July 8, 2004: Ann Cooper, Executive Director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, discusses threats to free press in Russia and elsewhere with host Mishal Husain.

MISHAL HUSAIN: Ann Cooper, welcome to WIDE ANGLE. Your work is all about press freedom. And you’re, in fact, just back from Togliatti, the city that we saw in the film. What are your conclusions about what’s been happening to the journalists there?

ANN COOPER: Well, Togliatti is a mighty grim, industrial city, as you could see in the film. And one of the few bright spots for most people in Togliatti in recent years was the creation of this newspaper — which was a tough-minded, investigative newspaper exposing corruption and exposing organized crime. It was shocking when the founding editor was murdered in 2002, but really just unbelievable when his replacement, Alexei Sidorov, was killed last October. And, I think people really are very much in shock about how this could happen.

MISHAL HUSAIN: Do you think those killings are related to the editors’ work on organized crime and corruption?

ANN COOPER: You know, there are many theories about both of these murders and what led to them. There’ve been many different stories. There’s a trial going on for the murder of the second editor — in which a laborer is being accused of the murder and, supposedly, this had absolutely nothing to do with his work. I don’t think anybody believes that. I think they do believe that both of these murders were very much tied to the hard-hitting journalism that this newspaper was doing. And that simply would not be tolerated by the criminal mafias in Togliatti.

MISHAL HUSAIN: Is there also a possible link to local government, to government officials?

ANN COOPER: Well, you have to understand, Togliatti is a city that in the 1990s saw a huge war among criminal mafia factions. And there certainly are many, many accusations that local police and local authorities were complicit — to one degree or another — in all of this fighting. And that they continue to tolerate mafia control of the city and, in particular, if they’re lucrative industries.

MISHAL HUSAIN: In fact, it was your concern about those cases and your interest in them that took you back to Togliatti just now. What kind of a response did you get from the authorities when you tried to press them on these cases?

ANN COOPER: Well, we had a goal of meeting with both people in the prosecutor’s office who were responsible for prosecuting these crimes — investigating and prosecuting these crimes — and with the mayor of Togliatti. The mayor’s office told us on Friday that we would be able to see him on Monday. But, then, suddenly on Monday, he was too busy. So, we were not able to meet with him and discuss this issue. We did meet with the prosecutor and with the chief investigator in both of these murder cases. And basically they said, “Here’s where things stand. One murder is unsolved. You know, it’s pretty cold at this point.” They didn’t hold out much hope that it would ever be solved. And, in the second case, they’ve said, “You know, we think we found the murderer.” And, I’m not sure that anybody in Togliatti believes that the man who’s currently on trial, in this second murder case, is really the murderer.

MISHAL HUSAIN: How does it leave you thinking about the state of justice and the rule of law, if there seems to be this official apathy in justice being served in these cases?

ANN COOPER: Well, I must say, it was extremely discouraging. The prosecutor we met with is a man who’s been a prosecutor for 32 years. That means most of his experience was during the Soviet era. He acknowledged that it wasn’t normal for him, during the Soviet era, to ever talk to the press about these matters. He was trying to show that he’s more open now. He said he’s met with reporters. And he sat down and met with us from the Committee to Protect Journalists. But we asked him about this: someone in his office had called in a reporter covering the trial in the second murder, and this lower level prosecutor had castigated the reporter. And he said, “Yeah, you know, that probably happened.” But, he said, “Look, I don’t think that a trial should be covered while it’s underway.” He thinks that the newspapers there should let the trial take place and then, basically, publish the verdict at the end. And then some details about what happened.

MISHAL HUSAIN: Given all of that, do you think that, ultimately, we will ever see justice served for the two editors who died in Togliatti?

ANN COOPER: “Ultimately,” “ever” — those are pretty strong terms. I certainly hope so. But, it’s not going to happen very quickly. That’s for sure.

