Conveying Truth: Independent Media in Putin’s Russia

Abstract

The Chernobyl comparisons began in March, in response to Russian government updates on the spread of COVID-19 cases. “Everybody’s talking about, ‘Oh, it’s Chernobyl again,’ ” one young Russian skeptic told The New York Times. “I do not trust these figures,” the editor of an independent newspaper in the Russian city of Kaliningrad told the Committee to Protect Journalists. “I remember Chernobyl, when [then-Soviet] authorities tried to hide the truth.” A prominent liberal commentator expressed his doubts to both Russian and Western media. “It’s a tradition for Russia since Chernobyl -- to hide the truth,” Valery Solovei told ABC News, not long after he’d made similar remarks on the infuential Russian radio station Ekho Moskvy. In his March 16 Ekho interview, Solovei cited numbers of coronavirus cases and deaths that were signifcantly higher than Kremlin ofcials acknowledged. When Russia’s media regulator Roskomnadzor ordered the station to remove the interview, “to prevent the spread of false information related to the coronavirus,” Ekho complied.