MOSCOW — The dead loom over the morning editorial meeting at Russia’s leading investigative newspaper. Novaya Gazeta’s staff is trying to plan the next issue, and editor in chief Dmitry Muratov is in an understandably foul mood.
In a corner hang photos of four reporters he has lost in the past eight years — one beaten to death, one allegedly poisoned, two shot — the most recent Jan. 19.
It’s not easy to put a paper out these days, Muratov said.
“There’s usually a lot of jokes, laughing, talk about ideas. But our batteries are totally spent,” said Muratov, 47, billows of pipe smoke filling the long pauses. “How can there be any sort of (normal) frame of mind when a journalist is being buried?”
That journalist was Anastasia Baburova, a 25-year-old cub reporter. She and a human-rights lawyer were shot execution-style by a masked man with a silenced pistol as they walked together a few blocks from the Kremlin.
In a country considered one of the most dangerous for journalists, no Russian newspaper has suffered like Novaya Gazeta.
In a country where most media have been cowed into submission, no other newspaper publishes such probing investigative articles and acid commentary about government corruption, police-state politics and Chechnya war abuses.
“Every two or three years, we lose someone,” said Elena Kostyuchenko, a 21-year-old investigative writer for the paper. “But you just have to write, write, write and keep writing. You have to.”
Many at Novaya Gazeta are convinced that nationalist or fascist groups are behind the latest attacks. Others suspect the involvement of security agencies, citing past incidents when Novaya Gazeta’s phones were tapped or in 2000, when its computer hard drives were stolen.
Novaya Gazeta writers and editors have attended self-defense classes and keep their notes hidden or stored on secure computer servers. Some use pseudonyms. At least one has bodyguards because of death threats.
