03 Mar 22 | News and features
In the very first edition of Index on Censorship, published 50 years ago almost to the day, we raised the case of Mykhaylo Osadchy, a Ukrainian journalist and poet, who had been arrested for “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda”. In a secret trial in his hometown of Lviv in September 1972 he was sentenced to seven years in prison and five years of exile.
An extract from The Mote, Osadchy’s lightly fictionalised memoir of a dissident writer, was published in the Autumn 1972 edition of Index. It provides a unique picture of the life of an intellectual in Ukraine under Soviet rule. “I had committed every vile deed that mankind throughout his existence could ever commit,” he writes. “I had never had the slightest suspicion of what a hostile element I was, or how hostile my thoughts had been.”
Cat and Mouse in the Ukraine by Victor Swoboda from 1973 is a lengthy but fascinating study of contemporary writers struggling, and often failing, to stay on the right side of the censor. Swoboda highlights the significance of the unpublished poem To the Kurdish Brother by Vasyl Symonenko, a writer celebrated by the Soviets as a hero of Communism but taken up by dissidents after the posthumous samizdat publication of his critical diaries. The poem tells “the Kurd” to fight chauvinists who “have come to rob you of your name and language”. It continues: “our fiercest enemy, chauvinism, fattens on the blood of harassed peoples”. It is not hard to see who the “Kurd” in the poem was intended to represent. In 1968 Mykola Kots, an agricultural college lecturer, was arrested for circulating 70 copies of the poem in which “the Kurd” had been replaced with “the Ukrainian”. He received the same sentence as Osaschy.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Index continued to support writers from Ukraine. As a result, we were the first to publish the work of Ukraine’s most celebrated contemporary writer, Andrei Kurkov, in English. The November 1993 issue contained an excerpt from The Cosmopolitan Anthem, a short story denounced at the 1991 All-Union Writers Conference in Yalta as “anti-Russian”. The story is, if anything, an attack on unthinking nationalism. Its narrator, an American with mixed Polish-Palestinian heritage, finds himself fighting on both sides of the Vietnam War and Afghanistan. The title of the story refers to the soldier’s utopian dreams of creating a unifying anthem to appeal to people’s better nature.
In 1999 we published extracts from Ukraine’s Forbidden Histories, which combined oral histories collected by the British Library with contemporary photographs by Tim Smith. It remains a striking document of the imprint Ukraine’s past atrocities left on the country. The authors pay tribute to the work of the organisation Memorial (now banned by Putin) in documenting the crimes of the Stalin era. The extracts include testimonies of the Babi Yar massacre of the city’s Jewish population, which has only been officially recognised in 1991. A monument to Babi Yar was reported to have been bombed during the recent invasion.
In 2001, Vera Rich, who devoted her life to translating Ukrainian and Belarusian literature, wrote Who is Ukraine? on the tenth anniversary of the country’s independence. Despite her obvious passion for the country (she translated the national poet Taras Shevchenko) it provides a clear-eyed look at the complicated nature of Ukrainian identity. “For a country to survive… a sense of national identity is required. But the question of what that identity should be has by no means been resolved,” she writes.
Finally, no collection of archive articles from Index on Ukraine would be complete without something from Andrei Aliaksandrau, who worked for Index for several years before returning to his native Belarus. He has now been in prison for over a year after being arrested by the Lukashenka regime. His piece, Brave New War from December 2014, reports on the information war being waged in Ukraine. It is a brilliant piece of reporting. “The principles of an information war remain unchanged: you need to de-humanise the enemy. You inspire yourself, your troops and your supporters with a general appeal which says: ‘We are fighting for the right cause – that is why we have the right to kill someone who is evil.’ What has changed is the scale of propaganda and the number of different platforms used to distribute it. In a time of social networks and with the whole world online, there is no need to throw leaflets over enemy lines, instead you hire 1,000 internet trolls.”
Aliaksandrau has been silenced, for now. But we will continue to report on Ukraine in tribute to him and the other courageous dissidents who have inspired the work of Index over the past five decades.
Research by Guilherme Osinski and Sophia Rigby
02 Mar 22 | News and features, Russia, Ukraine
John Sweeney reporting from Ukraine for Index
Rost used to be a hot air balloon pilot before the war but now he’s a grim figure in dark hoodie, carrying a rifle, his face knotted with pressure because he is guarding Kyiv’s TV tower from Russian attack. But there is only so much that the Ukrainians can do and the previous night, Tuesday 2 March, at 1800 hours four Russian missiles punched through, hitting the tower’s control building by its base and knocking Ukrainian TV off the airwaves. The moment curfew lifted at 0800 hours Wednesday morning, I thumbed a lift to the TV tower and was the first reporter inside the complex. The more Rost showed me, the darker it got.
