The Kremlin wins one: President Vladimir Putin's bitter critic, Media-Most media empire, is dead. Its assets have been transferred to pro-Kremlin stockholders, its journalists have been fired or silenced and its owner, Vladimir Gusinsky, is hiding abroad.

According to the Kremlin, Media-Most collapsed under the weight of its own debts and gross mismanagement, not under state pressure, let alone persecution. Yet the Kremlin wants Spain to extradite Gusinsky for alleged "economic crimes." As for Media-Most's journalists, they are being lectured by Putin on what is ethical and what is not ethical in covering the news. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? An iron hand in a velvet glove always starts by crushing the unfriendly mass media.

Media-Most used to consist of several prize pieces, with the NTV television station being its crown jewel. In the muddled world of Russian broadcasting, NTV definitely stood out as an island of professionalism and general high standards. If other TV stations were just holdovers from the inglorious Soviet past, NTV was attempting to build something completely new for Russia: a dynamic, thought-provoking channel, combining political liberalism with advanced, Internet-age aesthetics.