Russians who watched television on Saturday actually saw the reports about the attempted coup, as state news agencies covered the armed insurrection led by Yevgeny Prigozhin while downplaying the potential chaos threatening Russia.
Prigozhin’s uprising is perhaps the most direct internal threat to the Kremlin since the 1991 Soviet coup attempt, when communist hardliners detained Mikhail Gorbachev and sought to seize control of the country.
On Saturday, Prigozhin sent his mercenaries to capture the city of Rostov, which has a population of more than 1 million people, and sent several thousand fighters on toward Moscow, laying the ground for clashes in the capital and a potential civil war.
Russian state television often ignores news that it considers inconvenient, particularly regarding the invasion of Ukraine. Famously, during the 1991 coup attempt, Soviet television showed a tape of the ballet Swan Lake, forever binding the image of the Dance of the Little Swans to political upheaval.
But in this case, state-run Channel One broadcast an emergency news briefing about Prigozhin’s declaration of an armed uprising, also airing his claims that Wagner troops were struck from behind by artillery fired by the Russian military.
Then the presenter, Ekaterina Andreeva, one of Russia’s best-known television personalities, quickly declared it a fake. “The first sign is the lack of any other witnesses,” she said. She also pointed to the speed with which Prigozhin denounced the defence ministry just 15 minutes after the alleged strike took place.
On the three o’clock news, Russian state television carried scenes from Rostov showing Wagner fighters walking the streets. The scenes focused on angry locals who challenged Wagner personnel, showing one man with a bicycle telling them they should be ashamed of themselves as “defenders of the fatherland”.
Still, the executives at Russian state television did try to skirt round the topic of the attempted coup. Shortly after Vladimir Putin came on television on Saturday morning and declared that Russia was planning to “brutally” put down the “internal mutiny”, the stations aired a long documentary about the life of Silvio Berlusconi. The Italian politician was a friend of Putin’s, but the canned documentary could have waited for the resolution of Prigozhin’s attempt at regime change.
Another TV station showed a documentary about the illegal production of caviar.
They were clearly dealing with an event that was too large to ignore, and have sought to discredit Prigozhin while preventing additional panic.
“All I can say is that they’re very closely sticking to the official statements that are coming out,” said Francis Scarr, a reporter for the BBC who covers Russian state television. “They had a correspondent in Rostov earlier who admitted that people were panic buying fuel etc, but concluded that the ‘overall situation is calm’.
“So they’re definitely not ignoring it entirely, but clearly attempting to downplay it.”
Others sought to put the blame on the west, with RT saying that American and British intelligence stood behind the insurrection.
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