There is a monument outside Moscow's Central House of Journalists depicting a Soviet journalists wearing a fine military uniform, high boots and a cape.
He has a camera slung from his neck and holds a notebook with pencil poised. It is dedicated to all the journalists who covered the Great Patriotic War. The journalist looks confidently ahead as snow falls on his notebook and military cap. His role is to bring honour and glory to the Motherland and the Communist party.
The successors of that anonymous journalist have no such certainties. Those scribes from all over the former Soviet Union who gathered last week to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the foundation of the Russian Union of Journalists at the same place are not even certain of a wage. Even the restaurant of the Central House of Journalists has been commercialised and let out, and few members of the union could probably afford to eat there today.
The 200 delegates came from across Russia, central Asia, the Ukraine and Belarus as well as the Baltic countries. Their number included the young associations, the bodies that have sprung up to represent those working in the new and small independent media. The leadership of the old unions are survivors. Some were members of the Communist Party, the party that is now calling for tighter control of the media. Many would be nostalgic for the time when they were certain of their role and of a good income at the end of the week. Now they call for press freedom and freedom of expression and are linked to international organisations that were on the other side during the Cold War.
But while the leadership was able to celebrate that the union was still in place (admittedly with a membership at about 56,000, half of that during the period of the Soviet Union), the celebration was overshadowed by the reality of being a journalist in what was the Soviet Union.
Seven years after its dissolution there is still little press freedom or freedom of expression. From Kazakhstan to Kirgizstan and Tadjikistan to Belarus and Ukraine, the story is of harassment using tax laws, laws that forbid insulting high officials and the president and compulsory registration of media. One evening there was ceremony where the president of the union, Vsevolod Bogdanov, presented commemorative medals to the children of journalists who had died while reporting.
Koutikkadam Seidakhmet, a journalist with Argumenti I Facti, in Kazakhstan, told the conference that there had been a degree of press freedom in 1992, but it had been eroded. Pressure had been heaped on democratic journalists and petrol bombs had been thrown into newspaper offices. A black list of journalists disliked by the authorities had been prepared. The government had made it so expensive to start up new media that the only media mogul in Kazakhstan was the president and his family.
In 1992, when independence came to many of the former Soviet Republics, the new constitutions all included guarantees of press freedom and freedom of expression. In the intervening years that has been eroded. The president of the Belarus Association of Journalists, Zhanna Litvina, spoke of how the official media was used for propaganda purposes, of new regulations forbidding officials from speaking to the independent press, giving information or comment and of laws that closed newspapers deemed to have insulted the honour and dignity of President Lukashenka.
Igor Zaseda of the Ukrainian Union of Journalists said that journalists had been killed. In Russia, meanwhile, regional newspapers have had to withdraw Moscow correspondents because of the costs. Journalists are also increasingly willing to write complimentary pieces about local politicians or business interests in return for a fee.
There has, however, been one unexpected benefit from the economic crisis. Aleksey Simonov of the Glastnost Defence Foundation, the media legal defence foundation, says that the economic crisis forced the media to less obsessed with itself. The media has begun to understand that survival was not just survival of the media, but total survival and that outside the power structures there is a society. Newspapers have started writing stories on how to survive and have become more relevant.
The total number of newspapers has fallen, but actual newspaper sales has increased. For the first time, since the end of the Soviet Union, people are buying newspapers because they are useful and important to their lives.
The "least bad situation" is in Russia, Kirgizstan and Moldova, says Mr Simonov. It is getting worse in Ukraine. Ukraine is nearing the same situation as Belarus. Turkmnistan is the very worse case. "There is no problem of freedom of speech in Turkmenistan because there is no freedom of speech." Kazakhstan is now nearing the situation of Belarus. In Armenia there is a free press, of sorts, but there are no laws. In Azerbaijan, like Belarus there is little press freedom. As Mr Simonov finishes his assessment of the health of freedom of expression in the Russian Republics and CIS states, a few elderly journalists, raise their vodkas and start to sing the old national anthem of the Soviet Union. Some younger people look embarrassed. "It is just old men being nostalgic," says one.