Galina Timchenko still thinks about the scene with disbelief. This day in 2013, the then editor-in-chief of the very popular Lenta.ru platform suddenly became aware of the danger awaiting her. In the platform owner's office, she presents the company's results to him. "I thought he would be delighted," she explains in a café in Paris, where she found refuge. "Our monthly audience was 25 million people. One in five Russians read us! But I saw fear on his face, his hands were trembling. He took off his glasses and said to me: 'Galina, these figures are frightening. It's the equivalent of Première Chaîne [the public television channel] on the internet.' I then understood that any media outlet enjoying great popularity in the country must be under the control of the Kremlin." Six months later, Galina Timchenko was fired, “on the direct order of the presidential administration”.
In Russia, the takeover of the media begins with television. In 2001, the private channel NTV, known for its satirical puppet show "Koukly", came under the control of the state gas giant Gazprom. Violence against journalists is common. Anna Politkovskaya, who investigated the crimes of the Russian army in Chechnya for Novaya Gazeta, was assassinated in 2006. But for Galina Timchenko, the "real censorship" began in 2012, when Vladimir Putin became president again after four years as Prime Minister, exchanging his post with Dmitri Medvedev. The demonstrations of winter 2011, nicknamed the "snow revolution", "deeply frightened the Kremlin", according to her. On May 6, 2012, the day before Vladimir Putin's inauguration, a rally on Bolotnaya Square in central Moscow degenerated into clashes with the police. Vladimir Putin would then have warned, according to Galina Timchenko without anyone really paying attention: “You have ruined my inauguration, I will ruin your life”.
In the process, a repressive legislative arsenal was put in place: law on "foreign agents", first designed to repress NGOs, it would later target journalists, reintroduction of the offense of "slander" and "defamation" into the Penal Code, blocking of Internet sites. A censorship that is being put in place gradually. "In Russia," explains Galina Timchenko, "we call this 'heating the frog in milk': we light the fire very slowly and raise the temperature very, very slowly. The frog doesn't even have time to realize that it is neutralized. That's exactly what happened to us. We didn't even notice the moment we lit the fire under our feet."
After her forced departure from Lentu.Ru, Galina Timchenko realized that she would no longer be able to carry out her work in the country. "In Russia, if you run a media outlet that displeases the authorities, an 'undesirable' media outlet, you encounter the most unexpected problems: checks from the fire safety services, the tax office, the police, the FSB... We knew they wouldn't let us work."
The journalist leaves for Riga, capital of Latvia, where she has an apartment. It is from there that she created Meduza, an independent newspaper which has just celebrated its twelfth anniversary, becoming the most important Russian media in exile. Until February 2022, the newspaper, which has around sixty employees, will operate across both countries. The management and headquarters are in Latvia and most journalists are distributed between Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg and Novosibirsk.
Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine is the final blow to most independent media outlets in the country. As of March 2022, the Duma adopts a new law according to which journalists can be sentenced to up to 15 years in prison for any information deemed “false” about the Russian army. “It was impossible to call the war by its name,” explains Galina Timchenko. “It was a real military censorship that was established.” From then on, most independent newsrooms, such as Dojd television or Echo of Moscow radio, were liquidated and/or left the country. In two weeks, Meduza evacuated around thirty journalists.
To continue to inform its readers, the online site Meduza, cut off from most of its distribution platforms on social networks, had to reconstitute a new network of correspondents, which now includes around forty freelance journalists. To thwart the constant surveillance of the authorities, the newspaper has implemented what it calls “proxy reporting”. "One journalist takes photos, another makes calls, a third interviews residents, a fourth goes to see officials. A fifth does something else... Then we put it all together like a mosaic."
This is how Meduza, for example, covered the funeral of opponent Alexei Navalny on March 1, 2024. Four photographers and four reporters were distributed in different locations, to be sure that if one of them was arrested, the report would not fall through. A time-consuming, complex, expensive process, while on site, the number of journalists ready to take risks is decreasing day by day. “Many exile media have the same people working for their reports,” explains Galina Timchenko. “If we, for example, respect security protocols, and they are very strict, our colleagues may be tempted to take this security lightly. However, if the person is arrested, it is not only us who are in danger, but everyone.” Added to this, with European sanctions against Russia, is the difficulty of paying these journalists. It is impossible to pay them a salary directly; the editorial staff must compete in ingenuity to find legal solutions.
The independent online newspaper Mediazona, mainly devoted to human rights, also encountered all these difficulties. Since the start of the large-scale war in Ukraine, this media, whose members are scattered in Lithuania, the United States, France, the Czech Republic, and even Germany, has given itself two priority objectives. The first, in collaboration with the BBC, is to count the number of Russian soldiers who died at the front: in October 2026, 282,000 were identified. Work carried out in "open source", on the Internet, so there is no need to take risks in the field. Second objective: document the trials and the repression. For this, explains Sergei Smirnov, the editor-in-chief, journalists continue to go daily to the courts. An essential job because, he says, "political prisoners are more and more numerous and the problem is that they are less and less visible." According to Mediazona, ten political prisoners have died in prison since the start of 2026.
In Russia, censorship can sometimes take unexpected turns. In October, Mediazona published a lengthy investigation into the censorship of foreign series broadcast in Russia. As a result, one in two foreign series was cut. Scenes related to LGBT people, allusions to Vladimir Putin or the war in Ukraine and criticism of Soviet history have disappeared. More surprisingly, certain scenes from series like Twin Peaks or The Sopranos have been censored. “When we see this, we understand that the extent of censorship and state interference is much greater than we think.” According to him, the Kremlin's goal is to build "a kind of parallel reality, where everything is fine, where propaganda tells how Russia wins the war and people's incomes increase." A world where, thanks to censorship, there would be "only good", like in the Soviet era.
