On Russian TV, ads for cheap products like chewing gum are run, ad nauseam, at bargain-basement rates. At the same time, onscreen battles between obnoxious political oligarchs and their mouthpieces are of little concern to the deeply suffering Russian masses. The zillion-ton gorilla, whose every twitch still makes smaller countries jump, is no longer Super Power No. 2. Even so, it still has 30,000 nuclear weapons, tremendously talented people and a great, vibrant culture. Nonetheless, the current population of about 146 million is predicted to drop to 131 million by 2015 and to 80 million in 2050, according to demographer Murray Feshbach, a professor at Georgetown University.
Oligarchs own the media, too.
A close confidant of Yeltsin's, Berezovsky owns Aeroflot Airlines, car dealer LogoVaz, many newspapers and magazines. NTV, slightly more liberal than its competitors, favors the Kremlin's rivals, Yuri Luzhkov and Evgeny Primakov. At the same time, the company is in furious pre-election wars with the Kremlin. Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov has his own television channel, TV Tsenter. He is backed by a widely diversified telecom investment conglomerate called Sistema.