Please see this table. It is included as a kind of executive summary to illustrate the transformation of the public communication process in the last decade.

1985-1990. Glasnost and increasing media power under Gorbachov ensured tremendous circulation and prestige of the publications. When the network of communist-time social institutions collapsed, the Russian media became the most important communication lines that remained in the disintegrating society. Most of the publications kept their Soviet-time layout, staff, formats and genres but embraced the new ideology of market fundamentalism and a firm belief in democracy.

1990-1995. At the beginning of the decade Boris Yeltsin had all the support of the media he needed due to the first wave of privatization of the media outlets that is often overlooked. In fact the new Russian government simply registered the existing mass media allowing them to escape their ‘founders’ – various political and social institutions of the Socialist era. In the first Soviet media law of 1990 property rights were not mentioned, so the new Russian press at once emerged completely free. The television was controlled by the state, but it also became more democratic in rhetoric and independent in management.

This independence was treasured much by the former propagandist workers of the Soviet Union, where printed press was tightly controlled as a fundament of ideological control mechanism. It was correctly assumed that protection of this independence could be ensured only if Boris Yeltsin kept the communists out of power. This explains why the media were close allies to the Russian authorities from the start.

Media professionals in the beginning of the nineties saw their social place in the terms of the “forth power” concept that placed them on equal level with other branches of power – the executive, legislative and judicial. It can be concluded that journalists behaved in the old ways. As before they propagated communist ideology and, later, with Gorbachov reforms, they turned to the liberal ideology and made it popular. The main point made by editors during the “forth power” concept discussion was that even while receiving money from the state (as most of the traditional newspapers did in the years following 1992 liberalization of prises and ensuing economy collapse) the press should be allowed to criticize the executive power. And it did, in a friendly way.

Crushed by the economic hardships, created by the falling demand on one hand and postal and printing monopolies on the other, the circulation of newspapers and magazines fell 10 times or more, compared to the Soviet-era high levels. In general, the power of the press diminished significantly, and the broadcasting rose respectively.

The liberal-democratic utopia fell from grace - ‘free market’ and ‘democracy’ reforms became empty words. With the decline of market fundamentalist ideology propaganda (still present in media rhetorics) became inefficient. At the same time the media turned away from Boris Yeltsin, shocked by the war in Chechnya and its inability to stop it.

1996-2000. Russian media system in the second half of the nineties can be roughly divided in two parts – the politicized and the commercial, although the division lines are sometimes blurred.

Most of the TV networks and traditional radio stations that can be received nation-wide and feature extensive news coverage and Moscow-based quality newspapers are better treated as politicized media, while entertainment TV, magazines, and tabloids – as exclusively commercial.

Both of these segments of Russian media system develop towards the same media culture, the global media culture, as defined by Denis McQuail. McQuail attributes the emergence of this global media standards to the influence of the emerging international media, but there are other explanations available as well. Our belief here would be that what stands behind the convergence of media cultures world-wide is a set of universal commercial media standards. Competing for consumers attention in a media-saturated market leads to the adoption of the genres and styles increasingly similar in different national systems, although there are always differences and specifics that must be dealt with in the actual local contexts.

The difference between the politicized and the commercial segments in the Russian media system is not to be observed on the level of media standards. All these channels, radio stations and newspapers want to reach masses of people showing little bias and collecting as much advertisements as possible in the process.

But the difference existed – simply because politicized media were set up and financed to compete on a market of political influence. All through the nineties this market was very important and extremely profitable, although in a slightly peculiar way. By wielding the media power to the benefit of Boris Yeltsin the access to privatized property was gained.

And Yeltsin clearly was in need for help. With a 6% rating in the end of 1995, Yeltsin faced the summer elections of 1996. Winning them was even more problematic because even while the newspapers and television still gave their support to the ‘reformers’, they suffered almost complete political defeat in the parliamentary elections of 1995.

