The publishing house Condé Nast is embroiled in a row over censorship after it allegedly prevented the publication inside Russia of an article deeply critical of Vladimir Putin, which appeared in the US edition of GQ.
The acclaimed war reporter Scott Anderson wrote the piece for the September edition of the magazine. It casts doubt on the official Russian version of events following a series of devastating apartment bombings in Moscow in 1999, in which hundreds of people were killed.
The article’s key claim — that Russia’s security services were behind the attacks, rather than Chechen terrorists – has been made on many occasions before, most strikingly by Alexander Litvinenko, a former member of Russia FSB spy agency, who was murdered in London in November 2006.
But it is Condé Nast’s attempts to prevent the article from appearing in Russia that have stoked controversy. Entitled Vladimir Putin’s Dark Rise to Power, the article has not been distributed in Russia on the advice of Condé Nast’s lawyers. Management has also stopped it from appearing on the internet.
The move appears to have badly backfired. Furious bloggers in both Russia and the US have denounced Condé Nast for craven self-censorship. The gossip site Gawker accused the publishing house of an ”act of publishing cowardice”. Over the weekend it posted a scanned version of the article, inviting Russian readers to translate it.
Anderson told National Public Radio he was mystified by Condé Nast’s behaviour. ”It was quite mysterious to me,” he said. ”All of a sudden, it became clear that they were going to run the article but they were going to try to bury it under a rock as much as they possibly could.”
The editor of the Russia edition of GQ denied there was any political subtext to the decision by Condé Nast’s management. Nikolai Uskov dismissed Anderson’s lengthy account of the 1999 bombings as containing ”nothing new”, and pointed out Litvinenko had said much the same thing in an interview with Russian GQ in 2005.
”I can publish it, if I want to. It’s another question whether the article contains anything that hasn’t appeared before in the Russian mass media many times in the past,” Uskov told the Echo of Moscow radio station. ”There isn’t any sensation in yet another article which goes back to the version of FSB participation in the bombings.”
Condé Nast owns Vanity Fair and GQ in the US, as well as Russian editions of GQ, Tatler, Glamour and Vogue. It did not respond on Tuesday for comment. Its Russian GQ edition sells 100 000 copies a month. Most Russian newspapers, and all state TV, are generally reluctant to criticise the country’s leadership, especially Putin who is prime minister.
Anderson’s article repeats claims made by several Kremlin critics: that Putin used the 1999 apartment bombings as an excuse for beginning a new war in Chechnya — the Kremlin’s second — and that conflict propelled him towards the Russian presidency. Anderson’s main source is Michael Trepashkin, an ex-FSB agent who investigated the bombings, and spent several years in jail after his former organisation arrested him. – guardian.co.uk