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Kristina Safonova

Special correspondent at Meduza, investigative reporter, author of the book "We Looked The Other Way"

What I miss most, in exile, is the courts. I still write about the politically motivated persecution of people in Russia, but now I work almost exclusively with documents and people who are willing to speak with an "undesirable organization" (many are afraid to talk to us even anonymously — they can be fined and prosecuted for doing so).

It’s no longer possible for me to go to the courts at seven in the morning, stand out for two hours in the cold, then jostle with other journalists for a small space on a hard bench and spend the entire day in a stuffy courtroom with basically no break. And then when the judge finally decides that everyone needs a little break — choose between the toilet, a smoke or a snack.

Oh, yeah, there are also excellent security procedures at the entrance [to the courthouse]. I tried to make them more fun and enjoyable for both sides by buying various new passport covers. I had a pink one with a kitten on it, the bailiffs really liked that one. Often they don’t let you bring water inside, so you have to find it in the courthouse. Then you get home late in the evening and write up a text in a couple of hours. I miss that.

Was it hard to report on court proceedings? Well, I was working, and those are special conditions. At the time, I thought of it like documentary theater. Everyone knew their role ahead of time, everyone said what they were supposed to, nothing surprising happened. At the same time, it was interesting to document. It’s true, I don’t really think these stories of persecution will matter much in the future. Experience shows that we don’t always learn the lessons of the past.

I don’t think that I, as a journalist, can influence the situation. And that’s not my goal, I just find it interesting. Journalists are often presented as selfless heroes without any needs — no food, no water, no salary, they just want to work and save the world. I don’t agree much with this approach. We’re all people with our own desires, and not all of these desires are always acceptable to voice. Some are driven by vanity, many others by passion. This is normal.

Everyone has their own good, too. I’m sure that the employees of the judicial and law enforcement systems in Russia don’t wake up with the thought: "Let’s go do some evil!" Why is it that my good is correct, where did I get that from?

If I had the opportunity to live several lives, I probably wouldn’t be a journalist again in the next one, just because I’d want to try something new. But I’m grateful to myself that I picked journalism at some point because I’ve learned so many interesting stories. I have the joy of telling these stories and the joy of working with talented people, whom I really value.

Vitaly Vasilčenko

Editor of the Explainers desk at Meduza, co-author of the book "We Can Repeat. The Language of Putin’s Propaganda"

I don’t think that the news is a product, or that the media should be subject to market logic. The news is hygiene. You brush your teeth, wash your face, change your sheets and bathe — and you read the news in the same way, because world events influence you, the people around you, and the place you live. It’s understandable that people experiencing depression sometimes have trouble brushing their teeth. Hygiene is the first thing that suffers when something goes wrong in your life. But it’s weird to blame the media for the fact that you feel bad.

We’re now in a historical moment when readers are having the burden of systemic problems dumped on them, and they’re being left to bear that burden alone. A caveat: I believe collective responsibility exists, as much as many of us would like to pretend it doesn’t. And of course, an individual person can’t always be held responsible for — or respond to — systemic problems on their own. Therefore, readers’ reactions to current events are pretty logical: "What can I personally do about the climate crisis, injustice, genocide, and war crimes? Nothing". The first reaction is to turn off the news, stop reading and retreat into your own little life. The problem is that your own little life is pierced through with politics. We can judge people who avoid the news and politics, or we can choose not to judge them. I think, though, that this situation isn’t the main problem; rather, it’s a symptom of the polycrisis in which the world now finds itself.

Unfortunately, I’ve read too many books to deceive myself into thinking that the future will be better. Judging by what’s happening in the world now, it’ll probably be worse. In my view, this is just the reality we need to accept. Hope is overrated. It does probably help some people live. I’m happy for those people: they found something that helps them cope. But I think that hope can also paralyze — and impede us from doing something in the here and now. Hope for something better can deprive us of agency.

I want the world to have less violence — systemic, military, gendered, socio-economic, colonial, physical, psychological, symbolic, cultural, etc. I want people in every part of the world to live free, autonomous, independent and happy lives, and for that freedom to be material, not just on paper. And I want violence over one group of people to never become the conditions of freedom for another. This clearly won’t happen in my lifetime, but I will still behave as if a world free from violence depends on each of my actions and decisions.

Anton Khitrov

Culture editor at Meduza, art & theater critic

I’m currently living in a democratic country for the first time, and my impression is that everything works like this: The left uses the right to scare voters, and the right uses the left the same way. The more afraid we are of each other, the more likely we are to go to the polls, so that we don’t let our opponents gain power. Politicians peddle simple answers, and for me, the most valuable part of my work with my colleagues, real journalists, is that they try to do the opposite, to make the world more complex.

