I’m an exiled Russian journalist – I see worrying parallels between Trump and Putin

Vladimir Putin did not destroy Russia’s independent media through some overtly dictatorial laws or even through the corrupt courts he controls.

Freedom of speech in Russia was strangled first and foremost by capitalist mechanisms, which proved to be an unbeatable tactic. Someone from the Kremlin would call the owner of a particular TV channel and then came a “request” that the owner usually could not – or did not want to – refuse.

The question was always the same: what mattered more, his business or a particular journalist or story? From that point on, the owner handled everything himself. He needed no additional instructions and no legal paperwork.

So when the exact same scenario played out in the US with Jimmy Kimmel and others – right down to a phone call from the Federal Communications Commission to the network’s leadership – I felt something even stronger than déjà vu.

By the time my former TV channel, TV Rain (Dozhd) – the last independent television network in Russia – was created in 2010, Putin had already managed to suppress nearly all remaining pockets of free speech. He would go on to throttle the rest, with TV Rain forced to relocate in 2022 after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It is now based out of the Netherlands.

To achieve this, whether in Russia or elsewhere in the world, the same tool is always used by those in power: self-censorship.

Self-censorship is far more effective than censorship. If journalists sense what is expected of them, and what they will be punished for – if they know that careless words, a too-bold investigation, or an overly sharp interview will cost them their job and make it hard to find another – then they don’t need government censors. These journalists begin to feel the boundaries of the permissible on their own.

Self-censorship is probably the most important word in US journalism today. It spreads gradually, like a dangerous illness. Journalists can fight it, can speak freely, and can fulfil their duty to society only if there are equally steadfast media owners standing behind them. We are seeing cracks in this in the US.

Once media owners align themselves with authorities, be that Putin or Donald Trump, all those efforts by journalists become futile. You cannot fight authoritarian leadership and your own employer at the same time.

Russian television channels were engulfed by self-censorship in the first years of Putin’s rule, and it only took a few notable moves by the Kremlin. First, it forced one oligarch, Boris Berezovsky, to sell his channel, then the state corporation Gazprom seized NTV from another oligarch in a classic corporate raid. All of this happened very quickly. Since then, self-censorship has taken root in the minds of virtually all journalists in Russia.

My colleagues and I never became the victims of self-censorship. We were young, brave and naive – we belonged to the next generation of journalists. Our channel emerged during the so-called Medvedev thaw, when Putin stepped away from the presidency and the previously rigid system loosened somewhat.

This did not mean that we were allowed to do whatever we wanted. But because we were building from scratch and had no idea what the rules were supposed to be, it was easier for us – we had nothing to lose. We did not have big TV salaries or nationwide fame. We were amateurs, startup-style, and that approach helped us create the country’s only – and ultimately last – independent TV channel.

Ultimately, however, Putin moved to destroy us the moment it became genuinely dangerous for him to have dissenting voices in public.

But there was a problem. Our TV channel never belonged to any oligarch. The owner was a self-made businesswoman, Natalya Sindeeva, a bold adventurer who dreamed of creating real, honest television and stubbornly pursued that dream. The Kremlin could not lean on her the way they used to pressure oligarchs.

But even here, the capitalist approach allowed them to find a way, and this is another reason why those in the US and elsewhere who care about free speech should be worried.

To destroy our TV channel – which was carried by every cable network across Russia and was the most influential and popular news channel in the country – the Kremlin didn’t need to pressure us directly. Instead, it put pressure on our distributors.

All it took was Kremlin officials calling a few owners of the largest cable and satellite providers to “recommend” that they cut our signal. And just like that, everything was settled.

These businessmen were extremely anxious. Many called us and candidly told us what had happened, apologised and said they genuinely liked what we were doing. But none resisted. Within two weeks, we lost 99 per cent of our audience simply because we had been cut out of all the cable networks.

We are seeing signs of something similar brewing in the US, with Trump publicly questioning why cable networks were continuing to air certain shows. “Why does ABC Fake News keep Jimmy Kimmel, a man with NO TALENT and VERY POOR TELEVISION RATINGS, on the air? Why do the TV Syndicates put up with it?” he wrote on Truth Social last week. He is clearly trying to put pressure on them to stop.

When Westerners ask me what it was like to be an opposition journalist in Russia, I say that we were not opposition journalists. We were a normal TV channel, because we gave the floor to both representatives of the government and to members of the opposition. The others were simply propagandists.

Putin’s move didn’t kill us as journalists, but it pushed us to the margins, working exclusively online. We were expelled from the mass media market, and the approach we had always considered maximally independent and impartial suddenly appeared deeply marginal.

Russia’s attacks on the media had one main consequence: the very notion of what “normal” is changed completely. Russian society stopped believing it had a right to independent journalism and stopped demanding it.

There is now a wide range of viewpoints in the Russian media landscape, but all of them serve Putin because all of them supported him in their own ways. The spectrum runs from the ultra-right to more moderate voices – but always deeply loyal ones. Liberal journalists have been driven underground.

I am convinced that the US is not at risk of this – at least not yet. In Russia, independent media was the only functioning social institution. In America, they still have that most essential institution of all: free elections.

However, the methods being used by the Trump administration to interact and engage with journalists, and the way US society has often barely reacted, shows something important and scary. The psychology of people in different countries and societies can be strikingly similar. The US – and the West overall – shouldn’t sleepwalk into the same kind of situation we have seen in Russia.

The Dark Side of the Earth: How the Soviet Union Collapsed but Remained by Mikhail Zygar is out now