“Slava, bring me some condoms!” Repin shouted again. Condoms have been in brief provide in the usS.R., and each males had proud reputations as womanizers.
“What color condoms would you like, Lyonya?” Golovanov shouted.
“Green!”
“You are right, Lyonya,” Golovanov shouted. “Green makes you look younger.”
It was probably the most worldly dialog Muratov had ever heard.
Today, he usually makes use of an identical intonation of loud, performative familiarity, ceaselessly laced with profanity, that invitations the interlocutor to be in on some shared data. (When the Nobel committee was attempting to achieve him, Muratov was arguing with certainly one of Novaya Gazeta’s reporters, Elena Milashina. Later, once I requested him what the argument was about, he exclaimed, “Masha! Masha! How could one not be having a fight with Milashina? How can one ever have a calm discussion with Milashina?” I do not know; I barely know Milashina.) It’s the intonation from that overheard dialog from 1987, when historical past was all of the sudden occurring, and the newspapers have been writing it down, and everybody learn them, and the whole lot they reported mattered. “The eighties and the nineties—it was a black-and-white show in which everyone smoked and we were called ‘newspapermen,’ ” he instructed me. “That was my life. Now I study new things, I take classes in English and coding, but I’m still there, in the time of the war in Chechnya, in Afghanistan, the war in Karabakh, the storming of the television tower in Vilnius—I’m still there, right there.” We have been a few glasses of whiskey into the dialog.
In 1992, a 12 months after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a number of dozen journalists, together with Muratov, left Komsomolskaya Pravda to begin one thing new. On April 1, 1993, Novaya Yezhednevnaya Gazeta (the New Daily Newspaper) printed its first subject. At the time, President Boris Yeltsin was locked in battle with parliament. The entrance web page featured a miniature manifesto, headlined “A Few Questions for Ourselves.” The first query was “Whose side are you on?” The reply: “Neither . . . We need new people, with hands clean enough to conduct politics and minds clear and sober enough to know how to do it. The fact that they didn’t exist before does not mean they don’t exist at all.”
The subsequent 12 months, Russian troops launched an offensive within the breakaway republic of Chechnya, and Muratov went to report on the struggle. So did tons of of different Russian and international journalists. Reporters risked their lives documenting the brutality of a navy carpet-bombing its fellow-citizens; they printed lengthy exposés of the origins and the mechanics of the humanitarian disaster. But the struggle went on, and life elsewhere in Russia continued because it had earlier than. This was the tip of the period when the whole lot mattered and the start of the epoch of cynicism. Russians, like a lot of the remainder of the world, are nonetheless dwelling in that point—now labelled “post-truth”—however Muratov has refused to simply accept it. In 1995, he grew to become the editor-in-chief of Novaya Yezhednevnaya Gazeta.
Yeltsin, who remained President till the tip of 1999, permitted a lot of impartial media retailers to thrive. When Putin succeeded Yeltsin, that unprecedented press freedom was all however crushed. Most Russian media organizations that started within the nineteen-nineties have lengthy since shut down; others have been absorbed by the state propaganda equipment. One of the exceptions is the radio station Ekho Moskvy (the Echo of Moscow), which ceaselessly criticizes the federal government, praises dissenters just like the opposition politician Alexey Navalny, and appeals primarily to older liberals. Another is Novaya Gazeta, which, other than dropping “daily” from its identify, has undergone remarkably few modifications.
After different media stopped reporting from Chechnya—as a result of it was too harmful and it felt futile—Novaya Gazeta stayed on the story, documenting the demise toll, the disintegration of civilian life, the disappearances and hostage takings, and, beginning in 2000, the rise of the Kadyrov-dynasty dictatorship. The lead journalist overlaying Chechnya, Anna Politkovskaya, survived an obvious poisoning in 2004; in 2006, she was shot useless in her condo constructing in Moscow. Elena Milashina took over the beat, and has damaged many tales: in 2017, she uncovered the arrests and extrajudicial executions of homosexual males in Chechnya. Novaya Gazeta additionally aggressively investigated the struggle in Ukraine. In 2014 and 2015, the particular correspondent Elena Kostyuchenko documented the Russian occupation of japanese Ukraine, which the Kremlin denied. And after a Malaysian passenger aircraft was shot down over a area of japanese Ukraine held by pro-Russian separatists, in 2014, Novaya Gazeta journalists spent months reconstructing the tragedy.
It’s not fairly exact to explain Novaya Gazeta as a newspaper. It is just not what, say, the Times and even the lefty investigative journal Mother Jones can be below extra attempting circumstances. Imagine, relatively, the Village Voice of the nineteen-eighties crossed with a mutual-aid society, however run, at occasions, like Occupy Wall Street. Novaya Gazeta is a neighborhood and a humanitarian establishment, and it is extremely messy.
