Raucous Russian Tabloids Thrive (original) (raw)

July 27, 2008

MOSCOW For decades, Komsomolskaya Pravda served up article after leaden article about Soviet officials meeting with other Soviet officials. Now, reinvented as a tabloid, the newspaper has a rowdier agenda and a huge audience.

The paper’s most-read item one recent day was a verbal catfight between a celebrity radio hostess and Ksenia Sobchak, Russia’s answer to Paris Hilton.

In the newspaper’s Moscow offices, a star correspondent was polishing an intrigue-filled opus on the death of the supermodel from Kazakhstan who jumped or so the police said from her Lower Manhattan balcony last month. The editor-in-chief was lukewarm on the photo of the model in her prime: Was there one that showed a little more leg?

A 27-year-old crime reporter thought he might have a big scoop, the ultimate Russian tear-jerker: A World War II veteran said he had been robbed of his medals. Better yet, the old soldier claimed to have served with the father of Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin.

“We’ll run, before the competition beats us,” the reporter, Shamil Dzhemakulov, shouted to his anxious editor. “I have all the documents!”

The newspaper is part of a vibrant tabloid culture that illustrates the complex nature of Russian life under Mr. Putin. As long as they do not threaten the Kremlin or its closest friends, it seems, Russian newspapers can be as raucous as they like.

For papers like Komsomolskaya Pravda, which sells more copies than any other Russian newspaper, the country’s recent rollback of press freedoms is largely beside the point.

Their investigative journalism tends toward exposés of incompetent police work, corrupt low-level officials and dirty train stations, everyday problems Russians care about. And their standard fare of scandal, entertainment and “news you can use” represents a normalization of sorts in a country that for years was too poor to develop a consumer culture and too caught up with political turmoil to dwell on celebrity gossip.

Founded in 1925 as the organ of the Komsomol, the Communist Party’s youth movement, Komsomolskaya Pravda has kept only its name from the Soviet past. Now, its bread-and-butter themes would not be out of place in the tabloids of New York or London.

Its most-feared competitor for Moscow readers, Moskovsky Komsomolets, is another former Communist organ that now specializes in acidly written crime briefs. One told how a large-breasted woman tried to bribe the police with wads of cash hidden in her bra. A national rival, Zhizn, is modeled on Fleet Street’s The Sun.

Publishers like theirs have decided that Russian society is tired of politics and has turned its attention to more mundane topics like shopping and family life.

“It’s not politics, it’s not economics. It’s the everyday life of people. Love, tears, what we call Santa Barbara,” Sergei Ponomaryov, the regional editor of Komsomolskaya Pravda, said, referring to the American soap opera that took Russia by storm in the 1990s.

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The staff of Komsomolskaya Pravda at its headquarters. Credit...Mikhail Galustov for The New York Times

Russia’s newspapers have changed with the country. Under Communism, newspapers were gray government mouthpieces like Pravda, whose name was Russian for truth. After the Soviet Union fell, they exposed once-forbidden stories of oppression. Later, they took part in the rough-and-tumble political battles of the 1990s, as Russia’s new plutocrats vied for power and sometimes bought newspapers to use as weapons.

Now, press freedom has dwindled as the Kremlin has consolidated control over media, particularly by forcing the sale of independent television stations and newspapers to government-friendly owners.

A few investigative newspaper reporters still regularly confront the Kremlin. But their work is dangerous several, like Anna Politkovskaya, have died in mysterious circumstances and their publications, compared with the tabloids, sell poorly.

That contrast has earned the tabloids some resentment.

“Komsomolskaya Pravda has absolutely no relation to freedom of the press,” said Aleksei K. Simonov, founder of the Glasnost Defense Foundation, a Moscow-based organization that monitors press freedom. “It doesn’t trouble them at all.”

He said the tabloids might be fun but that, like celebrity obsessions in other countries, they distract readers from fundamental issues, like the country’s lack of effective political opposition and persistent social problems.

To be fair, Komsomolskaya Pravda has pursued its own brand of muckraking. It has spotlighted problems of violence against immigrants from Central Asia and the Caucasus and asked whether the police could have acted more quickly to catch a serial killer known as the Bitsevsky Maniac.

Still, the paper, controlled in part by Baltic Media Group, whose president has been reported in Russian media to be close to Mr. Putin, does not seriously challenge him or President Dmitri A. Medvedev.

