REPORTER: Kim Traill
It was the day Vladimir Putin became the most powerful leader since the tsars. On March 14 last year, he was elected President with a crushing majority, consigning his token opponents to oblivion. But his first promise was to give power back to the people.
VLADIMIR PUTIN, RUSSIAN PRESIDENT (Translation): Were going to strengthen the multi-party system, were going to strengthen our civil society and do everything to ensure the freedom of mass media.
It didn't take long for the promise to be broken, with exquisitely Russian irony. The first casualty of his crackdown on freedom of speech was, in fact, a program called 'Freedom of Speech'.
SAVIK SHUSTER FORMER HOST OF FREEDOM OF SPEECH (Translation): Good evening, 'Freedom of Speech', live to air. Here, freedom of speech is restricted only by time and me, Savik Shuster.
'Freedom of Speech' or 'Svoboda Slova' presented lively debates on controversial subjects to an audience of many millions. It was a programmer's dream - television that was cheap and popular. But in July last year after complaints from the Kremlin, it was axed.
SAVIK SHUSTER: There wasn't an official reason. An official reason was, if you want, was my promotion, you know, because I became deputy general director, responsible for documentary films. So basically you know, it's the usual story in Russia where you demote by promoting.
Like most journalists, Savik Shuster had no choice but to accept his television station buckling to political pressure. Once a bastion of independent journalism, NTV is now controlled by a government subsidiary that dictates editorial policy.
SAVIK SHUSTER (Translation): You see, '60 Minutes' is investigative journalism and nowadays we don't have investigative journalism. We don't have any journalism at all.
As the other two national television networks are also Kremlin-controlled, there's no place for freedom of speech.
SAVIK SHUSTER: I think that a program like that cannot exist now because it's absolutely uncontrollable from the point of view of the Kremlin. It's impossible to control, it's live. And whatever happens, happens.
In the early years of Russia's post-Soviet democracy, television experimented with investigative journalism and critical scrutiny of politicians. what the hell music is that But these days it's becoming uncannily similar to the controlled party line of Soviet days, with nightly news little more than a chronicle of the leader's day.
NEWS READER (Translation): The president was shown the finest of the cattle. There were horses and ponies, one was called Cadillac, and even a local stud camel. You've got everything but hippos.
A former KGB spy, Vladimir Putin appears to have settled back comfortably into the mode of Soviet censorship. Dissident journalist Oleg Panfilov is one of his dwindling band of public critics.
OLEG PANFILOV, JOURNALIST (Translation): President Putin is a KGB officer. Those people were always... they were taught to lie. They were taught to act in such a way that people would believe them.
Russia has become a dangerous place for journalists. 148 have died of unnatural causes since 1992. Many are thought to have been victims of contract killings, a few by the targets of their stories, and almost all of their murderers have got away with it. Oleg Panfilov heads the Centre for Journalism in Extreme Situations.
OLEG PANFILOV (Translation): Sadly, the murders of journalists are barely investigated. Official investigations are held. The prosecutor's office will claim it's looking into the matter but journalists' murders linked to their professional activities are hardly ever investigated.
But Panfilov believes the Kremlin has become an even greater threat to journalists than contract killers.
OLEG PANFILOV (Translation): The problem with journalism in Russia is that in the five years since Vladimir Putin became president propaganda has re-emerged in Russia. Censorship too has re-emerged.
The new controls on Russia's media were never more evident than during the siege of Beslan. On September 1, the residents of this small town in southern Russia watched in horror as armed men and women seized a school, taking more than 1,100 people hostage. The Kremlin ordered state TV to downplay the crisis and drastically reduce hostage numbers.
NEWS READER (Translation): According to new information, the number of hostages is 354. The authorities wanted to get water, food and drugs to them but the bandits said no.
For Shuster, the Russian coverage demonstrated how completely the Kremlin could control TV news.
SAVIK SHUSTER: Here, nobody took any decisions, because everybody was afraid. Should we show? Should we not show? Everybody was waiting from Kremlin for a decision to come and, therefore, it was a mess. People did not understand - people, viewers, the country, they did not understand, first of all, the proportions of a possible tragedy because immediately there was an order to say that 354 people are hostages.
OLEG PANFILOV (Translation): People in Beslan, the residents knew it was a lie and they were furious.
Panfilov made a detailed report about the Russian coverage of Beslan for the European Security Organisation, the OSCE.
OLEG PANFILOV (Translation): They even caught journalists in the street and beat them up for broadcasting incorrect information. But Russian journalists couldn't broadcast anything else because they were afraid of being repressed.
Reporters even asked the security services chief on camera if they had reported events correctly.
REPORTER (Translation): Did I make mistakes? Did our journalists get it wrong?
But perhaps the greatest failing of the television media was stopping the broadcast when Russian troops stormed the school.
While Western television ran a live feed, the two state networks, Channel 1 and RTR, began showing movies. Only NTV continued to broadcast and that was merely through an accident of timing.