MISHAL HUSAIN: And what was your impression about the impact on the journalists at the paper itself? Also, journalists in Togliatti — what is the effect that the killings have had on their work?

ANN COOPER: Well, clearly, the killings have had a very chilling effect on all of the journalists in Togliatti. And, in particular, on the newspaper TOLYATINSKOYE OBOZRENIYE. You know, people say that after the first murder, the newspaper toned down quite a bit. After the second murder, it really pretty much stopped doing any investigative reporting. And other newspapers there certainly are not doing so either. It’s my understanding that there are only two papers in that region that are covering the trial. One of them is TOLYATINSKOYE OBOZRENIYE — the newspaper that had two of its editors killed. And another is a local newspaper in Samara, which is a couple of hours away.

MISHAL HUSAIN: In fact, that’s what we see right at the end of the film. We see the third editor, effectively, saying that he’s going to scale down political and criminal coverage. Do you think that, in a way, that is a fair way to proceed from now on? Is it really worth the cost in human life to keep pursuing these stories?

ANN COOPER: Well, if you look at it strictly in those terms, is it worth the cost of a human life? No, of course it’s not. But the problem here is not just that the journalists in Togliatti have been chilled, that they have been frightened and will no longer do investigative reporting, will no longer look critically — or as critically as they ought to — on the government. The problem is that there’s a message here for the entire city. And that message is, “Don’t criticize. Don’t investigate. Don’t poke your nose into things that are not your business — where there may be corruption, where there may be criminal action.” Because if you do, whether you’re a journalist or whether you’re just an average citizen, you could be punished. Look what happened to the two editors.

MISHAL HUSAIN: So, there’s no doubt at all in your mind that they died for their work. I mean, Russia and Togliatti in particular have a very high crime rate. Is it not possible that they were the victims of ordinary crime in your view?

ANN COOPER: I don’t think that either one of them were victims of ordinary crime — Now, there are various theories, particularly in the first murder of Valery Ivanov. He was also a member of the local city council. So, you know, he was involved in politics as well. And, look, this is a very complex city where politics, organized crime, all of these things are jumbled together. And who’s straight and who’s criminal? It’s very hard to sort that out. That’s what his newspaper was trying to do. There are suggestions that maybe he was murdered because of his political activity. I don’t know that. The bottom line, though, is let’s have a real investigation. Let’s find out who murdered him, who ordered the murder and why it happened and bring those people to justice.

MISHAL HUSAIN: Togliatti’s, of course, just one city. Are these isolated incidences? What’s it been like for journalists elsewhere in Russia? What kinds of things are happening elsewhere?

ANN COOPER: Unfortunately, these are not isolated. It was shocking to have two editors from the same newspaper killed in an 18-month period. But, if you look at the cases that we’ve documented — in the four years since Vladimir Putin came to power — 13 journalists have been killed. A few of those were journalists who died in Chechnya in conflict situations. But most of them were bludgeoned or killed by gunfire. Killed with an axe, with a blunt instrument, stabbed to death. Often on the doorstep of their apartment buildings as they were going home. You know, messages are being sent here. And they’re usually provincial journalists far from the center in places where criminal mafia rules or the local government really operates almost like a fiefdom with a high degree of power and the message is, �Don’t poke around in things that are not your business. Don’t try to expose crime here. Don’t try to expose corruption.” And the murders are horrible. They’re horrific in their details. And they do send a very, very chilling message not just to journalists, but to everybody.

MISHAL HUSAIN: In fact, in the making of this particular film, our filmmakers told us of the difficulty they had in terms of getting people to speak to them openly about what they felt about the restrictions they were operating under. Is that the kind of thing that you also found on this trip? Was there a mood or an atmosphere?

