No

Friends and acquaintances know me by one name, and my colleagues and sources — by another. I can’t tell the full truth about myself to any of them. It’s not worth it for the first group to know what I do for a living. As for the second group, the details of my personal life — where I was born, where I studied, where I work — need to be kept private. To put it bluntly, the life of a journalist working for independent media while remaining in Russia resembles that of a spy film.

Usually everything goes smoothly, but sometimes there are glitches. At the birthday party of a close friend, someone I didn't know extends his hand and says "Hi, I’m Lyosha." It takes me a few seconds to figure out how I should introduce myself in response — using my real name or my pseudonym. The whole time I’m trying to analyze whether this new acquaintance could become a potential protagonist in some of my work. Which name I choose depends on this.

I sometimes feel like a pathological liar. Someone tells me something personal, but I can’t reciprocate — or even admit that I’m not telling them everything. It’s depressing, I feel constantly ashamed. When I had to come up with a pseudonym, I felt completely stupid. I had to give myself a name out of nowhere. I passed through different stages of accepting this, from disappointment and sadness to incredible anger and fatigue.

I have the rare opportunity to do important things without facing censorship and, in contrast to colleagues who were forced to leave, I can stay in familiar, comfortable conditions. At the same time, I feel like an impostor. What I do now is journalism in exile, meaning free journalism. But I myself am not in exile.

I have a number of acquaintances who, despite everything, are still working in Russia at publications under censorship. These journalists continue to struggle over every comma and have parts of their texts deleted when management finds them alarming. I haven’t faced that. What gets removed from my text is the boring bits — it doesn’t happen due to censorship.

Of course, the editors have objective reasons to worry about my safety. Journalists in Russia truly do face persecution, fines, and prison terms. To avoid that, I follow security protocols. I know my lawyer’s phone number by heart, just in case.

It’s hard to follow protocols, though. For example, I communicate with my editor via Signal, the messaging app. In Russia, it doesn’t work without a VPN — this is pretty inconvenient, but we can’t use other messengers for security reasons. I have three different VPNs on my phone — when one isn’t working, I switch to another. I’m constantly juggling between these services, and sometimes I’m basically unable to communicate for some period of time. When that happens, my editor gets extremely stressed, believing that she’ll have to figure out how to extract me from somewhere. She worries about my safety way more than me or my own mother.

An independent journalist in Russia can be exposed at any moment, but for a long time I felt no fear at all. I even asked myself whether I was a psychopath, whether I was truly not afraid. But gradually the fear crept up on me. The more often loved ones asked me whether I was afraid and taking sufficient security measures, the stronger it got. At some point, I even requested that people not ask me about it. I just automatically look out of the corner of my eye to see if anyone is following me, if there are any suspicious people around. When I’m convinced that no one is there, I just live my life and do my work.

At the beginning of the war, I thought that people supported the war because they didn’t know what was really happening. Then my friend and I started to print anti-war posters with slogans like "We need love, not war!" and hang them up on the streets of downtown Moscow.

There were times when we only managed to get a few meters away before someone would stop next to a poster and tear it down. Not municipal workers, but regular people — well-dressed, probably educated and well-off. That was really demoralizing. It turns out the problem isn’t so much that journalists can’t tell the truth about the war, but that people to whom that truth is addressed don’t want to hear it.

A freelance journalist for Meduza who lives in Russia and whose name we cannot disclose for security reasons.