The parliamentary election results came as no surprise for the political elite. Propagating the ideals of free market and democracy after the people became impoverished and the tanks fired shots on the Russian parliament, the ‘democratic’ press and even state television discredited itself. They could no longer persuade.

But. As it turned out, they still could manipulate.

By 1996 the printed press could no longer compete with the television on the markets of political influence and advertising.

After the last street fights of October 1993, when the Russian parliament was disbanded and a new Constitution ensured the domination of executive power, the political process moved to the symbolical space of the broadcast media.

Mediated politics is different from the battle of ideas or competing political parties, characteristic for the Soviet Newspaper Age. They’re not about logic. They are about images and drama.

By the middle of nineties Russia became a part of the global “McLuhan Galaxy” as defined by Manuel Castells, and thus the development of the media system was synchronized with the global transformation process.

What cannot be conveyed to the mass audience in the course of rational argument, can be displayed as a succession of images on the TV that are easily grasped and assembled in the language of myth. The heroes, heroines, enemies and mystic forces clash in the highly dramatized public spectacle on the TV. The patterns of these conflicts and their outcomes determine the unspoken laws of the public scene that replaces the ideal “public sphere”.

To manipulate the mass audience thus one has to use the rules of drama and the logic of myth, directing the public spectacle in the desired way. In such a way, as it turned out, the barriers of recipient mistrust can be overcome, and the message can be conveyed.

This hypothesis was tested during the elections of 1996 with great success. Instead of ‘supporting’ Boris Yeltsin, television provided the channels for the campaign.

To ensure complacency, the first and second channels of television were reformed before the elections. Boris Berezovsky emerged here as a person responsible for the operation. He established a new company, Public Russian Television, on the first channel (securing 51% stake for the state and a number of shares for himself and his business partners), and placed his business associate Eduard Sagalaev, the founder of TV6, as the director general of first channel (RTR).

NTV, the forth channel operator, controlled by Vladimir Gusinsky, was the main obstacle due to its fierce antiwar campaign, that helped it to built strong credibility. But in the end Gusinsky agreed to support the president.

The other media outlets controlled by Boris Berezovsky (“Ogonyok”, “Nezavisimaya Gazeta”) and Vladimir Gusinsky (newspaper “Segodnya”, radio “Echo of Moscow”) provided the arguments and comments that were cited and disseminated in the analytical TV-programmes.

The opposition was also integrated in the spectacle, but in a peculiar fashion – the marginal militants had their say at the expense of the leaders and standing candidate Gennadij Zuganov, whose press-conferences were smartly sabotaged.

In the article “Virtual reality of the elections” Victor Toporov observed that the resulting control of the symbolic media space was almost total. There were multiple ‘virtual achievements’ to be proud of – the elimination of salary debts, the virtual economic stabilization, the virtual entering of G7 club by Russia and the virtual end of the Chechen war was finally put.

Serving the interests of party of power in the privatization era was unbelievably profitable. Boris Berezovsky managed to acquire a huge oil company “Sibneft” and Vladimir Gusinsky sold 30% of NTV stake to natural gas monopoly Gazprom for $120 millions – just enough to establish a satellite TV network.

Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky were the media muscles behind the electorate campaign. As such they demanded more access to the privatization. Yet the government has already disposed of the most part of enterprises in the raw materials sector. “Svyazinvest” was created as a super-scale telecom holding from regional and long-distance telephone operators, packaged to be sold to a foreign investor that could present the biggest bid. Faced with looming salary debts and a pension crisis, the government was desperate for money.

But even united and with a foreign partner, Berezovsky and Gusinsky could only bid $1,4 billion for a company that was sold for $2 billion to Vladimir Potanin and George Soros. What happened next was a revenge – an unprecedented all-out information war waged by media owners against the government that could not even defend itself because Potanin owns only mass circulation newspapers and no TV channel aside from marginal RTR state TV was ready to side with them.

