Russia


Moscow raises the temperature amid pandemic


on Russia from Lenin to Putin. That something related to the Soviet role in the war. “Any kind of suggestion that their World War II record is not spotless is badly received here.” The approach taken when the


Pressure on foreign reporters in Russia has been growing, says James Rodgers


T


he pandemic has sparked the latest flashpoint between the Kremlin and Moscow’s foreign press corps.


The race to create and distribute


vaccines has become a matter not just of public health but also national pride. The Sputnik V vaccine has been Russia’s representative in the competition for perceived scientific supremacy (and commercial gain). Because that competition has played


out in the international media, Moscow correspondents have been dragged in. “That’s where we in particular have


felt most pressure – in our reporting of both the development of the vaccine and its distribution around the world,” says a news editor for a major international media organisation. “In fact, on that latter subject, we have come under a good deal of official pressure.” A foreign reporter based in Russia


agrees: “The Russian authorities are increasingly sensitive to criticism on a wide range of topics from the coronavirus pandemic to human rights.” The history of the treatment of


western correspondents in Russia is also the history of Russia’s relations with the west. Today, those relations, especially


08 | theJournalist


with the UK, continue to sour. The distrust and disapproval are mutual. “The growing anti-western rhetoric in Russia makes reporting from here challenging,” says the reporter. “The portrayal of the West in the Russian state media as waging some kind of campaign to undermine Moscow means that western journalists are often viewed here, wrongly, as having an anti-Russia agenda – simply not the case.” In at least one case, journalists have been threatened with prosecution. Take the sensitive issue of the Soviet victory in World War II – sensitive as it has become a cornerstone of President Vladimir Putin’s idea of Russia as a great and courageous nation, capable of withstanding threats of invasion from the west. Even today, journalists mention the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact – a non- aggression agreement reached between Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany in 1939 – at their peril. “I once had somebody send to me on


WhatsApp, statutes from the Russian Criminal Code when we’d written something that they didn’t like,” one long-serving western correspondent in Moscow told me in an interview for my book, Assignment Moscow: Reporting


Western media raises questions about Russian or Soviet narratives has evolved since the Cold War. The Kremlin has gone on the offensive. As Dmitri Trenin, the director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, put it in his 2016 essay, Should We Fear Russia? “Rather than hushing up criticism of Russia and its leaders, which the Soviet Union practised all the time, the Russian state-run media attack this criticism immediately, head-on, and seek to demolish the western story.” Matthew Chance has reported from Moscow for CNN since the late 1990s. His experience in the latter part of his time there tends to confirm that. “We’re seen more as hostile actors in their world,” he told me. “It translates into the way we’re spoken to, into the access we’ve got, which is negligible, and just the general climate of distrust of the foreign media that is


cultivated by the authorities and by pro-Russian outlets.” The way the Financial Times and the


“


That’s where we have felt most pressure – in our reporting of both the development of the vaccine and its distribution around the world


New York Times reported Russia’s coronavirus death toll is a case in point. Although the papers based their stories on data released by officials in Moscow, in May last year, the Russian foreign ministry dismissed the reporting as ‘anti-Russia allegations’. “These publications are incorrect, biased and provide an unacceptably lopsided picture,” said ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova (pictured), although she stopped short of acting on suggestions from some Russian parliamentarians that the two papers be stripped of their accreditation. In all this, there is good news for


today’s Moscow correspondents. They may be offered negligible access, but their work does get read at the highest level – and taken seriously. Why else would the Russian state media try to ‘demolish’ their stories?


James Rodgers completed postings in Moscow for Reuters TV and the BBC during the 1990s and 2000s. Assignment Moscow: Reporting on Russia from Lenin to Putin, is published by IB Tauris


ITAR-TASS NEWS AGENCY / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO


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