In Russia, Journalists Face Blatant Attacks
Mikhail Beketov, an editor, was beaten severely in 2008. More Photos »
Published: May 17, 2010
KHIMKI, Russia — Mikhail Beketov had been warned, but would not stop writing. About dubious land deals. Crooked loans. Under-the-table hush money. All evidence, he argued in his newspaper, of rampant corruption in this Moscow suburb.
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“Last spring, I called for the resignation of the city’s leadership,” Mr. Beketov said in one of his final editorials. “A few days later, my automobile was blown up. What is next for me?”
Not long after, he was savagely beaten outside his home and left to bleed in the snow. His fingers were bashed, and three later had to be amputated, as if his assailants had sought to make sure that he would never write another word. He lost a leg. Now 52, he is in a wheelchair, his brain so damaged that he cannot utter a simple sentence.
The police promised a thorough investigation, but barely looked up from their desks. Surveillance videos were ignored. Neighbors were not interviewed. Information about politicians’ displeasure with Mr. Beketov was deemed “unconfirmed,” according to interviews with officials and residents.
Prosecutors, who had repeatedly rejected Mr. Beketov’s pleas for protection, took over the case, but did not seem to accomplish much more. Mr. Beketov’s close colleagues said they were eager to offer insights about who in the government had been stung by his exposés. But no one asked.
Eighteen months later, there have been no arrests.
In retrospect, the violence was an omen, beginning a wave of unsolved attacks and official harassment against journalists, human rights activists and opposition politicians around the region, which includes the Moscow suburbs, but not the city itself. Rarely, if ever, is anyone held responsible.
One editor was beaten in front of his home, and the assailants seized only copies of his articles and other material for the next day’s issue, not his wallet or cellphone. Local officials insisted that he sustained his injuries while drunk.
Another journalist was pummeled by plainclothes police officers after a demonstration. It was all captured on video. Even so, the police released a statement saying that he had hurt himself when he was accidentally pushed by the crowd.
These types of attacks or other means of intimidation, including aggressive efforts by prosecutors to shut down news media outlets or nonprofit groups, serve as an unnerving deterrent. And in a few cases in recent years, the violence in the country has escalated into contract killings. Corruption is widespread in Russia, and government often functions poorly. But most journalists and nonprofit groups shy away from delving deeply into these problems.
The culture of impunity in Russia represents the most glaring example of the country’s inability to establish real laws in the two decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union. And this failure radiates throughout society, touching upon ordinary men and women who are trying to carve out lives in the new Russia, but are wary of questioning authority.
Russia’s president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, has bemoaned the country’s “legal nihilism.” Yet under Mr. Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin, it has persisted. And among the major beneficiaries have been the governing party’s politicians.
Threats, Then a Beating
Boris Gromov, the governor of the Moscow region, commanded the 40th Army during the Soviet war in Afghanistan, and his opponents believe that he governs with a general’s sense of order. Mr. Gromov, appointed by Mr. Putin, has in turn seeded local government with fellow Afghanistan veterans, including the Khimki mayor, Vladimir Strelchenko.
Mikhail Beketov often referred to Mr. Gromov and Mr. Strelchenko as “army boots,” and did not think much of their honesty.
Mr. Beketov was brawny like a boxer, fast-talking, perpetually late and prone to latching onto causes. He himself had been an officer in the army paratroops, but then switched to journalism, working as a war correspondent in Afghanistan and Chechnya. His experiences left him with a distaste for overbearing military officials.
He established his newspaper, Khimkinskaya Pravda (Khimki Truth), in 2006. He wrote regularly about what he considered corruption among local officials, who were often members of Mr. Putin’s governing party, United Russia.
He financed the newspaper himself. It had a circulation of only about 10,000 copies, but it garnered a large following in Khimki, which has a population of 185,000, and the surrounding cities, especially after Mr. Beketov grabbed hold of two topics.
His articles resonated nationally when he questioned why the city had demolished a monument that contained the remains of Soviet fighter pilots. The work was done to widen a road.
And he relentlessly focused on the fate of the Khimki forest, a pristine expanse of old-growth oaks and wild animals, including elk and boars, improbably close to Moscow. With little public notice, the government had planned to build a major highway to St. Petersburg through the forest. Mr. Beketov suspected that officials were secretly profiting from the project.
James Hill for The New York Times
Pyotr Lipatov was brutally attacked as he was participating at an opposition rally. More Photos »
Above the Law
Intimidating the Messengers
Articles in this series examine corruption and abuse of power in Russia two decades after the end of Communism.
Local officials, unaccustomed to such criticism, lashed out publicly. Privately, Mr. Beketov received phone threats. He asked the authorities for help, but was rebuffed, his colleagues said. He returned home one day to discover his dog dead on his doorstep. Then his car was blown up.
Instead of investigating the explosion, prosecutors opened a criminal inquiry into his newspaper. His friends said that Mr. Beketov told them that one city official had warned him about his articles.
But he did not relent. “You can imagine what kind of money the authorities plan to fleece from this so-called infrastructure,” he wrote about the highway plan.
“For four years, I have observed our authorities,” he said. “I have closely interacted with many senior officials, including Strelchenko himself. Given how the authorities have collected scandals with frightening regularity, I have come to a regrettable conclusion: They are shameless.”
On a November evening in 2008, Mr. Beketov was assaulted, most likely by several people, outside his home. He was discovered by a neighbor the next day.
