Robert Parsons of Radio Free Europe reports:

In Moscow, I attended a conference of mostly young Russian journalists on the question of defending journalists' rights. I expected a chorus of discontent but did not find it. Of course, there were complaints about the difficulties they faced in carrying out their profession -- among them censorship and threats of violence -- but there was also an acceptance of the Putin model of governance. I asked one who he thought had been responsible for the chain of apartment bombings just before Vladimir Putin's election as prime minister in 1999. "The FSB, of course," he told me, without a moment's hesitation, referring to the successors of the KGB. "Sometimes," he went on, "the state has to do such things to protect itself. It was a smart move." The message he and his colleagues seemed intent on making was that the state had to come first. And if in the process the flow of information had to suffer, well, so be it.