stories

How Novaya Gazeta journalists tried to buy a nuclear warhead in 1990s Russia

Source: Meduza

In late October, Novaya Gazeta announced it was closing. On November 5, World Digital Preservation Day, RIMA and Kronika are making the complete Novaya Gazeta archive available, including previously unavailable issues. They are now all collected in one place, free to read and fully searchable. One of the most unforgettable stories the outlet ever ran, back when it was called Novaya Ezhednevnaya Gazeta (New Daily Gazette), was its investigation of Russia’s black market in nuclear arms. Co-author Kirill Belyaninov told Meduza how he, Dmitry Muratov, and columnist Vladimir Filin set out to buy the makings of a nuclear bomb from Moscow middlemen.

‘We had a chance to do what we wanted, without these weird old guys’

— What was the Novaya Gazeta newsroom like in its first year?

— It came out of a conflict at Komsomolskaya Pravda, the country’s highest-circulation daily. There was an election for editor-in-chief, and the winner was Vladimir Sungorkin, who has since died. He turned the paper into what it is today.

About 60 people led the resistance. They included Dmitry Muratov, now a Nobel laureate, Sergei Kushnerev (Komsomolskaya Pravda’s managing editor at the time), Sergei Kozheurov (then deputy editor-in-chief), and practically all the newsroom’s young staff, which included me at the time. We left in protest after losing the election for editor-in-chief to Sungorkin. That was November 13, 1992. For years afterward, we marked that odd anniversary.

We decided to start Novaya Yezhednevnaya Gazeta — simply because those 60 people didn’t know how to do anything else. The newspaper Moskovskiye Novosti, which was based on Pushkin Square at the time, gave us a room with two computers. We put the first issue together mostly in the newsroom bar, because there wasn’t room for everyone upstairs. People took turns going up to those two computers, typing up their stories, then going back down to the bar to wait for their next turn, and so on.

We were making it all up as we went along, running on enthusiasm, without any money. As soon as the first issue came out, we realized there was one thing we hadn’t thought about at all. They delivered the entire print run to the Moskovskiye Novosti newsroom, to that room where we were working — enormous stacks, 150,000 or 200,000 [copies]. They brought them in and said, “Well, here you go.” We said, “What do you mean, ‘here you go’?” They said, “Well, here’s your newspaper. Do whatever you want with it.”

We’d spent years working at a daily with a circulation of 22 million copies and its own distribution department. We’d never had to worry about any of that. So on the day the first issue came out, the entire staff was out on the streets of Moscow: We just stood there handing the paper to passersby.

— So you gave away the first print run instead of selling it?

— We didn’t know how else to distribute it — we had no agents or distributors. We had no agreements with newsstands or retail chains. We simply hadn’t thought about it, because we’d never done it before. We wrote stories, laid out the paper, took good photographs, talked to people. But we didn’t know how to sell it.

Until the first money came in, which, as everyone knows, [Mikhail] Gorbachev provided, the staff worked without salaries or freelance fees. So I was also working in the investigations department at Literaturnaya Gazeta — Yura Shchekochikhin had invited me there. Literaturnaya paid something resembling a salary; you had to live on something. Novaya Yezhednevnaya didn’t pay anything, but it was fun: Your friends were there, there was this energy, and we really hoped it would take off.

— What did you tell people you knew when they asked where you worked? Naming Komsomolskaya Pravda or another major publication is one thing; naming a media startup, as we’d call Novaya today, is another.

— I ran into that in the 2000s, when I became Kommersant’s correspondent in America. Until then, I’d been used to calling anywhere and saying, “I’m so-and-so from the newspaper Kommersant,” and everyone immediately knew who you were and where you were from. In America, people would just look at you blankly. You’d launch into a long explanation: It’s Russia’s biggest independent publication, it’s Russia’s Wall Street Journal. You constantly had to explain what it was, because nobody really knew.

