ResistingRussian I


Team 29 is a unique Russian media platform which is run by journalists and lawyers. Barney Cullum reports from St Petersburg


f you want to fight someone and win, first you have to be prepared to laugh at them, says Nikolay Ovchinnikov. The Team 29 editor has a mop of red hair and darting eyes, and a well-worn thumb knuckle is working


independently, calming pulsing smartphone notifications. If hackers employed by the Russian government are indeed targeting the 29-year-old’s emails and social media – as he suspects – they will have a job keeping up. Ovchinnikov is alerted whenever an app called Gebnya – a Russian slang term that loosely translates as ‘bloody KGB’ – is downloaded from the Team 29 website. This happened more than 50,000 times in the first three months after its launch in April. Gebnya is mainly a platform for journalism but it also hosts a video game. It’s a not-so-virtual world in which the central character has to stay one step ahead of state ‘tricks’ to bring him down (puppet judges, mercenary police and the like). The game instils confidence and a sense of resilience in Team 29’s readers by laughing at the ‘bully’ state machine. Away from the light relief, the ability to guarantee connectivity to empowering news and information was the serious, primary reason the spin-off app was developed. “It means that, if our website is blocked in Russia, we have somewhere else we can publish, which can be accessed offline too,” explains Ovchinnikov. “You can go to the protests, call Gebnya up on your smartphone and read the legal advice.” The medium was designed in 2017 during a political climate


in which appetite for protest against the Russian government was matched only by a blunt determination from the police to squash it. In St Petersburg, where Team 29 is based, protesters were forced to serve ‘administrative arrest’ for up to five days in cells with no bedding, according to Amnesty International. The human rights organisation described the pre-election crackdowns as ‘purposeful humiliation’. Websites that do not peddle the government’s party line can


be temporarily blocked during sensitive periods. Journalists have been victims of assassination attempts too, although the Glasnost Defence Foundation, which monitors such attacks, has observed a marked decrease in suspected contract killings since 2010. Three incidents were recorded last year. Vladimir Putin was re-elected just before the app could be


rolled out. However, in Russia, it is rarely the president who is reviled but the country’s wearying tradition of heavy-handed state control. “The number of people who want to live a life where the government doesn’t touch them, doesn’t interrupt their communications, doesn’t go to their houses is growing,” says Ovchinnikov. “Six per cent of


14 | theJournalist


the Russian population were the subject of state espionage in the first half of this decade. That’s a very big number.” In Soviet times, ‘enemies of the state’ could be sent to labour


camps or executed. Things have improved, but that does not mean a civilised and satisfactory state of affairs. Educated Russians are aware of their rights to express themselves and to support political movements. Both were enshrined in the 1991 constitution established when the Russian Federation was born. Article 29, which allows the right to freely seek, receive, transmit, produce and distribute information, inspired Team 29’s name. The team’s mix of lawyers and journalists are unravelling


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If our website is blocked in Russia, we have somewhere else we can publish, which can be accessed offline too


cases where people have been persecuted as a tactic to increase public loyalty, to the state’s politics through fear. Its biggest success? Last year, Putin pardoned Oksana Sevastidi, a pensioner with no political history who had spent several years in jail after receiving a benign text message from Georgia, with which Russia had been at war. Ivan Pavlov, the lawyer who created Team 29, represented Savastidi four years ago after being connected to her by a reader. Ovchinnikov then made people aware of the flaky closed-court verdict. His reporting and feature writing exposed the holes in the prosecution’s case to the extent that it threatened to embarrass the government. “The president pardoned them only after we took this case, wrote about it and dedicated our lawyers to it,” he recalls with some pride. Team 29 also publishes pre-emptive ‘how to’ pieces that arm readers with sufficient knowledge of the law and police-state culture to avoid detention. “Our structure is unique,” says Ovchinnikov. “In Russia, there are law firms that have a press secretary. But we are a team of three journalists and six lawyers. That structure hasn’t been built elsewhere.” “In Russia, ‘winning’ represents getting a fine rather than a


prison term, whether you’re guilty of any crime or not,” I am told. This goes for journalists and protesters alike. Team 29 is not scared of a crackdown, feeling its legal savvy and digital dexterity will keep it a step ahead of bent judges and state censors. Young Russians’ enthusiasm for such skills is reflected in the


title’s readership figures. Resonant articles are attracting 20,000 unique page views. Appetite can be measured by the donations that are flooding in. “We call them payments, not donations,” I’m corrected. “We cannot call ourselves an NGO any more [due to ‘foreign agent’ legislation introduced in Putin’s previous term] so we cannot call what we receive donations either. But we get tens of thousands of euros from ordinary readers every month.” Where does this leave questions about media imbalance?


The west is fretful of the influence of quasi-state broadcasters such as RT (formerly Russia Today). Ovchinnikov laughs off the threat of propaganda, saying it is merely background noise in post-Soviet Russia. “When we hear that people are scared of Russia Today, we think it’s very funny. No one among Generation Y watches television in Russia.” The reality for young Russians


is that Team 29 is just one progressive information source in


KREMLIN POOL / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO


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