Clara Zid, May 2024 (Translation: Vittoria Sperante)
“We left because we didn’t have any wish to breathe the same air with people who support the war“.
Victor is a 65 years old journalist who has spent 30 years of his life working on TV2, a Siberian independent media outlet, closed down by the Russian government in 2015. He continued working on TV2s online News Agency, which was blocked in 2022 after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. About the same time, he migrated to Europe and launched two new media projects: Nemoskva (Not Moscow) and Ochevidcy (Eyewitnesses), which are now both blocked by the Russian Supervisory Service.
He says: “I collect blockages, I already have four of them, but our main ways of communicating with the audience are social media now”. Qurium has built Bifrost mirrors for both Ochevidcy and Nemoskva to ensure that its readership can reach the sites without the use of VPNs.
The curious thing about these “tribulations of a journalist in Russia” is that Victor was not trained to be a journalist. His passion for journalism started when he somewhere around 1990 was teaching a course in Medieval History at a university when a friend created the first independent, non-governmental television company in Tomsk, TV2. The friend invited Victor to join. “At that time, lots of people in Russia started a new life and I was one of them”, he recalls.
TV2 became a large regional media company with more than 200 employees but, from the moment of Putin’s arrival, pressure increased year after year: “We were under pressure from advertisers and we were regularly under threat that the license would be withdrawn”, Victor recalls. Also, there were difficult relations with the regional government in Tomsk.
One of the most awarded interviews in the history of TV2 was with the chief of the Directorate of Internal Services in the Tomsk region, General Gretschmann. “He was our enemy, he put a lot of effort into closing the TV company. He wrote denunciations against us and filed criminal cases against the management of the TV company”, Victor remembers. In 2010 a journalist died while being held in a drunk-tank (sobering-up room) in a police station in Tomsk. It was a big scandal and being under pressure from media General Gretschmann consented to give TV2 an interview. After the interview the General was dismissed and TV2 received the main TV award in Russia – the Tefi Award – for the interview.
It was three decades of work in one of the smartest regional media companies in Russia, says Victor. “It was very interesting, lovely work with very bright people, a work that brought me joy and was appreciated by the citizens of Tomsk. It wasn’t by chance that they held rallies to support us when the government closed us down”, Victor says. But he is afraid they as a newsroom, they didn’t manage to do the most important thing: “To change life in Russia. And what happened in the end with the country I consider to be my personal defeat”.
“I always liked Navalny’s courage, his thorough journalistic investigations, and his belief in his own actions.”
The TV2 channel hosted opposition figures such as Alexei Navalny on various occasions, starting when he was gaining popularity as a blogger. “I have a lot of respect for Alexey, it is still difficult for me to accept the fact that he is dead. I can not agree with some of his political views or actions, but I always liked Navalny’s courage, his thorough journalistic investigations, and his belief in his own actions. The Russian powers were afraid of him”, says Victor.
The journalist is blunted about Navalny’s death and says that he was killed in prison: “He was being slaughtered. Man-slaughtered. He was constantly thrown to the detention unit. The violent and arbitrary circumstances of the detention were killing him. No rules applied to Navalny. The authorities were killing him on the behalf of Kremlin. The last time Alexei talked to his colleagues he mentioned that he could be poisoned at any time.”.
According to Victor, Navalny had a tremendous impact on the young generation as he was showing that the dignitaries who make the decisions were archaic: “His murder was first of all a tragedy for young people who hoped to live in another Russia”.
In the end of 2013 there was an important event that was one of the reasons for the closure of TV2 – they sent a reporting team to Kyiv to cover the first strings of the Maidan revolution The Maidan RevolutionIn February 2014 the Maidan Revolution took place in Ukraine when deadly clashes between protesters and state forces in the capital Kyiv culminated in the ousting of elected President Viktor Yanukovych, the return to the 2004 Constitution of Ukraine, and the outbreak of the 2014 Russo-Ukrainian War (Source: Wikipedia). (Revolution of Dignity). Federal television didn’t give an objective picture of the event, and TV2 journalists wanted to see what actually happened on the ground. The TV team talked to those people standing on the Maidan square in Kiev but also to those in Kharkov, who were against the revolution.
“People were shocked by the shower of lies that came from the federal media”
Both Ukrainian supporters and opponents of Maidan said the same thing, the Ukrainian government had been caught stealing and should resign and be replaced, but the narrative was different from what Russian people heard from the federal channels. “People were shocked by the shower of lies that came from the federal media”, Victor explains. After TV2 aired their interviews they received lots of critics from their audience as they trusted the federal news.