Does it bother me that people read less of the news? I’m more worried about why we’re asking ourselves this question. Maybe we’re just really damn arrogant and we choose to suffer from the news, from our awareness, from our concern about the world. Because in the moment, we seem like hot shit to ourselves. "Look how much I’m fucking suffering, I’m Hamlet. And you — you’re not suffering? You chose yourself, stopped reading the news, you’re eating healthy, you stopped smoking? Fuck off". I think this is one of any number of ways to feel comfort, through suffering and self-congratulation.

On the other hand, when I speak with Germans, they’re usually shocked. They want to talk about the weather, and I’m saying, "Is this a comforting topic for you? Pretty soon we’re all going to be climate refugees". So, that’s why I don’t have any German friends.

I don’t feel the need to base my identity on my passport or ethnicity. Right now, I identify as a migrant. I’ll speak German with an accent all my life, and I’ll never fit in here. I’m fine with it: I already have trauma from belonging to a dominant society. I like the marginal position better.

The idea that everything was fine before the pandemic is our generation’s main delusion. Everything was bad, just not for us. The 2000s and the 2010s were frightening, bloody, problematic times. It’s just that there were certain groups within society who had the privilege not to notice. If the full-scale war had not begun, but the nature of the Putin regime had still been what it is, I think I would have stayed in Russia and eventually become a worse person. I would collaborate with some unsavory institutions and convince myself that it was all for the sake of art.

Hope is like anxiety — I don’t control it, I just have it. I can think of it as either detrimental or beneficial for me, but it’s there in my mind regardless of the value I assign to it. I don’t know that there’s been a time in my life when I haven’t had hope.

Ekaterina Balaban

Photo editor at Meduza, author and producer of documentary projects

At the end of 2023 and the beginning of 2024, a photographer working for Meduza covered New Year’s celebrations in half-ruined cities and villages in eastern Ukraine. In one of the photos, there was a little boy with a toy made out of cotton wool. It was a very simple photograph, but it stayed with me and I later asked the photographer whether he could visit the boy and his family again. He went back in the spring, but they were forced to evacuate and the photographer lost track of them.

It was important for me to know this little boy’s fate. The photographer told me it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. Then he found out that the family had been evacuated to Kharkiv, so he went around organizations that help refugees and finally managed to find the boy and his family. We hope that we can continue to tell their story. These kinds of photographs that show the war’s underside resonate more with me than images from the frontlines with people standing around howitzers.

When the war started, I was grateful to be in the right place at the right time — I felt like I could help people see something regardless of how pompous or presumptuous that may sound. In the beginning, every morning I would pick out a photograph with the caption "War" to be placed on our website that would cover half of the landing page. I would try to understand my own feelings: what did war mean to me on that particular day?

In my work, it’s important for me not to lose myself in the world and try to help readers to latch onto something, at least with a glance. In these moments, I’m interested to know if the person looking at their screen will feel what I feel. If they’re not in the war zone, but looking at it from afar, they won’t be really able to feel it viscerally. But giving readers the opportunity to encounter and reflect, even if only a tiny bit, on the reality of war — that’s already something.

How do I cope with these experiences? It’s helpful to be in touch with photographers in Ukraine. They’ll tell me things like, "I went to photograph Kharkiv, but the hotel got shot up", and all of my own hardships start to seem very petty. When you’re always in contact with people on the other side, you can manage to stay afloat.

We show photographs from the war every single day. Sometimes it can feel like there’s a concrete wall in front of us that keeps getting thicker and thicker, and we’re just endlessly striking at it with tiny hammers. This wall is hardening, muffling any sounds, but I hope that one day we’ll accidently hit a pebble in the wall that will make the whole thing crumble. The main thing is to keep chipping away, and the more people do it, the greater the certainty that someday that moment will come.

Katerina Abramova

Communications director at Meduza. Worked at the Help Needed foundation. One of the organizers of the project “Let’s Help” that helps Ukrainians affected by the war

In Russian media, there’s always been a big debate about where to draw the line between journalism and activism. I think that we’re journalists, not activists, and we’re trying to stay that way. At the same time, in the past few years my colleagues and I have run several charitable campaigns: one called "Let’s Help" in support of Ukrainian civilians, another — a marathon in support of political prisoners. There’s no textbook answer on how to strike a balance between activism and journalism. It’s up to us to decide where that line is every time.

