Authors

James Rodgers¹; Dina Fainberg¹;  ¹ City, University of London, UK

Discussion

The murders in the 1990s of the journalists Vladislav Listyev and Dmitry Kholodov were signs of the violent lawlessness that plagued Russian society in the decade after the collapse of communism. The deaths provoked widespread public sympathy. While the two killings had this in common, there were also important distinctions that have much to say about the relationship between the state, powerful business interests, and violence against journalists.
These murders foreshadowed important trends in a country that has tended to feature in the bottom quarter of the World Press Freedom Index published annually by Reporters Sans Frontières/ Reporters Without Borders.
Kholodov worked for 'Moskovsky Komsomolets'. In the 1990s, it served up a mixture of scandal, crime, and hard-hitting investigations. In 1994, working on a story of corruption in the Russian military, Kholodov was given a tip-off to go to collect a briefcase from a Moscow railway station. When he opened it, it exploded, killing him.
Listyev was one of the highest profile journalists of the late Soviet and early post-Soviet periods. In March 1995, having just been appointed head of Russia’s main TV channel, ORT, he was shot dead on the stairs of his apartment block.
In neither case were the perpetrators brought to justice.
This paper will situate both murders in their wider historical and political contexts. It will argue that although one was investigating official corruption, and the other’s death is thought to have ordered by ruthless business people who feared losing out from his planned reforms to television advertising, their deaths were milestones in the history of violence against journalists in Russia. This was a time of greater freedom of expression. It was also one that set dangerous and deadly precedents. These were followed by the murder in 2006 of Anna Politkovskaya, and the driving into exile of opposition journalists fearful for their safety.
About the authors
James Rodgers is Reader in International Journalism at City St George’s, University of London. He is the author of 'Assignment Moscow: Reporting on Russia from Lenin to Putin' (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020 and 2023). His next book, due to be published by Yale University Press in 2025, will be on Russia’s relations with the West from the 1990s until the present decade.
Dina Fainberg is Senior Lecturer in Modern History at City St George’s, University of London. She is an historian of US-Russia relations, Soviet media and propaganda, and Cold War Culture. Fainberg is the author 'Cold War Correspondents: Soviet and American Reporters on the Ideological Frontlines' (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021). Together with Artemy Kalinovsky she is the co-editor of 'Reconsidering Stagnation in the Brezhnev Era: Ideology and Exchange' (2016)