We didn’t have that problem with Komsomolskaya Pravda, the paper we’d left: It was in “Guinness World Records” as the world’s largest daily newspaper. Novaya relied on the contacts its journalists had built up over the years — we took all of those with us and used them as best we could. Gorbachev’s backing actually grew out of a series of interviews Dima Muratov and Yura Sorokin had done with him back at Komsomolskaya Pravda.

— Why did you think readers needed another newspaper, and what did you want Novaya to be?

— To us, it was the Komsomolskaya Pravda we wanted to make. In late 1992 and early 1993, absolutely every door was open. Journalists were practically kicking in the door of the Federal Security Service — we did it ourselves.

It was the freest time there’s ever been for journalism, and we thought we had a chance to do what we wanted, without these weird old guys. Though I realize now that the old guys we were fighting were about 40. Back then, we thought they didn’t understand a thing about journalism, while we knew everything and were going to show everyone how it was done.

— Was the investigation published in 1993, the first in Novaya’s history, supposed to be one of those examples?

— It wasn’t the first investigation — I had one in the very first issue about ballistic missile specialists from the Makeyev Design Bureau, in the Urals, who’d been going to help the North Koreans. We’d always done investigations of one kind or another. The only difference was that the atomic bomb story was our longest investigation: It lasted about six months, if I’m remembering correctly. We worked on it while putting out the newspaper and writing other stories for it.

— The story itself calls it the newspaper’s “first journalistic investigation” and says the work took two months.

— I think it was a bit longer. It was our first classic investigation — what you’d call undercover reporting. Before that, we’d worked with sources and approached people openly. Here, we were pretending to be someone else. In that sense, yes, you could say it was our first experience of that kind, and it really was very different from everything we’d done before.

— What did investigative reporting look like in Russia in 1993? What stories did you draw on, and what standards were there?

— There weren’t any standards. Or rather, there were international standards, but we didn’t know anything about them and didn’t give them much thought. An interesting story? Great, let’s do it.

At Komsomolka, for example, we investigated the 1979 anthrax leak in Sverdlovsk. We had a team of four journalists, and the four of us would go somewhere and spend a week gathering everything we could on the subject, talking to witnesses, digging up documents. [For another story,] my colleagues investigated “the party’s gold” and spent ages in the Communist Party Central Committee archives, talking to people.

Basically, it all came down to contacts and finding documents. Take those missile specialists who illegally flew to North Korea to make some extra money. I happened to meet one of them socially, and then I just had to follow up on the story: find another person, track down some details, talk to the Defense Ministry.

Read about three decades of Russian history through Novaya Gazeta’s reporting and investigations in RIMA’s selection.

‘I expected a black market full of arms barons, but these were ordinary businessmen, and small-time ones at that’

— Why did you decide to investigate the nuclear weapons black market?

— As far as I remember, it was Dima Muratov’s idea. Volodya Filin, who’d been the military columnist first at Komsomolskaya Pravda and then at Novaya Yezhednevnaya Gazeta, was involved too, because he had good relationships with various security agencies.

They brought me in because I was considered the paper’s nuclear weapons specialist — I had contacts in the Defense Ministry’s 12th Main Directorate, which handles nuclear weapons, and in all sorts of laboratories. I’d been to Chernobyl and the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site, and I knew people in that field.

At the time, the Western press was full of stories about terrorists freely buying nuclear bombs in the collapsed Soviet Union, about sinister Russian criminals selling “red mercury,” nuclear weapons, enriched uranium, enriched plutonium… Supposedly, you could go to a farmers market on a Sunday, and there, between the old women selling cucumbers, would be some grim-looking guy with an atomic bomb.

Besides our curiosity — “Let’s see, can you really do it?” — there was something else. We knew that if we did the story right and actually found sellers like that, we’d have a very good chance of putting an unknown newspaper on the map, getting it recognized in the West too, and making a name for ourselves.

— Looking back, do you think that bet paid off?