At the end of 2014, the final decision on cutting off TV2 from broadcast was made in Moscow at the level of president administration. They accused TV2 of promoting separatist ideas. Victor agrees that economic issues were on their agenda, like the fact that only 20% of tax money remained in the region and the rest was transferred to the central administration. Or ecological issues, reporting how woods and forests were being destroyed due to lack of money. “We covered all those issues so that people could ask themselves the question. Did we have a separatist agenda?”.
TV2’s TV channel disappeared but the TV2 News Agency remained as a small media, with 15 people and under constant pressure. “Federal media wrote a lot about the fact that we were agents, they showed me on federal television, describing me as an agent of Mossad, FBI and member of terrorist organizations. There was even a film shot about me”. But there was still an opportunity to work, TV2 had advertisers and the outlet became a successful regional business until February 24, 2022, the day of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
“We managed to talk about the war for ten days and after that we were closed.”
“All this time I told journalists when they came to work: you should know that you can loose this job at any time, the media can be closed any day”, Victor says. TV2 News Agency was blocked in March 2022 by the Russian Roskomnadzor together with other media reporting on the war. The site was blocked because they used the word “war” Victor says: “Because we called war a war. We managed to talk about the war for ten days and after that we were closed”.
It was not easy: “There was a feeling of general defeat because we managed to build TV2 News Agency under difficult conditions, and now it was being destroyed again”. Victor and his wife decided to leave Russia: “It was difficult to know whether we would be imprisoned or not, but the reason of the departure was the fact that the authorities did not allow us to work according to our code of ethics which lead to that we could not work at all”.
Now Victor is worried for his dear and near ones that stayed in Russia: “What we do fear is some kind of Armageddon. It’s like in the movie “Don’t Look Up”, where people are trying not to mention, not to pay attention, to the approaching comet”.
Victor is now working on his new projects that try to warn of the approaching comet. Ochevidcy (Eyewitnesses) records feelings and thoughts about the war from ordinary people in Russia and Ukraine. They have collected 500 video interviews and more than 300 texts. People from Russia and Ukraine started sending their letters with texts, describing what they felt, what changed in their life. Some of them even sent their diaries.
The letters kept coming every day. “I hope that they will be useful to future historians”, Victor says. I especially recall a video from an old woman who as a child saw the bombing of Kharkov during the Second World War. And she survived. Now her granddaughter lives under the bombs all in the same Kharkov. Only then there were German bombs and now there are Russian bombs. The grandmother is expressing her feelings and thoughts about the situation in front of a camera.
The sites contain a lot of testimonies, like Pravdin, an ex-psychiatrist who regularly goes with a placard to manifest against the war in Ukraine. They detain him, he pays the fines and the next day he returns with a new placard. Or a Russian woman who came to Mariupol to visit her family, and then the war broke out. “First she believed all the things that were shown on Russian television, but her opinions changed”, Victor explains. They had nothing to eat, and they had to loot. She survived and could finally leave Mariupol.
“I hope that Ochevidcy might not only help historians but also Ukrainians and Russians, to give a feeling that they are not alone”, Victor says. He adds: “Often people with anti-war views feel that they have gone crazy, they live under pressure from colleagues, relatives, the state, and here we make it clear that in fact there are many people like them who understand that war is evil”.
“Nemoskva” (Not Moscow) is Victor’s other project that he launched with old colleagues from TV2. Nemoskva covers local problems in Russia like social, economy, ecology and human rights: “We are trying to establish relations with an audience that does not seem to be against the war but really does not support it personally. They doubt and are looking for alternative sources of information. We are trying to provide them with alternative information that might change their minds”.
Nemoskva has correspondents in Russia that are forced to work more and more underground, nameless, anonymous, because they work in a situation of very high risk. Victor has had to take some of them out of Russia because they were under too great threat: “I constantly think about what can happen with my colleagues who remain in Russia. It is not easy for us to accomplish this project, but we believe that we are doing the right thing”.
It is difficult to predict Victor’s and Russia’s future: “We are in a very unstable situation; we do not know what will happen in one year”. Victor would like to come back, to walk the streets of his city, but he does not know if this will ever happen: “I hope to live to the time when I see that this evil is punished, this power is evil for Russia, evil for Ukraine, evil for the world”.
Nemovska and Ochevidcy are hosted with Virtualroad.org since 2023.