How to read Russian exile media
At a time of war and repression, a vibrant independent press covers the country from abroad.
It was an eye-catching scoop that any major US or European news outlet would have been proud to publish: the discovery of a Russian burial site containing the bodies of several dozen Wagner Group mercenaries killed in Ukraine, on grounds outside the Siberian city of Irkutsk. The journalists’ investigation found that 17 of the Wagnerites—fighters belonging to the group founded by the late Kremlin-connected oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin—had been convicted for murder before being pulled out of prison to go to war for Vladimir Putin, Russia’s tsar-like president. The publication included a video of the gravesite. At the end of the article, a roll gave the names of the dead, their dates of birth and where they were from in Russia. Some of their relatives had not even known their family members had perished until informed by the reporters.
The source of this April 2023 report was not a foreign publication, however, but a Russian one: Ludi Baikala. In English, that’s “People of Baikal,” an independent online media outlet whose 2019 creators, Olga Mutovina and Elena Trifonova, went into exile abroad after Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, but have continued to publish from outside Russia with the aid of staff still working anonymously in the Baikal region of southeastern Siberia.
Never heard of Ludi Baikala? Neither had I, until I somehow found myself on the email subscription list, for free, in the summer of 2022. The stories were in Russian but Google automatically translated the text into English. At the time, I was at my home in Massachusetts researching a book that became Putin’s Exiles: Their Fight for a Better Russia, and I was eager for any scrap of information about what was happening inside the country. And the best scraps, I found, often came from outlets run by exiles with assistance within Russia.
Russian exile publications are generally easy to read translated into English on the internet and should be a staple of the media diet for anyone following the twists and turns of the Russia story. Probably the newsiest of the lot is Meduza, founded in the Latvian capital Riga in 2014 by the exiled Russian editor Galina Timchenko. As Putin and President Donald Trump were preparing to meet in Alaska this August, a Meduza special correspondent, Andrey Pertsev, managed to obtain a Kremlin document providing “guidelines” for how Russia’s state-oriented media should cover the summit. I didn’t see that reported in Western media.
To this treasure trove of reportage produced by the Russian exile community can be added TV Rain, an independent television channel now based in the Netherlands. Until it was forced to leave Russia— “No to war!” its CEO, Natalya Sindeyeva, defiantly declared on the final Moscow broadcast in early 2022—the station had for a dozen years supplied unvarnished coverage of events like the 2015 murder of the anti-Putin politician Boris Nemtsov on a bridge near the Kremlin.
As surprising as it may appear to Westerners accustomed to seeing Russian “journalists” performing on television as puppet-like appendages of The State, Russia still has a vibrant, homegrown tradition of tough-minded media. The roots are in Glasnost, the loosening of strictures on the media initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union’s last leader, in the 1980s. The independent Russian press flourished under the post-Soviet presidency of Boris Yeltsin. Putin put the clamps on independent journalism on ascending to the Kremlin at the end of 1999, gradually at first and then with greater force. But by then, a new generation of stubborn journalists had been formed, many determined to hold Russia’s leader to account.
To be sure, Western news outlets such as The New York Times have their own tentacles into Russia. Two months before Ludi Baikala’s revelation of the Wagner gravesite in Siberia, Valerie Hopkins of the Times disclosed a similar graveyard in a town near the Black Sea. This past May, Francesca Ebel wrote a fascinating piece for The Washington Post from inside Russia about the “militarization of education” for young Russians made to attend “weekly patriotism classes.” For years, Nanna Heitmann, a German documentary photographer based in Moscow, has bravely provided striking images like those of anti-Putin street protests staged on behalf of the jailed dissident Alexei Navalny while he was alive.
And then there’s the BBC’s Man in Moscow, Steve Rosenberg, who has resided in Russia’s capital since 1991 and been the BBC’s premier Russia voice for decades. With his impeccably spoken Russian and encyclopedic knowledge of post-Soviet Russia, not to mention his well-known piano playing skills (he once tickled the ivories while the deposed Gorbachev crooned a song), Rosenberg is a veritable institution in Russia.
Still, not even a Steve Rosenberg is free of the shackles the Kremlin places on journalists working inside Russia. Asked in a segment for CBS Sunday Morning in May whether there are “red lines you know you can’t cross,” Rosenberg replied, “I don’t know, actually. There probably are. It feels like walking a tightrope over a minefield.” But that is surely too tentative a formulation. Every inside-of-Russia journalist is mindful of the intimidating example of Evan Gershkovich, The Wall Street Journal reporter arrested, jailed and convicted on espionage charges. He spent 13 months in a tsarist-era Moscow prison before the Biden White House obtained his release in a swap in 2024.
James Rodgers, a UK-based journalism professor and former BBC Moscow correspondent, is the author of a 2023 book, Assignment Moscow: Reporting on Russia from Lenin to Putin. I recently spoke with him for my podcast, “America and Beyond,” on the New Books Network. Is it possible, I asked him, for anyone to carry out independent journalism inside Russia? “The short answer to the question is no,” he said. The long answer, he added, based on his continuing “private conversations” with Western foreign correspondents still active in Russia—he declined to name names—is that the correspondents understand they must circumscribe the scope of their reporting activities. It’s a matter of basic survival as journalists subject to the country that hosts them.
By all means, listen to the BBC and read the Western papers. You’ll find informed analysis of the Kremlin’s thinking on geopolitical issues from Ukraine to China. But if you have a yearning for the deep Russia beyond Moscow, the textures and rhythms of this vast and fascinating place, read Russian exile media. I have not been able to visit the country since 2018, and most of all I miss the travels I was once able to make as a foreign journalist, without all that much concern about the authorities, from the Black Sea region to Western Siberia to the frozen turf of Chukotka.
Once, decades ago, I was able to visit Lake Baikal, home to our planet’s deepest body of fresh water as well as the native Buryat people. The dispatches I receive from Ludi Baikala bring that picture back, the reports reminding of a humanity that exists even in “Putin’s Russia,” as that grim locution, which I detest, goes. In June, I opened an email to find an on-the-ground report on that month’s remarkable Ukrainian drone strike deep into Russia’s heartland. One drone, it turned out, “hit an old building” in the village of Novomaltinsk in the publication’s coverage area. “People of Baikal” dug up an eyewitness, 13-year-old Sveta: “I was walking with my sister, saw a drone fly over me, and a few minutes later it exploded near our school. It was very scary. We ran to the store to take cover.”
Simple stuff, but isn’t that what journalism often is at its best? “Our task is to talk about the problems of ordinary people from small towns and villages and bring them into the public sphere so that society knows about them and the authorities cannot ignore them,” Ludi Baikala writes in its mission statement. Perfect.
Paul Starobin, a former Moscow bureau chief of Business Week, is author of Putin’s Exiles: Their Fight for a Better Russia (Columbia Global Reports, 2024).
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