SOCIETY
‘We Need to Try to Maintain Contact with People in Russia as Much as Possible’
July 17, 2024
Sergey Smirnov
Journalist, Editor-in-chief of Mediazona
- Anna Klishina
The Russia Program at George Washington University
- Maria Popova
The Russia Program at George Washington University
Editor-in-Chief of Mediazona, a publication that writes about repression, talks about the radical changes in the Putin regime and what he sees as the purpose of his work.
How has independent Russian journalism in general and Mediazona in particular changed since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in the spring of 2022?
Many things have changed. Independent media as an institution no longer exists within Russia. There may be individual journalists who are extremely cautious, but they are very rare.
There is a big difference between whether you work and stay inside the country, or whether you work inside the country but live outside it. In the second case, you have to restructure your work, since you can’t go and see everything with your own eyes. Instead, you need to find people within the country and build specific working relationships with them.
At the same time, it is now impossible to ensure people’s safety within Russia. We, journalists and editors, have virtually no influence on our own work within the country and take very serious risks.
Many independent media sources are now recognized as undesirable organizations, and the criminal code on cooperation with undesirable organizations carries a sentence of up to four years. This particular article hasn’t really been enforced yet, but it could come into force at any time. And while in order for the criminal article on “fake news” to apply, a person must say or write something, all a person needs to be accused of collaborating with an undesirable organization is to be in the chat room of an undesirable organization.
Russian journalists are disconnected from the environment they cover. How does this affect their work?
We will be able to assess how it has affected our work 50 years from now. There are two perspectives. The first is that it doesn’t affect our work at all, and the second is that it has a catastrophic effect, and that we haven’t been able to determine what is truly going on in Russia for a long time. Neither is true.
I am absolutely convinced that it is possible to continue work from abroad. There are obstacles, but in most cases, they can be overcome. Will staying in Russia allow a journalist to see more than feedback from subscribers on social networks?
But the longer we are cut off from the country, the more difficult it really becomes to understand what is really happening. At first the problem is in the details, then they lose touch with what topics are important for people in Russia and what is important for those who left. That being said, I am not sure that opposition-minded people in Russia will be able to maintain an understanding of what is happening within the country.
This isolation will increase, but thanks to the internet and the ability to maintain contacts, this will happen more slowly than it was during earlier waves of emigration. Therefore, a very important task for us is to continue to communicate with people in Russia, and not to isolate ourselves in emigrant conversations.
How would you describe Mediazona’s main mission at this time?
In reality, our mission hasn’t changed much. I have the feeling that I am in a more comfortable position than most Russian journalists and representatives of civil society, because we have been writing about repression and growing pressure for a long time, and therefore were prepared.
Many things have changed. Independent media as an institution no longer exists within Russia. There may be individual journalists who are extremely cautious, but they are very rare.
There is a big difference between whether you work and stay inside the country, or whether you work inside the country but live outside it. In the second case, you have to restructure your work, since you can’t go and see everything with your own eyes. Instead, you need to find people within the country and build specific working relationships with them.
At the same time, it is now impossible to ensure people’s safety within Russia. We, journalists and editors, have virtually no influence on our own work within the country and take very serious risks.
Many independent media sources are now recognized as undesirable organizations, and the criminal code on cooperation with undesirable organizations carries a sentence of up to four years. This particular article hasn’t really been enforced yet, but it could come into force at any time. And while in order for the criminal article on “fake news” to apply, a person must say or write something, all a person needs to be accused of collaborating with an undesirable organization is to be in the chat room of an undesirable organization.
Russian journalists are disconnected from the environment they cover. How does this affect their work?
We will be able to assess how it has affected our work 50 years from now. There are two perspectives. The first is that it doesn’t affect our work at all, and the second is that it has a catastrophic effect, and that we haven’t been able to determine what is truly going on in Russia for a long time. Neither is true.
I am absolutely convinced that it is possible to continue work from abroad. There are obstacles, but in most cases, they can be overcome. Will staying in Russia allow a journalist to see more than feedback from subscribers on social networks?
But the longer we are cut off from the country, the more difficult it really becomes to understand what is really happening. At first the problem is in the details, then they lose touch with what topics are important for people in Russia and what is important for those who left. That being said, I am not sure that opposition-minded people in Russia will be able to maintain an understanding of what is happening within the country.
This isolation will increase, but thanks to the internet and the ability to maintain contacts, this will happen more slowly than it was during earlier waves of emigration. Therefore, a very important task for us is to continue to communicate with people in Russia, and not to isolate ourselves in emigrant conversations.
How would you describe Mediazona’s main mission at this time?
In reality, our mission hasn’t changed much. I have the feeling that I am in a more comfortable position than most Russian journalists and representatives of civil society, because we have been writing about repression and growing pressure for a long time, and therefore were prepared.
