Khodorkovsky & Lebedev Communications Center

"The information blockade has been broken," journalist Alexander Ryklin triumphantly announced last week, having seen for the first time in a decade the appearance of opposition leaders on Russia's tightly censored state-controlled television. Only a few months ago, such a sight was unimaginable, but now, under pressure from multitudinous protests, the Russian government is slowly and selectively broadening their tolerance.

Several journalists have observed this "thaw" in the Russia's media environment, which includes new screenings of previously banned films, huge billboards mocking Vladimir Putin facing the Kremlin, and more balanced news coverage of the protesters from state media outlets.

"I cannot imagine being given permission for this a year ago," said Vadim Korovin, the distributor of a previously banned documentary on the 1999 apartment bombings, adding that he had obtained special permission from the Ministry of Culture to show the film in several art house theatres in Moscow. "It is a result of the political turbulence - the bureaucracy is paralyzed. They feel if they prohibit this, they will contribute even more to the public anger."

For years Russia has tolerated a wide range of political opinions on the Internet, while radio station Echo Moskvy, despite being 60% owned by Gazprom, has long been allowed to operate to serve its function as a "pressure valve." But it was always an entirely different story for television, the most important and widely consumed media in Russia, ever since Vladimir Putin engineered the takeover of NTV and assumed a complete monopoly over the nation's airwaves.

So in many ways, the first-ever appearance on television of people like Boris Nemtsov and Mikhail Kasyanov could be considered an important victory of the protesters, in that they have forced the state to change its behavior, forcing them to abandon their strict censorship model. So the next question is what does this mean? How much is the Kremlin willing to open up the country to competing political discourse? Is this just another tightly managed ploy (for example, state TV still will not show Alexei Navalny), or is it a small-scale peterstroika, similar to Gorbachev's experience when he meant to carefully manage just a few reforms, but instead opened the floodgates of change?

But not even Nemtsov buys into the lightened censorship. Writing on his blog, he noted that although this was the first time in five years he'd been shown on state TV, it wasn't so much due to a political thaw as to the Kremlin's desire to "show an imitation of free speech." The broadcast had been heavily edited, he said, to exclude accusations that certain Russian businessmen had benefited financially from their relationship with Putin.

There is also scant evidence that the Kremlin has had any meaningful change of heart. Just this week, hacking activists Anonymous released a series of emails showing that the Kremlin generously funds a group of Nashi Internet trolls who are paid to post hundreds of comments on negative press articles to massage Putin's image. The newspaper Kommersant has filed a complaint blaming a government funded youth group for a series of illegal hack attacks which crashed their website in 2008. Other examples include the recent firing of a journalist from the Gazprom-owned NTV, who had the temerity to greenlight an on-air critique of Putin, as well as the hacking of Nemtsov's phone, which resulted in juicy conversations between him and his press secretary being made public.

In a recent column for NPR, Julia Ioffe interviewed Yuri Kotler, a young United Russia member who was also once an advisor to former Duma speaker Boris Gryzlov. Kotler used an interesting anecdote to describe why what we're witnessing right now is probably equal parts thaw and crackdown.

"Imagine if your cat came to you and started talking," he told Ioffe. "First of all, it's a cat, and it's talking. Are you sure it's talking? You have to make sure. Second, all these years, the government fed it, gave it water, petted it, and now it's talking and asking for something. It's a shock. We have to get used to it."

Interestingly, Ioffe's take is that the trajectory is more in favor of "tightening the screws", a popular phrase from the Soviet era. "They're waiting for the opposition to make a mistake," one Moscow source with close knowledge of the Kremlin told her. "Once they do, it will be a welcome opportunity to crack down."

This kind of logic goes hand-in-hand with the near certainty that Putin will be reelected president, and that the main victory for the opposition will by Pyrrhic in nature. But Nemtsov appearing on TV is, already, a kind of absolute victory that guarantees things will never be the same. It suggests the recent opening, however uneven and unpredictable, is hard to reverse once people have gotten used to it, even if we don't fully know what it means yet.

It also suggests that the Kremlin's initial response to the protests, of pretending nothing was happening or blaming it on a Western conspiracy, hasn't worked. If the protesters sustain momentum, what will be the state's next revelation?

By James Kimer, Guest Commentator to the Khodorkovsky and Lebedev Center