Condé Nast accused of journalistic cowardice over anti-Putin
article
Publishing house printed piece in US edition of GQ but
withheld it from Russian edition and internet. By Luke Harding
Luke Harding in Moscow
guardian.co.uk,
Tuesday 8 September 2009 16.40 BST
The publishing house Condé Nast is embroiled in a row over
censorship after it allegedly prevented the publication inside Russia of an
article deeply critical of Vladimir Putin, which appeared in the US edition of
GQ.
The acclaimed war reporter Scott Anderson wrote the piece
for the September edition of the magazine. It casts doubt on the official
Russian version of events following a series of devastating apartment bombings
in Moscow in 1999, in which hundreds of people were killed.
The article's key claim – that Russia's security services
were behind the attacks, rather than Chechen terrorists – has been made on many
occasions before, most strikingly byAlexander Litvinenko, a former member of
Russia FSB spy agency, who was murdered in London in November 2006.
But it is Condé Nast's attempts to prevent the article from
appearing in Russia that have stoked controversy. Entitled Vladimir Putin's
Dark Rise to Power, the article has not been distributed in Russia on the
advice of Condé Nast's lawyers.
Management has also stopped it from appearing
on the internet.
The move appears to have badly backfired. Furious bloggers
in both Russia and the US have denounced Condé Nast for craven self-censorship.
The gossip site Gawker accused the publishing house of an 'act of publishing
cowardice'. Over the weekend it posted a scanned version of the article,
inviting Russian readers to translate it.
Anderson told National Public Radio he was mystified by
Condé Nast's behaviour. "It was quite mysterious to me," he said.
"All of a sudden, it became clear that they were going to run the article
but they were going to try to bury it under a rock as much as they possibly
could."
The editor of the Russia edition of GQ denied there was any
political subtext to the decision by Condé Nast's management. Nikolai Uskov
dismissed Anderson's lengthy account of the 1999 bombings as containing
'nothing new', and pointed out Litvinenko had said much the same thing in an
interview with Russian GQ in 2005.
"I can publish it, if I want to. It's another question
whether the article contains anything that hasn't appeared before in the
Russian mass media many times in the past," Uskov told the Echo of Moscow
radio station. "There isn't any sensation in yet another article which
goes back to the version of FSB participation in the bombings."
Condé Nast owns Vanity Fair and GQ in the US, as well as
Russian editions of GQ, Tatler, Glamour and Vogue. It did not respond yesterday
for comment. Its Russian GQ edition sells 100,000 copies a month. Most Russian
newspapers, and all state TV, are generally reluctant to criticise the
country's leadership, especially Putin who is prime minister.
Anderson's article repeats claims made by several Kremlin
critics: that Putin used the 1999 apartment bombings as an excuse for beginning
a new war in Chechnya – the Kremlin's second – and that conflict propelled him
towards the Russian presidency. Anderson's main source is Michael Trepashkin,
an ex-FSB agent who investigated the bombings, and spent several years in jail
after his former organisation arrested him.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/sep/08/conde-nast-consumer-magazines
