This article was found in Anna Politkovskaya’s computer after her death and is addressed to readers abroad.
“Koverny,” a Russian clown whose job in the olden days was to keep the audience laughing while the circus arena was changed between acts. If he failed to make them laugh, the ladies and gentlemen booed him and the management sacked him.
Almost the entire present generation of Russian journalists, and those sections of the mass media which have survived to date, are clowns of this kind, a Big Top of kovernys whose job is to keep the public entertained and, if they do have to write about anything serious, then merely to tell everyone how wonderful the Pyramid of Power is in all its manifestations. The Pyramid of Power is something President Putin has been busy constructing for the past five years, in which every official – from top to bottom, the entire bureaucratic hierarchy – is appointed either by him personally or by his appointees. It is an arrangement of the state which ensures that anybody given to thinking independently of their immediate superior is promptly removed from office. In Russia the people thus appointed are described by Putin’s Presidential Administration, which effectively runs the country, as “on side.” Anybody not on side is an enemy. The vast majority of those working in the media support this dualism. Their reports detail how good on-side people are, and deplore the despicable nature of enemies. The latter include liberally inclined politicians, human rights activists, and “enemy” democrats, who are generally characterised as having sold out to the West. An example of an on-side democrat is, of course, President Putin himself. The newspapers and television give top priority to detailed “exposés” of the grants enemies have received from the West for their activities.
Journalists and television presenters have taken enthusiastically to their new role in the Big Top. The battle for the right to convey impartial information, rather than act as servants of the Presidential Administration, is already a thing of the past. An atmosphere of intellectual and moral stagnation prevails in the profession to which I too belong, and it has to be said that most of my fellow journalists are not greatly troubled by this reversion from journalism to propagandising on behalf of the powers that be. They openly admit that they are fed information about enemies by members of the Presidential Administration, and are told what to cover and what to steer clear of.
What happens to journalists who don’t want to perform in the Big Top? They become pariahs. I am not exaggerating.
My last assignment to the North Caucasus, to report from Chechnya, Ingushetia, and Dagestan, was in August 2006. I wanted to interview a senior Chechen official about the success or failure of an amnesty for resistance fighters which the Director of the Federal Security Bureau, the FSB, had declared.
I scribbled down an address in Grozny, a ruined private house with a broken fence on the city’s outskirts, and slipped it to him without further explanation. We had talked in Moscow about the fact that I would be coming and would want to interview him. A day later he sent someone there who said cryptically, “I have been asked to tell you everything is fine.” That meant the official would see me, or more precisely that he would come strolling in carrying a string bag and looking as if he had just gone out to buy a loaf of bread.
His information was invaluable, and completely undermined the official account of how the amnesty was going. It was conveyed to me in a room two metres square with a tiny window whose curtains were firmly drawn. Before the war it had been a shed, but when the main house was bombed its owners had to use it as kitchen, bedroom and bathroom combined. They let me use it with considerable trepidation, but they are old friends about whose misfortunes I wrote some years ago when their son was abducted.
Why did the official and I go to these lengths? Were we mad, or trying to bring a little excitement into our lives? Far from it. Open fraternisation between an opposition-inclined gatherer of information like me or another of my Novaya gazeta colleagues and an on-side government official would spell disaster for both of us.
That same senior official subsequently brought to the sometime shed resistance fighters who wanted to lay down their arms but not to take part in the official circus performance. They passed on a lot of interesting information about why none of the fighters wanted to surrender to the regime: they believed the Government was only interested in public relations and could not be trusted.
“Nobody wants to surrender!” The pundits will find that hard to believe. For weeks Russian television has shown dodgy-looking individuals declaring that they want to accept the amnesty terms, that they “trust Ramzan.” Ramzan Kadyrov is President Putin’s Chechen favorite, appointed Prime Minister with blithe disregard for the fact that the man is a complete idiot, bereft of education, brains, or a discernible talent for anything other than mayhem and violent robbery.
To these unholy gatherings squads of journalist-clowns are brought along (I don’t get invited). They write everything down carefully in their notebooks, take their photographs, file their reports, and a totally distorted image of reality results. An image, however, which is pleasing to those who declared the amnesty.
You don’t get used to this, but you learn to live with it. It is exactly the way I have had to work throughout the Second War in the North Caucasus. To begin with I was hiding from the Russian federal troops, but always able to make contact clandestinely with individuals through trusted intermediaries, so that my informants would not be denounced to the generals. When Putin’s plan of Chechenisation succeeded (setting “good” Chechens loyal to the Kremlin to killing “bad” Chechens who opposed it), the same subterfuge applied when talking to “good” Chechen officials. The situation is no different in Moscow, or in Kabardino-Balkaria, or Ingushetia. The virus is very widespread.
At least a circus performance does not last long, and the regime availing itself of the services of clownish journalists has the longevity of a mouldering mushroom. Purging the news has produced a blatant lie orchestrated by officials eager to promote a “correct image of Russia under Putin.” Even now it is producing tragedies the regime cannot cope with and which can sink their aircraft carrier, no matter how invincible it may appear. The small town of Kondopoga in Karelia, on the border with Finland, was the scene of vodka-fuelled anti-Caucasian race riots which resulted in several deaths. Nationalistic parades and racially motivated attacks by “patriots” are a direct consequence of the regime’s pathological lying and the lack of any real dialogue between the state authorities and the Russian people. The state closes its eyes to the fact that the majority of our people live in abject poverty, and that the real standard of living outside of Moscow is much lower than claimed. The corruption within Putin’s Pyramid of Power exceeds even the highs previously attained, and a younger generation is growing up both ill-educated, and militant because of their poverty.
I loathe the current ideology which divides people into those who are “on side,” “not on side,” or even “on the wrong side.” If a journalist is on side he or she will receive awards and honors, and perhaps be invited to become a Deputy in the Duma. Invited, mind, not elected. We don’t have parliamentary elections any more in the traditional sense of the word, with campaigning, publication of manifestos, debates. In Russia the Kremlin summons those who are irreproachably on side, who salute at the right times, and they are enlisted in the United Russia party, with all that entails.
Today a journalist who is not on side is an outcast. I have never sought my present pariah status and it makes me feel like a beached dolphin. I am no political infighter.
I will not go into the other joys of the path I have chosen: the poisoning, the arrests, the menacing by mail and over the Internet, the telephoned death threats. The main thing is to get on with my job, to describe the life I see, to receive visitors every day in our newspaper’s offices who have nowhere else to bring their troubles, because the Kremlin finds their stories off-message. The only place they can be aired is in our newspaper, Novaya gazeta.
What am I guilty of? I have merely reported what I witnessed, nothing but the truth.
Published in a special issue of Soyuz zhurnalistov, October 26, 2006