foreign Ministry before traveling outside Moscow. Their phone lines were tapped, and they were routinely tailed by the Committee for State Security, or KGB, the main security agency in the latter half of the Soviet Union, according to several people who worked as journalists in the Soviet Union.
Russian President Boris Yeltsin supported a flourishing of the press after the Soviet Union fell in 1991. New, independent television networks, led by NTV, and radio stations, chiefly Echo of Moscow, sprang up to investigate once-taboo topics, such as government corruption and military overreach.Photo:The freewheeling environment swept up foreign correspondents, as Russia opened itself to greater public scrutiny. Western reporters even gained access to Soviet intelligence archives.
Throughout the 1990s, Western correspondents enjoyed ready access to Russian ministry officials and members of the Duma, the country’s lower house of parliament. But as government power loosened, crime rates rose, posing a new threat to journalists in Russia. Some Russian journalists fell victim to violence, and several were murdered, but being a foreign correspondent in Russia allowed one to “swagger with a certain invincibility,” said Mr. Pohl, the photojournalist.
“That drove suspicion in Russia of foreign journalists,” said Ms. Knobel, the television producer. “There was a palpable change in the administration’s view of foreign reporters.” “A ministry official had a stack of my articles printed out,” Mr. Shuster said. “He would lay his hand on the stack and say, ‘We’re watching you. You’re on the radar.’ ”
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