— Back then, yes. At one point, Western TV companies were lining up to talk to us. After we finished the story, I had an article published in The New York Times. The investigation got noticed, but people covered it as a story about what was happening in the collapsed Soviet Union, rather than as a unique investigation by journalists at a particular publication. The story got away from us a little.

— How did you, Dmitry Muratov, and Vladimir Filin divide up the roles?

— Dima Muratov was in charge overall; he was the strategist. He and I also went to the key meetings, though not all of them. The same with Volodya Filin — and he also took care of [our safety]. We didn’t know who we’d run into or how serious these people were. Volodya arranged backup through his contacts in the police and the FSB. We knew that if something happened, we had someone who could make one phone call and get people to come and try to get us out.

— So, roughly speaking, while you were at these meetings, someone somewhere in Moscow was standing by, keeping an eye on things?

— No, nobody was sitting around in Moscow, and we didn’t tell anyone anything in advance. Volodya would call his contacts and say, “Guys, we have a meeting. Let’s stay in touch for the next three hours — if anything happens, we might call, and you’ll need to figure out how to help us.”

But he didn’t say who we were meeting or where. Nobody cleared any of this with law enforcement or the security services — we just knew we had that option. Again, this was 1993. People in Moscow were being blown up every day, not every other day, so getting into this without at least the possibility of backup would have been foolish, to say the least.

— This may be a naive question, but still: How common was it in 1990s Russia for journalists to have contacts well above the lower ranks of law enforcement and the security services, and to be able to ask them for help?

— It was standard practice. There’s an old saying: Your beat has its perks. Volodya Filin, for example, covered law enforcement and the security services, knew people there personally, and could call them at any time. I personally knew the head of the Defense Ministry’s 12th Main Directorate for nuclear weapons. I could call General [Sergei] Zelentsov at 8 a.m., for example, and be sitting in his office drinking cognac at 8:30. That was completely normal.

People saw journalists a little differently then — as people who could call the shots. That went back to Soviet times: You’d fly in on assignment, and because you were from Komsomolskaya Pravda, the first secretary of the regional Komsomol committee would meet you in a black Volga. You only had to ask, and he’d drive you wherever you needed to go and gather whoever you needed to see.

It was much the same with contacts — if someone covered law enforcement and the security services, they just knew people. But they were simply acquaintances, nothing more.

— How many people in the newsroom knew you were working on this investigation?

— Probably about five. When someone goes away on assignment, of course people ask, “Why are you going? What’s the story?” But if people are running around town, [as we were,] well, they’re running around town — they must have something to do. We’ll find out when they write it. We didn’t really talk about it, and nobody asked.

Novaya Yezhednevnaya had no real hierarchy. There were department heads on paper, but they weren’t even responsible for departments or people, just subjects. Dima handled international coverage, Volodya covered science, and so on.

Journalists moved from one department to another without any formal supervision. Want to write about international politics today? Go ahead. Want to write about soccer? Go write about soccer. Besides, Muratov, one of the paper’s founders, was leading [the investigation]. There was nobody who could ask him, “What are you up to, Dima? Why are you taking a reporter along?”

— Muratov wasn’t editor-in-chief yet?

— I think Seryozha Kozheurov was. But it was more of a title on paper — there was more democracy at the newspaper than you could imagine.

— Before buying enriched plutonium or other components for a nuclear bomb, you obviously had to prepare: find sellers and raise money to show you could pay. How did you go about it?

— We had several sources of information: Volodya Filin’s contacts, my contacts, and just newspaper ads along the lines of “‘Red mercury’ for sale” or “Radioactive material for sale.”

— Didn’t those ads attract law enforcement’s attention? Someone writes, “Plutonium for sale” — didn’t that raise any red flags?

— Well, of course nobody was writing “Plutonium for sale,” “Uranium for sale,” or “Nuclear warhead for sale.” But there were ads saying “Radioactive material for sale.”

— You’d think that would still have been illegal. Or were things so free that a little thing like a newspaper ad offering radioactive material for sale barely raised an eyebrow?