ANN COOPER: I would say there was an atmosphere of resignation, depression. Because nothing has happened in these cases. In one case, no justice at all. In the other case, it seems to be, essentially, a cover-up and a man arrested who most people think really had absolutely nothing to do with this crime. So people are seeing that justice is not done. What kind of message does that send about the government’s concern for its citizens? For their security? What kind of message does it send about the safety of journalists? If you’re in Togliatti and you don’t like something that a journalist is writing about you or your criminal mafia operations or whatever it may be, what do you know about how you could silence that journalist? What you know is: you could murder that journalist and probably get away with it.

MISHAL HUSAIN: Now, you’ve known Russia for a long time. You’ve lived and worked there as a journalist yourself in those crucial years as Communism came to an end at the beginning of the ’90s. What was Russia like then as a place for a journalist to work?

ANN COOPER: Well, I arrived at the very end of 1986. Mikhail Gorbachev had come to power as the head of the Communist Party. He started releasing political prisoners. He declared a policy of glasnost, or openness. And, it was an incredibly exciting period. Glasnost meant that the press was freer than it had been. I wouldn’t say it was a free press by any means. And it also meant that the public was freer to express its opinions, to debate issues. Again, not total freedom.

MISHAL HUSAIN: Did they use the freedom that they had?

ANN COOPER: Boy, did they. It was amazing. It was astonishing to pick up the newspapers every day, to turn on the TV. You know, Gorbachev for a long time seemed to feel that he could control this whole process, that he could decide just how much freedom people would have and what sorts of things they could talk about and what was still off limits. But people started pushing at those boundaries. And pushing very, very hard. Journalists were out there in the forefront on this. And you never knew when you picked up your paper, was there going to be a re-examination of Lenin and his economic policies? Were you going to see the first articles about Trotsky and Stalin and names that had been totally banned from discussion and certainly banned from the media for, literally, decades?

MISHAL HUSAIN: So, would it have been a fair assumption to make, at that point, that Russia was on the road to a fully free press?

ANN COOPER: It wasn’t very clear at the beginning. There was always this kind of lingering doubt. Has this newspaper or that magazine gone too far this time? What’s going to happen to them? Will they be reigned in? And we knew from editors that they were getting phone calls from the Kremlin sometimes. But they kept on going. And it was fascinating to talk to them about, “How do you know what you can do?” And, they didn’t always. But they would decide, “O.K., you know, we’ve gotten some more freedom. This war is still going on in Afghanistan and thousands of Soviet soldiers are dying and that’s not really being written about. Let’s see what we can do there.” And one by one these barriers would fall.

MISHAL HUSAIN: But, if it was a qualified freedom of the press — in a sense — at that time, how different is that to what we’re seeing in Russia today?

ANN COOPER: Well, it was a qualified freedom of the press at the beginning and really for quite a long period. But, as I say, the press and other organizations — other citizens groups within the Soviet Union — started breaking down the barriers. They started talking about, for example, environmental damage — you know, spots in history that had been blotted out for a long time. And after a while, you looked around and said, “Gee, what’s still off limits?” There wasn’t very much that was still off limits. And, at some point, I would say that it was a pretty free press. But, remember that all of the media was still controlled by the state and the Communist Party. It all belonged to party organs or local governments. So, there was always that potential for things being brought back under control.

MISHAL HUSAIN: So, you lived in Russia at that key transition time just as it was moving from Communism and starting on a road towards a democracy. How did the hopes and dreams of that time compare to the reality of life in Russia today?

ANN COOPER: It was a time of incredible optimism, I think, and great excitement. There was also a lot of anger and unhappiness because while people were given a lot more freedom to speak their minds and to discuss topics that had been forbidden in the past, the economy was collapsing. And on an everyday level, that was very, very difficult for people. Shelves in stores emptied out. There was nothing to buy. It was a struggle just to get food on the table every day because it simply wasn’t in the stores. So, that old economic system was collapsing at the same time that there was this excitement about freedom of expression. And sometimes people would say, “I might be willing to give up a little bit of this freedom of expression if I could just go into the store and buy some stuff.”

