Frontline: "Putin vs. the Press" (Oxford Films Production for GBH/FRONTLINE and Channel 4, aired September 26, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On Tuesday, September 26 PBS showed a documentary on their Frontline series called “Putin vs. the Press,” though it’s not a story of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s attack on all independent media outlets but one newspaper, and one individual, in particular. The newspaper is Novaya Gazeta (“New Gazette”) and the individual is its editor/publisher, Dmitry Muratov. Muratov co-won the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize with Maria Ressa, a journalist from the Philippines who likewise defied a dictatorial and corrupt government to report the truth about it to her readers. In his acceptance speech, Muratov said these depressing words: “The world has fallen out of love with democracy. The world has begun to turn toward dictatorship. In my country, and not only there, it is popular to think that politicians who avoid bloodshed are weak, while threatening the world with war is the duty of true patriots.” Even the United States, long considered the world’s bastion of republican government, is undergoing a long-term embrace of dictatorship; the Republican Party has virtually abandoned democracy as a long-term goal or a short-term practice. Donald Trump’s 2024 Presidential campaign is on a major roll, not despite but because of its openly dictatorial character, It seems like nothing will break his hold on the overwhelming majority of his party, and as he himself has boasted, every new criminal indictment against him just strengthens his hand politically and reinforces his absolute rule over his party.

Novaya Gazeta was founded in 1993 with seed money from the Nobel Prize scholarship awarded to former Soviet Union president Mikhail Gorbachev, who tried and ultimately failed to break Russia’s long-time record of authoritarianism. Gorbachev wanted a mixed economy for the Soviet Union and an end to the forcible repression of political dissent. He saw a free press as crucial to the latter and he backed Muratov’s enterprise as one way to ensure that future Russian governments would face legitimate criticism from an independent media. Muratov recalled during the show that he had got interested in journalism in particular after two star players on a Russian hockey team had brusquely refused his request for autographs. His mom complained to the local state-owned newspaper and they ran a story that resulted in Dmitry receiving signed photos of the two hockey players in the mail. Unfortunately, Vladimir Putin took over as Russia’s president at the end of 1999 and immediately declared war on the free press, punishing newspapers and other media outlets that dared criticize him with threats, denials of licenses needed to publish, and worse. During the show Muratov notes he’s been to the funerals of at least six of his best reporters, all assassinated – he thinks – by Russian goon squads associated with Putin and in some cases directly working for him. “Igor Domnikov was the first,” Muratov said on the program. “He was a brilliant guy. He was killed by bandits for his series of investigations. Yuri Shchekochikhin, my closest friend and an outstanding journalist. He was poisoned. Anna Politkovskaya. She made it to Chechnya, disobeying all orders. And I was on vacation at the time. Of course, I blame myself terribly for this. I should also mention Nastya Baburova and Stas Markelov. Natasha Estemirova, who was Anya Politkovskaya’s main collaborator on Chechnya. Their portraits hang on the walls right above the table where we meet and I see them many times a day. I’m ashamed of myself, but not the newspaper.”

Things got even worse for Muratov in 2022 when Russia launched its invasion of and war against Ukraine. If I were in Russia I could be arrested and sentenced to 15 years in prison for writing the above sentence because Putin and his puppet legislature, the Duma, has literally made it a crime to call Russia’s attack on Ukraine a “war” or an “invasion” instead of the Russian government’s preferred euphemism, a “special military operation.” For years Muratov had gone up to the limits of Putin’s censorship without actually crossing the line – there’s footage of him asking Putin about his designations of certain individuals, including journalists, as “foreign agents” without any due process or right to appeal. Muratov once even asked Putin at one of the president’s press conferences, “I still have a question about ‘foreign agents.’ This law has no judgment. There is no court there. You are declared a ‘foreign agent.’ There is no evidence. There is no sentence. You are just branded a criminal. Let me remind you of our favorite childhood book. This is exactly what happened to Milady in The Three Musketeers. But when Milady was beheaded at dawn, she was at least finally read the sentence.” Putin replied, “First of all, I would like to congratulate you on being awarded the Nobel Prize. So, your concern about ‘foreign agents.’ I’m not going to beat around the bush. You said there was no verdict. You’re right, there really isn’t one. Milady was sentenced and her head was cut off. But no one is cutting anything off here.” Muratov also lost a key protector when Mikhail Gorbachev died of natural causes in August 2022 at age 91, cutting off one of the few remaining disincentives for Putin to mess with him directly.