Novaya Gazeta additionally carries on a peculiar Soviet custom: the newspaper as a courtroom of justice. The Soviet citizen lived surrounded by impenetrable partitions of paperwork—there was no recourse for injustices huge or small, besides when a letter to a newspaper received a reporter’s consideration and didn’t elicit the censor’s objections. A narrative might result in change: an abusive instructor would get fired, for instance, or an unsafe constructing would get repaired. At Novaya Gazeta, such tales are mainstays. In the late nineteen-nineties, when Russian troops pulled out of Chechnya, leaving some fifteen hundred troopers behind—nobody knew what number of have been useless or have been being held captive—the paper often printed articles by an Army officer, Major Vyacheslav Izmailov, who organized search events and wrote about them. For years, households would come to Novaya Gazeta to ask Izmailov to search out their sons. In 2000, the paper opened a hotline to gather word-of-mouth stories of soldier deaths to be able to examine official statistics on navy casualties in Chechnya. The mission later expanded to incorporate survivors, then modified to compel the navy to assist the wounded and their households. People would line up exterior Anna Politkovskaya’s workplace to ask for assist with their disappeared or injured family members. In 2002, when a gaggle of Chechens took greater than 9 hundred folks hostage in a Moscow theatre, Politkovskaya went in as a negotiator and persuaded the hostage takers to permit water and juice to be delivered to their captives. In 2004, when one other group took greater than a thousand kids and adults hostage at a college in Beslan, in southern Russia, Politkovskaya flew there to barter, however was poisoned en route. “This paper was created to help people,” Milashina instructed me. “Not humanity but people—and not by informing them but by getting them actual help.”
Muratov “is a paratrooper,” Dmitry Bykov, a poet and a journalist who has been affiliated with Novaya Gazeta for twenty-two years, instructed me. “He values friendship above all else, and he is always ready to parachute in. He was a paratrooper in the military, too.” Bykov should have discovered a crack in Muratov’s N.D.A.
Unlike most publications, in Russia and elsewhere, Novaya Gazeta doesn’t belong to a rich particular person, a company, or a basis; it’s owned collectively by its employees. When the paper started, Milashina mentioned, “there weren’t yet any wealthy people who wished to invest in media.” One early supporter, Gorbachev, purchased some computer systems for the paper; legend has it, he drew the funds from his personal Nobel Peace Prize, which he obtained in 1990. In 2006, dealing with an acute monetary disaster, the paper offered a minority stake to Alexander Lebedev, a billionaire who had served within the Ok.G.B. After a number of years, Lebedev, who was divesting in Russia, gave the shares again to the Novaya Gazeta collective.
In the Soviet Union, all publications have been (on paper) collectives and editors have been (nominally) elected. In reality, Soviet media have been microcosms of the totalitarian state. Over time, Novaya Gazeta has turn out to be a functioning democracy: the editor-in-chief, the editorial board, and a just lately created ethics council are all elected. Any employees member can name a basic assembly to air a grievance. A number of years in the past, in a radio look, Muratov praised a author from a unique outlet for a narrative about protests and reminiscence in Beslan; Elena Kostyuchenko had coated the story, too, however Muratov didn’t acknowledge her work. Kostyuchenko and her colleagues referred to as a gaggle assembly. Muratov heard her out. He hedged and preened a bit—he quoted the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard—then conceded, “Something fragile has been violated. If Lena feels it, then that’s what happened. I sincerely apologize. I certainly didn’t want to hurt you. Can we put this behind us?” (The assembly was filmed by the documentarian Askold Kurov, who included the footage in a film he made about Novaya Gazeta.) Kostyuchenko, a lady with a skinny, birdlike profile, nodded with out Muratov. The assembly ended. Two girls comforted Kostyuchenko as she wept.
Soon afterward, Ilya Azar—the journalist whom Muratov had praised at Kostyuchenko’s expense—joined Novaya Gazeta and ran for editor-in-chief. Azar printed flyers stating that, with Muratov ever on the helm, the paper’s thought of democracy was “like Putin’s, if not worse.” He received 13 votes to Muratov’s seventy-four. (A 3rd candidate, the paper’s longtime director basic, Sergei Kozheurov, received fifty-one.) Azar and Kostyuchenko now share an workplace.
Novaya Gazeta’s tolerance for inside dissent meant that even its most celebrated reporter, Politkovskaya, confronted skepticism from her colleagues. “I didn’t like the tone of her writing—it was too personal and a bit hysterical,” Dmitry Bykov instructed me; they “barely spoke for the last few years” of her life. (In the early two-thousands, Bykov additionally vehemently disagreed with Muratov’s—and plenty of Novaya Gazeta writers’—wariness and criticism of Putin, however, he mentioned, “this had no impact on my relationship with Muratov.”)