This fight was followed by a strong miners strike at Rostov and other places in 1997. The miners occupied the rails and thus blocked the trains. They received tremendous publicity, letting PR experts of the government panic and claim that the new figure of “the people” appeared in the symbolic space of the media:

Character killing and staged events became a norm in Russian media, which takes always one step forward from the media-literacy levels of the public. And then it turned out that you don’t really have to own a media outlet to play a role in the public spectacle. All you needed in fact was a skill in PR and some ideas about how to make the event spectacular enough for the commercial TV standards to make it worth showing, and clear enough for FM broadcasters and newspaper journalists to spread the word around.

During the elections campaign of 1996 the new PR technologies were introduced and showed the effectiveness of the mass media as an information weapon. The new Russian business elite rushed to invest in media, taking over traditional ‘democratic’ publications and entertainment TV. This flow of politicized investment produced the so-called media-political system.

In spite of the continuing process of the political party construction, the political system in Russia was weak all through the nineties. In fact Communists remained the only political party that had strong grassroots support and mass membership. All the other parties were just election brands with weak regional offices. Thus in the mediated democracy of the Russian Second Republic the industrial age party system never took hold. The role of the parties was played by the media holdings.

By the end of the nineties in Russia there were more than a dozen of media-holdings, but only four of them could compete on the market of political influence: centrally controlled state mass media, Berezovsky and Gusinsky media-holdings and a media holding of the Moscow mayor Youry Luzhkov and his affiliates. Every holding had at least one TV channel, a number of radio stations and several publications, among them daily newspapers and weekly magazines.

By the end of the nineties the global media culture of commercial media standards was already firmly entrenched, but there were important distinctions between the ideologies, or we could even say realities, conveyed by the holdings. The most vivid of them, Gusinsky holding and Luzhkov media, stood at the opposing sides of this spectrum.

NTV television, Echo of Moscow radio station, daily “Segodnya” and weekly “Itogi” (a joint venture with “Newsweek”) that are controlled by Vladimir Gusinsky, are the ultra-liberal, pro-democracy media outlets. It is a world of intelligentsia and high-income professionals, who usually vote for democratic opposition.

Luzhkov’s TV-Center, “Moskovskaya Pravda”, “Vechernyaya Moskva” dailies and “Literaturnaya Gazeta” weekly fiercely promote the Slavic Orthodox ideology constructed by the Mayor and implemented in the city space as a series of kitsch monuments – reconstructed Church of Christ the Savior and Peter the Great monument to name just a few – that dominate the Moscow river embankment.

Mass media of the state and Berezovsky shared similar views in spite of tactical disagreements: a bit of Great Russia (for the masses), a little democracy and respect for the property rights.

A brief consensus of the political elite emerged in the time of Evgeny Primakov government (1998-1999) that dealt with the ruble crisis, opposed the Yugoslavia bombing campaign and kept the ruble weak enough to make locally produced goods competitive.

However when Boris Yeltsin decided to pick up a successor, he disposed of Primakov, the secret service veteran, who was becoming more independent and powerful every month and already formed a partnership with Yury Luzhkov and regional leaders. Sergey Stepashin was appointed and dismissed in two months, and then Vladimir Putin was introduced as a Prime Minister in mid-1999.

Three large apartment houses in the outskirts of Moscow and one in province (Volgodonsk) were blown up by unknown group, and rebel Chechens attacked neighboring Dagestan Republic, a part of Russian Federation. Thus a war in Chechnya started and all of a sudden Putin became a war premier. Putin, an energetic man in his forties, was bold enough to seize the opportunity and produced tough stance demanding nation-wide war effort.

His rating took off like a rocket. For the parliamentary elections a political bloc “Unity” was constructed in partnership with regional administrations that mimicked the “Fatherland – all Russia” of Luzhkov and Primakov, who were thus defeated by a clever counter-campaign.