MISHAL HUSAIN: So, how far has Russia come, then, in these last 15 years or so? Because prosperity is there in abundance for many people, but it’s certainly starting to come through a wider part of society.

ANN COOPER: I would say the prosperity is there for some people, but I think there are many people who feel that they have been left out of this. That their lives are not really, substantially, changed by everything that’s happened in Russia in the last 15 years. There was a moment when we were meeting with the family of the second editor who was killed in Togliatti — Alexei Sidorov. We were getting ready to leave and his family said, “Well, we could call a taxi for you.” In Soviet times, there was supposedly a taxi service you could call, but the taxi might never show up or it might show up in two hours. Nowadays, you can call a taxi service and a taxi will come and get you rather promptly. So, it is a real service — something that didn’t exist in Soviet times. And Sidorov’s father said, “Yeah, we do have this. You know, here’s an example of something that’s changed for the better.” His family was living in a much nicer apartment than a Soviet-era apartment. But what good was that when his son was killed and justice was not being done. And not only was justice not being done, but the state had come up with what looks like a sham story that his son was killed in a common street murder. It was almost insulting to this family.

MISHAL HUSAIN: So, how far would you say that Russia’s come politically in its journey over the last 15 years?

ANN COOPER: I think many people would say that Russia went some distance towards democracy and is not retreating. President Putin has spoken about the need for a managed democracy. Well, what is that? How do you manage democracy? That seems to be a code word for control, for repression. And what we’ve seen in the area of press freedom is that, since Putin took power, the Kremlin has gradually taken control of national broadcasting so that there isn’t really much criticism left on national TV.

MISHAL HUSAIN: Would you still call Russia a democracy then?

ANN COOPER: That’s an extremely difficult question. That’s a large question that we could probably debate all day. You know, there were presidential elections this year. There were parliamentary elections late last year. Those parliamentary elections were severely criticized by the OSCE — the European observers who went there to watch them. One of the things they criticized was the lack of press freedom and the lack of opportunity for rival candidates to get their message out through the media. You know, that’s so fundamental to democracy that if it doesn’t exist, if candidates in a competitive election can’t get their voices heard through the media, then can you say that’s democracy? It’s pretty difficult.

MISHAL HUSAIN: Let me put it to you, though — probably the argument that Vladimir Putin would make. He said that he does believe in the freedom of the press. But he also thinks that, perhaps, there are certain stages of Russian democracy; that certain things are right for Russia at different times. And, in fact, that he doesn’t think Russia has the conditions needed to ensure full press freedom at this point. Would you buy that argument?

ANN COOPER: You know, the Committee to Protect Journalists hears that kind of argument from so many governments all over the world. “You know, we’re different from your country. We’re still struggling. We’re trying to build democracy, but it’s complicated.” And so they use that as an excuse to say that the press shouldn’t be criticizing the government. I mean, that’s fundamentally what this is all about. Governments don’t like criticism. That’s pretty understandable. None of us likes to be criticized. But, if you’re going to have democracy, if the people are going to elect a president, if they’re going to elect legislatures, those people have a public trust and they have to submit themselves to scrutiny. And where does that scrutiny come from? First and foremost: from a free press.

MISHAL HUSAIN: But, are there stages of democracy, perhaps? I mean, lots of countries which are at a similar stage of economic development as Russia also have limited press freedom, limited judicial freedom, a problem with corruption, for instance.

ANN COOPER: Are there stages to democracy? Certainly, these things do not develop overnight. Since the Soviet Union collapsed at the end of 1991, we’ve seen almost 15 years of working towards democracy. Of investment by Western governments, in many cases. In building independent media and trying to build organs of civil society. And meanwhile, what’s happening with the Russian government, and with local governments in many places, is their restrictions on the press, and on those civic organizations. So there really is a rolling back. It’s a massive struggle that’s going on right now.

