The Real Russia. Today. A Russian teenager uses YouTube to regain her memory, the ‘Kommersant’ scandal continues, and Yekaterinburg dismantles the wall

Tuesday, May 21, 2019

This day in history: 155 years ago, on May 21, 1864, Tsar Alexander II declared an end to the Russian-Circassian War in the North Caucasus. The emancipator of Russia's serfs then approved a decision to deport and exile the entire Circassian people for their refusal to convert to Christianity and for their raids on Russian villages.

• Fifteen-year-old Anya Zharova lost her memory half a year ago. She’s making YouTube videos to try and get it back.
• Kommersant: What newspaper staff were told vs. what managers claim publicly
• ↑ Journalists who resigned in protest locked out of newsroom, escorted out of office building under guard
• Opinion: Political expert Andrei Kolesnikov says the Kommersant scandal is a symptom of the Russia media's capitulation to the Russian state
• Yekaterinburg dismantles perimeter at controversial construction site ahead of citywide poll
• Opinion: RT editor Maria Baronova thinks modern-day Stalinists and Russian liberals are two sides of the same evil coin
• Forbes releases Russian ‘30 under 30’ rating for the first time
• Investigative Committee reportedly received a second claim of high-ranking FSB racketeering two months ago and has not responded
• State Duma passes bill allowing Russians with HIV to adopt children already living with them

She only knew her own name

A few months ago, Anya Zharova left her apartment in the Moscow suburb of Balashikha to take out the trash and never came back. Several hours later, Anya’s family found her in a hospital, but she didn’t recognize them. Now, Anya is running a YouTube channel in an attempt to remember who she was before — and to warn friends from her past life that she no longer knows who they are. Meduza asked Kommersant correspondent Ksenia Mironova to tell Anya’s story.

Read the story: “Fifteen-year-old Anya Zharova lost her memory half a year ago. She’s making YouTube videos to try and get it back.”

A crisis at Kommersant

🤥 What newspaper staff were told vs. what managers claim publicly

On May 20, the public learned that Kommersant has forced out two journalists, special correspondent Ivan Safronov and editor Maxim Ivanov, at the insistence of the newspaper’s owner, Alisher Usmanov. The dismissals were reportedly the result of an article published on April 18 about Federation Council Speaker Valentina Matviyenko potentially stepping down to lead Russia’s Pension Fund, clearing the way for current Foreign Intelligence Service Director Sergey Naryshkin. After Safronov and Ivanov were dismissed, Kommersant’s entire politics desk resigned in protest, plunging the outlet into a crisis. The newspaper’s editor-in-chief and the chairman of the board then accused Safronov and Ivanov of violating editorial standards, prompting a statement from the remaining staff that Kommersant’s shareholders “are right now destroying one of the best media outlets in Russia.” Meduza has learned more about how the situation with the Matviyenko story developed inside Kommersant’s newsroom, uncovering information that undermines claims from management that reporters broke any editorial standards.

Read the story here.

😇 The Kremlin comments

Kremlin representative Dmitry Peskov commented on the forced resignation of Ivan Safronov and Maxim Ivanov from the major Russian newspaper Kommersant. Peskov, who lauded Safronov, called the matter “an exclusively corporate question.” He said the Kremlin sees no reason for government involvement to examine potential violations of Russian media laws or intimidation of journalists.

📦 Journalists who resigned in protest locked out of newsroom, escorted out of office building under guard

The 11 journalists who resigned yesterday from the Russian newspaper Kommersant have had their passes into the publication’s newsroom blocked. One of the journalists, deputy politics editor Mariya-Luiza Tirmaste, wrote on Facebook that the newspaper’s head of human resources notified the group about their blocked passes at the apparent request of its editor-in-chief, Vladimir Zhelonkin. Tirmaste asked her followers to help her find a labor attorney.

Read Meduza's report here.

🗑️ Kolesnikov: The Kommersant scandal is just the latest in an industry that's been reduced to a sham

In an op-ed for RBC, political expert Andrei Kolesnikov says Russia’s news media has “fallen from grace” because reporters and shareholders are now accountable to the state’s ruling elite, not readers. Kolesnikov’s article is a response to the crisis at Kommersant, but he says the Russian media’s decline dates back to the “book scandal” of 1997, when television and newspaper journalists launched an “information war” against five leading reformers in the Yeltsin administration. This incident, he argues, divided the media into several “fronts,” and started reporters down a path where they are always “changing sides,” depending on an outlet’s current owners.

