The assault team, including investigators from the FSB, the domestic successor to the Soviet KGB, searched the premises for documents and videotapes. At first the federal prosecutor’s office said the raid was mounted to seize evidence connected to a three-year-old investigation into alleged financial misdeeds by a former Finance Ministry official. But by the end of the day, the FSB said its agents were investigating the operations of Media-Most’s private security apparatus, which the FSB alleged had been involved in surveillance activities that violated Russian privacy laws. The Russian tax police, which said in the morning that it had merely “lent” some of its paramilitary agents to back up the raid, later weighed in with dark hints that it was also investigating tax irregularities within Media-Most.
Gusinsky, who flew back from Israel to manage the crisis, said he was a victim of “political pressure” and accused Putin of using Soviet-era tactics. “It looks like everything is going backwards–the same masks, the same special services, the same witch hunting,” said the media baron. His headquarters were invaded by security forces once before, in 1994. That raid was ordered by Aleksandr Korzhakov, then chief of Kremlin security, in an apparent attempt to intimidate NTV, which had given unsympathetic coverage to the first Chechen war.
The Media-Most empire–which includes the weekly news magazine Itogi, published in cooperation with NEWSWEEK–also has supported one of Putin’s chief rivals, Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov. Last year NTV aired a series of reports alleging that Yeltsin’s presidential administration–most of whose members are still in place–was involved in siphoning off billions of dollars of state funds through corrupt building schemes. The station also angered the FSB with a report suggesting that the security agency could have been involved in a series of bombings that killed 300 people last summer–for which Chechens were officially blamed.
Enraged at all the sniping, Aleksandr Voloshin, the head of the presidential administration under both Yeltsin and Putin, has openly vowed to break up Gusinsky’s empire. The company claims the Kremlin is trying to force it out of business by putting pressure on Gazprom, a natural-gas giant partly owned by the state, to recall a $211 million loan to Media-Most. It also claims the Kremlin blocked its efforts to sell one of its subsidiaries, Most-Bank, to raise money for the Gazprom debt.
Media-Most interpreted last week’s raid as another form of retaliation. “This is an act of intimidation and an attempt to interfere with the publication of materials on corruption at the highest levels of power,” said Igor Malashenko, deputy chairman of the company’s board of directors. “It’s very difficult for me to imagine that the raid was undertaken without a green light from the top,” he added. Putin himself had nothing to say in public about last week’s raid. His office issued a statement insisting he “strongly believes that freedom of the press is a cornerstone of democracy… but everyone must be equal under the law.” Senior Kremlin aides said privately that the order for the raid didn’t come from Putin. If so, the initiative most likely originated with the presidential administration or the FSB. That possibility made some people wonder who is really in charge of Putin’s Russia.
