Abstract
A little while ago, I sat in an audience of journalists, campaigners and donors at the Index on Censorship Awards and watched a fresh-faced young man give a short video acceptance speech on behalf of a remarkable Russian human rights organisation. Leonid Drabkin works for OVD-Info, which has monitored political repression in Russia for the past decade and supported protesters who have fallen foul of the Putin regime. It runs a helpline and provides legal assistance to those arrested (OVD is the acronym for the Russian Interior Ministry, the source of the repression).
Drabkin’s speech was humble and understated, paying tribute to other civil society organisations and independent media helping to get the message out to the world that internal dissent in Russia does exist, despite what the regime might say. “Russian…propaganda states every day that everyone in Russia [is] supporting the current war,” he said. “But that is not completely true. There are a lot of people and organisations in Russia that are against the war and our mission is to support them.”
The OVD-Info website has a counter with the number of people arrested at protests since the February 24 invasion of Ukraine. It stands at 19,335 as I write. A single day of monitoring included reports on the eviction of the 86-year-old mother and two children of a Moscow region official who had supported environmental protests, an anti-war protester on hunger strike, and an OVD-Info lawyer challenging a decision to refuse him access to those detained at a St Petersburg rally in April 2021 in support of opposition figure Alexei Navalny.
The work of OVD-Info is obsessive in its detail and the sourcing and counting methodology are transparent. And this is the point. In a world of fake news and disinformation, objective truth and the hard reality of dissenting activity are precious commodities. The Index awards always serve to put our own parochial concerns in perspective, so it is a somewhat uncomfortable experience to toast the courage of journalists in extremis over a three-course meal in the comfort of a Mayfair hotel.
This year, this contrast felt particularly stark. The journalism prize went to Sophia Huang Xueqin, a reporter and women’s rights activist who documented sexual harassment across China. Huang disappeared in September 2021 and her arrest and imprisonment was only confirmed two months later. She is now held in the No 1 Detention Centre in Guangzhou. The arts award this year went to Cuban artist Hamlet Lavastida, who sees his art as a non-violent means of documenting the abuses of his country’s government. For instance, an exhibition created during his residency at the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin in April 2021 included transcripts of a police interrogation and the forced confession of a poet alongside a mosaic representing the Cuban security apparatus. He was arrested on his return after discussing the idea of stamping Cuban coins with the logos of activist organisations. He now lives in exile in Europe.
A common thread runs through the work of all three award-winners: an obsession to document reality. Each is driven to record the abuse they have witnessed in the face of threats to their own safety and liberty.
The obsessive nature of OVD-Info’s work reminded me of Peter Pomerantsev’s preface to his extraordinary book on fake news, This is Not Propaganda. He talks about his parents’ lives as Soviet dissidents and the absolute imperative to get even the smallest details of information to the outside world. He describes the Chronicle of Current Events, one of the inspirations for the work of Index. “The Chronicle was how Soviet dissidents documented suppressed facts about political arrests, interrogations, searches, trials, beatings, abuses in prison. Information was gathered via word of mouth or smuggled out of the labour camps in tiny, self-made polythene capsules that were swallowed and then shat out, their contents typed up and photographed in dark rooms. It was then passed from person to person, hidden in the pages of books and diplomatic pouches, until it could reach the West…” Pomerantsev’s point is that these tiny pieces of smuggled truth provided essential ammunition against the vast Soviet edifice of lies. OVD-Info is the Chronicle of Current Events for the Information Age.
Thankfully, we do not need the equivalent of OVD-Info. With all its flaws, we have a national press and independent broadcast media that records the failings of the Home Office on an almost daily basis. But we should not be complacent. New legislation curbing the right to protest is a real concern and a National Security Bill that comes close to conflating spies and journalists should be opposed by everyone who cares about investigative journalism.
Perhaps more worrying still was the news of cuts to BBC local news radio announced in November. We saw during the round of interviews with Liz Truss in the run-up to Conservative Party conference this year just how important local knowledge can be in holding the powerful to account. The decimation of local newspapers already means that the reporting of local councils, courts and policing is withering away. In a time of austerity and economic uncertainty, this is precisely where some of that obsessive desire to document reality should be directed. And this is why the BBC’s decision is so incredibly short-sighted.
Events in Ukraine and Russia remind us that media freedom does not come cheap. I’d like to think that if some senior BBC executives had been in the room when Leonid Drabkin picked up the Index Campaigning Award, they would have thought twice about their decision. As the drive for “content” risks pushing out genuine reporting, we can learn from OVD-Info and the dissident tradition it represents that simple facts are precious, whether they are contained in polythene capsules or their digital equivalent. They are precious when reporting on protesters in St Petersburg or from outside a local court in Newcastle.
