If anyone had any illusions about the state of media freedom in Russia, they will have been put to bed by yesterday’s ugly and unabashed intervention in the work of Kommersant publishing house.  Kommersant Vlast editor-in-chief Maxim Kovalsky and holding general manager Andrei Galiyev were fired over a rather acerbic insult directed towards Vladimir Putin published in the weekly magazine.  The lampooning of Russia’s national leader was, it seems, not taken well by the magazine’s billionaire owner Alisher Usmanov.  Today we saw that Mikhail Prokhorov is now interested in purchasing Kommersant.  Will Englund in the Washington Post sees intrigue afoot:

Why has Prime Minister Vladimir Putin been so quiet? What does it mean when a former Putin cabinet minister, Alexei Kudrin, talks about creating a liberal opposition?

And what’s the story behind the firing this week of the top management at one of Russia’s more respected magazines?

That last incident looked to a lot of Russian journalists like a signal. It’s not what we say in public, it’s what we do behind the scenes, the authorities seemed to be warning them. But this also could have been the initiative of a loyal member of the inner circle — in this case, the owner of the magazine — trying to anticipate his patron’s wrath and moving first. There’s a long Russian — and Soviet — tradition of that. Or, possibly, it was just because someone in power doesn’t like bad taste.