MOSCOW — I'd never been in a green room before, especially not one with ultra-nationalist politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky sucking up all the air in it. Yet there he stood in a blue suit, surrounded by concentric rings of advisors, assistants, and supporters. Producers and hosts ran around with clipboards. Billionaire and budding politician Mikhail Prokhorov sat nervously on a couch as his publicist prattled on next to him. Margarita Simonyan, the head of the Russia Today network, was getting her make-up done; the leader of the ousted liberal party Yabloko stalked about gloomily. Two higher-ups from the ruling United Russia party checked their watches; the deputy head of the Communists sparkled in a shiny suit and a flawless coiffure. And then there was me, lightly dusted with powder, standing a careful few feet away from the refreshments table with its sweating cold cuts, unpeeled banana halves, and Hennessy.
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Earlier that week, the hosts of the political talk show "NTV-shniki" (or "NTV-ers") had invited me to appear along with the leaders of Russia's main political parties and some Russian journalists to kick off the political season by asking the politicians some questions. Given the degree of state control over Russian television -- "NTV-shniki" appears on the Gazprom-owned NTV channel -- I was wary of participating: Would I be edited out of the final show unless I asked softball questions? Would I be, as one Russian friend warned me, "legitimizing their charade"? "Don't be shy," one of the producers told me a couple of days before the show. "Be provocative!" She added that Simonyan wanted to prod Prokhorov on his alleged dalliances.
In the end, I agreed. There hadn't been anything like this for a while. It promised to be, at the very least, interesting. "Today, on our show, we have something we haven't had in about 10 years," Anton Khrekov, the main host, intoned when the cameras started rolling. "The leaders of the biggest registered parties will meet in one place to participate in an open political discussion." What, I wondered, would that look like in Putin's Russia, where TV politics are drab and dully loyal? Would they pull it off?
The first question, from Khrekov, was not one you hear too often on Russian television.
"Why are your parties participating in these elections if the count is dishonest, if the election is dishonest?" he asked. "Aren't you just aiding those who have orchestrated this buffoonery?"
His colleagues weren't much gentler. When Vladimir Kashin, the Communist, started alluding to thieves and "corruptioneers," one of the hosts, Anton Krasovsky, started to press Kashin: "Who?" he asked. "Who? Name one name." (Kashin didn't.) They went after the Communists for glorifying Stalin -- "How many people would your leader sacrifice to build the Belomor Canal? 500,000?" -- and for being the Kremlin's lapdog: "Your leader ... meets with the president, discusses with him nuances of internal politics," one of the hosts asked. "How come Comrade Lenin didn't meet with Nicholas II to discuss with him the reform of the country?"
They went after Yabloko for scuttling every liberal coalition, Zhirinovsky for selling his party's votes in the legislature. (At this, Zhirinovsky stood up and hurled his clip-on mic to the floor. "Enough lying!" he bellowed as it exploded into its separate components.) The hosts even went after United Russia for campaign posters in Novosibirsk that implied that federal funds spent on road repair in the region were a gift from the party. (Andrey Isaev, the bigwig representing United Russia at the debate, did not see a problem with this.)
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