If you’ve left Russia, you’re already in a fairly privileged position. Obviously, there are plenty of challenges here. Let’s leave aside issues of security and just consider access to information: you can read, watch and listen to whatever you want to. And if you happen to know another language, it opens up the whole world to you.

People read Meduza in a lot of countries, but our main priority is readers inside Russia — there are still millions. They’re in a completely different situation from us, but they rely on our work. They need the news, and they need to sense that they’re not alone, that they haven’t lost their minds, that they’re not the only ones who see what’s happening.

I have a dream of opening a restaurant, I’ve thought about it on and off for many years. Last winter such an opportunity came up — I received a proposal to participate in the opening of a new project and there was enough money to make it happen. I was thinking: "What if I quit my job and start a new life?"

I was imagining how I would think through the menu, in detail… and then Navalny was killed, and all of those fantasies dissipated. I understood that the only thing I wanted was to be in an editorial office. I don’t need any other kind of life. Maybe someday, but definitely not now.

On the one hand, it’s all atrociously hard; on the other, it’s awfully interesting work. I have the impression that I’m on the pages of history as it unfolds. I think, for non-Russians who participate in our crowdfunding efforts, what we do is like something straight out of "Star Wars", "Harry Potter" or "Lord of the Rings".

It’s a story of resistance that may seem doomed to fail. It’s the archetypical story of struggle and overcoming adversity, when a group of random idiots strive towards an unattainable goal. These stories give us hope. And we’re the characters inside one such story.

So, the hope is still there. It’s easy to forget about it, but it’s a constant presence. If you have no hope, at some point you’ll just grind to a halt.

Sultan Suleimanov

Publisher at Meduza’s English-language edition, worked for Lenta.ru and TJournal

I think journalists have two roles: telling people what they want to know and telling people what they don’t want to know. In the latter case, you need to not only understand an issue, but also convince readers that they should know about it, even if they never wanted to hear about it in the first place. These days our readership is tired of war; they read the news less and less, but we need to keep writing about it.

This goes for not just the war, but also other, less global issues. We often hear from readers things along the lines of: ok, so some journalists exposed a corrupt official, but instead of going to prison, he got promoted. So then they ask themselves: why did I read about this? And then they get mad at journalists. So why should people know about this stuff? It’s like choosing between eating potato chips tonight or losing weight in six months. If you don’t read about disagreeable things, it will be easier in the moment, but then six months or a year later you’ll wonder: who are these new people in power and why is this guy unjustly imprisoned?

Over the past year and a half, I’ve been interested in artificial intelligence and whether or not it will kill journalism. I think that as soon as AI learns to write news items and simple texts, it will turn into a kind of media junk food. A lot of people will read what AI produces, it’s possible it will even be tailored to their needs: if you want, you can read the news with curse words, with emotions, long-form or short-form. It will be a mass-market, cheap, and superficial product, but it will be what people want. Traditional media will become an elite product, a handmade craft without the use of machines. The wealthy will be able to order news from real people and be informed about things that the masses won’t know about.

It’s a really dangerous trajectory. When journalists think about this, they probably see themselves working in these elite media outlets. We’ll stick around, they say, our audience will shrink, we’ll have to ask them for more money, but we won’t produce junk food. I’m afraid that, just based on the theory of probability, most of us will end up training a model to retell the latest Kim Kardashian scandal. Another dangerous trend is the personalization and fragmentation of media. With AI, a small team can produce an exhaustive amount of content. We could end up with each school running its own little media outlet, with audiences splintering into various "bubbles". At the same time, if you look at it from a positive angle, each community will be able to get exactly the type of information that it’s interested in.

As a news journalist, I still get a kick from major current events. My eyes light up and I get straight to work. These "highs" are incredibly important for journalists even though they can also lead to a burn-out. But they bring you back to basics, back to your roots. You’re overloaded, deadlines are looming, your boss is breathing down your neck. Then something major happens — and off you go. What deadlines? You write everything in 10–20 minutes. No excuses like "I’ll send it tomorrow, I didn’t have time to finish". Then you get back to your routine, exhale, but that drive stays with you. I can’t say it’s a positive emotion—usually you’re dealing with really upsetting news. But in those moments you pull yourself together, focus, and feel like your team is still working like a well-oiled machine.

It doesn’t matter that you’re on vacation, it doesn’t matter that it’s the middle of the night. You open your laptop and realize that instead of just sitting there clicking away anxiously, like you would as a reader, you can actually help your audience figure out what’s going on.