Fassbinder and the running of the bulls
in Pamplona. The show, which aired at
a time of mass bewilderment, was a cap-
tivating distillation of Ernst’s idiosyn-
crasies. “As always, during any great rup-
ture, cracks and openings appear in the
system, which allow just about anyone
to enter,” he told me.
Four years into Yeltsin’s Presidency,
with the country still reeling from the
Soviet collapse, Ernst produced dozens
of public-service advertisements called
“The Russian Project,” which used sen-
timental scenes to teach basic lessons:
cherish your loved ones, take pride in
your work. In one, an elderly man hears
buskers on the metro playing an old
military march and recalls a wartime
love affair. As the music swells, the tag-
line appears: “We remember.” “People
felt lost, as though they had been dis-
carded,” Ernst told me. “It was impor-
tant to let them know that not every-
thing in the past was bad, that we still
held something in common.”
His most popular project from the
nineties was “Old Songs About Im-
portant Things,” a faux-retro musical
set on a Soviet collective farm, in which
actors crooned tunes from the Soviet
songbook. Leonid Parfyonov, who col-
laborated with him on the program,
told an interviewer at the time, “It’s
about admitting that there were things
that were good, that there is nothing to
be ashamed of, and that we don’t have
any other history.”I
n 1995, Vladislav Listyev, a beloved
television host from “Viewpoint,” was
made the director of Channel One and
put Ernst in charge of drawing up a plan
for new programming. But, just five
weeks after Listyev took over, he was
killed in the stairwell of his apartment
building. His murder, never solved, was
rumored to be connected to his decision
to change the way the company bought
ads, potentially cutting out gray-market
middlemen. Channel One’s main share-
holder, Boris Berezovsky, a rapacious oli-
garch with interests in everything from
oil to automobiles, proposed that Ernst
take over. At first, Ernst resisted—he
found Berezovsky distasteful and un-
trustworthy—but eventually he agreed
to become the channel’s chief producer.
During the 1996 Presidential race,
Channel One joined other outlets in
openly supporting Yeltsin’s campaign and
disparaging his revanchist Communist
opponent. On the eve of the election,
the channel aired an ominous spot that
ended with a timer counting down to
voting day. Anna Kachkaeva, a television
critic, saw Ernst a few days afterward
and asked him about it. “From the brain-
washers, hoping for your understand-ing,” she recalled him saying, smiling
mischievously. Kachkaeva told me that,
even as Ernst “retained a sense of hoo-
liganism,” he came “to understand what
kind of instrument he held in his hands,
that he is a person of the state.”
In October, 1999, Ernst agreed to take
on the role of general director at Chan-
nel One. His relations with Berezovsky,
for whom the network served as a per-
sonal plaything, were tense, but Bere-
zovsky thought of Ernst as a “very sen-
sible, well-educated person” with great
potential. “That all turned out to be true,”
Berezovsky told the weekly magazine
of Kommersant, a Russian newspaper, in- “But, as subsequent events showed,
he has no real political position. That
would be well and good in a stable de-
mocracy, but is absolutely dangerous in
a transition to a totalitarian regime.”
Berezovsky backed Putin’s candidacy
in 2000, and even claimed credit for en-
gineering his ascent. But after Putin
gained office the system that he began
to construct had little tolerance for cocky
and unruly power brokers, and Bere-
zovsky’s ego didn’t allow him to bend to
the new rules. Things came to a head
eight months into Putin’s Presidency,
when a torpedo exploded in the bow of
the Kursk, a nuclear submarine in the
Barents Sea, killing a majority of the hun-
dred and eighteen men aboard. Twenty-
three survived, and waited for rescue.
Russia’s attempts to reach them were un-
successful, and it initially refused foreign
help. Nine days later, after Putin relented,
Norwegian deep-sea divers opened the
hatch and found everyone dead.
Berezovsky unleashed his network,
which hammered away at the Kremlin’s
incompetence and compared its han-
dling of the Kursk disaster to the gov-
ernment’s fumbling response to the nu-
clear accident at Chernobyl, in 1986.
Channel One’s flagship news program
broadcast scenes of anguished relatives
subjecting government officials to scath-
ing criticism. Putin was livid. He and his
advisers claimed that the more inflam-
matory clips were manufactured, or at
least grossly manipulated, as part of an
information war carried out by Berezovsky.
When Putin finally visited the bereaved
relatives, he lashed out at the media:
“Television? They’re lying! Lying! Lying!”
According to reports in the Russian
“That’s a coat. That’s a coat. That’s a jacket. That’s a coat....” press, Ernst, in private discussions with