20 Feb 15 | Awards, mobile, Russia
Journalism nominee Ekho Moskvy
Ekho Moskvy (Echo Moscow) is an independent Russian radio station. One of few media outlets that is critical of Vladimir Putin’s regime, it is revered by many as the last bastion of free speech in the country.
Ekho was set up in 1990 by radio veterans jaded with Soviet propaganda, and has taken an interrogative stance towards Russia’s government ever since. Its focus is on maintaining balance – it airs pro and anti-Kremlin voices in equal measure. Its editor-in-chief, Alexei Venediktov, has often done battle with Putin and his government. In 2012 Putin is said to have remarked that Ekho served foreign interests, and “pour[ed] diarrhoea over me day and night”.
During the 1990s, Russia’s news outlets developed into a world-respected critical force. But since Putin came into power in 1999, the media’s role as objective watchdog has diminished, and most news organisations are now resolutely pro-Kremlin.
In 2014, Russia attracted significant international condemnation over its involvement with the Ukraine civil war. In response, Putin began to cultivate an us-versus-them atmosphere in his country which saw his popular approval ratings grow to 80 per cent. Such an atmosphere has little room for dissidence, and anti-government voices have been silenced. The remaining politically independent news outlets are gradually being banned, crippled or brought in line with the Kremlin.
In the autumn 2014 edition of Index on Censorship magazine, contributor Helen Womack interviewed Sergei Buntman, the station’s co-founder. Womack wrote:
“There are various theories as to how Ekho gets away with it. Some say the radio and associated website, with a following of nearly one million in Moscow and three million in the regions, is tolerated because it allows the intelligentsia to let off steam, with little impact on the rest of the TV-watching country. Others say it allows the Kremlin to argue to the world that free speech is not dead in Russia. And one theory has it that Kremlin staff themselves depend on Echo to be properly informed because they can’t rely on their own propaganda.”
Buntman has another explanation, Womack wrote. “It’s no miracle and no wonder,” he told her. “You’d be surprised but a lot actually depends on us. Many journalists just give in too soon; they give up at the first hurdle.”
Last year was especially turbulent for Ekho Moskvy, which fought Putin’s media crackdown on many fronts. Its website was banned in March by Roskomnadzor, Russia’s media watchdog, after it published a blog post by leading opposition figure Alexei Navalny. In December, the Dagestan limb of the station was shut down by Roskomnadzor for no official reason.
The outlet was issued its own warning from Roskomnadzor in October. The watchdog cited two interviews aired by Ekho with journalists who provided first-hand accounts of fighting in eastern Ukraine. Roskomnadzor said the programme contained “information justifying war crimes,” and ordered the station to take down the interview transcripts from its website. Two cautions from Roskomnadzor in a year usually leads to an organisation’s closure.
Alexander Plyushchev, who conducted the banned interviews, was fired by Ekho’s owner Gazprom-Media in November, though Venediktov would later reject the dismissal and reinstate Plyushchev. Ostensibly, Plyushchev was sacked because of an insensitive tweet he had sent about the death of the son of Putin’s chief of staff. But Venediktov has suggested that Plyushchev’s controversial interviews the month before are behind the firing by Gazprom-Media owner Mikhail Lesin, Putin’s former press minister.
Despite challenges, the station’s news coverage was commended for staying true to its spirit of independence. Reports on the fighting between pro-Russian separatists and the Ukraine government were praised for their even-handedness, at a time when the majority of Russian media took a staunchly pro-Kremlin approach. As a result, Venediktov and his colleagues have appeared on several blacklists and have been labelled “enemies of Russia”.
This article was posted on 20 February 2015 at indexoncensorship.org
17 Nov 14 | Awards, News and features, Russia
Former naval officer and journalist Grigory Pasko risked everything to uncover environmental degradation committed by the Russian Navy. (Photo: robertamsterdam.com)
In the 1990s, Grigory Pasko, a former naval officer and journalist, reported that Russia’s navy was dumping nuclear waste in the Sea of Japan (East Sea). After a series of articles exposing the environmental crimes, Russian federal security service agents arrested him in 1997, on charges of espionage and abuse of his official power. He was tried several times and eventually sentenced in December 2001 to four years of imprisonment for espionage. He was finally released in January 2003.
Pasko is one of many journalists who has been targeted by the Russian government. He says that freedom of speech and media in the country today, is not that different from when he was named International Whistleblower of the Year at the Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Awards 13 years ago.
“It is just the same blatant rule by the security services, the same totalitarianism and lack of democratic institutions,” Pasko told Index in an email exchange.
Investigative journalists, in particular, are scarce in the current Russian environment, though the 1990 Law on the Mass Media [1991] states that journalists are allowed to carry on investigations. Article 29 of the Russian Constitution bans censorship altogether. However, under Vladimir Putin’s administration, Pasko said that press freedom and new, economically independent media have disappeared in favor of blatant propaganda.
Nominations for the 2015 Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Awards close on 20 Nov.
Who will you nominate? A journalist? A digital activist? A campaigning organisation? An artist? Or all four?
“Investigative journalism barely exists as a genre in Russia,” Pasko said. “Journalists in our country are killed and put in prison.”
In March 2011, Pasko and his colleagues, Galina Sidorova and Igor Korolkov, established the Foundation for Investigative Journalism as a way to help professional and citizen journalists alike, as well as to create open discussion and respect for the law. It maintains “zero tolerance towards corruption in all forms”.
