They want to return us to silence

The intelligentsia defends not only NTV

For almost a year now, the country's largest non-state nationwide television company, NTV, and its partners in the Media-Most corporation have been under unprecedented pressure.

For this pressure on them, all the power of our law enforcement system is used. For almost a year it has been steadily intensifying, gradually acquiring the character of repression. Searches, interrogations, arrests, intimidation and public slander have already become routine circumstances in which company executives and employees, editorial offices and journalists work.

The political subtext of these persecutions is quite obvious: the suppression of dissent in the country. The efforts of the authorities to explain what is happening exclusively with financial and economic or criminal procedural claims against the holding and its owners seem hypocritical to us.

Meanwhile, Russian society has been watching what is happening all this time with amazing composure. One gets the impression that the protection of freedom of speech is a private problem of the NTV channel and its partners, and the threat to this freedom is a personal nuisance of employees of one corporation.

This is a dangerous delusion.

We are confident that protecting the rights of citizens to receive objective and complete information, to freely express their opinions (and these rights are under threat today) is the duty of the citizens themselves, of society as a whole. This, and this alone, is our interest in the fate of NTV, regardless of whether we are its fans or not.

We have no doubt that the political consequences of NTV's transition to state control will affect everyone. All world experience - and especially our own, Soviet - confirms: having accustomed society to silence, the state quickly enters into a taste. And this taste will soon be felt by everyone - regardless of their attitude to business and politics.

We think it's time to start worrying. Moreover: it is obviously time to demonstrate this concern publicly. We believe that a rally initiated by the signatories of this letter would be a perfectly appropriate form of such a demonstration.

Konstantin Azadovsky, Yuz Aleshkovsky, Arkady Arkanov, Ruslan Aushev, Leah Akhedzhakova, Bella Akhmadulina, Oleg Basilashvili, Mikhail Berg, Konstantin Beskov, Andrey Bitov, Alexander Bovin, Vsevolod Bogdanov, Oleg Bogomolov, Zoya Boguslavskaya, Elena Bonner, Genrikh Borovik, Mikhail Boyarsky , Petr Weil, Arkady Vaksberg, Andrey Voznesensky, Vladimir Voinovich, Alexander Volodin, Yegor Gaidar, Sergei Gandlevskaya, Alexander Gelman, Mikhail Gorbachev, Yakov Gordin, DDT group, Boris Grachevskaya, Larisa Guzeeva, Lyudmila Gurchenko, Ilya Dadashidze, Armen Dzhigarkhanyan , Igor Dmitriev, Veronika Dolina, Alexander Domogarov, Tatyana Drubich, Lev Durov, Rostislav Evdokimov, Viktor Erofeev, Vadim Zhuk, Yasen Zasursky, Boris Zosimov, Arkady Inin, Fazil Iskander, Garry Kasparov, Nina Katerli, Evgenia Katseva, Timur Kibirov, Julius Kim, Philip Kirkorov, Yuri Kobaladze, Iosif Kobzon, Sergei Kovalev, Mikhail Kozakov, Naum Korzhavin, Vladimir Kornilov, Daniil Kramer, Yuli Krelin, Anatoly Kurchatkin, Olga Kuchkina, Otto Latsis, Viktor Loshak, Vladimir Lukin, Yuri Lyubimov, Yuri Mamin, Boris Messerer, Yunna Moritz, Lyudmila Narusova, Boris Nemtsov, Yuri Norshtein, Dmitry Pevtsov, Valery Plotnikov, Vladimir Pozner, Anatoly Pristavkin, Alla Pugacheva, Nikolai Rastorguev and the Lyube group, Evgeny Rein, Irana Rodnina, Maria Rozanova, Yuri Rost, Lev Rubinstein, Yulia Rutberg, Vladimir Ryzhkov, Eduard Sagalaev, Nina Sadur, Georgy Satarov, Mikhail Svetin, Felix Svetov, Alexei Simonov, Alexander Sklyar, Viktor Slavkin, Vladimir Solovyov, Vladimir Spivakov, Boris Strugatsky, Oleg Tabakov, Lev Timofeev, Valery Todorovsky , Petr Todorovsky, Natalia Troepolskaya, Mikhail Ulyanov, Nina Urgant, Mikhail Fedotov, Alexander Filippenko, Valery Fokin, Irina Khakamada, Alexander Khalifman, Dmitry Kharatyan, Marlen Khutsiev, Mikhail Chulaki, Inna Churikova, Grigory Chkhartishvili (Boris Akunin), Adolf Shapiro, Lilia Shevtsova, Yuri Schmidt, Sergei Yursky, Sergei Yushenkov, Grigory Yavlinsky, Igor Yakovenko, Alexander N. Yakovlev, Yegor Yakovlev, Evgeny Yasin.