— Honestly, I don’t know if anyone was keeping an eye on it. But you did come across those ads. Obviously, they weren’t on the front page, and nobody was buying half a page for them. They were little ads tucked away [among all the others], and you had to spend quite a while combing through them to find any. Though, since we found some people through Volodya’s law enforcement and security contacts, I suppose someone was keeping an eye on them after all.

After my first meeting with one of the sellers, my girlfriend at the time nearly threw me out of the house.

These people were offering what’s called MOX — a uranium-plutonium mixture. They claimed it was uranium that had been used in a reactor, mixed with plutonium, enriched to as much as 40%. You need 60% for a bomb, preferably 90% — and they were claiming to have 40%. I went to see them, and they showed me a metal pipe with both ends hammered flat. A piece about a meter long, probably. They said, “The product’s in there.”

— The pipe was a kind of carrying case for the radioactive material?

— Well, in theory, yes. I was the only person in the newsroom with a dosimeter, because I’d been to Chernobyl and the Semipalatinsk test sites. I held it up to the pipe, and it showed there was radiation. Not very much, but there was some. I couldn’t tell what the pipe was made of. Lead blocks radiation, so the pipes are usually lead. But this one didn’t look like lead.

I talked them into letting me have it for two days — that was the only time we did anything without leaving a deposit. I said, “Guys, I need to take it to a lab — we can’t buy it until we know what it is.” And they gave it to me! No deposit, nothing — all they had was our newsroom phone number. I took the thing and brought it home.

At home, my girlfriend asked, “What’s that?” I said, “Oh, just a piece of an atomic bomb. Don’t worry about it. I’ll put it in the desk drawer.” I was promptly thrown out — so I ended up tossing the pipe in the trunk. I had a very rusty Zhiguli back then, and the thing spent the night in the car. In the morning, I went to a lab where I knew people, and about two hours later they told me it was junk. Radioactive junk, yes, but junk — just remnants of some medical isotopes, like cesium and something else. So it gave off radiation, but it was useless.

— No practical use.

— None whatsoever. I went back and showed them the paper the lab had given me, with a full spectral analysis of the stuff. I said, “Guys, neither I nor the most desperate Middle Eastern terrorist is going to buy this from you, because you couldn’t even make a dirty bomb out of it. It’s crap.”

“Okay,” the seller said very calmly. “We’ve also got two railcars of sugar. Want those?” He couldn’t have cared less what he was selling. Typical early-1990s business. Of all the sellers, he made the biggest impression on me. I’d expected a black market full of arms barons, people who talked to Middle Eastern terrorists every day, blew up planes, wanted to destroy London. But no, these were ordinary businessmen, and small-time ones at that.

Then there were all sorts of meetings in big offices in central Moscow, where people offered various kinds of “nuclear crap,” as they called it. We met lots of strange people in apartment building entryways somewhere on the outskirts. The main problem was that so-called “air sellers” were very common then — they made up about 70% of the people we spoke to.

— Who were they?

— “Air sellers” were people selling thin air. You’d go to see them, take a small sample, literally three or four grams, to test in a lab, and leave a cash deposit. At the lab, you’d find out it was more junk, while the people with your money had disappeared: They weren’t answering the phone, nothing.

A week later, they’d turn up and say, “Yes, yes, yes, I had to go away, there was a problem, but if you’re not happy with the goods, we’ll give you your deposit back.” And they really would return it — but they’d spent that whole week using it to trade on exchanges and invest through banks, making a little money.

There were lots of people who’d simply found something that gave off radiation and were trying to sell it. In a few cases, people were selling radioactive waste with a fairly high enrichment level — not enough for a bomb, but enough for a so-called dirty bomb. In other words, if you dumped what they were selling into the water supply, you could seriously contaminate a district of Moscow. Where they’d gotten it — nobody asked questions like that, of course.