“Our goal is to help those who pursue this form of journalism,” Pasko said. “So far we have held schools in investigative journalism for journalists and bloggers in many towns throughout Russia. Unfortunately, funds from our sponsors limit us to holding only three such schools a year.”
Pasko said the foundation aims to teach journalists “to be free. To obey the law. To help the democratic development of journalism in Russia. To know how to use the rights they have been given by the constitution and the law. Not to be afraid.”
In a bleak time for journalists and a free media, Pasko said there is always hope for a brighter, freer future.
“The Russian public will feel a need for the truth, just as it has a need to drink fresh not stagnant water,” Pasko said. “Then society will have a need for independent free journalists. Our task and our goal meanwhile are not to let them disappear and keep the genre of investigative journalism alive.”
This article was posted on 17 Nov 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
16 Oct 14 | News and features, Politics and Society, Russia
Russia’s All-Russian Memorial Society faces closure after the Justice Ministry filed a suit with the country’s Supreme Court late last month.
The Justice Ministry filed its suit on 26 September, though Russian news outlets only publicised the case last week.
Recently, Memorial, a long-time critic of the Kremlin, has tried to gain more information on political prisons and has sought justice for victims of political persecution.
Russian prosecutors first sued for Memorial to register as a “foreign agent” under a law that targets groups that receive grants from abroad. However, the court struck down this request.
The Supreme Court will hold another hearing on 13 November, according to Radio Free Europe.
Updated 31 October. An earlier version of this article incorrectly reported that the International Memorial Society, an Index on Censorship award winner, was the subject of the Kremlin action.
This article was posted on 16 October 2014 and updated on 31 October 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
12 Sep 14 | Belarus, Europe and Central Asia, News and features, Russia
(Photo: Okras/Wikimedia Commons)
Pity poor Dmitry Dayneko. The Belarusian teen recently completed the ice-bucket challenge, as millions like him have before, and posted the video of himself being drenched in cold water on social media. So far, so hilarious/tedious (depending on your view of the challenge), but, ultimately, quite harmless.
Except apparently it wasn’t. Dmitry and the friends who poured cold water over his head say they were summoned by local authorities and given a stern warning to behave themselves, apparently on the orders of the KGB in Minsk. The reason? Not the icy water itself, but Dmitry’s temerity in nominating Belarus’ president, Alexander Lukashenko, to do the challenge next.
Lukashenko, one feels, is not a man who does lighthearted fun. One cannot imagine him posting a selfie of himself holding a cocktail with an umbrella in it, hashtagged #YOLO. One cannot even begin to think what he’d wear on fancy dress day at Bestival. He’s probably weirdly competitive at bowling. He does not do Wii.
This does not make him an exceptional dictator. In the history of autocrats, I can’t think of a single one who was mainly in it for the laughs, unless it was fun of the crushing your enemies, seeing them driven before you, and hearing the lamentations of their women variety.
In journalist Ben Judah’s recent, acclaimed essay on the court of Vladimir Putin, he describes a lonesome, rigid emotionless figure, whose only apparent joy is ice hockey, which Judah says, Putin finds “graceful and manly and fun”. This is quite normal for a man of his age and geographical situation (Lukashenko has the same love for ice hockey). But there is a difference between “fun” and “funny”; playing sport is fun. It may even be more fun if your opponents are scared of you. What it is not, though, is funny.
Because dictatorships don’t — can’t — do funny. People can make great jokes about authoritarian regimes, certainly. Ben Lewis’s Hammer And Tickle details the jokes that got people through Soviet communism between 1917 and 1989, most of which revel in the jarring, depressing juxtaposition between Soviet promises of milk and honey and everyday reality (“What is the definition of capitalism?” “The exploitation of man by man” “And what is the definition of communism?” “The exact opposite”.)
But those within the regime, within The Party, never, ever find themselves funny, which is why the generals end up with such large hats.
A couple of years ago, a viral video spread of Belarusian soldiers putting on a display on the country’s Independence Day. It was synchronised, controlled, disciplined, and one the campest things I have ever seen — the Red Army choreographed by Busby Berkeley. But this would not for one moment have occurred to anyone in charge.
Funny doesn’t work for dictatorships because funny usually involves humanity, and vulnerability. This is the appeal of the viral ice bucket challenge video: not admiring the superhuman feat of standing still while freezing water cascades over you, but laughing at the apprehension beforehand, and the hopping and shouting and screaming in the moments afterwards.
In the hands of the likes of Putin or Lukashenko and their apparatchiks, the challenge would have to become a real feat of strength and endurance: somehow Vladimir Putin would invent colder iced water than everyone else did, and then have more of it poured on him than anyone thought possible. And it would be boring because he would not flinch. And then he would not nominate anyone else, because, well, where do you go after Vladimir Putin or Alexander Lukashenko? What man could equal such a task?
Andy Warhol once pointed out that in America, an odd consumer egalitarianism existed: “You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola,” the artist said, “and you know that the president drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking.”
The same is true of viral phenomena like the ice bucket challenge, or the Harlem Shake before it (that meme aggravated the Azerbaijaini authorities so much that people were arrested for allegedly taking part in it). There’s no way of making throwing water over someone’s head much more than it is. The Harlem Shake effectively died when people started trying to make slicker or (shudder) sexier versions.
In spite of near-ubiquitous celebrity participation, an ice bucket challenge is an ice bucket challenge is an ice bucket challenge.
In spite of its claim to oversee a “social state” that works “for the sake of the people”, the Soviet nostalgist regime of Lukashenko cannot bear such egalitarianism.
This article was posted on 11 Sept 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
