Russia in Global Affairs

The depth of political changes Vladimir Putin’s latest reform will bring to Russian society and Russia’s state system is comparable to that brought about by Boris Yeltsin’s disbandment of the Congress of People’s Deputies (former parliament) and the adoption of a new Constitution in 1993. Thus far, those two events have been the fundamental political landmarks in Russia’s modern (post-Soviet) history.

The situation with the Russian mass media, despite the continuous heated debates over this issue, is fairly simple. The position of Russia’s mass media is generally congruous to the current state of its economy, politics and public opinion: they have been all drifting together since the anarchic romanticism of the last years of Gorbachev’s perestroika to the current transitional phase, to a future that is as much predestined as the general course of Russia’s development.