Evan Gershkovich: We must be as loud as possible

This Friday, 29 March, marks the one-year anniversary of Russia’s arrest and unlawful detention of my colleague, Evan Gershkovich, of The Wall Street Journal. That’s one year that Evan has been deprived of his basic rights and confined to a cell 23 hours a day, held on a charge of espionage which he, the US government and the Journal vehemently deny. One year that his parents and his sister have been deprived of their son and brother.  And one year since a mass chilling effect descended on the foreign press corps in Russia because of this brazen assault on the freedom of the press.

Evan’s detention is a singular outrage but also part of a much broader pattern. Last year and this year have been brutal for the safety of journalists working to get the facts from dangerous places across the globe, as chronicled by the Committee to Protect Journalists, Reporters Without Borders and others.

Even within Russia, Evan is not alone: Alsu Kurmasheva, a Russian-American reporter for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty was seized by Russian authorities on a trip to visit her mother and has been in prison since October. Paul Whelan, of course, has been detained there for five years.

After Evan’s arrest, many news outlets withdrew to cover Russia from Berlin, Warsaw and elsewhere given that Vladimir Putin’s regime has made what you and I understand to be fair and independent reporting effectively a crime.

So we are deprived of fact-based news from a country that is central in defining the future for the USA and other democracies. If we don’t stand up and protest against the silencing of the media on such a vital story, when will we decide the time is right to be loud?

We have been making noise for a year now, to ensure we are drawing as much attention as possible to Evan’s predicament and this broader outrage. We did so in part because journalists run at the story. But we also did so because, in the very early days after Evan’s arrest, we received advice from a trusted source that there will be times to be loud and times to be quiet and this was a time to be loud. Put another way, until there is reason to be quiet – which might suggest a sensitive breakthrough is near at hand – be loud.

We also didn’t have a choice. There may be times when quiet diplomacy can be effective to resolve such hostage issues. In our case, the Russian government had publicly accused our innocent colleague of spying, a message we had to counter as forcefully and as quickly as we could.

In that, as in so many other things over the course of the past year, we were greatly aided by outside help.

The White House, the State Department and the US Senate Intelligence Committee immediately made clear Evan – an accredited reporter in Russia – is not a spy. And in the days, weeks and months that followed, we have benefitted hugely from the interest and support of other news organisations, the international community of journalists and well-wishers the world over to keep awareness of Evan’s situation high.

We know that The Wall Street Journal won’t directly negotiate his release – that is the responsibility of governments. But we are convinced keeping Evan in the spotlight will help set the stage for successful negotiations at the right time. We hope that time is very soon.

Within the Journal, we have learned that being loud is a companywide effort. I don’t think there is a department at Dow Jones & Co., the Journal’s parent, that hasn’t in some way been involved.

The company’s leadership, legal team, the newsroom and communications department would be obvious. Less so, maybe, the marketing team, which we rely on to create ads that we and other newspapers have run on milestones such as 100 days of Evan’s incarceration. Or the advertising department, which has used barter ads to push Evan’s cause on social media. Or government affairs, which has launched a campaign of awareness on Capitol Hill in Washington. Or technology and circulation, which have built a page outside of our paywall on WSJ.com so readers can learn about Evan free of charge. Or our Standards team, which ensures that our advocacy work and our news reporting are kept appropriately apart. Or our individual reporters, who have taken it upon themselves to organise runs, swims, read-a-thons and letter-writing campaigns to highlight Evan’s work and interests.

Yet we also realise all this has yet to pay the one dividend that matters: Evan’s safe return.

So on his one-year anniversary we also ask that you take the time to think of Evan, to talk about him, to amplify stories about him with the hashtag #IStandWithEvan, to explore his work at WSJ.com/evan, and to dig in with us so that the light we shine on Evan and the broader cause of press freedom is brighter than ever.

When is a landslide not a landslide?

By international comparison, Putin’s ‘win’ in the recent elections in Russia was practically marginal.

Forget the ruthless despots of yesteryear; Putin’s victory could put him in the running for the title of “Worst Dictator Ever” securing as he did, just 87% of the vote and struggling to convince a whole 13% of Russia’s population that he deserves their vote.

Putin’s efforts to reach the dizzying heights of previous autocratic excellence is not without precedent.

Nicolae Ceaușescu, the Romanian maestro of self-delusion, once claimed a staggering 98.8% approval rating from voters who seemingly found his continued leadership irresistible.

And, of course, the multiple successes of Saddam Hussein, who, not content with anything less than perfection, treated himself to not one, but two elections where he waltzed away with a cool 99% of the vote, leaving the remaining 1% presumably too busy planning their escape routes to bother casting a ballot.

