Columns Moscow’s Fleet Street is in Riga

In due course many London newspaper deliveries and presses were located on Fleet Street. Although newspaper houses have moved from the street decades ago, the name of the street is still a concept in which Britain still refers to the entire press.

There has been no such common concept in Russia. Russia’s history is authoritarian, and independent media have not had time to become a strong institution in brief and exceptional moments of freedom.

However, the Russian invasion of Ukraine changed the situation. As a result, journalism independent of those in power became dangerous in Russia and its practice within the country virtually ceased. At the same time, Russia also got its own Fleet Street.

Its name is Riga.

When One week after the start of the attack, at the turn of February and March, the Russian authorities enacted strict laws, and many Russian journalists fled the country.

The capital of Latvia was a natural option for many. It was close, as many left behind when rumors of an emergency spread and flight connections to the west were already broken. There were other practical reasons, but the experiences of the Russian news site Meduza were of great importance. Founded in autumn 2014, Meduza’s central delivery has been in Riga from the beginning and there have been no problems.

Meduza’s journalists who worked in Russia rushed to Riga. The majority of the Russian-language service of the British broadcaster BBC, as well as several other Russian journalists and Western correspondents, also moved there. A new version of Novaja Gazeta Jevropa, a newspaper that has ceased operations in Russia, will also be made in Riga.

They are important last beacons of Russian journalism. Meduza is a popular news site that makes such a significant investigative journalism that in the summer of 2019, police in Moscow tried to stage its journalist Ivan Golunov as a drug offender. The BBC’s Russian-language service, meanwhile, has rallied Russia’s best journalists in recent years, with the former quality magazines being shredded one by one. Novaya Gazeta is Russia’s oldest independent magazine, whose editor-in-chief Dmitry Muratov received the Nobel Prize last year.

In Russian the media in Finland have a poor reputation. That is understandable, because here we mainly see excerpts from news and current affairs broadcasts on Russian television channels.

Russian President Vladimir Putin took national television channels under the control of the Kremlin shortly after he rose to power twenty years ago. It ended with a puppet satire joking about Putin’s size Kuklybut also critical journalism.

The task of television was to increase passivity, encourage politics to be avoided and make people doubt everything they heard. Propaganda’s main focus was on television because it was the only major mass media. The magazines were allowed to operate more freely because their circulation was small and the audience was already critical.

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Meduza worked in Riga from the beginning.

There were a lot of good journalists in the press. Almost all the big scouts about Russia have been dug by Russian journalists. Many of them switched to news sites when newspapers began to be disciplined a few years ago. Although the internet was restricted, it remained quite free for a long time. There was still a lot of critical journalism published there last year.

When opposition leader Alexei Navalnyi returned to Russia last year after recovering from an attempt to poison the authorities, the rest of the independent media began to be severely disciplined. The attack on Ukraine then ended everything.

Blocked media can still be watched from Russia if you see the effort. Many do not know, and many do not want to.

Now Russian journalism is done in Riga, where journalists who moved to consider how to stay relevant.

Russian television channels, on the other hand, have moved on to mobilization and hysteria, but at the same time they are being watched in the West again to find hidden messages. Therefore, the model of decent cremlology is now considering how Colonel (evp) Mikhail Hodarjonok was allowed to speak roughly true on Rossija 1.

The author is the editorial editor of HS