A Russian Journalist Who Stayed Behind
The invasion of Ukraine is a crime committed by a kleptocratic despot who has declared it illegal to call a war a war. On Wednesday, Russian forces in Ukraine continued their “special military operation” with an air strike on a maternity hospital in the city of Mariupol. Few in Russia will hear of the event. Vladimir Putin’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, was dismissive in the usual fashion: “This is not the first time we see pathetic outcries concerning the so-called atrocities perpetrated by the Russian military.”
Putin’s capacity to wage this hideous war depends at home on his capacity to sell his fables of Moscow’s valiant “de-Nazification” of Ukraine. To create the comprehensive information vacuum that he requires, he has jailed his most vivid political rival, Alexey Navalny; intimidated other opponents into exile or silence; declared street protests or dissenting social-media posts crimes punishable by lengthy prison terms; and shuttered the last of Moscow’s independent news outlets. Many of the reporters from those outlets––Echo of Moscow, TV Rain, and others––have, with good reason, left the Russian capital for the safety of Yerevan, Baku, Tbilisi, and points west.
Yevgenia Albats is one who has dared to stay. For years, I’ve listened to her Monday-night radio program on Echo of Moscow, and read The New Times, the liberal independent magazine that she edits. Her radio show is called “Polniy Albats,” which her daughter deftly translates as “Absolute Albats.” The title mimics an obscenity that describes a constant state of affairs: polniy pizdets, or “all fucked up.” Two days after Echo of Moscow was accused of sharing “deliberately false information about the actions of Russian military personnel in Ukraine,” its board of directors closed the station.
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When I reached Albats at her apartment in Moscow, she told me that the shuttering of her two longtime media outlets, along with Google suspending the monetization of YouTube videos by Russian content creators, has deprived her of all income. But she wasn’t complaining. “I’ve been fighting this regime all my life,” she said. “But I’ve failed. We’ve failed. Ukrainians are dying every day and Putin remains, after twenty-two years. So what income do I deserve?”
When the news came, on Thursday, that talks in Turkey between Lavrov and the Ukrainian foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, had collapsed, Albats told me, “The negotiations were doomed. They are all pretend. The whole purpose of having them was so that they would fail and Putin could say, ‘See? You can’t negotiate with Nazis.’ ”
More than any Russian reporter I’ve ever encountered, Albats has studied the K.G.B. (now the F.S.B.) relentlessly, interviewing scores of ex-agents and officers for her articles and her book, “The State Within a State: The KGB and Its Hold on Russia––Past, Present, and Future.” Albats was prescient, arguing since the early nineteen-nineties that, despite all the forecasts of economic and political transformation in Russia, the officers of the secret services were emerging not as shamed losers of the ancien régime but as shrewd survivors who would become the overlords of a new Russia. That Putin, a K.G.B. lieutenant colonel in his time, has filled the ranks of the regime with his former cronies, many from his native city of St. Petersburg, is now a commonplace. Albats saw it happening from the start.
Despite Putin’s intensifying crackdown, Albats persists. She did her usual Monday show, featuring an interview with Gleb Pavlovsky, a former adviser to the Russian leader. It went out by live stream on YouTube. Albats knew that amounted to far fewer listeners. And yet she was still on the job, funny, garrulous, as intense as ever. When I asked her if she was afraid to stay in Moscow, she didn’t make a show of bravado.
“I am afraid to go to jail,” she said, with a characteristically sly smile. “I had a knee replacement three weeks ago, and I’m afraid that a Russian jail cell is not the best place to recover. But I have to see this through. I did my show today, and so we will see whether I am going to get arrested or not. So, if you ask if I am fine, I am not so fine. Were it not for my knee, I would go report from Ukraine, of course.”
Russians who have a working familiarity with V.P.N.s and an urge to search out the truth online can still learn what is happening in Ukraine. Albats said that she had just been reading about the vicious assault on Mykolaiv, a city in southern Ukraine that is known in Russia as Nikolaev.
“When I saw that footage from Nikolaev, my mind turned to Mark Albats, my dad, who, on September 5, 1941, was parachuted into Nazi-occupied Ukraine. So, when I see the footage, it hurts. I know this place!” she said. “I went there because my dad was there as a Soviet spy under the Nazi occupation trying to help save Ukraine. His safe house was in Nikolaev. Now the Ukrainians are getting anti-tank missiles from Germany. And who is attacking Nikolaev? Russia! This is beyond crazy.”
