Sometimes, it’s best to be in the rear guard than the avant garde. Novaya Gazeta, Russia’s only investigative newspaper, is proof of this. The paper’s editor-in-chief Dimitri Muratov is running a decidedly urgent arm of the press. Way back before papers went colour, before the term lifestyle became a catch-all philosophy, the press retained one important function: to speak truth to power.
Today’s Russia adds an immediacy to Novaya Gazeta’s mission. More prosperous now than perhaps ever in the last 500 years, Russians are burning the candle of capitalism at both ends. An astounding dynamism and rebirth is matched only by equally astounding stories of corruption and graft. Whether it’s reporting from Chechnya or on the endemic corruption of Russia’s bureaucracy, Novaya Gazeta has been involved in the most hard-hitting investigative journalism this side of the Volga. Over the course of the last seven years, three of Novaya Gazeta’s top journalists, most notably Anna Politkovskaya, have paid with their lives. Muratov maintains a refreshing if heartbreaking sense of humour, one assumes, to be able to soldier on. Recently awarded the CPJ International Press Freedom Award, Muratov sat down with us to talk about optimism, politics and the press.

Payam Sharifi: Tell us about the editorial vision of Novaya Gazeta?
Dimitri Muratov: We don’t make a newspaper for a given target audience; we certainly don’t make this newspaper for the government. Nor do we make it for the opposition. What we’re doing is making a wrong newspaper, and we do this to attract talented journalists to work for us. As a result we’ve found the most intellectual audience in Russia. They’re called the golden intellectual million. There’s one peculiarity about this project: others would commit suicide given the daily obstacles. But I’m happy. Our audience is more clever than the journalists who make this newspaper, including the editor. And we love each other.

PS: What you said you about doing a ‘wrong’ newspaper is very interesting. It seems in today’s climate, doing something wrong can in fact amount to doing something very right.
DM: I recently read Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer. In it there is an 11th commandment: Do not change. I take this to heart sincerely. We do not change. We’re a black and white newspaper on principle; our readers don’t care about glamour and style. They’re not interested in a poor paper done in colour; they’re more interested in ideas and irony. Our readers know that we are independent and that we are in nobody’s pocket. I am often asked, ‘Where’s your place in the market? ’ I answer, ‘That’s the market’s problem. The market should find a place for us. ’ Once a distributor owned by an oligarch decided to remove our newspaper from its stands otherwise full of glossies. In the end, nobody went to this outlet again… People usually buy several things from one kiosk and when Novaya Gazeta was no longer there, customers just moved to the next kiosk. That’s why we claim our paper is ‘Sugar Free’.

PS: What do you make of the current climate of Russian optimism? What is it like to run a hard-hitting paper in a climate of so-called euphoria?
DM: I’ll give you one example which sums up everything about this climate of optimism: the affordable housing initiative. In order to buy one square metre of housing in Kaluga (some 200km outside of Moscow), without counting the costs of eating or drinking, it will take five months. If you want to buy a 50 square metre apartment it will take 200 months. That’s almost 17 years. Add eating and drinking to that and it balloons to 34 years. So you could say I am an optimist: people have to live a long time to own their houses!
The conclusion I draw is: there will be peace because no one can afford or has time to wage war! If anyone is optimistic, it’s our bureaucracy. Our bureaucracy has a historical optimism; they have been before and are again now the richest bureaucracy in the world. Their children study in London. Their money is stored in Swiss and American bank accounts. No matter how hard we try to kick out the British Council from Russia, no matter how many of our old aeroplanes fly over the Barents sea, no matter how much we threaten to use nuclear weapons, it will never happen. Because they have children over there, and women over there, and money over there, and yachts, and houses. They will never give it up. So the corruption actually acts as a guarantor for world peace. (Muratov laughs a hearty laugh).

PS: Do you feel Russians are going in the direction of the Americans, with more interest in micro-issues, say of celebrity culture or lifestyle, than important issues like politics?
DM: Sure, the tendency is towards knowing only the local news. But there will always be a segment not interested in this type of infotainment. The Nation has a remarkable audience and that’s why we decide to collaborate on some projects together in the second half of the year. And we’ve begun a new project with the New Yorker. David Remnick knows our newspaper very well and he was very optimistic about it. One of our assassinated journalists – Yuri Petrovich Shchekochikhin – was a good friend of Remnick’s so in this sense Shchekochikhin’s legacy continues to work.