SAVIK SHUSTER: We were showing what was happening only because it started during our newscast and it was absolutely impossible to turn off. I think if somebody could have turned it off, they would have turned it off, but it was impossible because it started during the newscast.
NTV's live coverage meant it broadcast something the government didn't want the public to know - the army blasting the school with a tank, possibly killing many of the hostages.
ARMY OFFICER, (Translation): Some bandits were still hiding we can't hear the blasts now... hiding in the cellars and storerooms. So we wiped them out. We had to shoot and we used tanks.
OLEG PANFILOV (Translation): It's well known in Beslan that many children were killed when the Russian troops used one of the tank cannons. And when they shot, the wall collapsed and many children were crushed. Today, of course, they all officially deny it and refuse to say that the deaths of some 100 people were caused by the military.
The fact that the military had fired from tanks was removed from every subsequent report.
OLEG PANFILOV (Translation): No-one remembers them now. The authorities want to clean up that truth and leave only that truth which serves their interests.
President Putin made his views about truth in journalism known when he addressed reporters at a press conference three weeks after the tragedy.
VLADIMIR PUTIN (Translation): You have in your hands a powerful informational tool capable of both dividing and uniting the world community. Faced with the global threat of terrorism, with people dying, the mass media cannot remain mere observers.
SAVIK SHUSTER: What does he mean? I really don't know, because... we are in different professions. The President is a president and we are journalists. He says that war was announced against us. He uses the wording of the Second World War. And that kind of rhetoric, it follows that the press and the army and the Kremlin, they all have to be together. Times are different. Journalism is different. Of course President Putin's view is more or less 60 years old.
Until the dying days of the Soviet era, media was a propaganda tool for the Kremlin - the line between truth and patriotism blurred as the communist state pushed its anti-Western party line.
ARCHIVE NEWSREEL (Translation): Bombs, blood, crying children. This is America. A dishonourable America, a violent America, an America that violates smaller nations. It boastfully calls itself the most just country on earth, its most free and democratic nation. Here is one of its representatives, a humanist.
OLEG PANFILOV (Translation): In the Soviet Union, there used to be a saying - "How will we be able to overcome hardships if we don't first create them for ourselves?" In the Soviet Union, our propaganda, our foreign policy, our Soviet government... they all had to have an enemy.
The end of the Cold War temporarily turned old adversaries - Russia and the West - into friends. But it didn't take long for a new enemy - international terrorism - to appear and for the government to bring out the old propaganda.
OLEG PANFILOV (Translation): Right now, the Russian Government has two enemies. The real enemy is the West, with the USA at its head. Then there's a virtual, mythical enemy, international terrorism.
Immediately after Beslan, Putin addressed the nation in a speech laden with the same Cold War rhetoric.
VLADIMIR PUTIN (Translation): We showed weakness and the weak are beaten. There are people who want to tear away a piece of our land and there are others who are helping them. They help them, thinking that Russia, as a major nuclear power, still poses a threat to them.
Sympathetic commentators took up his theme on the main state TV network.
TV DEBATE, MAN (Translation): Does the USA want to tear off a piece of Russia? Does it want to dismember Russia? Yes or no?
MAN 2 (Translation): The USA wants to finish us off because Russia is a country that can be a threat to the USA.
But some journalists are fighting against the tide. Sergei Sokolov is editor of the feisty, but small-circulation weekly opposition newspaper, 'Novaya Gazeta'.
SERGEI SOKOLOV, EDITOR (Translation): A journalist must do his job honestly. That is his only duty. If he gets orders from above on what to say or not to say, he's not a journalist, he's a propagandist.
The reporters are dedicated to exposing government corruption and military brutality. It's a dangerous business.
SERGEI SOKOLOV (Translation): In the 11 years that we've been in operation we've lost four journalists. First our correspondent Sveta Orliuk was killed in Vladikavkaz in mysterious circumstances. Then one of our department heads, Dumnikov. Then again in mysterious circumstances, deputy editor Yuri Schekochikhin died. Before that our author Victor Popkov was killed in Chechnya. And there have been many threats to Politkovskaya.
Anna Politkovskaya is the paper's chief correspondent on Chechnya. Her fearless reporting from the war-ravaged republic has constantly contradicted the official line, making her deeply unpopular with the Kremlin. She has twice had to leave Russia because of death threats.
ANNA POLITKOVSKAYA, JOURNALIST (Translation): I've written my will. I'm gradually getting my children used to the fact that at any moment they might be left without me. They have all my instructions for that scenario.
Two years earlier, she attempted to play peacemaker in a hostage-taking in Moscow when Chechens occupied the Dubrovka theatre, holding around 900 people. Politkovskaya managed to talk her way into the building and relay the demands of the terrorists to the media outside.
ANNA POLITKOVSKAYA, (Translation): The president has to say it, publicly. Not just sign some order, but say it. They need his word, that he will end the war.
