War With the Media; Moscow's crackdown on independent news outlets harkens back to the dark days of the Soviet era.

Byline: Owen Matthews and Anna Nemtsova

The call from the secret police came just hours after Daniil Alexandrov committed his thought crime. Alexandrov, editor of St. Petersburg's Daily Sports newspaper, had put a small ad on his Web site for an upcoming protest by an opposition group. By the next morning, the Federal Security Service, or FSB, was on the phone with the paper's owner. "Stop your anti-Russian campaign," the spooks demanded. The ad was yanked.

The moral of the story? "The FSB is watching us all," says a deeply worried Alexandrov. "Watching very closely."

It's no secret that President Vladimir Putin has been tightening the screws on press freedom in Russia for years now. But over recent months, editors, journalists, politicians and human-rights campaigners have started to complain of a far more powerful crackdown of a like not seen since the end of the Soviet Union. The explanation is simple enough: elections for Parliament will be held in December and for the presidency next March, and the Kremlin wants to make sure things go exactly as planned--which means ensuring it can control the public's sources of information. Accordingly, the Kremlin's network of direct and indirect control over the media has grown in scale and sophistication, as has the FSB's monitoring of the Internet. Those who dare defy the party line find themselves under increased scrutiny, harassment and worse.

"I understood from the start of Putin's rule that the Kremlin intended to kill free media in this country," says Igor Yakovenko, head of Russia's Union of Journalists. Now, he says, the Kremlin is close to success. "Putin walked the country away from the idea of an independent media to the model where censorship is the norm, where professional journalists are being replaced by loyal writers of propaganda."

The latest and most effective instrument in the Kremlin's crackdown is a law punishing "extremism." The law was intended to block hate speech--but it is increasingly used instead to target "people who disagree with Putin's regime," says political analyst Andrei Piontkovsky, one of the law's recent victims. Under an amendment passed last year by the Duma and sponsored by the Kremlin, the law now punishes any statement that could "undermine the security of the Russian Federation" and "interfere with the lawful activities of the state." Earlier this month, Piontkovsky, a senior researcher at Moscow's Institute of Systematic Analyses and an activist for the liberal Yabloko party, found himself under criminal investigation after criticizing Kremlin corruption in two recent books. The same week, another analyst, Vladimir Pribylovsky, president of the Panorama think tank, had his computer and papers confiscated after the FSB raided his home. (Pribylovsky's hard drive is currently being analyzed for signs of "extremism.") "This is just the beginning," warns Oleg Pamfilov, head of Moscow's Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations, citing a large number of cases filed in Vladimir, Khakassia and Altay against Internet bloggers who aired anti-Kremlin opinions. Two journalists have already been jailed this year for "extremist" views after they wrote for Chechen Web sites, and at least 20 more are under investigation. And the law is only going to get stiffer--last month the Duma introduced further amendments increasing the prison term for "activity rousing extremism" to 12 years.

Yet the extremism law is only part of a much wider campaign to tighten the state's control over all media. Independent newspapers have been steadily bought out by the government or loyal businessmen. According to a study by Russia's Union of Journalists, the state and its proxies now own 92 percent of all media--up from 30 percent in 2000. The last major critical newspaper, Kommersant, was bought by Alisher Usmanov, a Kremlin-connected metals magnate, last September. And though Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov insists that "censorship is absolutely ...