Last month's brutal seizure by the state-controlled gas monopoly Gazprom of NTV, Russia's only private national news-oriented broadcaster, happened hours after President Putin again announced his sincere devotion to freedom of the press.
Ever since, newspapers worldwide have been juggling words. Did Russia really have press freedom during the nine years of the Yeltsin regime? Was NTV independent, or just a mouthpiece of its owner, media mogul Vladimir Gusinsky? Was it necessary to bring law and order into a young, corrupt and chaotic Russian democracy?
In fact, what happened early on that Saturday morning, when broad-shouldered private security men led by their secret police and militia pals walked into the NTV newsroom, has a clear and definite word: tragedy.
A real tragedy happened to a whole generation, particularly of journalists, who grew up under the Soviet regime, worked through the years of censorship and state-imposed lies and got a taste of freedom - however relative. Now they are left watching its sunset with no hope of living long enough to see that freedom return.
Was NTV a truly independent voice - independent from any interests, owners included? No, it was not. I know it pretty well. I had a political show - something like NBC's Meet the Press - back in 1997, and got kicked out.
Was it an alternative nationwide voice that expressed views different from those of the state? Yes, it was. And that's what counts. In a country so vast (with 10 time zones), and so poor that ordinary citizens have no money to buy papers, non-state electronic media are the only source of information forming a civic society - one that pursues interests other than that of the state.
With NTV's collapse, all three national news-oriented channels, covering 99% of viewers, are under state control, doomed to promote news, views and opinions carefully calibrated in the Kremlin.
These are examples of what happens in the reality concealed from outside eyes.
A popular TV talk show, Press Club, has existed since the early 90s on the state-owned Channel 2. It was one of the first live shows that gave space for discussion of the most heated weekly events to politicians, journalists and MPs.
It is no longer live. It started to be taped after the tragedy with the submarine Kursk. I was present at that show, and was stunned to see the televised version: it was severely edited with respect to any critique of President Putin.
Future shows had even tougher scrutiny: statements by participants were not just edited, but the whole course of the discussion - in pure Soviet style - was altered by changing the sequence. Viewers are unaware that they see a fake taped version of a studio debate made days earlier: a running line of supposed pager and email messages from "viewers" aims to convince them that the show is going out live. In Kremlin language this is called "managed democracy".
Izvestia, the privately owned national daily, early in the year published several articles criticising Putin's move to reinstate the old Soviet anthem. The following week the Kremlin's Management Department filed a lawsuit disputing the legality of the dubious privatisation deal over the newspaper's office building back in the mid-90s.
The outcome was predictable. My weekly column that had described teenagers' bitter resistance to the old/new anthem was dropped. "We took a political decision to remove your column," the editor explained. The lawsuit was frozen, but not withdrawn - just in case the paper made another wrong move in Kremlin politics.
Marina Lelevyvi, one of the best Channel 2 reporters, was assigned to interview Ludmila Putina, Putin's wife. She submitted the questions, but happened to ask another couple of her own. She got punished: the videotape was destroyed and barred from broadcast. The same day the reporter quit and joined NTV. It was just a few days before NTV's seizure. She walked out of its newsroom along with some 100 of the best NTV reporters.
I could fill an entire Guardian page with such stories, but for fear of creating problems for my colleagues back home. Many with families have a hard choice: to comply with the Kremlin rules or look for other jobs. I am not happy to violate these rules - I know the price I will pay for that. But there is no other way to explain the real state of press freedom in Russia.
If nothing else, it may help Tony Blair the next time he drinks beer with his Russian friend Vladimir Putin - let us say during the upcoming G7 meeting in Genoa this June - to better appreciate the vital necessity of the alternative media in Russia - such as NTV once was.
Yevgenia Albats, a Moscow-based independent journalist, wrote KGB: State within a State (IB Tauris, 1995)