WaPo Notices Bleak Prospects For Russian Journalists

The editorial board of the Washington Post takes note of the recent suspicious deaths of a number of Russian journalists critical of Vladimir Putin and his mafia-style government. It is very dangerous to be a journalist in Russia these days if you are in any way critical of the government.

Normally it would be unwarranted to speculate that Mr. Putin's security services might have had something to do with the journalist's death — or, for that matter, with the shooting of Russian specialist Paul Joyal outside his Prince George's County home March 1. But the instances of violence against journalists in Mr. Putin's Russia and of the brutal elimination of his critics both at home and abroad have become so common that it's impossible to explain them all as coincidences. Since the Russian president took office in 2000, 13 journalists have died in contract-style murders, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, which ranks Russia as the third most deadly country in the world for reporters.

Mr. Safronov's death was preceded by the slaying in October of Anna Politkovskaya, a fierce critic of the war in Chechnya who was gunned down in her apartment building. The exiled Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko was investigating Ms. Politkovskaya's death when he died of poisoning in December; British authorities have been unable to reach the two leading suspects in his death because they are being shielded by Mr. Putin's government. Mr. Joyal was shot in the groin days after appearing in a television documentary about Mr. Litvinenko. In it, he had said that the message to Kremlin critics was "no matter who you are, where you are, we will find you and we will silence you in the most horrible way possible."

I've noted the same thing, of course. It is extremely deadly to be an enemy of the Putin regime. If this many journalists have died, how many others with less publicly visible jobs have also died? Russia is slipping back into a dreadful mix of Soviet-style authoritarianism with organized crime. People who complain about the US government might want to really take a hard look at what it is like in other countries.