THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER16, 2019 25
Putin, encouraged one of the more nox
ious conspiracy theories floating around
the Kremlin: that a number of the griev
ing women shown on television were
actors. Ernst adamantly denies that he
said any such thing. But, while Krem
lin officials ordered Berezovsky to un
load his shares in the channel, they held
Ernst in great esteem. “He is a very tal
ented journalist,” Alexander Voloshin,
Putin’s former chief of staff, said, in 2011.
“All we had to do was free him from
Berezovsky’s influence.” When I spoke
to Ernst, he echoed this version of events.
Under Berezovsky, the channel’s news
staff was “waging some kind of politi
cal battle rather than doing reporting
work,” he said. At the height of the fall
out over the Kursk disaster, Ernst—
whether acting on his own initiative or
with instruction from above—fired a
number of staffers close to Berezovsky.
Under duress, Berezovsky fled to En
gland, where he hardened into a strident,
although not always reliable, critic of
Putin. (He died, apparently by suicide,
at a manor house outside London, in
2013.) However, he never managed to
develop a real hatred of Ernst. “Ernst
could not exist without relying on the
state,” he told Kommersant, from exile.
“He made a choice not so much against
me personally but for Putin. It was a
choice in favor of power.”
P
ut in charge of the largest platform
in the country, Ernst set about re
alizing his creative vision, which skill
fully combined a certain cosmopolitan
savviness with ultimate subservience to
the state. Ernst considers himself a go-
sudarstvennik—a statist—a term many
in Russia’s ruling class, including Putin,
use to describe their belief in the inherent
virtue of the state. “It would be strange
if a channel that belonged to the state
were to express an antigovernment
point of view,” Ernst told me.
Under Ernst, Putin’s subsequent in
augurations became ever more ambitious
productions, involving several hundred
cameramen as well as cameras mounted
on helicopters and overhead tracking
cranes. Ernst also reimagined the annual
Victory Day parade, a celebration of the
defeat of Nazi Germany, putting cam
eras in the cockpits of bomber planes, to
create shots reminiscent of “Top Gun.”
According to Arina Borodina, a journal
ist and media critic in Moscow, Ernst
has no equal in creating the spectacles
that the country’s rulers covet. “Who else
is going to make their illusions, their
myths, their beauty?” she said.
“For Ernst, a sense of immense vi
sual scale was always important,” An
drei Boltenko, a producer and director
who worked at Channel One in the
early twothousands, said. Russia was
emerging from the confusion and depri
vation of the nineties, and the mood
was hopeful. Viewers wanted a
story of resurgence. Boltenko
told me, “The scale of the tele
vision form matched the scale
of belief in the state.”
In December, 2001, Channel
One aired its first callin show
with Putin. Ernst told me that,
when he introduced the idea
to Putin, “he listened and said,
‘That’s interesting.’” The live broad
cast—in which Putin fields questions
from citizens, often for more than four
hours—has appeared nearly every year
since. At one moment, he might prom
ise a new children’s playground; in the
next, he might conjure up months of
withheld salaries for laborers building a
cosmodrome. Ernst described the show
as a particularly Russian phenomenon:
“The Russian mentality stipulates that
the leader of the country, no matter what
this person is called—President or tsar,
Prime Minister or General Secretary
of the Communist Party—is seen to
answer for everything, that there is one
person who symbolizes the entire state.”
Under Ernst, the network took pains
to avoid the sins of the Berezovsky era,
as the Kremlin understood them. In Sep
tember, 2004, Chechen terrorists seized
a school in the town of Beslan, in the
North Caucasus, and government offi
cials claimed that there were just three
hundred and fiftyfour hostages when,
in fact, there were more than a thou
sand. Channel One cited the lower num
ber. On the third day of the standoff,
when a frenzy of shooting left more than
three hundred people dead, foreign media
covered the events live, but Channel One
aired just a few minutes on the crisis be
fore returning to the Brazilian telenovela
“Women in Love.” Ernst defended his
coverage. “Today, the main task of the
television is to mobilize the country,” he
told the Financial Times, in 2004. “Our
task No. 2 is to inform the country about
what is going on.”
Over time, Ernst and Parfyonov, his
former collaborator, began to diverge
professionally, even as they remained
friends. Parfyonov prized his indepen
dence, which left him with fewer op
portunities on federal airwaves; Ernst
took the other route. “Kostya wanted to
be both an artist and a creative direc
tor,” Parfyonov told me. “But it would
prove impossible to be a creative direc
tor without serving the state in
one way or another.”
Yet, even as Channel One
transmits the official narrative,
it does so with a measure of taste
and restraint, at least compared
with its two main competitors:
Rossiya, which is wholly owned
by the state, and NTV, now
owned by a holding company
with ties to Putin. Rossiya is home to
Dmitry Kiselev, the most sulfurous per
sonality on Russian television, who holds
forth on topics including the arms race
(Russia is the only country that can turn
the United States into “radioactive dust”)
and gays and lesbians (“They should be
banned from donating blood or sperm,
and if they die in a car crash, their hearts
should be burned or buried in the ground
as unsuitable for the continuation of life”).
NTV is known for pseudodocumenta
ries that disparage opposition figures and
hint at all manner of foreign conspiracies.
Such offerings rarely appear on Chan
nel One—not because of Ernst’s deep
ideological opposition but because they
do not correspond to his vision of what
is beautiful and worthy. Yulia Pankratova,
a news anchor on Channel One from
2006 to 2013, told me that, during her
tenure, the network’s employees prided
themselves on the sense that “you can
do propaganda, but you can’t let your
self fall below a certain level.”
Ernst has directed most of his ener
gies toward entertainment program
ming. “The news is momentary and
ephemeral,” he told me. “But the artis
tic realm, this is something deeper. It
can stay in people’s minds forever.” It is
also the sphere in which he has the most
freedom. Ernst told me that, while his
interlocutors in the Kremlin pay close
attention to Channel One’s news cov
erage, they let him make creative series
and films with virtually no oversight. He