What finally killed our investigation was a nuclear warhead. We met some people somewhere in Yasenevo, in an apartment building, in a very, very dark stairwell. They told us in detail what they had. Then they took us to a garage, and there in the corner, covered with a tarp, was a warhead. I photographed it and said I’d call them the next day.

I went to the Defense Ministry, to that same 12th Main Directorate. The colonels I knew took the photographs off somewhere, then came back and said, “Listen, it looks like a warhead from the outside, but we need to take a look.” It really was the warhead section of a missile, but whether it had anything inside was unclear. You couldn’t tell [from a photograph]; you’d have to open it up and look.

I went back to the sellers, and they said, “Give us $150,000 and take it. That’s the only option.” At the time, an apartment in Moscow’s Patriarch’s Ponds neighborhood cost just $15,000. Of course, nobody had that kind of money.

We’d reached a point where there really was a chance to buy a warhead — if it was a warhead — but we’d have to come up with an unimaginable amount of money. There was no other option, so the investigation ended.

— Were you able to find out whether it was a real warhead?

— No. There’s this [complication]. The main base of that same 12th Main Directorate of the Defense Ministry, which handles nuclear weapons, is in Sergiyev Posad, outside Moscow. It’s an amazing thing: You’re walking through town, you come to the vacation homes of the officers stationed there, and suddenly there’s a ballistic missile in someone’s vegetable garden.

I asked someone I knew what it was, and he said, “We’ve got a warrant officer who made an outhouse out of a decommissioned missile.” It was completely empty, and he’d asked to have the top cut off and installed at his vacation home. So I certainly wouldn’t rule out the possibility that it wasn’t a warhead, just an empty metal shell with nothing inside — and I very much hope that’s what it was.

What we found in the end was that the market people in the West had been talking about for years didn’t exist. There were books about buying an atomic bomb in the new Russia; there were movies about it. We checked those rumors, and it turned out there was nothing behind them and this market posed no threat.

Ninety-nine percent of that market was either people who didn’t even understand what they were selling and wanted to make money off anything they could, or “air sellers.” Maybe there were people who really did have something. But to find out, you’d have to suddenly come into a fortune.

‘Apparently the sellers didn’t suspect anything, because we’re all still alive’

— Why do you think all these people weren’t afraid to deal with you, agreed to meetings, and let you take samples to a lab?

— I don’t know. Again, none of the people we met sold just this one thing. To them, it was just ordinary buying and selling. A potential buyer calls — why not meet him? Apparently, at least the people with offices in central Moscow had good protection from the police or the FSB.

Besides, I went to most of those meetings myself, and I definitely didn’t look like a police officer — quite the opposite: I was about 25, wore denim, and had shoulder-length hair.

— What did you tell the sellers about who you were and why you wanted radioactive materials?

— Our basic cover story was that we were ordinary wheeler-dealers with a potential buyer who was interested in this strange product.

For some meetings near the Aeroport metro station, Volodya borrowed a foreign car — a Volvo, complete with a driver — from a friend. Dima Muratov sat in the back as the successful businessman, Volodya Filin played the bodyguard, and I was the errand boy.

We played it by ear; we didn’t have an elaborate cover story. We used what we knew. I’d spent some time writing about attempts to smuggle that same “red mercury,” one of the most popular nonexistent products people tried to sell. As journalists, we knew the routes used by smugglers dealing in anything and everything, and we’d mention those, mention some imaginary contacts we had in customs. I don’t remember any extraordinary preparation.

— How did the sellers explain where they’d gotten the goods?

— Practically none of the sellers we talked to worked at uranium plants or places like that. Everyone said they had, say, a brother at the mining and processing plants in Zheleznogorsk.

But again, asking where you’d gotten it wasn’t really something you did. Some leads came through contacts in shady business circles. You’d ask, “Heard anything?” He’d say, “Haven’t heard a thing,” then call a week later and say some guys had told him that so-and-so [had something], and give you a number. About 10% of those calls led anywhere — not everyone would agree to meet.

