Russia silences tabloid

Carl Schreck, Foreign Correspondent

• Last Updated: June 16. 2008 11:33PM UAE / June 16. 2008 7:33PM GMT

MOSCOW // For more than a decade, The eXile has delighted Moscow’s English-speaking expatriate community with its irreverent mix of vicious humour, sharp political analysis and shameless hedonism.

But after 11 years of scorched-earth Gonzo journalism and taking down every sacred cow in sight, The eXile’s time appears to be up.

An unexpected inspection this week by Russia’s Federal Service for Mass Media, Telecommunications and the Protection of Cultural Heritage to see if the biweekly was in compliance with Russian media laws spooked the tabloid’s investors, who withdrew their funding, said Mark Ames, the editor-in-chief.

“This is exactly the kind of thing that they did not want to be involved with,” said Mr Ames, a US citizen who launched the newspaper in 1997.

The eXile’s closing comes after the Kremlin brought every major national media outlet to heel, leaving little room for political criticism in Russia’s public discourse.

The government media watchdog was to issue the results of its inspection on whether The eXile violated Russian media laws last Wednesday, but Mr Ames said he had not yet heard anything. Yevgeny Strelchik, a spokesman for the watchdog, declined to give any details and said it was an internal matter between the inspectors and the newspaper.

The newspaper could receive a warning for, among other things, publishing pornography or extremist statements, or for promoting drug use. A second warning could result in the paper having its licence revoked.

While it would not be difficult to find The eXile guilty on all three counts, Mr Ames said the inspectors’ conclusions are now largely irrelevant. In what he described as a type of soft censorship that permeates Russia’s current mass media climate, the attention paid by authorities to the newspaper was enough to prompt its funders to flee.

“The government does not need to jail or shoot people,” Mr Ames said. “All they have to do to keep people under control is say ‘Boo!’

“Nothing may come at all of the inspection. They may say there are no violations at all,” Mr Ames said. “But it doesn’t matter. The job is already done.”

In another such case, Mr Ames cited the example of the Moskovsky Korrespondent, a Moscow newspaper that published an article in April with the unsubstantiated claim that Vladimir Putin, who at the time was the Russian president, had divorced his long time wife and married an Olympic champion rhythmic gymnast.

Moskovsky Korrespondent subsequently closed, but the publisher said it was shut down because it was not making a profit, not because Mr Putin had taken offence to the report.

From its inception, The eXile has rubbed officials the wrong way, “but 10 years ago people were not so scared” about challenging the state, Mr Ames said. “Now, if you take on the government, not only is there a 100 per cent chance of losing, you could have your assets stripped or go to jail,” he said.

Mr Ames said when he met with government inspectors, they asked first about columns The eXile publishes by Eduard Limonov, a fierce Kremlin critic and a leader of Russia’s fractured opposition.

Mr Limonov, a friend of Mr Ames who founded the now-banned National Bolshevik Party, has written for The eXile since its inception and reserved some of his harshest words for Mr Putin and the business and political elite for his columns published in the paper.

The fall of The eXile, which launched the career of Matt Taibbi, a political correspondent for Rolling Stone magazine, marks the end of perhaps the world’s most unique publishing project.

Publishing in Moscow, it found a niche in which it was out of the reach of libel laws in western countries, yet, with its small circulation and foreign-language content, remained largely under the radar screen of Russian authorities – until now. The result was a paper that published sophomoric pranks on Russian government officials and western businessmen, savage criticism of western journalists covering Russia, and misogynistic club reviews informing male readers which clubs were optimal for finding overnight female companionship.

The eXile once paid the handlers of Mikhail Gorbachev to convince the former Soviet leader to act as “Perestroika Co-ordinator” for the then-struggling New York Jets and give pep talks to the American football team.

In 2001, the paper’s editors stormed into the Moscow bureau of The New York Times and threw a pie filled with equine sperm into the face of the bureau chief after accusing him of soft coverage of Russia’s political elite. In 2004, it published a doctored cover photo of Mr Putin as a Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth) member.

Mr Ames’s announcement of The eXile’s closure came last week, on the same day that Dmitry Medvedev, the current Russian president, told a conference of Russian journalists that free speech is key to “building a free and responsible society”.

The likelihood is extremely low that The eXile will ever publish another issue, “unless some angel or miracle comes along”, Mr Ames said. “But I don’t think that anyone wants to touch me. It’s like I have polonium on me.”

In the meantime, the publication is calling for donations on its website in the hopes of generating enough revenue to keep the site alive, Mr Ames said.

“This has always been more of an artistic and writers’ project,” Mr Ames said. “The business part of it has been a colossal failure.”

cschreck@thenational.ae