Sticking to the Party Line.(Russia, Communist Party)(Brief Article)(Column)

If press freedom in Russia is under fire, Mikhail Leontiev is proud to be a member of the firing squad. He's made a habit of trashing journalist colleagues. He has defended military officers sentenced for murdering a reporter who had implicated them in corruption scandals. He has savaged critics of the war in Chechnya. And lately the 42-year-old TV journalist has been hard at work demolishing the reputation of NTV, the independent TV station now under threat of a hostile takeover by the state-controlled corporation Gazprom. Leontiev finds nothing strange about his attitude. "I've never been a democrat," he declares happily.

Nor is Leontiev a member of Russia's lunatic fringe. In fact, he represents a growing cohort of Russian journalists who interpret freedom of speech as their president seems to--as the freedom to agree, completely and enthusiastically, with whatever the government thinks is good. "The idea of a strong government is very popular now," says radio journalist Andrei Babitsky, a Leontiev opponent who infuriated the Kremlin with his confrontational reporting on Chechnya. "And the journalists who support this idea are also very popular."

Even most ordinary Russians now seem to regard press freedom as something they can do without. In a recent poll conducted by the Public Opinion Fund, 57 percent approved of censorship of the media--up by 8 percent since last November. No one other than independent media watchdogs has protested the violence directed at Russian journalists in recent years. (By one estimate, 64 Russian journalists were attacked last year in connection with their professional duties, four of them killed.) When Babitsky was subjected to a campaign of harassment by the Kremlin's security forces in Chechnya last year, a rally in his favor attracted 150 people in Moscow--while 4,500 sympathizers showed up in Paris.

That apathy owes much to the disillusionment with democracy that underlies President Vladimir Putin's popularity. Among ordinary Russians, the economic chaos of the 1990s, compounded by foreign-policy humiliations such as NATO's enlargement and the bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, has fueled intense anti-Western sentiment. ...