ANNA NEMTSOVA - A knife in her throat could not silence journalist Tanya Felgenhauer
NB: A lesson in bravery for some of our journalists - who, honourable exceptions aside - have chosen to keep silent in the face of the threats and blandishments of the ruling dispensation. Shamelessness has plumbed new depths. The other day when I asked an economic journalist why, in his regular rantings about corruption, he always avoided mention of the Vyapam scam, or was silent about the failure of the government to investigate the Kalikho Pul suicide note, he loudly declared that he was a BJP supporter, and hence was not going to raise issues that might undermine its prestige. When I said this was a case of partisan deceitfulness, "everyone does it" was his justification. Tanya's example shows that everyone does not. There remains such a thing as journalistic ethics. DS
Journalist Tanya Felgenhauer was known for her lively morning show on Echo of Moscow. Then she was stabbed. Then, her scars still visible, she went to Putin’s big press conference.
“What really makes me sick is to see how people we considered to be professional journalists so recently have stopped being professional and joined the state propaganda.”
“What really makes me sick is to see how people we considered to be professional journalists so recently have stopped being professional and joined the state propaganda.”
MOSCOW—News that a
listener had broken into the independent radio station Echo of Moscow and
stabbed its deputy editor in chief, Tanya
Felgenhauer, sent tremors through the most remote corners of Russia last
October. Many wondered if the 32-year-old Felgenhauer’s voice, so familiar on
Echo’s incisive morning broadcasts, would be silenced forever. The vision of a
knife cutting into the throat of the slight young woman with a warm smile and
boyishly short red hair was painful even for the most conservative critics of
Russia’s leading liberal radio station.
But that was not the
end of the news about Tanya, and, no,
she was not silenced. A few weeks after she
was released from intensive care at a Moscow hospital, Felgenhauer pulled on an
elegant red dress, put on her glasses with red frames, and surprised Vladimir
Putin and millions of Russians watching the
annual presidential press conference with a brief but powerful speech
about the Kremlin’s selective application of justice. Felgenhauer, who loves
to host live talk shows, believes that real journalism is a serious calling,
and this was her unique chance to be heard all over the country on state
television. She was not going to miss it. At first, the
atmosphere at Putin’s press conference shocked Felgenhauer, who had never
attended the traditional event in the past: People accredited as journalists
clapped their hands and cheered in approval of the president’s words and
screamed in fury to drown out questions from independent journalists. Putin’s press
secretary, Dmitry Peskov, knew that Felgenhauer was present, and decided to
give her a chance to ask a question, but only at the end of the four-hour long
press conference.
“At that moment I was
so nervous, I think I was close to having a stroke, as all these people around
me, who’d been applauding for Putin for hours, started screaming to silence
me,” Felgenhauer told The Daily Beast. “I did not hear what Putin and Peskov
were telling me, all I knew was that now, when I had the microphone in my
hands, I should not let it go, I should speak, because the entire country could
hear me.” It was so noisy in the
audience, in fact, that Felgenhauer did not hear when Putin asked her how she
was feeling after the attack. Bright red scars across Tanya’s bare neck were
testimony to the severity of the stabbing.
Looking from under her
glasses straight into President Putin’s eyes, Felgenhauer described to millions
of Russian TV viewers the discrepancies in the way the courts handle public
figures. Independents like theater director Kirill Serebrennikov and the key
opposition leader, Aleksei Navalny, face one kind of justice, while people like
Putin’s close ally and “de facto deputy,” Igor Sechin, could ignore several
invitations to appear in court, as he did in the case of former Economy
Minister Alexei Ulyukayev, even though Sechin had orchestrated the
bribery “sting” that sent Ulyukayev to jail for eight years. “Any other man
[besides Sechin] would have been brought to court,” Felgenhauer told the
Russian president. Putin did not like her
little statement. In Moscow many believed that Sechin had framed former
Minister Ulyukayev, but most Russians were not aware of the allegations. And
Felgenhauer’s negative message about Putin’s close ally would never have passed
censorship on state TV.