Albats has been studying Putin for a long time. And while she notes that so much of his decision-making and motivations remain concealed, the stuff of rumor, his geopolitical ambitions have come out into the open. And, in order to demonstrate his singular power, he has made a point of going on television to humiliate any aide who has had the temerity to raise even a note of doubt or objection.
“The idea that he may go down in history as the tsar who re-created the Pan-Slavic state is what drives him,” she said. “I watched his Security Council meeting on television, and Putin made shit out of some of his closest people, like Sergei Naryshkin, the head of foreign intelligence. Naryshkin was K.G.B., he was in the embassy in Brussels––and Putin made complete shit out of him. He was demonstrating to the rank and file that he was capable of doing whatever he wanted.”
“The talk of the town,” she added, is that there had also been a closed meeting at the Kremlin at which German Gref, the C.E.O. of Sberbank, and Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin allegedly spoke out against the war. “But it’s all gossip,” she said, explaining that the possibility of getting real information was higher in the Gorbachev and Yeltsin eras than it is today. “There were factions in the Central Committee of the Communist Party and other interest groups afterward. No longer. We just don’t know.”
Albats believes that Putin has been establishing the preconditions for invading Ukraine for years, tightening the vise on dissent and then, in 2020, changing the constitution so that he could remain President for many years to come. “And in order to become a tsar with divine powers, unchallenged, he had to create external enemies,” Albats said. “The old slogan: ‘The Fatherland is in Danger!’ That makes everything permissible. When there is an enemy and a war on, you can cut off the hands of anyone you don’t like.”
Last week, Albats went to the penal colony east of Moscow where Navalny is locked up on dubious charges of parole violations. She is a defense witness in the ongoing proceedings against Navalny, who has long infuriated Putin, both for his attempts to run for office and for his relentless investigations of corruption among the ruling élite.
One of Navalny’s investigative films, “Putin’s Palace,” is about the Russian President’s billion-dollar property in the town of Gelendzhik, on the Black Sea. The exposé, which revealed that the leader’s residence features an underground hockey rink and other domestic necessities, got more than twenty million views on YouTube in twenty-four hours. (Putin denied ownership, and one of his childhood friends, the construction magnate Arkady Rotenberg, rushed forward to say that, in fact, he held title to the “dacha.”)
In Albats’s previous meetings with Navalny, as Russian troops massed on the Ukrainian border, the pair had debated Putin’s intentions. Albats insisted that he would invade; Navalny disagreed. “The first thing he said to me when I visited the other day was, ‘Zhenya, you were right,’ ” Albats told me, with barely concealed satisfaction.
It was getting late in Moscow, but Albats wanted to talk about how the bloodshed in Ukraine, which has only been increasing, might end. Most of the options were sickening to consider. The West has been shipping sophisticated weaponry to Ukraine, making it possible to destroy Russian tanks, helicopters, and even jets. Sanctions have turned out to be more effective, and more comprehensive, than many anticipated. “A lot of rich people are very angry,” she said. “The most they can take out of their hard-currency accounts here now is ten thousand dollars. How will they pay for their kids’ boarding schools in the West? How will they pay for their apartments in Abu Dhabi?”
For all Ukraine’s astonishing resilience and bravery, for all Putin’s miscalculations and the spectacle of his stalled assault on Kyiv, the Russian Army’s advance is proceeding––brutally, if sometimes fitfully––in Kharkiv, Kherson, Odesa, and many other cities. The West remains unwilling to commit itself to a direct military confrontation with a despot in possession of an immense nuclear arsenal. And, as negotiations collapsed yet again, it was impossible to know what combination of military resistance, human endurance, and diplomatic guile could bring a stop to the calamitous suffering in Ukraine without the country’s capitulation and an intolerable loss of sovereignty and nationhood. Putin seems capable of any cruelty, an impression supported by his bombardments of Grozny and Aleppo.
I asked Albats if it was possible that the business élites and the security chiefs around Putin could conspire to topple him. She is a proud reporter, but admitted that reliable information is hard to come by. “You have conversations with people who might know something, you hear things, and try to puzzle things together, like in Soviet times.” But real reporting from within Putin’s circle is nearly impossible.
What she has learned, however, is that many who have grown wealthy through their service and obedience to Putin are alarmed. “A lot of very rich people have lost a lot of money,” Albats said. “And these people understand that in order to get rid of at least some sanctions they might need to sacrifice this guy who brought these problems upon them. So, is there a possibility of a palace coup? Who knows.”
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