Even by recent standards, Putin’s election efforts fall into the ‘must try harder’ category. Take Paul Kagame – head of state in the unquestionably safe state of Rwanda – secured an impressive 98.8% of the vote in 2017. By coincidence, his two challengers were deemed not to have met the nomination threshold by the Rwandan Electoral Commission.

And even by Russian standards, Putin is an under-achiever. The absolutely above board and beyond reproach referendum in 2014 that took place in Crimea saw the Ukranian peninsula experience a collective outbreak of Russiophilia, with a jaw-dropping 96.77% of voters deciding that annexation was their number one wish.

But of course, when it comes to precarious polls, poor Putin is but an enthusiastic amateur of electoral absurdity when compared to North Korea’s Kim Jong Un whose 2019 flawless victory saw him win 100% of the vote. Imagine that, Putin. A leader so popular that no-one felt the need to vote against you.

So, at Index on Censorship, we offer our commiserations to Putin on an election which will inevitably cause him to struggle to look his fellow dictators in the eye. But he should take heart, for in the grand tapestry of dictatorial hubris,  he may have fallen short of the coveted triple-digit approval rating, but he’s certainly earned his place in the hall of shame. Bravo!

But in all seriousness, dictators yearn for legitimacy but equally cannot resist inflating their egos with absurd election results. Putin’s 87% victory is merely the latest in a long line of autocrats entangled in their own delusions. For them, the allure of unchecked power is intoxicating, and the illusion of overwhelming support is irresistible. So they manipulate, coerce, and fabricate, all in the name of bolstering their image and maintaining their iron grip on power.

Yet, in their desperate pursuit of approval, they only reveal the hollow emptiness of their rule and the farcical nature of their so-called “elections.”

In the grand theatre of autocracy, where dictators vie for the title of “Most Absurd Electoral Farce,” Vladimir Putin may have inadvertently claimed the crown as the reigning champion of underachievement.

His inability to secure a unanimous victory serves as a glaring reminder of the limitations of his power and the resilience of those who dare to defy his iron grip.

While we chuckle at his inflated ego and his desperate grasp for legitimacy, let us not forget the sobering reality faced by millions of Russians who lack the freedom to express dissent without fear of reprisal.

We can poke fun at Putin’s absurdity but we must also reaffirm our commitment to democracy and freedom of expression, values that remain elusive for too many in Putin’s Russia.

And we stand with the 13%.

Iran: do you want the good or the bad news?

A great privilege of working at Index is, and always has been, the amazing people we get to encounter, those who look tyranny in the face and don’t cower. Iranian musician Toomaj Salehi is one such person. This week, the 2023 Index Freedom of Expression arts award winner donated the £2500 cash prize to relief funds for those affected by the floods in Iran’s Sistan and Baluchistan province in an act of extreme generosity. We were informed of the donation by his family.

Salehi, whose music rails against corruption, state executions, poverty and the killing of protesters in Iran, has spent years in and out of jail. Today he is still not free – indeed he faces a court hearing on another new charge tomorrow. Our work with him doesn’t end with the award. But what solace to know that the money will make a tangible difference to the lives of many and that jail cannot stop Salehi from his mission to make Iran a more just country.

While Salehi, and others, confront the brutal face of censorship, those in the USA and the UK are this week dealing with the finer print – who owns what. The US House of Representatives passed a bill on Wednesday that will require TikTok owner ByteDance to sell the popular video-sharing app or face a total ban. This is challenging territory. TikTok is guilty of its charges, shaping content to suit the interests of Beijing and data harvesting being the most prominent. So too are other social media platforms. If it is sold (which is still an if) we could see a further concentration of influential apps in the hands of a few tech giants. Is that a positive outcome? And how does this match up against the treatment of USA-based X? The social media platform, formerly Twitter, has Saudi Arabia’s Kingdom Holding, the investment vehicle of Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, as its second largest investor. Is the US Government holding X to the same standards?

Meanwhile, the UK government (which has expanded the definition of extremism this week in a concerning way) plans to ban foreign governments from owning British media, effectively saying no to an Abu Dhabi-led takeover of the Telegraph. We have expressed our concerns about the buyout before and these concerns remain. Still, we’d like to see the final proposal before deciding whether it’s good news.

We’ve also spoken a lot this week about the decision by literary magazine Guernica to pull an article written by an Israeli (still available via the Wayback machine here) following a staff-walk out. We stand by everyone’s right to protest peacefully, of which walking out of your office is just that. But we are troubled by other aspects, specifically redacting an article post-publication and the seemingly low bar for such a redaction (and protest), which hinged on the identity of the author and a few sentences. We can argue about whether these sentences were inflammatory – I personally struggle to see them as such – and indeed we should, because if we can’t have these debates within the pages of a thoughtful magazine aimed at the erudite we’re in a bad place.

Speaking of a bad place, Russia goes to the “polls” today.

