Shaun Walker - The murder that killed free media in Russia
A decade after the assassination of Anna
Politkovskaya, news organisations increasingly avoid topics that could anger
the Kremlin.
No other reporter has been assigned Anna
Politkovskaya’s desk in Novaya Gazeta’s newsroom. It remains as a memorial,
alongside her photograph and those of other murdered journalists at the
newspaper, and as a reminder of the danger of the work.
Ten years after
Politkovskaya was shot in the lobby of her apartment block in Moscow, Novaya
Gazeta continues to be one of the few outlets for hard-hitting independent
journalism in Russia.
Its reporters still work from the North Caucasus, one the most dangerous part
of the region.
In September, Elena
Kostyuchenko, a reporter with Novaya, travelled to Beslan in North Ossetia to
cover the 12th anniversary of the siege in which 334 people died, including 186
children.
Politkovskaya had
attempted to make the same journey back in 2004, but fainted on the plane on
her way there. Doctors believe she was poisoned to prevent her from reporting. Nevertheless, Novaya
worked tirelessly to investigate what happened at Beslan, and published a
number of reports suggesting explosives planted by Russian special forces to
try to end the siege had been responsible for many of the deaths.
This September, a
number of mothers of victims, who have long campaigned for an independent
investigation into the events of the siege, planned
a protest to mark the anniversary and wore T-shirts bearing the words:
“Putin is the butcher of Beslan”. Kostyuchenko and a
photographer who went to cover the event were followed, intimidated, doused in
green paint and beaten up during their time in the town. Kostyuchenko spent a
week in hospital with concussion after being hit in the head.
Despite being just 29,
Kostyuchenko has already worked for Novaya for 11 years. Her stories include
one of the most detailed accounts of the mechanisms by which Russians fought in
the contested
regions of east Ukraine.
She started writing
for the local newspaper in her home town of Yaroslavl as a teenager as a way to
make ends meet. “I thought what I was doing was journalism. Then one day when I
was about 15 I bought Novaya Gazeta from a kiosk while I was waiting for the
dentist, and started to read one of Politkovskaya’s stories about Chechnya. I
was in shock and my world was turned upside down. I understood I didn’t know
anything about our country. I decided that if I wanted to be a journalist I
would have to work for Novaya Gazeta.”
She went to Moscow to
study and applied to work at the paper; she has been there ever since. In her
first months at the newspaper, Kostyuchenko was too scared to approach
Politkovskaya, because she felt too young and inexperienced. “I was scared of
looking silly. I thought that I would first become a good journalist, do some
work I could be proud of, and then tell her how her writing changed my life.”
She never got the chance.
In the decade since
Politkovskaya’s death, the space for independent journalism in Russia has
narrowed further. Since 2006, the Committee to Protect Journalists has
recorded 20 journalists’ killings, while Freedom House
has counted 63 violent attacks on reporters. But for the most part,
the threat of closure keeps publications in line and encourages
self-censorship. A number of news
sources have been built up into formidable publications, only to be cut back
down to size.
The
editorial heads of Lenta.ru were replaced by its owner when the news
website was seen as taking its Kremlin criticism too far; the independent
television station TV Rain was
forced to broadcast from an apartment after being kicked out of its
studios; and most recently, there was a purge of the newspaper
RBC after a string of reports on the wealth of Vladimir Putin’s inner
circle and an investigation into one of the president’s daughters.
Angry RBC journalists
taped their conversation with the two new editors appointed to take over the
newspaper. The new bosses compared the work of the paper to driving: “If you
drive over the solid double line, they take away your licence... Unfortunately,
nobody knows where the solid double line is.” In a media landscape
where most people steer clear of the solid double lines, another rare
independent voice in the Russian media landscape is the New Times, a weekly
political magazine with sharp design and even sharper analysis, edited since
its founding nearly a decade ago by veteran journalist Yevgenia Albats.
The magazine is
permitted to survive because of its small circulation, but nevertheless has
frequent problems. Recently, its publisher refused to release an issue with a
cover illustration of sheep at the Kremlin’s gates. “We’d been using the
publishers since 2008 and we didn’t owe them a cent, and then suddenly they
just refused to publish us,” said Albats.
Many oligarchs are
subscribers and the presidential administration orders 13 to 15 copies, Albats
said, yet it is almost impossible to find companies willing to advertise in the
publication. It is kept afloat by five sponsors, all Russian citizens, most of
whom wish to remain anonymous because of the risk to their reputations.
The war in Ukraine,
which began in 2014, has left the media even more polarised. The popular state
television anchor Ernest Mackevičius told hundreds of journalism students at a
youth camp last summer that the definition of journalism had changed, insisting
that western media lied about Russia, so Russia had to respond in kind. “You
understand that for the past year and a half, we have worked as part of the
government, because information today has become a very serious and effective
weapon.”
In the decade since
Politkovskaya’s death Kostyuchenko has had opportunities to move elsewhere, but
says she values the rare journalistic freedom of Novaya Gazeta. In 2015 she
catalogued the involvement of Russian soldiers in the war in east Ukraine, an
involvement furiously denied by the Kremlin and a taboo subject for Russian
journalists. “I was offered $10,000
a month to work on television, and at Novaya Gazeta I earn the same as my
sister earns selling jeans in Yaroslavl. But we [at the newspaper] have no
censorship, and that’s important.”
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