MISHAL HUSAIN: And how integral would you see the press freedom issue to the overall development of democracy? Is it possible that you could manage the press freedom issue and still end up with a fully fledged democracy?

ANN COOPER: You’ve got to have a free press to build democracy. You’ve got to have a free press to have debate. You’ve got to have a free press to have free and fair elections. If you’re the president of the country, and there are three rival candidates — you’re running for re-election and you control all of the state, all of the media, particularly broadcast media — how are those other candidates going to get their message across? Particularly in a huge country like Russia. You know, that’s how people get information, that’s how they hear arguments, that’s how they hear debate, and they’ve got to have that free flow of information if they’re going to be able to reform society and move forward with democracy.

MISHAL HUSAIN: What do you think, then, of the elections that we just had, when President Putin was re-elected with a huge majority?

ANN COOPER: I don’t think that anybody looked upon those as particularly serious elections. There were rival candidates, but the state essentially controls all of the national broadcast media. And that is crucial to holding on to power.

MISHAL HUSAIN: In the film, we actually hear Mikhail Gorbachev say something similar where he talks about the restrictions on the press ahead of the elections as being a big mistake. He, though, is someone who you would say, perhaps, doesn’t have a totally unqualified record as a supporter of the freedom of the press?

ANN COOPER: In retrospect, during those years that Gorbachev was in power — the late 1980s up through 1991 — there was great freedom of the press towards the end of that time period. It wasn’t just because of Gorbachev, it was partly because society and the press were pushing for greater freedom all the time. And I would say that the media, in the last days of the Soviet Union, was freer, was more freewheeling, was more critical than it is today in Russia.

MISHAL HUSAIN: It seems so ironic, given the fact that was a totalitarian state, in many ways.

ANN COOPER: Right. But remember, those were the years in which that totalitarian state collapsed. All of those things were falling apart, and one result was that people had greater and greater freedom to speak out. And the press, in particular, had greater freedom.

MISHAL HUSAIN: Is that what we saw when the Chernobyl nuclear disaster happened? Many people saw that as a landmark, in terms of what we knew about Russia, because foreign journalists were allowed in. There was a sense of that glasnost — openness at that time. Before we found out about Chernobyl.

ANN COOPER: You know, if you went back and looked at that now, it wouldn’t look quite so open because there was this period when there was silence. The initial Soviet reaction seemed to be the typical reaction. “Let’s not talk about it. Let’s not reveal what’s going on.” But then there was a bit of an opening up, which, at that time, was extraordinary. But if you looked back on it now, it would look like they were still trying to deny that something happened. And that they opened up only under great pressure and rather slowly. But, you know, 10, 15 years earlier, they wouldn’t have opened up at all. They would have just stonewalled. It was a very, very closed society. And if they didn’t want to talk about something, they simply didn’t do that.

MISHAL HUSAIN: And if something on that scale happened today, how do you think the authorities would deal with it? How much openness would they allow now?

ANN COOPER: Well, let’s look at about a year and a half ago, the hostage taking at the theater in Moscow — when Chechen rebels took several hundred hostages and held them for several days, and then the authorities moved in. They used a gas to overcome the rebels. But dozens of the hostages died as well. There was a fair amount of good coverage of that incident. Good coverage meaning: trying to get at what really happened. And to question the authorities: “What sort of gas did you use? How did you come to that decision? How do you live with the fact that you killed quite a few people using that gas?” And the Kremlin didn’t like that questioning. They really did not. They wanted people to just focus on, “Well, it’s over, we got through that, and there were some consequences, but let’s move on.” Shortly after that was when the Kremlin made its last move against NTV, which was the last independent national broadcaster. And, you know, NTV was brought under even greater Kremlin control. And, certainly, the perception is that this was punishment for NTV’s aggressive coverage of that hostage crisis.

MISHAL HUSAIN: Why, then, do you think we are seeing this shift? This shift towards greater restrictions. Is it a sign of the times? Is it a different mood or is this a deliberate government policy?

