Sometimes, amid all the media hubbub, it’s sensible to pause for a moment: and perhaps to stand for a minute’s silence, as International Press Institute members from all over the world did in Helsinki last week. We could have been honouring any of the 28 journalists who have died on active service so far this year — in Pakistan, Azerbaijan, Sri Lanka and beyond. We could have been showing our support for two young American reporters thrown behind bars in North Korea. Yet here was a different, poignant request from a bear of a man.
Dmitry Muratov edits Novaya Gazeta in Moscow. He came to Finland to pick up his award as this year’s Free Media Pioneer. Have you a personal dream? he was asked. ”Not to see any more of my reporters killed,” he replied.
Four of his journalists have been murdered in the past six years. Farewell Igor Domnikov, beaten to death; Yuri Shchekochikhin, poisoned; Anastasia Baburova, shot; and — of course — Anna Politkovskaya. He knows he could be next. Modern Russia is a dangerous place to ask questions, to begin turning over stones. He has two part-owners who matter — Mikhael Gorbachev and Alexander Lebedev — but even they can’t make the work he loves safe.
So why does he battle on? ”Because we think that a newspaper is a service provided to a fair people. Because I don’t want the world to think that my country is a country where the gene of Stalin will live forever. There is a question why today in official text books in Russia — on a number of official sites, including the ministry of defence — Mr Stalin is called ”an efficient state manager”, when what they would like to say is that efficiency in management is the same as violence.
”Why would the ruling elite do that in Russia? What they probably mean to say, and what they try to make us believe, is that the state, the government, is the supreme value of our life, the sun, the god. And corruption is the special profession attached to this god.”
You don’t often hear sincerity, defiance and courage in the briefest, most passionate of speeches. You can’t see the future that awaits Muratov or his paper. You can’t easily relate his spirit to the churnings of Fleet Street. What you can do is fall silent and remember there are fundamental challenges here which writers and readers forget at their peril. Muratov says sadly that Anna Politkovskaya has a granddaughter born four months after her murder. And also think about the man who helped make it all possible: Alexander Lebedev, owner of the London Evening Standard and perhaps now owner of the Independent. Has he got enough oligarch millions left for the task? Is his KGB past an issue as he scoops up British titles?
But judge him — hopefully, critically — by his deeds. And Novaya Gazeta is a good deed in a grim world. – guardian.co.uk