Some people immediately asked for a cash deposit we didn’t have, and that was the end of the meeting. We’d start mumbling that our money was in the West, in some account, and they’d say, “Fine. Bring it, and we’ll show you.”

— So in practice, you only had a small amount you could leave as a deposit for little samples to have tested?

— It wasn’t just that we had a small amount — we tried to do it without any deposit at all. Dima Muratov found $300 to $400 somewhere, which was pretty serious money in those days, and that was what we had to work with.

For some people, that was enough, and we’d get a sample. For others, it wasn’t, and we’d say, “That’s all we have on us.” Someone with $400 in his pocket in 1993 was already somebody to take seriously. We looked the part: We had cash in dollars, and we’d a borrowed cellphone — those cost about $5,000 back then. Someone with a cellphone didn’t have to show anything else — that was enough to convince you he was a serious businessman.

— Did anyone suspect you weren’t who you claimed to be? That you weren’t wheeler-dealers but, say, investigative journalists?

— Well, only journalists would think of that. I doubt it crossed their minds. Apparently they didn’t suspect anything, because we’re all still alive. Besides, none of the people we met were outright, completely unhinged gangsters. Mostly they were wheeler-dealers who were more interested in finding a way to sell something — the whole country was doing that.

There were endless rumors that radioactive materials were in great demand and easy to sell, including abroad, for foreign currency. So sellers started looking for them themselves [and then trading in them]. One guy told us he and his partner had been sitting on this junk for about a year and a half, but we were the first people who’d come to see them.

Everyone expected to steal something radioactive and find a line of Arab terrorists waiting to buy it. In reality, nobody wanted it. I imagine that’s one reason they were [willing to deal] with us.

But you’re not going to walk up to someone who’s selling you an atomic bomb and ask, “Listen, why are you selling this to me? Why are you meeting me?” I think they’d been sitting on this stuff for so long with nothing to show for it that when they saw a potential buyer, they thought, “Why not?” It seems the main thing was that someone had finally turned up, and all the trouble they’d gone through with this piece of metal — which they also had to hide from — hadn’t been for nothing.

— Weren’t you afraid you were putting yourselves in danger by handling radioactive materials?

— I was more relaxed about it back then — maybe because of my age, or maybe because I’d already spent about five years running around nuclear test sites. The dosimeter was what we went by. Check it — okay, radiation’s above normal, but not critically high. If it had been anything too serious, we wouldn’t have picked it up. There was adrenaline, but not much fear. It was an interesting story, after all; that mattered more than anything else.

— The story says you borrowed several more dosimeters and protective suits from Greenpeace’s Moscow office. Did they know what you were looking for and why?

— They knew exactly what we were doing. A close friend of mine, Dima Litvinov, the son of the well-known dissident Pavel Litvinov, worked at Greenpeace in Moscow then. Arranging it with Dima was no problem, especially since I was on friendly terms with Greenpeace too.

I said we had a chance to get an atomic bomb and asked what they had. Dima said, “We have dosimeters and protective suits.” We never used those suits, by the way — they just rode around in the trunk of my rusty Zhiguli. Sometimes we used protective gloves, but those don’t offer the highest level of protection.

— What about the danger from potential sellers? The investigation mentions that people involved in deals like this could be taken hostage, for example. Did you have a plan in case your meetings went wrong too?

— Youth, stupidity, and adrenaline are the only explanation for all of it. We didn’t take any special precautions beyond having our colleague stay in touch with some people in law enforcement and the security services. Someone would go to a meeting and call back after a certain amount of time: “That’s it, I’m out, I’m on the street, everything’s fine.” If that hadn’t happened, the safety procedure would have kicked in. Volodya handled that, and I don’t remember what it involved anymore. We never used it, so I didn’t even know whether [the threat] was real. Most likely it was.

— How do you view the investigation by today’s ethical standards?