Navalny told them not to give up – and they didn’t

“Don’t go over there,” a woman warned Yaroslav Smolev – artist and musician – as he was approaching the monument to victims of Soviet-era repression in St Petersburg. He then saw the police arresting people who, like him, came to lay flowers. One of the men had his arms twisted by the officers. This was on 16 February, the day Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny died, and hundreds of people came to honour him at improvised memorials.

Smolev, who spoke to Index four days later, said that the police were pushing mourners away from the monument. We found ourselves standing [at a distance], not knowing what to do or where to go from there,” he said.

But despite the brutality of the police, he recalled seeing “mountains of flowers” at the memorial.

The next day Smolev staged a solo protest in the city centre holding a sign which read “Navalny was killed because we didn’t care.” He felt that he had to speak up, remembering Alexei Navalny who “always stood up for what he believed in – in a peaceful way”.

“I knew that I wouldn’t be allowed to stand there for a long time,” Smolev said. Some people walking by gave him sympathetic looks. One woman approached him and said: “Thank you for speaking up.”

Shortly afterwards, he was taken to the police station. The officers threatened to forcibly take his fingerprints and measurements. According to Smolev, they didn’t have the right to request these. “They said: ‘If you refuse, we will put you upside down, and get all the prints we need, from the top of your head to your heels’,” he told Index.

An officer threatened to throw him in a detention cell for “disobedience”. He told Smolev: “Handsome men like you are always in high demand [among the inmates in jail].”

Smolev had to advocate for himself as all the lawyers were busy that day. He refused to give in and was released three hours later. He would have to pay a fine of about 4,000 rubles ($44) for “violation of anti-COVID measures” – for standing on a sidewalk with a sign.

Smolev said that above all he fears that his home will be targeted now, like was the case after his peaceful protests in the past.

According to Dmitri Anisimov, a spokesman for OVD-Info, an organisation monitoring repression in Russia, at least 462 Navalny mourners were detained across the country, almost half of them in St Petersburg alone. No less than 78 were jailed up to 15 days. In some cases, people were not allowed to see their lawyers. Echoing Smolev’s story, Anisimov told Index that if the detained found themselves face-to-face with the police officers, anything could happen to them. At least six people were beaten up during their detention. Anisimov said that the police also handed out draft notices to some men who came to the improvised memorials for Navalny. Later these papers turned out to be fake. It’s one of the various intimidation tactics used by the authorities, he said.

At least 15 mourners were detained days after they came to the memorials, at their homes or on public transportation. Many of them were “in a state of shock” because they were unprepared for this, Anisimov said. According to him, they had been tracked through a system of surveillance cameras. Some of the people Index was going to speak to got scared off after these “delayed detentions”.

During the days following Navalny’s death, dozens of volunteers provided support for those detained and given jail time. Ekaterina, a 28-year-old democracy activist, was one of them.

Talking to Index from St Petersburg, she said that many people were placed in remote detention centres. She brought food for the detained: “Some bread, sausages, cheese, a little bit of sweets and water.”

She has been doing this volunteer work for two years, since she was detained during the anti-war protests which followed the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. She told Index that people awaiting trial in detention centres are not fed properly – if at all – and are not always able to access tap water.

For Ekaterina, even though it may seem that with Navalny now gone all hope is lost, people “must continue searching for hope within each other”. “We need to help people who are still alive,” she added. “People such as political prisoners.”

When Navalny died on 16 February, she came to an impromptu memorial in St. Petersburg. There were no police around at that moment. “People came and came,” she recalled and she “got a chance to stand there and cry.”

The same day, a woman in Rostov-on-Don, around 1,800 km south of St Petersburg, also came to leave flowers in memory of Navalny at the monument to the victims of political repressions.

“There were so many police officers,” she said speaking to Index anonymously. The buses for the detained were parked next to the memorial and the police were filming people who brought bouquets. “I realised that nothing good would come out of it for me,” she said. “Call me a coward, but I decided to turn around and leave.”

Two days later the woman found out that the apartment where she is officially registered – but doesn’t live – was targeted. A police officer came to give her “some kind of warning”. She suspects that the authorities might have identified her by the car license plate while she was at the memorial – and now they are looking for her.

One of her friends, whom she had warned about the risks, came to the memorial for Navalny later that day. He was ordered by the police to write a letter of explanation stating reasons for his presence at the site.

“There are no mass killings by the authorities, nor people being hanged – but it feels that way,” the woman said. “We are so frightened that we don’t dare utter a single word, and I was too scared to even lay flowers!,” she added, outraged.

Despite this “climate of terror and fear”, as she called it, she empathised that there were many people at the memorial, who felt that it was their duty to honor Navalny.

“I think that Navalny was right when he said in a documentary about him that [if the authorities  decide to kill him it means that] we’re incredibly strong,” Ekaterina, the democracy activist, told Index.

In the film his main message to the Russian people was “not to give up”.