If a stock market falls, but no one hears about it, did it really happen? That seems to be part of the Kremlin's strategy for addressing Russia's jittery economy. The Moscow Times' Anna Smolchenko reports that state television channels have been instructed to downplay the severity of the financial meltdown:

The main channels have either downgraded or ignored altogether Russia's financial turmoil since it began in mid-September, according to media monitoring companies and research by The Moscow Times. On Monday, for instance, none mentioned the meltdown in Russia or any possible repercussions from the crisis. Only the smaller Ren-TV and Zvezda channels mentioned the stock plunge, according to Medialogia, a private company that tracks the media. [...]

The Kremlin recently instructed both state and privately owned television channels to avoid using words like "financial crisis" or "collapse" in describing the turmoil in Russia, said Vladimir Varfolomeyev, first deputy editor at Ekho Moskvy radio.

"Specifically, the blacklist includes the words 'collapse' and 'crisis.' It recommends that 'fall' be replaced with the less extreme 'decrease,'" Varfolomeyev said in comments posted on his LiveJournal blog late last week.

The media blackout is similar to those employed during the Beslan school massacre of 2004 and the sinking of the Kursk submarine in 2000. When TV channels have mentioned the crisis, it has been in the context of American and European financial woes, such as President Dmitry Medvedev's speech yesterday which blamed the crisis on the U.S. "unipolar economic model."

With surprising candor, Kremlin PR reps say they're just trying to prevent public panic and point out that anyone who actually wants to hear about the crisis can read about it online or in more upscale newspapers. But when the fallout from Wall Street inevitably hits Russian main street, a lot of folks are going to be wondering what hit them.