“This whole horrific nightmare has been obvious to us since 2014. It seemed to us then that we were shouting into the void.”
In November 2023, Sasha Skochilenko was sentenced to seven years in prison under Russia's "fake news" law for replacing grocery store price tags with anti-war messages containing information about civilian deaths during Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
We wrote “look, the regime is much worse than we ever imagined, we have no politics in our country, we only have repression and death; there is nothing else left!”
I think that we must make a record of real life, so that 40, 70, 100 years from now, it will be easier to see how we lived, what happened, how repression occurred. And we try to record this in as much detail as possible. Our second task is to make information relevant to a wider readership that may otherwise consider these events unpleasant or uninteresting.
We conducted the online trial of Sasha Skochilenko, the most striking case that falls under the article about fake news. Sasha’s team, and she herself chose the tactics of maximum resistance in court, and we recorded how this repression works, who these people are, how they draw up documents, where the orders come from, how the prosecutor supports the prosecution, how the judge behaves, what Skochilenko did when she didn’t cooperate in the courtroom, when they don’t feed her or take her to the bathroom. These are important topics that concern not only me, but everyone else. This is the story of how the authorities are turning Russia into a fascist state before our eyes.
Our mission is to show how the regime works using specific examples from courts, without adding anything of our own. Therefore, while we can, we will broadcast online from courtrooms in Russia and continue to talk about what is really happening within the country.
Are the judicial and penitentiary systems changing as the number of cases increases?
Let me respond using two criminal code articles as an example. The first is the article about treason. According to statistics, more than 100 treason cases were opened in Russia last year—exponentially more than in previous years.
Previously, treason cases were sporadic, one or two per month. Now the interpretation of the law has changed. Polina Yevtushenko was imprisoned under the article on treason and five more criminal code articles for running an Instagram account in Ukrainian, posting photographs with Ukrainian symbols, and providing links to the primarily virtual Freedom of Russia Legion. She faces 20 years in prison for treason—the maximum possible sentence for a woman.
Another new article concerns the unauthorized abandonment of a military unit. Since 2022, we have recorded 10,000 such criminal cases in judicial statistics (at the end of 2023, the number was just over 5,000 - RP). These are political criminal articles, but they are not the classic repressive articles that were used before.
It may seem that we are talking about mass repression, but this is not the case. In Belarus, where there are only 9 million inhabitants, there are several times more political prisoners. There are massive repressions there, but our country is still on the brink.
The authorities prefer a different strategy: they arrest several people under the criminal code and inflate it into a high-profile political case in order to intimidate others. The goal is not only to punish specific people, but also to show people like Sasha Skochilenko that their activities must cease.
But at any moment, the government could move to mass repression. The lists are ready, and there are a sufficient number of security officials who can begin to implement them. In March of this year, in the case of Pyotr Verzilov, the Federal Security Service conducted a search of at least 30 addresses of contemporary artists. What did they have to do with Pyotr Verzilov? Only that they were also contemporary artists. Why does the FSS need this information? Because there were presidential elections, and it was necessary to give a signal in order to prevent politicized demonstrations during the election period.
There’s the impression that the regime used to have clearer boundaries, but now these lines have become more blurred. Are there rules to the game now?
There are rules to the game, but they are not consistent. Today, certain rules exist, tomorrow there will be others. And this is a problem for those who don’t know that the rules have already changed. The case against Evan Gershkovich and his arrest are an example of how the rules of the game have changed in relation to Western journalists who lived and worked in Russia and thought that they had all their ducks in a row. But Putin took this and changed the rules. And you may suddenly find that you’re the first person to fall under the new law.
We try to monitor the actions of the authorities not because we hope to ensure people’s safety, but because when we write about this, we are able to clarify who, how, and for what people will be imprisoned next.
How do these rules of the game relate to the so-called “Putin’s concepts” by which the country lives?
Putin's concepts are quite simple. We are always trying to find some deep logic in them, but the simple concepts developed in the KGB continue to work. “The honor of the uniform” and “the officer’s word” overlapped with gangster concepts of the 90s, such as “one must be held accountable for one’s words” or “we gave you one warning, we won’t do it again.” A person with such criminal-cop logic believes that any laws or words are tantamount to introducing new rules of the game. There is no difference between law and words.
Sometimes you can act according to law, and sometimes “according to words.” Does the law work in Russia? It does, but when it’s not needed, it ceases to work, because there is the law, and then there is the authorities’ concepts.
One classic example is the head of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, Alexander Bastrykin. They show him some videos, and on the basis of this evidence, without further investigation, he demands that a criminal case be opened.
