THE owners of one of Russia’s most respected business magazines are seeking the dismissal of its editor after he criticised President Putin’s handling of the Beslan school siege.

National Reserve Corp, the publishing group, said yesterday that it intended to fire Andrei Grigoryev as editor of Kompaniya after a dispute over editorial policy. Shareholders will vote on his removal at a board meeting next month.

But Mr Grigoryev, who is also the magazine’s founder and general director, insists that National Reserve cannot legally dismiss him from the magazine, which has a circulation of about 60,000. He told The Times that either the owners were bowing to demands from the Kremlin to silence media critics, or a potential buyer was using the clampdown to further its business interests.

Either way, the dispute highlights the increasing pressure on the independent media in the wake of the Beslan school siege, which left 330 people dead, half of them children.

“When shareholders start to try and influence the editorial decisions of a magazine, it is of course an attempt at assassination of press freedom,” Mr Grigoryev said. “I see two factors here — there are people who want to buy us and there is Beslan.”

If National Reserve’s efforts succeed, Mr Grigoryev would become the second editor of a prominent Russian publication to be forced to stand down since the school siege.

Raf Shakirov, the editor of Izvestia, the daily newspaper, was forced to resign for his “emotional” coverage of the hostage crisis. Izvestia is controlled by a Russian billionaire with close links to the Kremlin, the metals tycoon, Vladimir Potanin. National Reserve is controlled by Aleksander Lebedev, another Russian billionaire, who is a former KGB officer, like the President.

Mr Putin has reined in the Russian media since he became President in 2000 by forcing two uncooperative media oligarchs into exile and reasserting state control over all national television networks.

Earlier this year, the last two independent political talk shows on television were pulled off the air. But the recent moves at Izvestia and Kompaniya indicate that the pressure is spreading to the print media, analysts say.

Mr Putin last week urged all reporters to join the fight against terrorism.

Mr Grigoryev had written an article in Kompaniya on September 6, criticising the security services for failing to prevent the bloodbath that ended the Beslan siege.

“Putin may be sincere in trying to entrench order and to double the economy but he’s doing this using the methods learned in the Soviet KGB, the methods of the last century and of a totalitarian regime,” he wrote.

He told The Times that it was the first article criticising the Kremlin to be published in the magazine.

National Reserve accused Mr Grigoryev of hiding information from shareholders and appropriating the magazine’s trademark. “Shareholders are unhappy about the lack of transparency in the magazine’s management and about the editorial policy conducted by the current editor in chief,” said Anatoly Danilitsky, the director of National Reserve.

Mr Grigoryev said that he had hidden nothing from shareholders and registered the trademark before National Reserve became a shareholder.

Asked whether the Kremlin was putting pressure on Mr Lebedev, he said: “It’s very hard for me to answer that question. I have known Lebedev since the founding of this magazine and it always seemed to me that we had the same ideology.”

He added: “Putin says that there is no such thing as an independent media here, that all magazines and television companies are in the pay of somebody, but Kompaniya was a truly independent magazine which survives on its readership and the adverts it carries.”

• Warsaw: Haunting pictures of bombs, terrorists and graveyards drawn by schoolchildren who lived through the terrorist attack in Beslan went on auction in Poland yesterday to raise money to help victims of the tragedy. The 49 drawings were brought to Warsaw by Grzegorz Slubowski, a journalist with Polish Radio One who reported on the school seizure. The auction is on the radio station’s website. (AP)

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