During the early 2020’s Muratov was more or less freely allowed to travel outside Russia – a privilege the Russian state in its various authoritarian regimes (the Tsarist Empire, the Soviet Union, now) hasn’t always allowed its citizens.. In this documentary he’s shown in Oslo, in Riga (the capital of Latvia, one of the Baltic republics Joseph Stalin forcibly annexed to Russia in 1940 and whose departure in the 1980’s started the chain of events that led ultimately to the Soviet Union’s disintegration) and even in New York, where he went to witness the auctioning off of his Nobel Prize medal to benefit Ukrainian refugees. His trip to Riga was particularly consequential because he was there ostensibly to be a judge at a documentary film festival, but really to supervise the evacuation of many Novaya Gazeta staff members, including young journalist Roman Anin, to Riga to publish an edition in exile there. Muratov took great pains to maintain the idea that the version published in Riga had no connection to his old one from Moscow, but after the film festival was over he returned to Moscow despite the warnings from Anin and others in his circle that this wasn’t a good idea. “I came to Novaya Gazeta in 2006 when I was 19 years old,” Anin said in this documentary. “He’s like my second father. People think that his job is to be the chief editor, but his job is to save people, and he has always been like that. I’m afraid that something might happen to him. I wouldn’t go [back to Russia] … [b]ecause I know that they most likely will arrest me. I know that nobody survives Russian prison, or at least there is a very small chance that you can survive Russian prison. And he knows all of that, and despite that he goes back.” When Muratov went back he got red paint laced with acetone, which burned his eyes and nearly blinded him, thrown at him in his train car. The Russian authorities identified his assailant but, all too predictably, did nothing. Muratov’s own reporters were able not only to identify him but document his connections to the Russian secret police.

Ultimately, on September 1, 2023, Muratov was officially declared a “foreign agent” by the Putin government for “promoting anti-Russian views.” It’s not clear just what the consequences of being declared a “foreign agent” are – whether it’s like the apartheid South African government’s practice of “banning” certain individuals, including forbidding them to be named or mentioned in the media, or it goes farther than that. But it’s certain that Putin has an ultra-low threshold of tolerance for dissent, including sending out hit people to assassinate those he considers “enemies of Russia” even in other countries. Muratov himself equated being declared a “foreign agent” with being called an “enemy of the people.” No sooner had Muratov returned to Russia that two of his reporters, Elena Milashina and Sasha Nemov, were seized by agents of the pro-Russian government in Chechnya. “They were severely injured, beaten,” he said. “Sasha Nemov and Elena Milashina were taken right after the flight [from Russia to Chechnya. Attackers] threw the driver out, put them in a car, took them to be tortured. [They had liquid iodine thrown on them and were repeatedly beaten with hard plastic sticks.] The people who did this, it was an armed group of 10-12 people. They knew what plane, on what flight, at night by Utair they would arrive in Grozny. This means that these people had access to the passenger flight booking system. To me, this shows that these people represent the authorities of the Chechen Republic.” “Putin vs. the Press” is an inspiring tale of resistance but also an extremely depressing program that shows how easily the virus of authoritarianism can infect even a country like our own which has traditionally taken its status as a republic for granted. Given the current state of American political affairs – with Donald Trump dominating the Republican polls and running neck-and-neck with Joe Biden in the 2024 Presidential election, and radical-Right House Republicans threatening to shut down the U.S. government and demanding an end to U.S. military aid to Ukraine as part of their price for keeping it open – Russia’s present could well be America’s future.