Since Russia enshrined freedom of speech as a constitutional right in 1993, a total of 152 journalists have been murdered there. A database set up last month by two media monitoring organizations, the Glasnost Defense Foundation and the Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations, sets out the details of each case. Yelena Tregubova is trying hard not to be the 153rd.
"I am not going to keep silent, because if I do, they will kill me silently," Tregubova declares. "I am in a privileged position because I can speak freely. Many of the colleagues I left behind in Moscow think as I do about what is happening, but they can't speak up. I don't have nuclear weapons, I don't have an organization like the KGB behind me. Journalism is my only weapon."
Tregubova is privileged, if you can call it that, by virtue of the fact that she is under police protection, applying for political asylum in the UK. The story of how she came to be here tells you some unpalatable truths about what is happening in Russia.
She was once a Kremlin pool reporter for one of Russia's brightest newspapers, Kommersant, a daily that glorified Russia's leap into brash capitalism in the 1990s. She got close to the oligarchs and stooges populating the inner court of the country's previous president, Boris Yeltsin; sometimes too close. Based on her experiences, Tregubova published a book adopting the narrative of a kiss-and-tell account. Called Tales of a Kremlin Digger, its contents became an instant talking point in Russia. Among those who featured in her tales of the power elite at the time was Vladimir Putin, whose roles included heading the Federal Security Service (FSB) from 1998 to 1999. He took a shine to her, or tried to recruit her (she says it was never clear to her which). She writes in the book that he invited her to an expensive sushi restaurant, a rarity in Moscow in those days, and hinted that he would rather like to spend New Year's Eve alone with her.
But beyond the personal, the book chronicled how Putin seized control of vital state assets - how, for instance, he destroyed the Yukos oil empire of the jailed oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, whom he saw as a political threat, and how he used the state energy monopoly Gazprom as an instrument of Kremlin control not only over Russia but also its neighbors. With a cover picture of a famous Soviet propaganda image of a woman fighter pilot in the Great Patriotic War, the book was an instant sell-out.
But Tregubova soon felt the earth tremors emanating from the Kremlin. An interview she gave to the weekly news program Namedi on state-controlled NTV was pulled and, she says, the Russian press minister Mikhail Lesin told her editor: "Does Tregubova realize she will never get work again?"
That was October 2003. In February 2004, she says, she got a call from a man, identifying himself as an employee of Moscow's Sheremetyevo International Airport, saying that a parcel had arrived and asking for her home address. She did not supply her address and asked the man what number he was calling from. He hung up. A few days later a bomb exploded outside the door of her apartment in Moscow, as she was about to leave to meet a friend. She had a narrow escape. Police classified the incident as an "act of hooliganism."
Tregubova continued to write, but this time it was for an updated edition of her book that was coming out in Germany, with the even more lurid title, Mutants of the Kremlin. Then came the day last year that all journalists in Russia can remember, the Saturday when Anna Politkovskaya, the journalist who repeatedly exposed and campaigned against human rights abuses in Chechnya, was shot dead in the entrance to her Moscow flat. It was 10 minutes' walk from where Tregubova lived. There were frantic calls as the news spread around Moscow and one friend wanted to take her straight to the airport.
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