Journalists sitting in
the first rows noticed that the president’s face turned red. “I disagree that
there are two parallel realities,” Putin responded. “The law has not been
broken.” But it was not the
answer that Felgenhauer cared about—the answer could be predicted—she was very
happy about the question she had managed to ask at the most-viewed press
conference in the country, putting forth as much information about the issue of
injustice as she could.
At the end of last
month, Felgenhauer was smiling a big happy smile at a coffee shop on Arbat
Avenue, a few blocks away from her newsroom at Echo of Moscow, remembering how
she framed her question for Putin after trying out different ideas on some
other talented independent journalists who are close friends. Felgenhauer said that
her mind has been occupied with concerns about the state of journalism in
Russia. She remembered, “One reporter from a state news agency noted that
Putin’s trip to Syria ‘was by the way very cool.’ I was amazed that one of the
key agencies could not stop itself from groveling before Putin.”
Then her big eyes grew
serious. “I have been thinking for a long time about the catastrophe that is
journalism in Russia—not about the authorities closing media, they will never
be able to beat the internet,” Tanya shook her head confidently. “What really
makes me sick is to see how people we considered to be professional journalists
so recently have stopped being professional and joined the state propaganda.” Felgenhauer, now 33,
came to work at Echo of Moscow when she was a student of sociology at Moscow
University, and has never left the radio. She covered terrorist attacks in the
Northern Caucasus, opposition protests, arrests. Prison was what really scared
her. “The most terrifying thing is that any of our loved ones can be locked in
prison, they can die there and we won’t be able to save them.”
One day in 2015
Felgenhauer came across a story about Aminat, a 16-year-old girl from Dagestan
who was dying of cancer in Moscow without any painkillers. That day Felgenhauer
decided to join a volunteer movement. She organized events at hospices, raised
funds for palliative treatment, collected presents for children. “We raised
hell to help Aminat, we made the difference: Today no child is tortured by
pain, Moscow provides painkillers now.”
“What really makes
me sick is to see how people we considered to be professional journalists so
recently have stopped being professional and joined the state propaganda.”
Russia has very few
independent media outlets surviving the pressure of state censorship in this
sensitive time for the Kremlin. Every week Felgenhauer voices her personal
opinion on Echo of Moscow, without any self-censorship, expressing views that
are not always popular even among her friends in the opposition. Last month
Felgenhauer said that Ksenia Sobchak—a presidential candidate also known as
Russia’s Paris Hilton—should step down and withdraw her candidacy from the
election process, which “Sobchak treats as her own ongoing show that has
nothing to do with democracy; she is using people like Navalny, as decorations
for that show.”
At a time when
Russia’s most-watched political TV shows are full of poisonous propaganda, a
sincere reporter like Felgenhauer sticks in the state’s craw, and Tanya’s
friends did not believe that the Kremlin’s officials felt sincerely bad about
the violent stabbing attack. “See, in Russia even a
reporter like Tanya, who does not go to cover the war but gives a real picture
of politics on a live show, is under a deadly attack,” says Pavel Kanygin, an
investigative journalist at Novaya Gazeta. Kanygin told The Daily
Beast he was not convinced that Felgenhauer’s attacker, 48-year-old Boris
Gritz, was crazy, as state investigators claimed. “Too many details of that
crime do not add up: For example, everything that the man had written about
Tanya in his internet blog had been edited professionally on the eve of the
attack.”
Not long before Gritz
broke through security at Echo of Moscow’s building and stabbed Tanya, Russian
federal TV channels accused Felgenhauer and her colleagues from Echo of Moscow
of being “agents of the U.S. State Department.” Kanygin is convinced
that independent journalists like Tanya will never get any protection from the
state. “One of the heads of the Kremlin would tell you that they respect and
value people like Tanya, the other will be furious that independent journalists
do not defend the Kremlin’s line. Tanya’s attacker is a symbol of the stubbed
out freedom of speech in Russia.”
As a little girl Tanya
saw her father, well-known military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer, being
interviewed by TV crews filming at her home and she learned to respect serious
journalism. As a teenager she went through a phase where she admired American
shock jock Howard Stern. Today, Tanya dreams of turning herself into a Russian
version of John Oliver or Stephen Colbert. “I love live shows that nail down
the truth,” she says.
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