None of these themes was even touched on by the Russian Service. All the programmes I mentioned were broadcast in a normal way and their viewers and listeners could make their own judgments. But listeners in Russia, already deprived of objective information by the government's control of the media, were denied by the BBC any chance to hear a non-Kremlin view on a story that concerned their country and that remains the most important episode in recent British-Russian relations.

The row over my programme lasted more than eight months, before my "written warning" was confirmed in autumn 2007. Since then, the BBC World Service has closed the Russian Features department, of which I was editor, and removed the line about the need to broadcast opinions "not heard on the state-controlled media" from its new strategy. A petition to the British Government, signed by more than 1,000 people, among them prominent historians of Russia, Russian-speaking academics, writers and translators, asking for an investigation into what the World Service was doing, was rejected. 

Recently, answering a listener who was concerned that the BBC Russian Service uses in its broadcasts too many journalists working for Russian media, the service's head wrote in her editorial blog on its website: "I am certainly not going to refuse a correspondent's services only because of the organisation he works for...We look for Russian-speaking journalists all over the world in order to deliver a quality news service to our audience, and very often, though not always, we prefer a Russian speaker, especially for radio, to a translation from the English." Nobody who has ever worked for radio would deny that the spoken word sounds better than one that is read, which naturally happens with translated texts. 

However, the issue of whose position the BBC is bringing to its audience remains. And the obvious fact that among Russian media correspondents, some of whom are very good, there can also be found those who work for the Kremlin and the FSB, does not seem to bother the Russian Service head. Nor does making the BBC in Russian scarcely distinguishable from Russia's own cowed media.

Which leaves just one question that is difficult to get away from: if in the current climate it makes sense to spend money on broadcasting to Russia — and I am sure it does— isn't it time to rethink what the Russian Service is doing?