The tower itself disappeared into the early morning fog, not obviously touched but the control building near-by had taken a direct hit. Windows were smashed to smithereens, frames hanging loose, rubble crunching underfoot. Rost explained what had happened in Russian, a language I studied at school and then forgot. I filmed what he said and put it up on Twitter and someone translated: “The rockets flew in….they were laser-guided, they have good equipment, they came towards the building, four rockets came this way, naturally the people died here because of the explosions and I’m showing the gentleman from Britain, losses are serious, the building is ruined.”
He took me round the front of the control building and he stooped to give me a present, an evil butterfly wing of shrapnel, fired from Russia without love. On the ground was a puddle of blood one metre wide, still brightly red in the cold, snow still on the ground. A worker had been killed in the blast, his corpse removed but no-one had yet got around to washing away the blood.
That was the easy bit. We went out of a guardhouse and across a wide street, stepping over electricity cables that had fallen onto the tarmac, to the far side where there was a row of shops, some burnt out, still smoking from the attack the previous evening. On the ground was the corpse of an elderly man and, closer to the shops, the bodies of a mother and child. Ambulance workers or perhaps people from the morgue had come and were placing blankets over the dead before putting them in a dark green van for their last long journey through Kyiv.
The Russian state is saying that it is not killing civilians. That is a lie. I saw evidence of that with my own eyes this morning.
Censorship has many forms but knocking a TV station off air by firing missiles at the transmitting tower is perhaps as subtle as Vladimir Putin gets these days. Less brutal but perhaps more effective in shoring up his grip in power is switching off the last two independent media stations in Moscow, Ekho Moskvy and TV Rain. The last brave reporters with some licence to hit the airwaves have been silenced.
Moscow is fast becoming the new Pyongyang, one of the airports still open to Russian air traffic. Putin’s war is a thing of evil but it’s possible to see that he had made a miscalculation, that he has hopelessly misread the courage of ordinary, extraordinary Ukrainians from their comic turned President down to the florists now making Molotov cocktails, that the West – for once – has got its act together, that the old man in the White House has far more fight in him than the Kremlin could possibly have imagined.
So switching off sources of information, rough and ready though they may be, will become crucial as things get darker for Putin’s regime. Here in Kyiv, that is not an academic question. If the Russians do arrive here in force, then any Ukrainian journalist with a strong voice will be in trouble. Foreign journalists with big media houses at their back – CNN, ABC, Reuters – will have some protection. As a freelance, for the moment, I have my orange beanie hat. Still, telling truth to the Kremlin is a necessity in the twenty first century and it’s only just become fashionable.
The truth is that Vladimir Putin’s military machine is killing civilians in a country at peace until he invaded it. And however much the censor’s pen and switch and missiles command silence, the truth must be told.
01 Mar 22 | News and features, Russia, Statements, Ukraine
The undersigned journalists’ and civil society organisations, which are partner organisations of the Council of Europe’s Platform to Promote the Protection of Journalism and Safety of Journalists, utterly condemn the threats to the lives and safety of journalists resulting from the Russian Federation’s illegal invasion of Ukraine and call for the protection of Ukrainian and international reporters covering the war.
The free flow of independent and accurate news and information is essential in conflict situations. Our organisations call for urgent and practical international assistance and support for the brave journalists in Ukraine seeking to provide the Ukrainian people and the global public with a timely and realistic picture of developments, as well as foreign journalists risking their lives for reporting in and about Ukraine. Their work helps keep people safe and ensures that the international community can understand the full consequences of this invasion and its appalling impact on human lives.
The immediate physical safety of journalists on the ground – Ukrainian and foreign – is our primary concern amid the incessant escalation of hostilities. We emphasise that journalists are considered civilians under international humanitarian law and are not legitimate targets. The U.N. Security Council in 2015 adopted – by unanimous vote – Resolution 2222 affirming that states must respect and protect journalists as civilians. Resolution 2222 also confirms that media equipment and installations constitute civilian objects and shall not be the object of attack or reprisals.