— I think that work would be fine today too. Undercover reporting is one form of journalism. The feature “Zhurnalist menyayet professiyu” (“A journalist changes jobs”) appeared around that time. Particularly brave young women posed as prostitutes — people tried all sorts of things. Getting a job somewhere and describing it from the inside was completely normal. People didn’t see any major problems with it, and I still don’t. Besides, all our meetings were recorded on [hidden] camera.

As far as I know, we didn’t go to the police or the FSB and turn any of these people in, though maybe we should have. In other words, we didn’t agree to work with law enforcement or the security services as informants.

— Did they ask you to?

— No, they didn’t. Some colleagues asked afterward, “Did you turn them all in or not?” We said no, because that wasn’t really what we were there to do. They have their job, and we have ours. We’re odd, curious people; we just want to know.

— Did you follow what happened to the sellers afterward?

— No. We didn’t know whether these people read newspapers, and we weren’t particularly eager to find out — they were all different, and we had different impressions of them.

— Tell us what happened to the people who offered to sell you a nuclear warhead for $150,000. The story ends with a postscript: “We didn’t have $150,000, or even 150 rubles, so we took [the warhead] for free… People in bulletproof vests helped us.” What was behind that line?

— I wasn’t there, and neither was Dima Muratov. We heard about it from our colleague Volodya, who wouldn’t answer the question either. We asked, “Did you tip off your contacts or something?” He said, “Guys, let’s just not talk about it. Let’s agree that’s how it happened.” Fine, then.

— So you decided to leave it at that ambiguous wording in the postscript?

— Well, we had to leave a little mystery, you understand. And second, honestly, we really didn’t know what had happened. We put in a little teaser, and that was that.

— Did any of the story’s authors face threats, surveillance, or pressure during or after the investigation?

— No, nothing like that. Nothing at all. We published the story, and portions of the video went to the West. Some clips were shown on what’s now Channel One, in a couple of investigative programs like “Chelovek i zakon” (“Man and the Law”) — they didn’t completely obscure the sellers’ faces, but put a black bar over their eyes.

As far as all these sellers were concerned, we hadn’t turned anyone in or exposed anything. Some of them were operating completely openly — some of the ads were right there in the newspapers. If the FSB or the police had wanted to go after them, they would only have had to do what we did — leaf through the papers.

We were worried. We thought we ought to be more careful out on the street, and for a while we really did look over our shoulders to see if there was anyone [suspicious nearby]. Our military columnist Volodya, with his decorations for Afghanistan and other things, was the only professional among us. The rest of us weren’t even amateurs — we were complete beginners. I don’t know if I could have told for sure whether someone was following me. At any rate, I didn’t notice anything.

Hi, I’m Katya.

I’ve been running Meduza’s crowdfunding since 2021. Today, supporting Meduza is a crime in Russia. You can be sent to prison just for donating. We’re still able to do our work thanks to thousands of our Russian readers who now live abroad. But even they’re no longer safe. 

Imagine you’ve left Russia, but then your mom becomes seriously ill. It could be your last chance to see her, so of course you go home. At the border, you’re interrogated. Officers hack into your phone and search for any trace that you’ve donated to Meduza.

The Kremlin is counting on that fear, and it’s working. People are afraid to donate. I’m afraid for our supporters, because any one of them could end up in prison. And I’m afraid for Meduza. Without crowdfunding, we simply can’t continue. So if you live outside Russia and don’t have to worry that donating to Meduza could keep you from going home to your family, I’m asking for your help. Please support our work.

‘I have no idea why they tolerated Novaya Gazeta for so long’

— You were one of Novaya Gazeta’s first writers. How did you end up leaving?

— The same way a lot of people did. Novaya’s first incarnation lasted a year and a half, I think — in 1995, the money ran out. Practically everyone in the newsroom had another job on the side, because Novaya Yezhednevnaya was chronically short of money. Things you couldn’t imagine elsewhere were completely normal: You’d tell the editor-in-chief, “I won’t be here for the next two days; I’m going on assignment for such-and-such a newspaper.” Everyone understood that people had to eat. And then everyone went their separate ways.

