RPT-FEATURE-'Crisis' a word best said quietly in Russia

By Denis Dyomkin and Christian Lowe

MOSCOW, Dec 16 (Reuters) - When a Russian sociologist wrote a newspaper column last month suggesting the global financial crisis could cause social unrest, the state media watchdog advised the paper not to spread extremist sentiments.

"This is censorship," said Yevgeny Gontmakher, the author of the column and the head of the Academy of Science's Social Policy Centre. "The situation in the country is changing; you can no longer utter the word 'crisis'."

The financial crisis is presenting Russia's ruling elite with the most serious challenge to its power in a decade. The Kremlin has responded by offering a bailout package and economic stimulus measures between them worth over $200 billion.

But journalists and critics say the Kremlin has deployed another weapon too: using its grip on the media to try to prevent ordinary people from finding out how bad things really are.

Russia's sovereign debt was downgraded by Standard & Poor's for the first time in 10 years on Dec. 8, stocks have lost about 70 percent of their value since May, and the central bank has spent $160.3 billion in a bid to support the rouble.

A reporter for a major Russian newspaper said editors told staff at morning meetings to exercise care when reporting on the impact of the crisis inside Russia.

"It comes from the top, via the meetings the top editors have with the government and the Kremlin," said the reporter, asking not to be named because he feared he could lose his job if he spoke publicly on the issue.

"The reasoning is to prevent panic from spreading inside Russia. We can still report on the crisis but we have to be very careful of how we term things, so it is a way of reporting rather than an outright ban."

At the end of last week Russia's chief macroeconomic planner was overruled by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin after saying Russia was already in a recession. Within hours, Putin told a different story, trumpeting growth of around 6 percent for 2008 and predicting Russia would weather the financial storm.

CRISIS ... IN RUSSIA?

Asked to comment on allegations the government was dictating how the the crisis should be reported, Dmitry Peskov, the chief spokesman for Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said: "That is absolutely not true."

Russian officials are not ignoring the crisis. President Dmitry Medvedev has acknowledged problems on the financial markets will spread to the real economy and Putin says the downturn will test the country's mettle.

Vigorous debates on the topic can be found on internet blogs and in some newspapers. Some of the reporting holds little back, with unsourced details about firms' financial health that in many other countries may spur a legal challenge.

But on the three main television stations -- the principal source of news for most Russians -- the crisis is often treated as a problem that is happening somewhere else.

On Nov. 24 last month, when U.S. President-elect Barack Obama formally set his economic team with a pledge to act "swiftly and boldly" to avert recession, the 9:00 p.m. bulletin on Russia's most-watched television station Channel One only directly referred to the crisis six items into the broadcast, in an item about the threat of layoffs in the United States.