For seven decades, the Soviet government and the ruling Communist Party of the Soviet Union prioritized reshaping society and creating a "new Soviet man" who would be, among other things, loyal to the party and infused with Marxist-Leninist ideology (Hoffmann 2011). In pursuit of this aim, all news and information made available to citizens was carefully filtered. The party and government ministries controlled all media in the country, from central television to local newspapers. A Soviet joke ran: "In Russia, we have two channels on TV. Channel One is propaganda. Channel Two is a KGB officer who tells you to turn back to Channel One" (Popson 1985). By the 1980s, the number of Soviet television channels had increased to six, but the political views they promoted were coordinated by the Propaganda Department of the Communist Party. This centralized control made it impossible for critical or ideologically inconsistent news stories to reach a wide audience. Information from abroad was typically blocked: Foreign radio stations, such as Radio Liberty, were often jammed (Nelson 1997), and only selected Western books and movies were allowed (Roth-Ey 2012).In the late 1980s, many Russians tasted media freedom for the first time, as Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms began to chip away at central party control. Gorbachev declared a policy of glasnost (openness), which held that Soviet citizens could criticize the government's shortcomings and debate its policies. This led to a relaxation of censorship and the beginning of real political discussion in the national media, as well as the emergence of tabloid-style journalism (McNair 1991). Popular media outlets such as Moskovskie Novosti, Ogonek, and Literaturnaia Gazeta published critical pieces on Stalin's repressions, the state of the Soviet economy, and other contentious issues.The overwhelming majority of Russian media organizations were at this stage still owned and controlled by the state, and certain politically sensitive topics were still censored. Nonetheless, by 1990, Western media were allowed to circulate more freely, and vibrant commercial newspapers such as Kommersant and Nezavisimaia Gazeta and radio stations such as Ekho Moskvy were established. The Soviet state also began to relax control over television, once the pillar of the communist propaganda machine.These changes played a key role in the anti-Gorbachev putsch of 1991, which foundered in part on the failure of the plottersa group of Communist hardlinersto establish monopoly control of the airwaves. Even as the State Committee on the State of Emergency ordered state media to broadcast pro-putsch messagesan order that was only partially fulfilled, as central state television gave voice to the oppositionprotest rallies and other events on the ground were covered by Ekho Moskvy and Voice of America. The failure of the putsch deprived the Communist Party of its