There were internal conflicts at the paper around the time Seryozha Kushnerev left — he was one of the founders and the first managing editor. He left to make the program “Vzglyad” (“View”), then “Zhdi menya” (“Wait for Me”) at the television company VID, and took a lot of our colleagues with him. I worked there for a while too. It seemed like the paper was finished. Muratov spent every day in a restaurant on the Arbat meeting potential investors. But we didn’t have much faith in it.

I stayed in touch with the newsroom when it started up again. Some friends were still there, and then a new generation came in; a lot of young people joined. For a long time, there were two groups: journalists no other Russian publication would hire anymore because of their age or their habits, and young people. In that respect, the paper was truly one of a kind.

Until recently, we got together almost every November 13, on the anniversary of our departure from Komsomolka.

— How did you react to the news that Novaya Gazeta was closing?

— It was expected. I have no idea why the authorities put up with them for so long. It’s just as much of a mystery to me as why they tolerated Oleg Roldugin’s Sobesednik, for example. In today’s Russia, Novaya managed [to operate] even though the newspaper was essentially banned.

Novaya’s magazine comes out in a print run small enough not to require registration — 999 copies. As a newspaper, Novaya died a long time ago — the website remained, some people remained. The latest decision to designate 100 of the paper’s writers as associates of a “foreign agent” — that’s some new, very interesting, incomprehensible status. People now have to display two labels: one saying they’re a “foreign agent” personally, and one saying they’re a “foreign agent” because they once wrote for Novaya Gazeta.

My former classmate Tatyana Malkina wrote one or two articles for Novaya, but poor Tanya, who lives in Moscow, now has to display a label saying she’s an associate of a “foreign agent,” whatever that means. Designating the Nobel laureate Dima Muratov a “foreign agent” is an astonishing precedent too. A Nobel laureate who’s a “foreign agent” — that’s a new contribution to Russian political thought.

And there’s one constant at Novaya: They’ve always been short of money. Now it’s really bad.

— The newsroom’s statement begins with the words “We’ve been killed,” and that wording prompted debate on social media. What do you make of Novaya’s statement?

— On the one hand, I understand what they [mean] when they say they’ve been killed. But there are plenty of newsrooms that don’t work out of an office building; they don’t need one. You can keep a website going from home; you can keep your social media going. I think that’s what will happen, that the paper will survive. In what form, I don’t know. But Novaya Gazeta has been through several reincarnations, and this will be another one.

I saw a debate on Facebook that struck me as strange. Novaya Gazeta and its staff are free to describe themselves in whatever words they [consider appropriate]. They’re the ones living through this at a newspaper that has lost its longtime home — not those of us discussing it. First of all, they know better than we do.

Second, Novaya Gazeta was and is a unique publication — in its voice, in how it treats journalists and approaches journalism, and in its writing. So if Novaya Gazeta were to die for good, that would of course be a great tragedy for the country, despite its fairly small audience. At the same time, I’m absolutely certain the paper will survive in one form or another.

As for people criticizing [the newsroom] for saying it’s been killed while bombs are falling on Ukraine — I don’t think that’s a fair comparison. Especially coming from people who, like me, are sitting in America watching all of this from across the ocean.

I’m very sorry this is happening to Novaya Gazeta. I know Dima Muratov is a very difficult person; plenty of people have fallen out with him, and fallen out for good. At the same time, Dima and the people at Novaya really are unique journalists, with a place in the Russian-language press that no one else fills. There’s no other publication like it. It’s like an endangered-species list: You don’t ask whether an animal on it is useful. There’s simply no other animal like it, so you need to preserve it, protect it, and take every possible care of it.

— For now, you think Novaya is alive and still on the endangered-species list?

— I do. It’s the same situation we were in after leaving Komsomolka: Do you know how to do anything else? No. The people there know how to make a newspaper. You may like it or dislike it, but they know how to make it. So I think they’ll use every opportunity they have to keep making it in one form or another.