That siege ended with federal forces storming the building, in the process killing 129 civilians. When Politkovskaya heard news of the hostage-taking in Beslan, she immediately tried to head off a repeat of Dubrovka's bloody outcome by contacting Aslan Maskhadov, then leader of the Chechen rebels.
ANNA POLITKOVSKAYA, (Translation): I did everything I could to get Maskhadov over there. The idea was to make it possible for him to get there and persuade the bandits to let the children go. That was my second role, apart from covering the events, as every journalist should.
She never made it to Beslan. While hundreds of journalists were able to reach the town unhindered, Politkovskaya fell unconscious on the plane after drinking a cup of tea. Medical tests suggest she was poisoned.
OLEG PANFILOV (Translation): I can provide a list of other journalists that the authorities would like to kill. And that list includes Anna Politkovskaya and many other journalists who publish articles the authorities do not like.
ANNA POLITKOVSKAYA, (Translation): I wasn't shocked. I just felt that I didn't do what I had to do, that I was careless. That I shouldn't have...eaten or drunk anything, and then I'd have made it to Beslan.
In the wake of Beslan, the parliament began considering even stricter controls on media coverage of terrorism. Pavel Pozhigaylo is deputy head of the parliamentary committee on information policy. The security services have lobbied him for a complete ban on reporting terrorist acts.
PAVEL POZHIGAYLO (Translation): We listened to the special services. They said no pictures, nothing. All quiet. No-one has to know. Then, if people were killed, there'd be no impact, no stress, no outcome favourable to the terrorists. How can you find a balance, an ethical balance, between the unquestionably important task of showing the truth, and the impact that empathy with the victims has on society?
But the Beslan siege showed the government has already decided the balance. Truth is the lowest priority of all. Even after the siege ended, state TV continued to broadcast that the hostage-takers were international terrorists, not Chechens.
ARMY OFFICER (Translation): Of the 20 casualties, 10 come from Arab countries. One of them is black. We are now trying to establish the identities of the bandits.
In fact, they were almost all Russian citizens, mainly from Chechnya and neighbouring Russian republics. The networks also followed a Kremlin directive not to mention the hostage-takers' demands, which included Russia withdrawing troops from Chechnya.
PAVEL POZHIGAYLO (Translation): You have to remember that the authorities' reaction to those demands is being watched by the relatives of the children held hostage. Those are people who are right on the edge. Who don't want to hear that some of the terrorists' demands can't be met. They say, "Get the troops out of Chechnya. Do whatever they say to get our children back." And, of course, this aspect of the situation is part of the information war they're waging. They set demands that can't be met.
It now appears the government's manipulation of news from Beslan actually endangered the hostages.
SERGEI SOKOLOV (Translation): The hostages themselves said that when the terrorists heard they were holding 350 hostages and not 1,200, they were furious and forbade the children to drink or move.
The person who benefited most from the media control was President Putin. It saved him the embarrassment of media analysis that his own policies in Chechnya may have contributed to the climate of terrorism.
SERGEI SOKOLOV (Translation): When our federal troops in Chechnya carry out their policies in a way that turns children into orphans and women into widows, when people disappear without a trace, and torture is used, all that naturally creates a breeding ground for terrorism. If we want to stop terrorism, we need the mass media to talk about it.
ANNA POLITKOVSKAYA,(Translation): This situation has arisen, beyond any doubt, from stupid, fruitless and short-sighted policies, including, first and foremost, those of Putin himself. These issues, of course, are never even mentioned.
Instead, Putin responded to Beslan by promising to crack down further on Chechen separatists. Pozhigaylo's information policy committee is drawing up new laws that will give the special services a role in media censorship.
PAVEL POZHIGAYLO (Translation): The mass media, really... Considering that the mass media in this new and challenging situation could easily become a handy weapon for terrorists, a weapon of mass psychological pressure, they should to some extent adjust their reporting and establish a rapport with the special services.
Under the proposed changes, anti-terror operations like Beslan could only be reported with prior approval from the authorities. The government could also refuse registration to media groups and prosecute them for reporting on what officials deem to be extremist organisations. Parliament is also considering new laws to keep critical foreign journalists under control. Authorities would be able to deny visas to foreigners whose actions are considered disrespectful towards the Russian Federation. Dissident journalists are now deeply pessimistic about the future of freedom of speech.
ANNA POLITKOVSKAYA,(Translation): We are now at a critical point, at a point of transition. Democracy will not be remembered in a year. If democratic freedoms are preserved, our press may yet recover, but I find that scenario hard to believe.
SERGEI SOKOLOV (Translation): But the main thing is to tell the truth. If that is done, if the state channels stop talking about new schools built in Chechnya and mention people being kidnapped every day, then we'll be fighting terrorism.
As Vladimir Putin celebrates the anniversary of his sweeping re-election, Russian journalists can only wonder what he has in store for the rest of his reign.