How Russian youth media operates in times of war and state repression

Russia’s invasion in Ukraine was promptly followed by an intensified oppression of freedom of speech within Russia’s borders. This suppression has not spared Russia’s younger generations, especially if they take an active stance against their country’s aggression, either by participating in protests or by spreading the word about the war that does not go in line with the Kremlin’s propaganda. 

The Fix Media spoke with editors of three media initiatives that address Russia’s youth. Although they are serving different regional and niche audiences, the war has similarly affected their operations, especially when it comes to  the safety of those involved.  

Protestny MGU, a Telegram channel about student activism  

In 2018, Dmitry Ivanov, a student at the Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics of the Moscow State University, Russia’s most prestigious university (often abbreviated as MGU), launched a Telegram channel called Protestny MGU (roughly translated as The Protesting MGU). The purpose at the time was to share news about the protests against creating a fan zone next to the university’s dormitories during the FIFA World Cup, which could force some students out of their rooms to give place to security servicemen. 

The channel received wider recognition at the end of 2018, when Ivanov got detained at a protest for peace in central Moscow. In an attempt to take a picture of one of the employees of Russia’s Centre for Combating Extremism, 19-year-old Ivanov got detained, beaten, and threatened with rape. 

He also got deprived of his mobile phone and with that of having access to his old Telegram channel. This is why he created a new one with the same name and recounted his story, which went viral and got over 100,000 views on his Telegram channel only. As of October 2022, the channel has about 9,500 followers. 

Posts in his Telegram channel gained him several detentions in the years that followed, mainly because he shared announcements for protests, which the security forces equated with the organisation of “unapproved public events”. 

The harshest persecution, however, came after Russia’s open invasion in Ukraine in 2022. Ivanov stood vocally against Russia’s aggression, urged people to join anti-war protests, re-shared Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s words and news about the war crimes in Bucha.

His public stance and posts in his Telegram channel eventually brought him a charge under the Russian law about spreading “fakes” about the Russian army in early June, for which he faces a prison term of up to ten years. This charge has also affected his parents, friends, and other former editors of the Protestny MGU channel, who are now considered witnesses to his alleged “crime”. 

The Telegram channel was therefore put on hold after his arrest until Ivanov managed to reach out to his friend and activist Nikita Zaytsev, who left Russia over the summer. He now runs the Telegram channel from Yerevan, Armenia. “I try to keep the same format, the same news of Russian political activism, news about political prisoners, announcements of protests,” Zaytsev says. The audience remain mainly those who are interested in civic activism, protests, and other activities Ivanov himself was involved in, he adds.

Zaytsev runs the channel on a volunteer basis; any financial support the channel gets goes to support Ivanov with food and other necessities as he is awaiting trial in a detention centre. 

Groza, a local initiative going country-wide

Groza (ThundersStorm) was launched under a milder name Veter (Wind) in 2020 in Kazan, the capital of the Tatarstan region. “We thought that this city lacks a student publication reporting about higher education issues and does not limit itself only to photo reports from university events,” says Groza’s editor-in-chief Leonid Spirin. 

Although primarily designed as a media outlet for young people from Tatarstan, they have in the last months launched sister publications in other Russian university cities: Novosibirsk and Yekaterinburg, as well as an all-Russian publication on youth affairs. They are mainly present on Telegram and on VKontakte, Russia’s alternative to Facebook.

Spirin left Russia after the start of the war and now works from Tbilisi, Georgia. However he remains the editor-in-chief of all the above-mentioned publications and supervises the editorial team of about twelve people. 

He does not consider him being abroad a major difficulty. “I focus on the editorial process, proofread texts, follow what’s going on,” he adds. “As an editor-in-chief, I am able to work well thanks to our people on the ground who understand what’s going on in their cities.” While editors all work from abroad, some journalists still take the risk to work from Russia. 

Their audience are also of great help, Spirin adds, since it is often them who send clips and pictures to Groza from protests they attend. Many readers are also personal acquaintances, which makes the task of fact-checking of the material received much easier, he notes. 

DOXA, a prominent journal working from abroad

Reporting from afar has also only been one of the smaller challenges for the prominent student magazine DOXA (from the Greek word meaning “to think, accept”) after the start of Russia’s war in Ukraine, notes one of its editors Armen Aramyan. 

Even before the war, the magazine launched in 2017 and known for its reporting on student activism and academic censorship, published many stories that Doxa’s reporters could write about remotely as long as they were able to back up the story with other materials, such as recordings. 

The magazine has been much more impacted by the fact that most of the team members had to leave Russia after the start of the invasion following the criminal investigation opened against Aramyan himself and three other DOXA’s editors, and that those who stayed had to stop working for the magazine, Aramyan notes. Right now, the magazine has about twenty employees, and twenty more regular freelancers. 

Money also has become an issue. The war brought financial instability to Doxa’s readers as well as Western sanctions, due to which holders of Russian cards are not able to support them on Patreon. Nowadays they get most financial support from readers based outside of Russia, most likely those who were able to relocate and work from abroad, notes Aramyan. Getting financial support from Russia remains a risk for both sides, he adds: for the magazine, which could be quickly deprived of its Russian accounts, and DOXA’s supporters if the magazine were proclaimed by Russia as a foreign agent. 

Due to all the censorship and blockings, it is nowadays also difficult for Doxa to define its audience, Aramyan adds. It has however definitely become broader, since some started reading them because of their coverage of the war in Ukraine and not for their stories on youth movements beyond Russia or stories that go in line with their leftist, progressive views. This has turned into an issue by itself since sometimes DOXA’s most recent followers do not always understand the journal’s positioning that goes beyond the war. 

Editor’s note: this article was updated to remove the mention of Saint Petersburg as one of the cities where Groza launched its sister publication.

Source of the cover photo: https://depositphotos.com/

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