PS: Iran, my country of origin, has a similar east vs west debate at the heart of its national character. I want to ask you, how do you see this debate within your editorial position?
DM: I have to return to the question of Russian bureaucracy. It’s anti-western, imperialist, and state-ist. And other official propaganda explains that democracy; is a useless doctrine, with an unfriendly interface and used by our enemies to annex Siberia to Texas. Russian bureaucracy has acted ingeniously: it has taken all the good things from democracy for itself like the belief in private property and freedom of movement. And to the populace, it has left all the drawbacks of democracy. So while we have total propaganda, it’s impossible to say whether Russia is Slavophile or western. Once a student came to one of my lectures, and told me, ‘I’m an antiiglobalist. ’ I told him to take his your clothes. He asked me why. And I said that globalisation is about the free movement of people and things across national borders. So, the whole auditorium will see exactly how Russian your clothes are. So he accepted the challenge, took off all his clothes and it turned out that he’s largely Chinese and Indian, about five per cent English due to his underwear, his t-shirt was Czech and his watch was Swiss. I don’t remember his shoes. I’m not ready to say where Russia lies. I think that we haven’t decided yet. There used to be a joke that said we want to live in a capitalist world but work in a communist one. Alas, that hasn’t worked!

PS: In your acceptance speech for the Press Freedom Award, you made a call to advertisers, particularly American ones, to support your paper and deal directly with you. How come?
DM: In Russia, the advertising market is a political market. Advertising is controlled by the company owned basically by the former Minister of Press Mikhail Lesin so advertising in Russia is a political bonus, so I can’t count on them. There was an interesting case: once a major automotive brand decided to advertise in our newspaper and they requested their Russian advertising agency to place an ad immediately. The Russian agency answered Munich: ‘Hey Munich, you shouldn’t advertise in this paper because they criticise the official government line. ’ Munich answered back, ‘Very well, don’t work with Novaya Gazeta. Starting next week, we’ll work with another agency. ’ So the Russian media agency changed its mind, and came back to us. Of course we had to raise our prices a bit after that! What it shows is this: any business, any activity in Russia depends on how it is viewed by the government. I think it should be vice versa and the government should be dependent on those who are producing economic wealth.

PS: Will that not give the government a premise to attack you as being foreign stooges?
DM: Apparently, oil as a substance, is the remains of prehistoric plants and animals. The corpses of dead animals and plants should not be prioritised over the human rights of living people. I don’t like this total dependence on the control of oil and gas. Where we influence people by either turning the oil and gas on or off. We’re not just burning fuel when we drive but to a certain extent, we’re burning freedom. I think that normal people understand that certain things cannot be traded for oil and gas. In today’s European Parliament building, there’s a press centre called The Anna Politkovskaya Press Centre. These people get it.

PS: Condoleezza Rice came to Russia late last year and among the few places she visited were the offices of Novaya Gazeta.
DM: In fact, we didn’t meet here; we met at a small library, to not have other people around. We invited Anna Politkovskaya’s son, Ilya. I’m not an expert on American foreign policy and I don’t know if she’s a good secretary of state. I can’t say anything about this, but I can say that in human terms, as a woman she found the right words to say. I told her that I was not sure whether any material published in a paper is worth the life of a journalist. I was thinking about closing the paper because of the dangers it poses. And Miss Rice told us that despite this tragedy, she can only support the choice of Ilya’s mom – Anna Politkovskaya – to work for the good of the larger community, despite all obvious risks.

PS: How has your life changed since the tragic loss of your three top editors and writers?
DM: I have 15 people working at my newspaper who have won the highest awards in our industry. Why should I write? After Pushkin, writing is difficult anyway! Last year when it was -40ºC in Moscow, we agreed with Pedigree Pal, to hire a big van with an orchestra and we drove around Moscow handing out dog food to the homeless dogs in Moscow. We painted a tiny old Soviet car in black, like government cars, painted black with tinted windows. We put a blue siren light on top of the car and urged the bureaucrats with a loud speaker to take off the blue lights they use to bypass traffic. Now we’re turning 15, and we’ve planted trees in the taiga around Altai, to grow trees used for our newspaper. But the most important thing remains the anti corruption investigations, we want to press the government, not to allow it to sell oil, to rob gas, we work in the interest of our society. Speak truth.