Working in exile
AMSTERDAM — Russian journalists working in exile continue to penetrate the Kremlin’s gargantuan propaganda apparatus, reaching millions of people who remain thirsty for the truth behind Vladimir Putin’s vast electronic curtain. Those reporters — tough, honest, fiercely defiant — these days mainly depend on the kindness of strangers, a business model whose days might be numbered.
The precariousness of their position, and the fragile lifeline of real reporting they produce against appalling odds, was driven home to me at a recent conference on Russian exile journalism. It took place nearly two years after the Russian president launched his savage war in Ukraine, banned the few remaining media outlets that offered reliable, independent information, and prompted hundreds of reporters from Moscow and other cities to flee their homeland.
They, like the hundreds of thousands of other Russians who have left the country since the full-scale invasion, are regarded by Putin as “scum” and “traitors” whose departure would be “necessary self-purification” for Russian society. Many left their country believing they might return within weeks or months. Few still cling to that hope. Moscow has issued arrest warrants for some exiled journalists and is suspected of having poisoned at least two others.
The conference I attended was held in a packed auditorium in Amsterdam, one of a handful of European hubs where Russian journalists have revived a facsimile of their prewar news operations. Those reporters, editors and videographers remain focused on the war and events in Russia, where their work has been deemed a criminal act and their sources face the threat of imprisonment.
In exile, once-profitable independent Russian media outlets have been severed from what had been their main base of subscribers and advertisers, who are forbidden from supporting them. Their business models are no longer viable.
To sustain their reporting, they rely largely on charity. That means thousands of donors, mainly foundations and individuals in the West. At some outlets, those gifts now account for three-quarters of the revenue needed to pay for TV studios, equipment, travel and salaries.
The resulting work is accessed by millions of Russians on YouTube, Telegram and the other remaining pinholes of uncensored content.
It is a crucial undertaking that enables a tendril of straight news to pierce the Kremlin’s thickets of lies. Its death would mean that Putin’s brainwashing project, which has already captured and coerced so many of his subjects, would go uncontested.
But the sense that they are working on borrowed time is an undercurrent to everything I’ve heard from Russian journalists. It is because of not only the uncertainly of funding but also the Kremlin’s intensifying efforts to muffle information that does not slavishly echo propaganda.
“In 2022, our Russian website was blocked four times,” said Alexander Gubsky, publisher of the Moscow Times, who described the regime censors’ cat-and-mouse game to silence unfettered reporting. “Last year, it was blocked four times a week.”
Mikhail Fishman is the well-known host of a weekly show on TV Rain, an independent channel that was banned after the invasion, prompting dozens of staffers to flee. It now works from Amsterdam; Fishman’s show attracts well over half a million viewers on YouTube and more on other platforms.
“Russian exile journalism still matters,” he said. It transmits a critical message to opponents of the regime and the war: You are not alone.
An echo of that message recently surfaced with the news that an antiwar candidate had announced he would challenge Putin in next month’s sham presidential election. The candidate, Boris Nadezhdin, was predictably banned by Russia’s electoral commission, which issued its ruling Thursday. The fact that tens of thousands of Russians had declared their support anyway, lining up in public to sign his ballot petitions, hinted at the latent opposition to the regime.
Putin’s aim is not mainly to convince Russians he is right or the regime is efficient or the war is just. It is to intimidate them into apathy, disengagement or silence. In that, he has been successful to some degree; dissenters who remain face a choice between keeping quiet or risking prison.
For Russians who have left, the choice is often excruciating. Often it means leaving parents or children behind; Fishman and some other well-known exiles would face certain prosecution were they to return. Still, they remain undaunted.
Derk Sauer, a Dutch media executive who founded the Moscow Times in the 1990s, fled Russia after more than three decades shortly after the invasion two years ago, carrying a single suitcase. He has been instrumental in establishing a safe harbor in Amsterdam for dozens of exiled Russian journalists and raising money for their work.
“That’s the $100 million question,” he said. “There’s no big master plan. If they all lose their jobs and become pizza deliverers, then you have no [Russian-language] journalism left. You have only propaganda.”