Word: gazeta
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These are, in Russian terms, declarations of war, and Novaya Gazeta has the casualties to show for it. In 2000, reporter Igor Domnikov was beaten to death; in 2003, deputy editor Yuri Shchekochikhin was fatally poisoned; and in 2006, reporter Anna Politkovskaya, famous for her coverage of the second Chechen war, was shot to death...
...paper still relishes its role as a combatant. There is no pretext of objectivity. Novaya Gazeta may be pro-Western, but the kind of journalism the paper churns out would hardly sit well at a newspaper in, say, the U.S., where reporters are expected to see both sides. Here reporters are expected not so much to unearth news as to find information that corroborates what everyone in the newsroom already believes: the Kremlin is bad; the security apparatus is bad; the intelligentsia is good; the Westernizers and liberals are right...
...West, there is a widespread and probably incorrect assumption that someone in the Kremlin had those journalists killed because they said (or were on the verge of saying) bad things about Putin. This belief is premised on another false assumption--that Novaya Gazeta poses a threat to the Kremlin. The paper claims a weekly readership of 1 million, but its ardently anti-Putin voice clearly has limited influence. In the recent presidential election, the main liberal candidate got 1.3% of the vote, while Putin's handpicked successor, Dmitri Medvedev, won more than 70%. As for Politkovskaya's death...
...There is no better way to defend against charges of repression than to point to a fully functioning newspaper that never has anything good to say about you. Says Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov: "When people say Russia has no free media, they totally forget about the existence of Novaya Gazeta. Certainly, this paper is quite liberal, very frequently opposing the official point of view ... We can't always agree with what is being published, but this is a normal relationship between official bodies and the media." In other words, All you moralizing Westerners, our press is just as rambunctious...
...even if the Kremlin deftly uses Novaya Gazeta as a shield, there is still no other voice with the same capacity to show Russian events and power players through an alternate prism...