The same resolution requires states to respect the professional independence and rights of journalists. The Council of Europe Platform partners condemn all efforts to restrict independent coverage of the Russian invasion and the ensuing hostilities, in particular within the Russian Federation itself. Journalists in Russia covering anti-war demonstrations have faced harassment and arbitrary detention. Russia’s media regulator continues to threaten independent media, block their websites, and force the removal of articles for deviating from the official state line on the war. This is a completely unacceptable violation of the Russian public’s right to independent information. We also condemn the continued and widespread crackdown on independent media in Belarus, where 32 journalists and media actors remain behind bars, according to the Belarusian Association of Journalists.
The Council of Europe Platform, the first ever Europe-wide monitoring and reporting mechanism aimed at countering all forms of attacks on journalists’ physical safety and protections in law, has grown into an important means of holding European states to account for serious violations. This role has now become all the more necessary, and we are committed to documenting all attacks on journalists and other efforts to restrict journalists’ ability to report on the war. The Platform partners have regularly expressed concern that the Russian Federation has declined to reply to alerts or engage with the work of the Platform.
This unprecedented attack requires a united effort to protect the rights and safety of journalists working in Ukraine. Urgent humanitarian assistance for journalists working in Ukraine is needed to ensure that they can continue doing their job safely and securely. This includes financial support to independent media outlets as well as appropriate safety equipment and other forms of practical support. We call on Council of Europe member states to make available emergency financial support that can be distributed to journalists, journalists’ organisations and media outlets in Ukraine. At the same time, we ask all concerned governments as well as international NGOs to do everything they can to support journalists who will be forced to flee the country and set up reporting bases abroad.
Signatories:
Index on Censorship
ARTICLE 19
Association of European Journalists
Committee to Protect Journalists
European Centre for Press and Media Freedom (ECPMF)
Free Press Unlimited
European Federation of Journalists (EFJ)
International Federation of Journalists (IFJ)
International Press Institute (IPI)
Justice for Journalists Foundation
PEN International
Reporters without Borders (RSF)
Rory Peck Trust (RPT)
25 Feb 22 | Belarus, Opinion, Russia, Ruth's blog, Ukraine
Graffiti of Vladimir Putin. Photo: Don Fontijn/Unsplash
I have struggled to write this blog. There don’t seem to the right words for something so serious, so terrifying but so utterly predictable.
Putin has invaded Ukraine – again.
As I write there are Russian bombs falling across Ukraine. Innocent people are dying, families are sheltering from bombing raids in the underground and people are fleeing.
This act of war, from a tyrant, cannot be explained or excused. This is an effort to destabilise Europe. To re-build a Russian Empire. To secure Putin’s legacy. It is not about NATO expansionism or a security threat from Ukraine. This is all Putin. This is not about the Russian or Ukrainian people.
Putin has brought war and death to mainland Europe and the world is more unstable than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis. That is our shared reality in 2022. This is the consequence of allowing a dictator to operate unchecked as readers of our work at Index know only too well.
Index does not exist to pontificate about international relations and defence policy – as frustrated as we may be. Our role, always, is to provide a space and a voice for dissidents and those being persecuted. But, and it’s a big but, we were founded in the midst of the Cold War half a century ago – to promote and protect the liberal democratic value of free expression. To work behind the Iron Curtain to provide a platform for the work and personal reflections of dissidents. We did this because we believe in democracy. That the foundations of free expression are protected at the ballot box. That the ultimate expression of freedom is the right to self-determination and to peace in a free society.
The invasion of Ukraine brings to the fore the reasons why Index exists. Even in the early hours and days of this aggression we have seen misinformation used as a propaganda tool. Journalists in Russia have been instructed to only use official comment on events in Ukraine. Protesters against the war in Moscow are being arrested in the dozens. And DDoS attacks on Ukrainian cyber infrastructure is becoming the norm. Putin is seeking to control every form of communication – that is not free speech.
In the months and years ahead Index will continue to provide a platform for dissidents. We will tell the stories of those writers, artists and academics who are being silenced by Putin’s regime. We will do what we do best – be a voice for the persecuted.
But as scared as I am of events in Eastern Europe – I worry about censorship through noise (as so ably articulated by Umberto Eco) that we are about to live through. Every repressive government could move against their citizens in the coming months with little global condemnation as our world leaders seek to find peace and secure the world as we know it. As we have for over half a century Index will be a home for those dissidents too – wherever they live – highlighting their stories and publishing their work.
The months ahead are going to be awful for too many people. Tyrants will believe they have a free hand to move against their citizens. Europe faces more war and the Chinese Communist Party may well seek to manipulate events to suit themselves.
In this unstable world the work of Index has never been more vital and we will do everything we can to support those who need us most.