However after the parliamentary elections were over, it became evident, that there is increasing convergence of the media holdings ideologies – and the point of convergence is the celebration of nationalism combined with all the inherent ideology of the global media culture, or mainstream media:

Only the Gusinsky media holding is somewhat isolated from this convergence process in the niche of democratic opposition to the new administration. This holding was the first to embrace the global media culture and probably it kept the leadership ever since, and that in fact explains the difference between the approaches taken by the media holdings towards the national consolidation in the symbolic realm. Aggressive nationalism of the Russian mainstream media is certainly not a future of “Most-Media” holding run by Gusinsky simply because the holding is an international business operation with global interests (it owns a satellite network as well as a prominent newspaper “Maariv” in Israel). And, certainly, Gusinsky is the president of the Jewish congress of Russia.

In fact Gusinsky himself was recently arrested and charged with stealing $10 million from the state in the illegal privatization of “Russian Video” company. Released from prison, Gusinsky claims he will not change the way his media reported the second Chechen war, which indeed looks like the true reason behind the pressure of the new administration.

The media-political system disappears now at the beginning of the new era, but this overview would not be complete if we do not explain why it happens and what this might lead to. Especially considering the emergence of the new media environment, the internet.

On the New Year eve Boris Yeltsin resigned and Putin had the opportunity to make the traditional warm evening speech by the president. This was a strong step, the most brilliant political move in decades, because here the strongest archaic logic embedded in this ritual was used and the symbolic space of the TV could be exploited to the full. Broadcasted on every channel, the first public speech by Putin fulfilled the ancient ritual of death and renewal in agrarian society which we know now as the New Year holiday. It is the only holiday that indeed unites people all through the Russian Federation and the only ritual everybody shares, consuming a lot of television in the family circle.

As if this was not enough, Putin flew to Chechnya to celebrate the New Year with the soldiers.

It is here that we can see the roots of the landslide elections victory that made Putin the Russian President in the first round and thus put an end to the power struggle among the political elite.

The ensuing fusion of perspectives of various media holdings, both politicized and commercial by origin, is amplified by the activity of the state. Suddenly this nationalist vision seems to become the social reality of the next era.

The pressure Putin now puts on Gusinsky media empire is meant to reassure us that the new power is not going to tolerate dissent. It is possible that Vladimir Putin is powerful enough to bend mainstream media to his will. A couple of years ago we could come to desperate conclusions that such pressure will unleash the spiral of silence and destroy the opposition.

But there are things power can not control – like the alternative media and the internet. The net is saturated with venture capital to such an extent that it appears commercialized. However, the net is impossible to judge. It does not even support generalizations. We can only mention some of the main features it presents for horizontal communication (mailing lists, chat, ICQ, forums and discussion groups) to put the emphasis on the idea that the net supports, strengthens and helps to visualize the interpersonal, group and other models of horizontal person-to-person and group communication.

This is very important. The spiral of silence will work only in the environments where points of view are not supported by instant access to like-minded virtual communities. The fact that mass media importance is decreasing gives hope of sustaining diversity in the face of the emerging new order.

Every force meets a counter-force, every action brings a reaction. The power of the President and current trends may make democratic opposition stronger and more effective in the long term. Disappointed by the shallow reality of the mainstream press, people may turn to horizontal communication in the net and cultural life will heat up.

For the younger generation of Russians the Putin’s administration is struggling with petty old problems of national identity, law, order and the like. The school of chaos they faced through the nineties let them adapt to any conditions and turn to private lives as spheres of self-realization almost completely ignoring the virtual community of the nation state. And here lies the seed of the next social project that may look nicer than the ‘Great Russia’ national identity that seems to emerge as a symbol of the Putin era. However, this does not mean that strong state ideal is detested by the younger audience.

In the literate cultures oppositions are necessary and exclusive, whereas in the oral or in ‘second oral’ culture (Ong, 1988) knowledge structure is additive, i.e. inclusive. The next social project can come into being only if some degree of stability and economic development can be reached during the Putin era. Only after that the ‘prosperous and mighty’ Russia will cease to be the cherished ideal the ‘enlightened Russia’ might become the foci of public effort.