ANN COOPER: Well, President Putin has been in power for over four years now, and we’ve seen a gradual, but very significant, retrenching in terms of press freedom — at the local level and very much at the national level. And it does seem quite deliberate. Putin seems to be a leader who does not tolerate criticism very well. You know, he doesn’t understand that in his role as the elected leader of the country, he needs to be able to stand up to that criticism. People have the right to ask questions about how he’s leading the country. They have the right to ask questions about how the hostage crisis was ended in Moscow. Could the authorities have acted in a different way that wouldn’t have cost so many lives? They have the right to know as voters. And the press has that right to raise those questions, and to analyze what happened. But Putin doesn’t seem willing to withstand that kind of scrutiny and criticism.

MISHAL HUSAIN: What he said directly to newspaper editors is that, “This is a really difficult time for Russia, and I need your support.” He’s saying, “I need your support to get economic reforms through. That’s what’s important. Be on my side.”

ANN COOPER: Well, you know, that’s what leaders all over the world say when they want to restrict the press. Because they don’t want to be criticized. You know, it’s an uncomfortable thing to be running a country and see yourself criticized in the press. But that’s part of the bargain if you’re going to stand for democratic election. The people chose you, they have a right to oversee your performance, and they have a right to decide whether you should continue in office. Do they like what you’re doing? Do they like the fact that you’re waging war in their name in Chechnya, for example, as Putin’s Kremlin is doing at this point.

MISHAL HUSAIN: What, then, do you make of many of the opinion polls that we see out of Russia, which basically seem to show us that Russians don’t really care about that. They just re-elected Vladimir Putin with a huge majority. One poll, recently done by Newsweek, found 57 percent approval for the restoration of censorship.

ANN COOPER: Well, it certainly seems ironic, doesn’t it? I think people went through a very, very turbulent time in the 1990s in Russia. There was a lot of economic chaos, and I think the perception is that under Putin things have stabilized to a large degree in terms of the economy. For many people, life is still not great, they’re still not reaping those economic benefits, but at least it’s not as chaotic as it was for so much of the 1990s.

MISHAL HUSAIN: But if that’s what matters to Russians, then should someone in your position be worrying about things like press freedom?

ANN COOPER: Well, you still need that scrutiny, the watchdog role of the press, in any sort of society that that wants to be democratic. What are you going to do — say Putin made things pretty stable and so let’s just let him lead forever and forever? People need to see how his government is performing. They need to see how local governments are performing. They need to make those choices. They may be reasonably happy right now with the way things are going in the sense that the economic chaos of the past is now past. But on an ongoing basis, they’re going to need to see how the Kremlin is performing.

MISHAL HUSAIN: But many of them seem to think they do have all of that information. There was another poll recently that said 75 percent of people think press freedom does exist in Russia today.

ANN COOPER: Well, there is certainly a degree of press freedom. It’s nothing like it was, you know, in the darkest days of the Soviet era. But there is less and less freedom. There are fewer and fewer different voices out there being heard in the media. And you have a situation like Togliatti, where you have two very high profile murders, and that tends to silence things. It tends to make people much more reticent to be critical. And, you know, that is simply not healthy for the development of democracy. If you give up your right to criticize, to say, “You know, actually, we don’t like the way you’re governing,” then what are you opening yourself up for?

MISHAL HUSAIN: So what’s the reality of the media in Russia, then? What do you see if you turn on the evening news?

ANN COOPER: Well, a lot of people say that increasingly, television resembles the news in the Soviet era. Putin is the focus of so many broadcasts. Who did he meet with today? What did he say when this world leader came calling? You know, that’s how the news used to be presented. There could be mayhem and chaos all over the world, but the lead story every night in the Soviet era was what did the Secretary General of the Communist Party do today? What meetings did he have? You didn’t even hear what he was saying, usually. Just him shaking hands with lots of people, and greeting them, and smiling in the Kremlin.

