Lessons from Russia

This article seeks to answer two interrelated questions: where does press freedom stand in Russia more than 15 years after Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy glasnost began? and, what does Russia’s media transformation tell us about our understanding of mass political media systems? It is argued that while the Russian media are suffering under the presidency of Vladimir Putin, circumstances are in no way as dire as in the pre-Gorbachev Soviet period, nor even as bad as some journalists’ rights organizations would have it. By using comparative analysis, and incorporating political science literature that offers typologies of non-democratic systems of governance, the article demonstrates that contemporary Russian media find much in common with authoritarian regimes across the world and are not sui generis as some have argued. In the process, the author attempts to resurrect some of the important distinctions made in Siebert et al.’s much maligned Four Theories of the Press, particularly the role of the state as the leading threat to media freedom. The author also argues for the need to distinguish more clearly between different types of non-democratic mass political media systems.