Vladimir Sungorkin, Komsomolskaya Pravda’s editor and general director, says its “optimistic” tone and lowbrow approach give readers what they want. They also help the paper survive at a time of shrinking profit margins and increasing competition from the Internet, the challenges that face newspapers around the world.

“It’s not a gloomy newspaper,” he said in an interview at the paper’s headquarters in a former coat factory. “We need to help people live.”

Some readers, particularly Russia’s intelligentsia, he said, have criticized the paper for being too sunny, too patriotic, too obsessed with sex and scandal. He calls them “fundamentalist” readers, “irritable and easily wounded.”

But he says his circulation numbers support his strategy. According to Russia’s National Circulation Service, Komsomolskaya Pravda has 745,000 readers daily and 3.1 million for its weekly edition. Its closest competitors are Argumenty i Fakty, a weekly with 2.9 million readers and a mix of celebrity fare and serious news, and Zhizn, with two million. Staples of the intelligentsia and business communities, like Kommersant and Literaturnaya Gazeta, print fewer than 100,000 copies.

“If we cover high culture, people will run away,” Mr. Sungorkin said. “Leo Tolstoy, we won’t come close to.”

At one of the paper’s recent daily meetings, several dozen editors planned the next day’s paper.

Above their conference table hung a large photograph of Mr. Putin peering over large sunglasses. Nearby were smaller portraits of opposition figures. At the back of the room hung a red velvet banner decorated with profiles of Stalin and Lenin, an artifact from the paper’s old building.

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Recent papers featured a hockey player hit with a cake and the headlines, “Have Piranhas Appeared Again in Novosibirsk?” and “In Krasnoyarsk They Are Closing 50 Street Cafes.”

Editors announced their articles in staccato shorthand and teased one another with repartee straight out of the 1994 Michael Keaton movie “The Paper.”

“An explosion in the suburbs,” said Yulia Volosataya, who edits crime stories. “Four prostitutes in the hospital, and, one, uh, ‘consumer.’ ”

Another editor suggested, “Let’s say, ‘user.’ ”

A tentative layout of the article from New York, “Seven Versions of the Death of a Russian Supermodel,” flashed on a screen. “We’re so sorry she ended up this way,” one editor blurted out.

Mr. Sungorkin was more concerned about the photo of the model, Ruslana Kornushova. It showed her striding down a runway in flowing pants that showed only a glimpse of shin.

“I’m sorry that she ended up without legs,” he said.

There was a discussion of more serious news, almost as an afterthought. United Russia, Mr. Putin’s party, was kicking out some members, perhaps for being too independent.

“Do a small item. Don’t make it too gloomy,” Mr. Sungorkin ordered.

Later, Zhenya Suprychova, 25, one of the paper’s stars, was starting on an undercover investigation into city problems. She was trying to get hired by a meat factory, where she suspected conditions would be less than safe and sanitary.

Mr. Dzhemakulov, the crime reporter, jumped in a taxi. He originally came to Moscow planning to study literature, but got hooked, he said, on the adrenaline of tabloid journalism. Now he was hoping to be first to confirm that the victimized veteran had served with Mr. Putin’s father.

The reporter whose business card reads “We pay for any type of information” had gotten the man’s number from one of the paper’s many paid tipsters in police stations, hospitals, cemeteries and government offices.

In a one-room apartment on the outskirts of Moscow, the veteran, Boris Skachkov, 85, described how three young women had talked their way into his apartment and ripped the medals from the threadbare jacket where he had pinned them. The medals fetch good money on the market.

“I cried all night,” he said before pulling out a yellowing snapshot that he said showed him with Mr. Putin’s father.

Shaky with excitement, Mr. Dzhemakulov snapped photos of the picture. Then his worst fear came true. The doorbell rang, and in walked two young women from Tvoi Den, the daily edition of the tabloid Zhizn, his nemesis.

Later, his editor said that unless he could confirm that Mr. Skachkov had served with Mr. Putin’s father, the article did not rate the front page. It was too late to reach the military. The dead model took the front-page slot.

The next morning, Mr. Dzhemakulov woke to see the veteran on the front page of Tvoi Den: “Brother-In-Arms of Vladimir Putin’s Father Robbed!”

He consoled himself with professional pride. “They go for screaming headlines,” he said. “We have different standards.”

Julia Talanova contributed reporting.

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