Russian North is Dying but Putin’s Media Policies Ensure Most Won’t Find Out

Paul Goble

            Staunton, November 28 – What is happening in the Russian North recalls to mind an old Soviet joke in which Hitler returns from the dead to watch a Soviet military parade in Red Square. After he has watched this display of military might, he is approached by a Soviet citizen who says, “I bet you’re thinking that if you had had such weapons, you wouldn’t have lost.”

            No, the shade of the Nazi dictator responds. “I’m thinking that if I had had a newspaper like your Pravda, no one would have ever found out that I did.”

            Two articles today, one on the Regnum news portal (regnum.ru/news/polit/2793404.html) and a second in The Barents Observer (thebarentsobserver.com/en/2019/11/free-media-scaffold), point to an analogous situation: the Russian North is dying but repression of media outlets and journalists there means that few will find out about that directly.

            Galina Smirnova and Ivan Kuznetsov of Regnum point out that the Russian North occupied two-thirds of the area of the Russian Federation but that only 6.8 percent of the country’s population lives there, the result of massive outflows and declining birthrates which have continued since 1989.

            As a result, industry has collapsed; and now agriculture is following, with people leaving the villages and small towns and not producing milk and other products. As a result, the two journalists say, Russians elsewhere have been forced to import them; and the region can properly said to be dying.

            Many assume that there is nothing that can be done, that the climate in the North is too harsh for agricultural development, and that Russia must simply give up on the North.  All three notions are wrong, the journalists continue. Finland shows what can be done in the north if the government gets involved, and conceding defeat will create an economic and security disaster.

            Indeed, they argue, investing in agriculture in the North is the best way to hold people there, make the North profitable again, and provide the basis for a revival of industry. Unfortunately, too many people assume that it is possible to save the North by industry alone. That won’t happen.

            Unfortunately, the death of the Russian villages in the North and the impact this is having on the region and country as a whole seldom get much attention in the central media which seldom any longer maintain permanent correspondents in the North and which thus rely on local media. The latter are in serious trouble.

            Some of that reflects declining audience size and falling advertising revenue, but another part is the result of Kremlin policies designed in the words of Atle Staalesen of The Barents Observer to tighten the Kremlin’s grip over the Russian media” and even to restrict the activities of outlets abroad like his own which seek to cover the Russian North.

          His publication has just released its third annual report of the moves Moscow has made not only against domestic Russian outlets in the North but also against media in neighboring countries which seeks to follow what is going on in a part of Russia that seldom gets much attention.

The title of this year’s report, Free Media on the Scaffold, highlights just how dire the situation now is  (thebarentsobserver.com/sites/default/files/publication.freemediaonthescaffold-kopi_2.pdfIn).