I think the investigators understand perfectly well that no crime has been committed, but that the boss’ order is above the law. For example, recently a veteran of the special military operation was removed from a Pobeda plane for smoking in the toilet. Cases were filed against the flight attendants. And we must remember that Bastrykin was the head of Vladimir Putin’s group.
Do you think the West understands who Putin is?
The problem with Western society is that it lives a little in the past. European politicians remember the Putin who sat at the same table with them, who talked and negotiated. Many of them think that since it was possible to reach an agreement then, it is possible now.
But we are always lagging behind this regime; we do not have time to adapt to it and understand it, and this gives the regime a great advantage.
I think that we must make a record of real life, so that 40, 70, 100 years from now, it will be easier to see how we lived, what happened, how repression occurred. And we try to record this in as much detail as possible. Our second task is to make information relevant to a wider readership that may otherwise consider these events unpleasant or uninteresting.
We conducted the online trial of Sasha Skochilenko, the most striking case that falls under the article about fake news. Sasha’s team, and she herself chose the tactics of maximum resistance in court, and we recorded how this repression works, who these people are, how they draw up documents, where the orders come from, how the prosecutor supports the prosecution, how the judge behaves, what Skochilenko did when she didn’t cooperate in the courtroom, when they don’t feed her or take her to the bathroom. These are important topics that concern not only me, but everyone else. This is the story of how the authorities are turning Russia into a fascist state before our eyes.
Our mission is to show how the regime works using specific examples from courts, without adding anything of our own. Therefore, while we can, we will broadcast online from courtrooms in Russia and continue to talk about what is really happening within the country.
Are the judicial and penitentiary systems changing as the number of cases increases?
Let me respond using two criminal code articles as an example. The first is the article about treason. According to statistics, more than 100 treason cases were opened in Russia last year—exponentially more than in previous years.
Previously, treason cases were sporadic, one or two per month. Now the interpretation of the law has changed. Polina Yevtushenko was imprisoned under the article on treason and five more criminal code articles for running an Instagram account in Ukrainian, posting photographs with Ukrainian symbols, and providing links to the primarily virtual Freedom of Russia Legion. She faces 20 years in prison for treason—the maximum possible sentence for a woman.
Another new article concerns the unauthorized abandonment of a military unit. Since 2022, we have recorded 10,000 such criminal cases in judicial statistics (at the end of 2023, the number was just over 5,000 - RP). These are political criminal articles, but they are not the classic repressive articles that were used before.
It may seem that we are talking about mass repression, but this is not the case. In Belarus, where there are only 9 million inhabitants, there are several times more political prisoners. There are massive repressions there, but our country is still on the brink.
The authorities prefer a different strategy: they arrest several people under the criminal code and inflate it into a high-profile political case in order to intimidate others. The goal is not only to punish specific people, but also to show people like Sasha Skochilenko that their activities must cease.
But at any moment, the government could move to mass repression. The lists are ready, and there are a sufficient number of security officials who can begin to implement them. In March of this year, in the case of Pyotr Verzilov, the Federal Security Service conducted a search of at least 30 addresses of contemporary artists. What did they have to do with Pyotr Verzilov? Only that they were also contemporary artists. Why does the FSS need this information? Because there were presidential elections, and it was necessary to give a signal in order to prevent politicized demonstrations during the election period.
There’s the impression that the regime used to have clearer boundaries, but now these lines have become more blurred. Are there rules to the game now?
There are rules to the game, but they are not consistent. Today, certain rules exist, tomorrow there will be others. And this is a problem for those who don’t know that the rules have already changed. The case against Evan Gershkovich and his arrest are an example of how the rules of the game have changed in relation to Western journalists who lived and worked in Russia and thought that they had all their ducks in a row. But Putin took this and changed the rules. And you may suddenly find that you’re the first person to fall under the new law.
We try to monitor the actions of the authorities not because we hope to ensure people’s safety, but because when we write about this, we are able to clarify who, how, and for what people will be imprisoned next.
How do these rules of the game relate to the so-called “Putin’s concepts” by which the country lives?
Putin's concepts are quite simple. We are always trying to find some deep logic in them, but the simple concepts developed in the KGB continue to work. “The honor of the uniform” and “the officer’s word” overlapped with gangster concepts of the 90s, such as “one must be held accountable for one’s words” or “we gave you one warning, we won’t do it again.” A person with such criminal-cop logic believes that any laws or words are tantamount to introducing new rules of the game. There is no difference between law and words.
Sometimes you can act according to law, and sometimes “according to words.” Does the law work in Russia? It does, but when it’s not needed, it ceases to work, because there is the law, and then there is the authorities’ concepts.
One classic example is the head of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, Alexander Bastrykin. They show him some videos, and on the basis of this evidence, without further investigation, he demands that a criminal case be opened.
