For the past decade and a half, the Moscow School of Political Studies has run a sprawling, argumentative and gripping seminar for Russian journalists at a former teaching institute on the town of Golytsino, some 40 kilometres west of Moscow. The Moscow School is the inspiration of a remarkable couple, Lena Nemirovskaya and Yuri Senokosov, who founded it in the early nineties and have managed to run it, through many  difficulties (which continue) ever since.

Its guiding principle has been: how to live in a civil society. Its founding insight was that Russia – and the other former states of the Soviet Union – had been unable to develop these through the Communist period, in part because of the terrorisation of the population from the twenties to the sixties under Stalin, in part because the post-Stalin regimes, less terroristic, were nevertheless concerned to preserve at least outward obedience to Communist norms and proletarian enthusiasms.

I became friendly with Yuri and Lena when living in Moscow in the late-eighties to mid-nineties, and contributed something to the development of the school. Mostly, I think, it was in arguing the centrality of journalism to the development of a civil society and democratic habits. I quoted to them the old saw – that journalism is the first rough draft of history (see Barry Popik's Big Apple website for the best  discussion I've seen of who used it first: usually credited to Phil Graham, former publisher of the Washington Post, in a speech to the Washington Press Club in April 1963: though others, less well known, had apparently used the phrase before, without the “rough”) – which Lena has used ever since when she introduces a discussion on the issue.

She did again last weekend, when I spoke at the school; following her lead, it was about the three central tasks of journalism: that is, to hold power to account; to give a clear and accurate account of the regular functions, decisions and actions of democratic institutions; and to provide space for broad debate and polemic. I asked the journalists there to check how they thought their journalism answered to these imperatives: or if they thought my list were imperatives for them, and for Russian journalism.

On the day I spoke, the star turn of the evening was Alexander Voloshin, formerly chief of staff to Vladimir Putin when the latter was president – resigning in 2003, and player in Kremlin circles, with a lucrative post as chairman of the giant Norilsk Nickel – the world’s biggest nickel producer and one of the largest of platinum and copper. Voloshin is a low-key, sardonic man, with something of a reputation for being the intellectuals’ man in the Kremlin: like me, he’s on the board of the School, and may give it some protection against the evident dislike it provokes in the upper reaches of the power structure.

Giving only the briefest of speeches, Voloshin preferred to take questions. Many of these concerned the nature and the actions of the current administration: at one point, he was asked what he thought of the chances of an opposition candidate gaining traction and challenging the present diarchy of Putin and President Dmitri Medvedev. Looking and sounding concerned, Voloshin said there was no such figure, either present or on the horizon. That was bad for Russia and bad for politics, he said: any system needed a challenge.

It was an impeccable reflection, but a hypocritical one. For he did not add that the present administration takes some care in ensuring no such figure does appear. There are candidates for high office: one is Boris Nemtsov, a former mayor of the major centre of Nizhny Novgorod and former deputy prime minister in one of Yeltsin’s administrations; and Mikhail Kasyanov, a former prime minister and economics minister. Both Nemtsov and Kasyanov have in the past been excluded from challenging power, either centrally – Kasyanov, who gathered the 2m signatures required for a presidential candidacy last year, saw himself disqualified on the grounds that some 13 per cent were invalid – a decision he described as “a farce”. In 2006, in a speech to the International Institute of Strategic Studies, Kasyanov said that, in Russia, “Separation of powers has been effectively demolished and replaced by the so-called ‘Vertical of Power’ which is based on the false idea that all the meaningful social and political processes must be kept under control by the state. The government and parliament cannot function any longer without daily instructions. The judiciary is increasingly servile. Independent TV does not exist any more at the federal level and is being quickly uprooted in the regions. Moreover, the state-owned companies and the state itself increase their grip over the electronic and printed media. Responsibility of the regional level of power is totally destroyed by the abolishment of direct elections for the governors."

As a critique of the current government style, it’s hard to beat: it’s one shared by Nemtsov, in numerous articles and interviews since the early 2000s. His own attempt to become mayor of Sochi failed: he alleged vote tampering and denial of access to the media. Neither man – nor any other likely challenging figure – is given anything more than cursory broadcasting time; neither can hold public meetings of any size.

Both, though, are free, hold directorships of companies, travel at home and abroad, and polemicise. They function in a system in which power is generally used to smother rather than to suppress; where compromat – compromising information – circulates constantly, with little indication as to its worth but having the effect of sullying all who would aspire to power. In such a soup, the clarifying function of journalism is urgently needed – and is always denied, except in small circulation papers or the liberal Moscow radio station Ekho Moskvy.

Journalism can effectively do none of its three central civic tasks in Moscow. It is allowed no clarity; no independent ordering of events; no space to pursue and demonstrate truth. Any assessment of it worth its name – as the Axess Programme plans to do – would lay some of the blame for this on post-Soviet journalists themselves. But the main responsibility lies with the Putin-Medvedev administration, and the care it takes not to be held to any kind of account.

We are not back in the USSR. We are in a more unpredictable, and often more violent space – where the possibilities for freedom are, to be sure, greater: but the possibility of prolonged repression presently better.