Russian Cop Reporter Profile
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Moscow Crime Reporter, Facing His Obituary Daily
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James Hill for The New York Times
Sergei Kanev, investigative journalist and crime reporter, near his office in Moscow. His mother objects to his dangerous work.
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By ELLEN BARRY
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Published: June 6, 2009
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MOSCOW — After the most recent attack on Sergei
Kanev — attempted strangulation with a wire, in his apartment’s
stairwell here — his editor visited him and delicately suggested that
he take a six-month sabbatical from crime reporting, in America.
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Mikhail Voskresensky/Reuters
Stanislav Markelov, a Russian lawyer, was killed in January.
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Mr.
Kanev still chortles with delight recalling this story, as if he had
been advised to take up tap dancing. He is the kind of reporter who
sleeps with a police scanner beside his bed. Without work, “I would die
of boredom,” he said. And yet, his life has bent under the
weight of danger. A specialist in police corruption and organized
crime, he crosses powerful people and half expects to be killed for it.
He has rigged up two cameras inside a bag he carries with him, so there
will be a record if someone comes for him. His most recent girlfriend
long since threw up her hands, so only his parents are left to beg him
to quit the job, saying fear for his safety is wrecking their old age. “I understand them,” said Mr. Kanev, who is 46. “I have no answer for them.”This has been a brutal year in Russia,
not just for muckraking journalists, but also for human rights workers
and a whole network of advocates who investigate public officials and
extremist groups. In the past year alone, the Committee to Protect Journalists has documented 3 killings of journalists and 19 work-related assaults. Amnesty International has documented one killing of a human rights worker and 16 attacks during the same period. Bit by bit, in the Vladimir V. Putin
era, the ranks of people willing to hold the powerful to account are
thinning. Their work is increasingly marginalized, so that most
Russians never learn what corruption or human rights abuses they have
uncovered. And while most do not blame the government for the attacks
themselves, they say failure to investigate and punish the crimes has
set a permissive, and dangerous, tone. “This is the point where people are justifiably making decisions about the rest of their lives,” said Tanya Lokshina, deputy director of the Moscow office of Human Rights Watch.
“You can’t keep approaching people and telling them, ‘I have this spare
room in my apartment, and you are welcome to stay there for a couple of
months.’ That is not a solution to the problem.” Mr. Kanev is
not the most obvious standard-bearer for press freedom. Stout, ruddy
and a chain smoker, he could be equally mistaken for a Russian beat cop
or a bandit circa 1992, the kind with “a raspberry-colored sport coat
and a huge mobile phone,” said Dmitri A. Muratov, editor in chief of
Novaya Gazeta, where Mr. Kanev works as a freelancer. He is also a reporter for “Line of Defense,” a true-crime show on Moscow’s Third Channel. If
the Soviet Union had lasted, Mr. Kanev might have remained what he was,
a disc jockey expressing his dissent by playing Donna Summer, who had
been blacklisted by the Communist Party for “propagandizing sex.” But
the deluge of the 1990s swept through his disco — two fatal attacks
unfolded on his watch — and he volunteered to work the graveyard shift
for a television news show. By 2005, his material had become
consistently critical of the police, and he lost his job at NTV, one of
Russia’s three national networks. That is how he wound up writing for Novaya Gazeta,
a newspaper known for two things: its pugnacious assaults on the
Russian government, and the number of its staff members who have been
murdered. “The most dangerous thing right now is not to
criticize the authorities,” said Yulia Latynina, a columnist at the
newspaper. “It’s to criticize people who can kill you. The people Kanev
writes about can kill. That is his problem.” The amiable chaos of the newspaper’s office froze up in January, when a masked gunman fatally shot Stanislav Markelov, the newspaper’s lawyer, and a young reporter, 25-year-old Anastasia Baburova. That
made five employees who had died under violent or suspicious
circumstances since 2000, and the first since the investigative
journalist Anna Politkovskaya was found shot to death in her elevator in October 2006. Mr.
Muratov, the editor, put two of his reporters under armed protection
and instituted a policy under which any reporters with sensitive
information are required to publish immediately, reducing the benefit
of killing them. Mr. Kanev, for his part, shrugs off the idea that protection is even possible. “Look,
if you want a safe job, work in a library,” he likes to say. In the
meantime, he goes about his workday with what can only be called joy. On
a recent Tuesday, Mr. Kanev climbed a staircase behind a mattress
salesroom and was led into an office where a tired-looking businessman
recited the details of his son’s kidnapping. Mr. Kanev mopped his brow
with a napkin and took no notes. A few hours later, at the
newspaper’s office, he received a gaunt, black-suited visitor from the
Interior Ministry. As he walked the man out, Mr. Kanev was so happy
with what he had learned that he actually began to skip down the hall,
making the linoleum squeak. “It’s like a thread,” he said. “You pull it, and pull it, and pull it.”Mr.
Kanev learned about risks early in his career, when six thugs from
Zelenograd tied him to a chair with speaker wire and pressed a scalding
iron to his chest, demanding he surrender a videotape. Since
then, he has ratcheted up his ambitions. Early columns on police
kickbacks and petty corruption have given way to detective work on Ms.
Politkovskaya’s murder and on a kidnapping ring based in Uruguay — a
case in which he suggests that former or current government security
agents play a role. The stakes have grown, along with his sense of
mission. “We try to reach our citizens to say, ‘Look, people,
it’s enough,’ ” Mr. Kanev said. “Let’s take back our country. This is
where we were born, right?” Last August, as Mr. Kanev was
returning to his apartment, two men slipped into the stairway behind
him. One wrenched away his bag, full of law enforcement documents, and
the other tightened a wire around his throat, leaving him slumped in
the stairwell. His mother, Nina, heard about it from a
television report, deepening her despair over her only child. She has
spent years trying to convince him that the work he does is not worth
the sacrifice. “It’s useless. It’s like hitting a stone wall with your forehead,” said Mrs. Kaneva, 71, a retired kindergarten
teacher. “You can hit it as long as you want and get bruises and lumps
if you’re lucky, or otherwise get crippled, or lose your life. How does
that address injustice? “He says, ‘Mom, if I don’t do this job, who will do it?’ And I say: ‘One man on a battlefield is not a warrior.’ ” Mr.
Kanev’s angry response is from the family’s history: When Nina Kaneva
was 4, her father was arrested as an enemy of the people, and she never
heard from him again. Mrs. Kaneva hid the story, afraid that she would
be ostracized. “I tell her, ‘All your life you were afraid to talk,’ ” Mr. Kanev said. “I don’t want to live that way.” And
so, this bargain: He signs his name to every article. If, walking in
his darkened stairwell, he senses someone behind him, he switches on
the cameras in his backpack. And when young people come to him to ask about investigative journalism, he can no longer in good conscience encourage them. “First I tell everything I know,” Mr. Kanev said. “Then I say, ‘Maybe you can find another profession.’ ”<nyt_update_bottom>
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