Even as Mr. Beketov later lay in a coma at the hospital, he was not safe. A threat was phoned in: We will finish him off.
His friends and colleagues grew so alarmed that they moved him out of the Khimki hospital to a better, more secure one in neighboring Moscow.
Both the police and prosecutors found the case tough to crack.
Yuliya Zhukova, a spokeswoman in the Moscow region for the investigative committee of the prosecutor general’s office, said the office had conducted a thorough inquiry, but ultimately had to suspend it for lack of evidence. She said that investigators needed to interview Mr. Beketov to make progress, but that his doctors would not allow that. (Mr. Beketov has been unable to communicate since the attack.)
Yevgenia Chirikova, a leader of a local environmental group who worked closely with Mr. Beketov on his articles about the highway, said that she was eager to help, but that investigators did not contact her.
“I waited and waited and waited,” Ms. Chirikova said. “I knew that according to the rules, they are supposed to question those closest to the victim.”
She said she decided to approach the investigators herself. They questioned her for several hours, asking her about her motivations for getting involved in the case, she said.
Ms. Zhukova criticized allies of Mr. Beketov and some journalists for assuming that the attack was related to Mr. Beketov’s work.
“Very often, unfortunately, they have presented erroneous information, and misled people regarding the course of the investigation,” she said.
Governor Gromov and Mayor Strelchenko declined to be interviewed for this article. After the attack, Mr. Strelchenko said he had played no role in it, but also complained that it was getting too much attention.
“I don’t want to say that it was good what happened to Mikhail,” he said. “But I want you to separate truth from untruth.”
Attacks on Two Editors
To the north on the M-10 highway from Khimki is a city called Solnechnogorsk, where a newspaper, Solnechnogorsk Forum, was publishing exposés about how local politicians were seeking to do away with elections to maintain power.
The newspaper’s editor, Yuri Grachev, is 73. In February 2009, several men assaulted him as he left his home, putting him in intensive care for a month with a severe concussion, a broken nose and other wounds.
Police officials first said he was drunk and fell down. Then they said he had been the victim of a random robbery, though all that was taken was a folder with material for the newspaper’s next issue. The muggers have not been found, and politicians from the governing party, United Russia, said the attack had nothing to do with Mr. Grachev’s work.
“Maybe it was hooligans or maybe it was by chance,” said Nikolai Bozhko, the local party leader, who is also an Afghanistan war veteran. “The idea that it was ordered — I don’t believe that.”
“The system will stop at nothing to break you,” Mr. Grachev said.
Farther up the M-10 Highway is Klin, where an opposition rally was held in March 2009 to protest corruption and increases in utility rates.
As Pyotr Lipatov, editor of an opposition newspaper called Consensus and Truth, was leaving the rally, three men pushed him to the ground and punched him repeatedly on the head. “Even when I was unconscious, they didn’t let me go,” Mr. Lipatov said.
This beating was recorded on video by protesters. Mr. Lipatov’s colleagues used the video to track down the men who beat him. They were police officers.
While Mr. Lipatov, 28, was recovering in the hospital, he said two other police officers visited and urged him to sign a statement saying that he had provoked the attack. He refused. The police then issued a statement.
“According to Lipatov, filming the meeting with his camera, he found himself in the middle of a reactionary crowd, was pushed and fell to the ground,” the statement said. Two videos of the demonstration show a different sequence of events.
Officials later acknowledged that police officers had been involved in the attack, but they still brought no charges. Instead, they raided Mr. Lipatov’s offices, seized computers and brought a criminal extremism suit against him. They asserted that he had sought to foment “negative stereotypes and negative images of members of the security forces.”
Fearing for his safety and more criminal charges, he quit.
“Everyone was against me — the judges, the police, the prosecutors, everyone,” he said. “I took over Consensus and Truth because I supported Prime Minister Putin’s call to fight corruption. But look what happened. The machine here did everything possible to defeat us.”
Promises, but No Arrests
After the attacks in Khimki, Solnechnogorsk, Klin and elsewhere, the authorities, apparently concerned that the region had developed a reputation as a danger zone for journalists, vowed to protect them.
“Attacks on journalists, naturally, create a special resonance,” Governor Gromov’s office said. “The regional government believes that every case of an attack on journalists must be thoroughly investigated.” Even so, no arrests have been made in any of the cases.
And the harassment has not let up.
On March 31, The New York Times interviewed Ms. Zhukova, the spokeswoman for the investigators, about Mr. Lipatov. The next day, investigators approached him in the central market of Klin and said they urgently wanted to question him about the beating, he said.
The session lasted more than six hours. Mr. Lipatov said they tried to pressure him to sign a statement saying that he had wanted to lead a mob to storm city buildings, thereby justifying the police beating. He said he declined to do so.
Back in Khimki, a new opposition newspaper, Khimki Our Home, was established to help continue Mr. Beketov’s work.
The editor, Igor Belousov, 50, is a deeply religious man. He publishes the Russian Orthodox calendar in his newspaper. Before turning to journalism, he was a senior city official, but he resigned because of what he described as pervasive corruption.
Not long after the publication got started, Mr. Belousov was accused of criminal libel by prosecutors and civil libel by Mayor Strelchenko. In February, the police, without any notice, arrested him on charges of selling cocaine. Court documents show that the case is based exclusively on the testimony of a drug dealer from another city who could not recall basic details of the alleged crime.
“We used to have so many journalists here, but they have all suffered and have all given up,” Mr. Belousov said. “Only I remained, and now I am giving up.”
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