Word: mezhennaya
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...Take the case of Elvira Mezhennaya, the 52-year-old chief editor of the City Channel, a TV station in Yaroslavl, some 270 km northeast of Moscow. She is due in court next week - the second time in three months - to face charges of slander for broadcasting a report alleging that regional financial inspector Nina Ryzhkova received a free apartment and financial rewards from Governor Anatoly Lisitsyn, the man whose operations Ryzhkova is supposed to supervise...
...Mezhennaya's case is only one in a series of crackdowns on the regional press. In January police searched the offices of Den Za Dnem, a Volgograd weekly critical of Governor Nikolai Maksyuta. In February police raided Novaya Gazeta, a weekly in Ryazan which had criticized Regional Governor Vyacheslav Lyubimov in its coverage of his election campaign. In March the regional prosecutor's office in Belgorod pressed charges against Olga Kitova, a correspondent for the local daily Belgorodskaya Pravda who questioned alleged financial machinations by the regional legislature. Though a member of the legislature herself, Kitova was detained and beaten...
...mopping up of Mezhennaya began a year ago, when City Channel correspondent Alexander Kukin broadcast the report about Ryzhkova that led to the slander charge. Kukin also alleged that the heads of federal agencies in the region were beholden for their jobs to the governor. Mezhennaya says she would not have been surprised if the report had triggered a civil suit, "but criminal charges until now have been unheard of." She claims that investigators piled on the pressure, tapping her phones and impounding furniture from her modest one-bedroom apartment. While she was on vacation last autumn she popped...
...March, however, a district court in Yaroslavl acquitted Mezhennaya "on the grounds of the absence of a crime," to use the Russian legal phrase. The prosecution promptly appealed and the ordeal will now start all over again, in the regional court. Mezhennaya says she has no way of knowing whether she will still be free at the end of the month. Kukin, the TV correspondent whose report triggered Mezhennaya's problems, now works for the local state-run TV station. He is testifying for the prosecution that she urged him to do the allegedly slanderous feature...
...Mezhennaya and her 120 colleagues do not consider themselves crusaders. "We're not all that independent," Mezhennaya says. "Fifty-one percent of our stock belongs to the city government. We know which lines we cannot cross." But the journalists still irritate the provincial notables with reports showing how the bosses live well while lesser mortals struggle to survive. Now, with the new mood in Moscow, the bosses feel free to strike back. "They felt the change in the air," says Mezhennaya. "They are growing stronger in the belief that they are our lords and masters...
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