Russian journalism archive aims to protect independent voices from media suppression

Washington — On a quiet May morning, two months after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the homepage of Kremlin-owned news website Lenta.ru was flooded with anti-war and anti-government articles. The articles disappeared from the webpage within the hour, but because of the effort of internet archivists, they can still be viewed separately today. 

This is one of many examples of the Russian government’s attacks on free media, one that activists and archivists hope to counter. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, almost all independent media has been banned or blocked, and journalists are frequently imprisoned over trumped-up charges, according to Reporters Without Borders.

To preserve over two decades of independent Russian journalism, exiled journalists and activists teamed up with PEN’s Freedom to Write Center to create the Russian Independent Media Archive, or RIMA.

“There is no freedom to write if there is no freedom to read,” Liesl Gerntholtz, director of PEN’s Freedom to Write Center, told VOA.

Currently, the website houses over 6 million documents from 98 outlets, starting from the year 2000 — when Russian President Vladmir Putin first came to power.

Co-founders Anna Nemzer, Ilia Veniavkin and Serob Khachatryan began the project around the time of the Ukraine invasion. The restrictive anti-war censorship laws that followed threatened press freedom and journalist safety in Russia, Nemzer told VOA.

More than 1,500 journalists fled the country after the invasion and 22 were imprisoned at the end of last year, according to data from the Committee to Protect Journalists.

“I remember thinking: how can we help these people?” Nemzer told VOA. “We couldn’t help them relocate; we couldn’t help them avoid prison if they stayed in Russia, but we thought the least we could do was save archives of their work.”

At the time of the invasion, Nemzer was on a business trip outside of her home in Moscow, and she remains exiled today.

Nemzer hopes the archive will protect work that is or might be “deliberately erased” by the government.

The main audience for the archive is journalists, academics and researchers who may not have access to relevant documents when they write about Russia. Gerntholtz of PEN sees this archive as the “first draft of history,” she told VOA.

But Nemzer also believes she is doing a service for the archived independent journalists, both in and outside Russia, by preserving their work.

PEN’s Freedom to Write Center agreed to help develop the project because of these shared views — the organization sees media archiving as a natural extension of protecting the reporters themselves, Gerntholtz told VOA.

Gerntholtz added that the organization is concerned about Russia’s “crackdown on free expression” that has only intensified after 2022.

“Free expression in Russia has been at risk for a really long time,” Gerntholtz told VOA. “We’ve seen more writers and artists who’ve been jailed for anti-war expression. We’ve seen civilian and professional journalists jailed for their activism journalism.”

She cited the April 2024 arrests of journalists Konstantin Gabov and Sergey Karelin as an example of the Russian government silencing anti-corruption reporting. They were arrested on extremism charges for their work for late Russian dissident Alexei Navalny.

Even before the invasion, a “huge attack” on journalists was already underway, Nemzer told VOA. She saw Russia’s government declare many independent media outlets as undesirable organizations and prosecute her peer journalists under foreign agent charges.

The Kremlin passed the undesirable-organization law in 2015, giving the government the power to shut down foreign and international organizations. However, critics say this law is a way to target government-critical news outlets. More than 175 organizations have been declared undesirable. 

Because of these crackdowns, Nemzer faced many hurdles in archiving decades of material. Mastering the technology to construct the archive to the scale it is today was especially challenging, and it is still a work in progress, she told VOA.

The co-founders collaborated with the world’s largest internet archive, the Wayback Machine, to use the technology to create a special archived collection.

The Wayback Machine archives over a billion URLs a day, according to its director, Mark Graham. RIMA has been able to access their collection efforts to preserve not just written articles, but also video and audio journalism.

“Material published on the web is not permanent or persistent,” Graham told VOA. “The reliability of the access to that information going into the future is uncertain.”

Among the millions of stories archived in RIMA, over 50,000 come from exiled independent news source The Moscow Times.

Since the Ukraine invasion, The Moscow Times and its staff have “faced nothing but challenges,” Alexander Gubsky, longtime publisher of the Times, told VOA. The staff had to relocate from Russia to Amsterdam within two weeks because of the Russian government’s hostile policies toward journalists, according to Gubsky.

“They want to shut us up,” Gubsky said. “We tell the truth, and they cannot allow the truth.”

Preserving the work of targeted individuals and outlets is one of the main reasons why Nemzer of RIMA helped create the archive, she told VOA.

However, Gubsky told VOA that the Times has an archive of their own work on their website, and prefers that curious readers turn their attention there.

He said that while RIMA is an “interesting project,” the Times owns the copyright for all their own articles, and their primary source of income is from licensing and syndication.

Graham of the Wayback Machine told VOA that the organization responds to legitimate requests from rights holders regarding the distribution of their material. He added that archiving public articles falls under fair use.

“RIMA is set up to facilitate a kind of exploration in a way that you simply can’t do if all you have is access to a few individual websites,” Graham said.

As RIMA continues to expand, Nemzer already has her sights set on the future. She hopes to take advantage of evolving artificial intelligence to help sort the archive.

Nemzer also aims to create similar projects for other countries with leadership that suppresses media and has already talked to journalists from Belarus, Afghanistan and Iran. 

“Writers play a particular role in challenging autocracy, in exposing human rights abuses and speaking truth to power,” Gerntholtz said. “And journalists are crucial to challenging powerful people and governments.” 
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