I think the investigators understand perfectly well that no crime has been committed, but that the boss’ order is above the law. For example, recently a veteran of the special military operation was removed from a Pobeda plane for smoking in the toilet. Cases were filed against the flight attendants. And we must remember that Bastrykin was the head of Vladimir Putin’s group.
Do you think the West understands who Putin is?
The problem with Western society is that it lives a little in the past. European politicians remember the Putin who sat at the same table with them, who talked and negotiated. Many of them think that since it was possible to reach an agreement then, it is possible now.
But we are always lagging behind this regime; we do not have time to adapt to it and understand it, and this gives the regime a great advantage.
“There’s a rule we’ve come up with: when you start thinking about the logic of the authorities, think about the worst-case scenario, and most likely, this is what will happen.”
Alexander Bastrykin, the Chairman of the Investigative Committee of Russia. Source: Wiki Commons
We must focus on words and actions, not look back at the past and plan for the worst scenarios.
Russia is now one of the main global threats, and few people will voice this. It seems easier to negotiate with North Korea right now than with Putin. The Putin regime has changed everything over the past 20 years, and in the most radical way.
How do you assess the prospects for closing and restricting the internet in the near future?
There exists the risk that internet access will be shut down. I am sure that the restrictions to internet access will continue, but at the same time I do not believe in the Chinese model of a completely autonomous internet within the country, because the Russian internet was created differently and is too much tied to the outside world. I would rather focus on the Iranian model.
In any case, we will look for alternative paths. They've already turned off a lot of things. We learned how to work with the site, taught millions of people to use a VPN and definitely not just one VPN, but several. This is an important task, to develop as many solutions as possible for people within the country to bypass the blocks.
There’s the feeling, especially after the murder of Alexei Navalny, that the Russian opposition has no future. Is this so?
The opposition consists of people who participate in elections and try to fight for votes. In this sense, there is no Russian opposition. The clearest analogy for the current state of affairs is the Soviet era, where dissidents were not oppositionists in the commonly used sense of the word.
If someone hopes to beat Putin in the elections, then there is no future. If we hope to maintain, or better yet increase, the number of people inside and outside the country who want to change the regime, then an important task is understanding what kind of Russia we want to see in the future.
I believe that the end of the Putin regime will inevitably lead to a very serious modernization of this system, and possibly to its ultimate collapse. For many within the elite, the Putin of 2010 was more palatable, and the Putin of 2003 was even better.
If we don’t offer an alternative point of view and talk to millions of people inside the country, if we don’t appeal to young people and leave school-children alone with the “important discussions,” the authorities will have a better chance of mothballing this regime for the future.
We need to fight for preservation and influence in education, information, culture, and literature. We need to try to keep in touch with people in Russia as much as possible, hoping for change. Putin will not last forever. We need to prepare for this change now.
Russia is now one of the main global threats, and few people will voice this. It seems easier to negotiate with North Korea right now than with Putin. The Putin regime has changed everything over the past 20 years, and in the most radical way.
How do you assess the prospects for closing and restricting the internet in the near future?
There exists the risk that internet access will be shut down. I am sure that the restrictions to internet access will continue, but at the same time I do not believe in the Chinese model of a completely autonomous internet within the country, because the Russian internet was created differently and is too much tied to the outside world. I would rather focus on the Iranian model.
In any case, we will look for alternative paths. They've already turned off a lot of things. We learned how to work with the site, taught millions of people to use a VPN and definitely not just one VPN, but several. This is an important task, to develop as many solutions as possible for people within the country to bypass the blocks.
There’s the feeling, especially after the murder of Alexei Navalny, that the Russian opposition has no future. Is this so?
The opposition consists of people who participate in elections and try to fight for votes. In this sense, there is no Russian opposition. The clearest analogy for the current state of affairs is the Soviet era, where dissidents were not oppositionists in the commonly used sense of the word.
If someone hopes to beat Putin in the elections, then there is no future. If we hope to maintain, or better yet increase, the number of people inside and outside the country who want to change the regime, then an important task is understanding what kind of Russia we want to see in the future.
I believe that the end of the Putin regime will inevitably lead to a very serious modernization of this system, and possibly to its ultimate collapse. For many within the elite, the Putin of 2010 was more palatable, and the Putin of 2003 was even better.
If we don’t offer an alternative point of view and talk to millions of people inside the country, if we don’t appeal to young people and leave school-children alone with the “important discussions,” the authorities will have a better chance of mothballing this regime for the future.
We need to fight for preservation and influence in education, information, culture, and literature. We need to try to keep in touch with people in Russia as much as possible, hoping for change. Putin will not last forever. We need to prepare for this change now.
Share this article
Read More
