The Kremlin's M.O.

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4.6 • 8.7K Ratings

🗓️ 9 March 2022

⏱️ 16 minutes

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Summary

This is a piece we first ran last September. It's reported by OTM producer Molly Schwartz who until the war in Ukraine started was a fellow on a journalism program in Moscow. Molly’s recounted for us the effects of a bizarre and cumbersome law - one of the many tactics used by the Kremlin to silence dissenting voices.

Following widespread protests across Russia last year in support of jailed opposition leader Alexey Navalny, Putin's government has engaged in a wave of crackdowns on dissent, expelling and imprisoning opposition leaders, and shutting down independent news outlets. They've also, since April 2021, added 30 Russian journalists or news outlets to the government's list of "foreign agents."

Journalists or news organizations who are labeled as "foreign agents" don't have to to shut down or stop publishing. Instead, they have to jump through various bureaucratic hoops — like reporting all their income and expenses to the Ministry of Justice (to be publicly posted on its website), and, perhaps most Kafkaesque of all, including a 24-word legal disclaimer on top of everything they publish. This includes every article, every advertisement, every tweet, every Instagram story, every response to a friend's comment on social media.

This is a segment from our September 24th, 2021 program, The Subversion Playbook.

Transcript

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0:00.0	On this week's On the Media Midweek podcast, where re-airing a piece we ran in September,
0:08.5	it's reported by OTM producer Molly Schwartz, who, until the war in Ukraine started, was
0:13.5	a fellow on a journalism program in Moscow.
0:16.7	The situation on the ground for independent journalism in Russia is dire and getting
0:22.1	worse daily.
0:23.5	Echo Moskv and TV Reign went dark last week, and this week some international news outlets
0:29.5	announced that they're pulling their journalists out of the country in fear for their safety.
0:35.5	The current crackdowns are severe, but silencing dissenting voices isn't a new thing for
0:41.0	the Kremlin.
0:42.1	And the months leading up to the Duma elections, the Russian government came down hard on
0:47.0	news outlets and other organizations.
0:50.2	In this story, Molly explains how death by bureaucracy is the Kremlin's MO.
0:57.5	On July 15, Sonya Grasman lost her job.
1:00.9	It wasn't the best day of my life, I can tell you.
1:05.2	Grasman is a 27-year-old Russian journalist who used to work at an investigative news outlet
1:09.9	called Pryact.
1:11.2	I did a podcast which told the stories of Russian doctors who were on the front lines against
1:18.5	coronavirus, which was based on doctors' diaries.
1:23.6	And it was the only podcast that conveyed a realistic picture of what was happening
1:30.7	in Russia's hospitals.
1:32.7	But back in July, the Russian government went after Pryact, calling it a quote, undesirable
1:37.7	organization and basically banning it from the country.
	...

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