The articles that investigative journalist Yuri Shchekochikhin wrote were “bombshells”— at least, that’s how Elena Bandarenko described them. In the film Yuri Shchekochikhin: His Life in Words and Deeds, Bandarenko remembered secretly retyping Shchekochikhin’s articles and redistributing them to workers at the clothing factory in Russia where she worked. “They read them to tatters,” she said.
The documentary is the story of Russian investigative journalist Yuri Shchekochikhin, who died in 2003 under strange circumstances, at the age of 53. He is one of a long list of Russian journalists who have died investigating issues that powerful people wanted to keep hidden. Today that list includes Anna Politkovskaya, who wrote about horrific conditions in Chechnya, Dmitry Popkov, who published reports about abuse of power and criticized the ruling party, and Larisa Yudina, who criticized the local corruption in the region of Kalmykia, a region in the southwestern part of Russia.
Journalist Nadezhda Azhgikhina, who was also Shchekochikhin’s wife, wrote the screenplay for the documentary. Azhgikhina, along with a few other journalists and scholars, held a panel discussion on February 18 at the Harriman Institute at Columbia University on the state of press freedom in Russia.
Today’s Russia is rarely considered a model for transparency and free press. However, in 1990 Russia’s law on press freedom was considered one of the best in Europe: it lifted censorship, made keeping information from the press punishable by law, and gave people the right to form independent media companies.
However, according to an article that Azhgikhina wrote, the law couldn’t prevent corruption and bad practices within the media itself. The new free market economy in Russia that opened up with the fall of the Berlin wall allowed new media companies to pop up daily, and their practices were sometimes far from ethical—they fabricated information, published articles for money, and sometimes became vehicles for state propaganda. By the year 2000, Azhgikhina wrote, only 6 percent of Russian citizens trusted the media. Then, the state began taking control, suppressing and murdering journalists who dared to speak up.
The official cause of death was a severe allergic reaction, but many people think Shchekochikhin was poisoned. At the time, he was investigating a Russian furniture company called Tri Kita (Three Whales), part of a money-laundering scheme that implicated members of Russia’s Security Service.
Shchekochikhin was both a wildly popular journalist and a politician. In 1988, he launched his career interviewing politician and one-time Soviet police detective Aleksandr Gurov for the independent Literatura Gazeta. The resulting article, called “The Lion Has Jumped,” about organized crime and corruption in the USSR, fell into the hands of Mikhail Gorbachev, and it prompted him to establish a division in the Soviet Interior Ministry to fight organized crime. The article was the first ever to openly talk about crime networks and systemic corruption in the Soviet Union, and it prompted other newspapers to look at the issue.
Shchekochikhin covered corruption in the state and human rights abuses. He also wrote about individuals’ experiences in Russian labor camps. At one point, according to the film, he interviewed a literary critic who was sent to the camps for two years after police found a few grams of marijuana on his wife. He was a critic of the First and Second Chechen wars, conflicts in the 1990s and 2000s between Russian military and militias in Chechnya. His last book tells the stories of people who were forced to become informers under pressure from the KGB. He served on the Congress of the People’s Deputies, the Soviet Union’s only semi-free parliament, and later was elected to the state duma, the lower house of Russian Parliament.
The panel speculated about how investigative journalism is still able to exist at all in Russia today. Tom Kent, professor at the Harriman Institute, suggested that one answer might simply be that the Russian authorities can’t censor all the mass media in existence. Another is that having some mass media allows Russian authorities to see what people are really thinking. Today, said Kent, people in Russia can be arrested just for “liking” something on social media. And there are a million ways to stop the presses: invoking tax laws or foreign agent laws, cyberattacks or getting the fire marshal to condemn the offices, to name a few.
But today’s youth have something that the youth of the USSR didn’t have: freedom from fear. “You have kids being arrested in protests, and tweeting in police vans,” said Kent, adding that, before, this would have been impossible. Azhgikhina added that the youth today understand the importance of freedom of expression, and that it is their job to fight for it.
Editor of The Nation Katrina vanden Heuvel agreed. She said that when people told her that “there wouldn’t be a Yuri today,” she thinks of the young women journalists who she has sat around tables with, who also need support. Azhgikhina said that two years ago, they established a contest for human rights coverage and received materials from all over Russia. Across the country, millennials, and especially millennial journalists, are resisting intimidation and forced silence.
For concerned Westerners who want to support Russian media, Kent’s recommendation is simple: Do nothing. Accepting money from Western organizations can affect Russian news groups’ credibility.
The panel also brought up the fact that few Westerners are aware of the issues affecting ordinary Russian citizens. In the eyes of the West, said vanden Heuvel, “Russia is Putin and Putin is Russia.” Instead, there are many other issues in Russia that people in the U.S. are unaware of, such as widespread domestic violence and truck driver protests against a toll tax levied by a private company connected to President Putin.
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