The next stage in the media’s downfall, Kolesnikov says, was self-censorship. Journalists are constantly “restraining themselves,” he explains, out of fear of upsetting their superiors. This chain of command extends to a publication’s owners, who are themselves perpetually trying to guess what the state elites want to see in the news media. As a result, self-censorship is now fundamental to Russian journalism’s understanding of professional standards and “corporate ethics.” In other words, journalists have gradually transformed into state employees, and the country’s private media outlets are only nominally private.

These shifts, Kolesnikov says, have made the economics of Russian journalism “a total deception.” Advertisements and subscriptions still matter, he says, but true survival in the industry relies on the support of sponsors (owners and investors) who seek to advertise their political loyalty to the state. The news media, in other words, is now a service provided by journalists to the authorities. As the space for independent reporting shrinks, owning media outlets in Russia becomes more troublesome and even dangerous, which leads players who don’t cash out (like Alisher Usmanov) to be more attentive than ever to the observance of “corporate ethics” in their newsrooms.

Russia’s most successful journalists today manage to combine quality reporting with an understanding of what’s off limits, but this can be exhausting for reporters and editors, and sometimes it leads to “image scandals” like the one at Kommersant this week, when tempers boil over.

In his conclusion, Kolesnikov argues that the Russian state has made a mistake by neutering the free press. The authorities need independent journalists like they need real elections: as a social force that criticizes, highlights, and controls its worst instincts.

And the walls came down 🚧

On the morning of May 21, crews in Yekaterinburg started dismantling a wall that went up a week earlier around the construction site for a new cathedral in one of the city's few remaining public parks. The wall was erected after protesters repeatedly toppled the original perimeter: a chain-link fence. After nearly a week of demonstrations that attracted national news attention, at the suggestion of President Putin, local officials decided to conduct a citywide survey to determine the construction site's future. In the meantime, the city's diocese asked workers to remove the wall around the site, “for the sake of peace and harmony in the city.”

Baronova: What did Stalinists ever do to you? 🤷‍♀️

In an op-ed for the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, former opposition activist turned Russia Today editor Maria Baronova argues that Russia’s modern-day Stalinists and liberals are essentially responsible for the same amount of evil in the country today. She arrives at this conclusion by downplaying the significance of contemporary Stalinists (they’re not trying to resurrect the Gulag; they’re just a bunch of Internet couch potatoes, pontificating about the dead of a past world, juggling statistics and fake quotes to defend a vanished regime), and citing her own experience as someone hounded out of the liberal opposition.

What on Earth do these two groups have in common? Baronova says they’re both motivated by “hatred, dreams of power, and the desire to hurt others, and to prove to themselves that they’re right, and that others are wrong.” Both Stalinists and liberals, Baronova says, “produce evil” in the name of their convictions. Liberals, she says, are actually worse, in the sense that they more often harass people who are still alive. Without referring to herself directly, Baronova is clearly describing her own experiences as an oppositionist, before joining Russia Today.

News briefs

• 🌟 The Russian edition of Forbes has released its first set of “30 under 30” profiles naming the most promising young Russians in 10 categories from sports to public service. The winners were selected from a pool of 100 nominees by Forbes staff and a council of experts. Find out who made the list.
• 👮 Alexander Shestun, the former government head for Moscow Oblast’s Serpukhovsky District, is in jail awaiting trial for embezzlement, bribery, and other charges. He had told journalists before his arrest that high-ranking officials in Russia’s Federal Security Service and in Vladimir Putin’s administration had threatened to bring a criminal case against him. Now, Shestun’s press secretary, Vlada Rusina, has told journalists that the former district head submitted a racketeering complaint against an FSB general two months ago. Read the story here.
• 👪 Russia’s State Duma has approved the third and final reading of a bill that allows people with HIV, hepatitis C, and other viruses to adopt children who are already living with them. Read the story here.