A recent blog by Lada Roslycky, director of strategic development for Ukraine Today, raises precisely that question. According to Roslycky, “as Ukraine continues to struggle towards democracy, the Kremlin’s tentacles continue to influence what people in Ukraine are able to see.”
As a prime example she offers the recent banning of the American film “Child 44” in Russia for “distortion of historical facts.”
Distorting historical facts, as most of us already know, is the code that Vladimir Putin’s Russia uses to describe anyone or anything that paints an accurate picture of that wretched state and its leadership.
It seems that the poor darlings were offended by a fictional, detective story that shows Stalinist bureaucrats in an unflattering light. (I wonder whether they would be equally offended at the mountains of dead, starved and mutilated bodies that serves as a fitting monument to that same demonic Stalinist era…..or the gutted and barely recognizable bodies that had experienced Girkin’s torture chamber in Sloviansk?)
After Russia banned the film, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan also forbade its distribution, and Georgia (which had acquired the rights from a Ukrainian distribution company) postponed its release until October at the request of that company. It would appear that the “Eurasian Union” – as had been feared – had now morphed out of simply being an economic union to a cultural and censorship union as well.
But what does that have to do with Ukraine and free expression?
Roman Martynenko, the chief of Multi Media Distribution, noted that the Ukrainian government’s film agency “gave permission to show the film without any reservations” and its premiere in Ukraine was planned for April 16 in 60 cinemas across 20 Ukrainian cities. But then something strange happened.
The distribution company, Central Partnership, after withdrawing the license from Russia,decided to also withdraw its distribution rights in Ukraine, forcing Multi Media Distribution to cancel the showings.
Central Partnership is a Russian film distribution and production company founded in 1995. In 2005 the controlling stake of Central Partnership was acquired by Prof Media. Prof Media, in turn, is owned by Gazprom-Media Holding, one of the largest media holding companies in Russia and Europe (with television, radio, printing press, cinema production, theaters and internet assets).
Gazprom-Media, having been sold to Gazprombank in 2005, is part of the government-owned energy giant Gazprom.
In 2015 Dmitry Chernyshenko was appointed chairman of the Board of Gazprom Media after having served as head of the “Volga Group” investment company. Volga Group is owned by Gennady Timchenko, one of Russia’s and the world’s richest oligarchs who has been placed on the U.S. Treasury Department’s list of sanctioned “members of the Russian leadership’s inner circle.”
So there you have it. The strange case of Child 44 is now solved. Despite Ukraine’s very laudable efforts to regain control of its information space from its northern intruder, and despite its openness to freedom of cinematic expression, many strings are still pulled from Moscow. When Putin itches, Ukraine still scratches.
And, even more troubling, is the vast media empire that Gazprom-Media now owns throughout Europe and which is largely influenced through a series of interlocking ownerships and collusive relationships, by the Russian leadership’sinner circle.
As an interesting and entirely coincidental side note, UNICEF, at the end of last year, published a report highlighting that at least 44 children had been killed in Putin’s invasion of east Ukraine. Although the movie “Child 44” is based on a Stalin-era fictional novel concerning a lone serial killer of children, the overlapping of the number “44” in the movie and the report caused me to speculate whether the killing of children by unprovoked, state-sponsored aggression is any less criminal than that of a lone, deranged killer.