MISHAL HUSAIN: And that’s not good enough, in your view?

ANN COOPER: Absolutely not. You know, what’s really going on? What policies are being carried out? What sorts of decisions are being made? What’s happening in Chechnya today? How is the conflict there going? The Kremlin wants people to believe that Chechnya is moving toward democracy. That things are normalized. You know, the few reporters who can get through the Russian military’s restrictions and try to report independently in Chechnya paint a rather different picture of life there. That’s important to know about.

MISHAL HUSAIN: What do you think when you hear the Russian government’s official position? President Putin says he absolutely does defend the press. That it’s something that he treasures and will stand up for.

ANN COOPER: Well, I don’t think most journalists in Russia believe that. I think that much of the public wouldn’t believe that if they really stopped to think about the way the press is treated and the range of voices, range of choices they have in terms of media today in Russia.

MISHAL HUSAIN: What does it tell us, then, about the bigger picture for the country if there are these restrictions on the freedom of the press? And if there’s one thing on paper, and something else in practice?

ANN COOPER: Well, it’s a pretty depressing scenario, in many places. There is independent media; where it exists, it has often been threatened or cowed into self-censorship. We saw this in many places late last year during the parliamentary elections. New restrictions were put on the press that forbade biased coverage. Well, what did that mean, exactly? And the way the press decided to deal with that was to play it safe and not do very much election coverage, which meant that you as the voter, going to the polls, probably didn’t know very much about your choices — the candidates for office.

MISHAL HUSAIN: Would you say it’s as bad, then, as it was in the Communist era, in terms of those controls?

ANN COOPER: No. No. Certainly not as bad as at the height of Soviet power. No, you can’t imagine the stranglehold that the Communist Party had on Soviet society for 70 years. It controlled absolutely everything. You know, if you wanted to buck that system, if you wanted to speak your mind, the consequences were very dire. The hard core dissidents ended up in the Gulag. They were in prison camps. They might be put in a psychiatric hospital and treated very, very severely.

MISHAL HUSAIN: So, what makes you so sure that the person who’s on trial now, for the murder of the second editor, isn’t the right person?

ANN COOPER: Well, I can’t say absolutely he’s not the right person. Anything is possible. But, look at the story here. He’s a laborer. He leaves his apartment at night, goes around the corner to buy a bottle of vodka. The editor comes home. Meanwhile, and as the laborer is returning back to his house, he encounters the editor. They’re total strangers; never met before. The laborer asks the editor to have a drink with him. And the editor refuses and they supposedly get into a fight, and the laborer pulls out an ice pick and stabs him more than a dozen times. I mean, how plausible does that sound? At a bare minimum, that story has got to be subjected to some very severe skepticism, and that simply was not done in this case. There seemed to be a real rush to get somebody, anybody on trial for this murder.

MISHAL HUSAIN: So would you suspect that this is a cover-up?

ANN COOPER: There are certainly many people who believe this is a cover up. Two murders of two top editors at one newspaper in 18 months? People think that smells like a story. They think that whoever was behind these killings did not understand that the second murder was going to get a lot of attention. A lot of international attention. And so, there was pressure. Something has to be done. We have to look like we’re bringing someone to justice. That we’re solving this murder. And so, someone was grabbed. That’s the theory of many people there.

MISHAL HUSAIN: Now, you followed this whole chain of events very closely. What have you learned about the editors — the two men at the center of what happened in Togliatti? Why are they people whose stories we should care about?

ANN COOPER: You know, these are two men who were teenagers in the last years of the Soviet Union. It was a time of great change, enormous change, and of a lot of optimism. People were finally given freedom to express themselves. The world seemed, probably, full of many possibilities for these two extremely bright, dynamic, young men. And they created a newspaper. And that newspaper made a big difference in their city. There was a reporter who went around after the murders interviewing people about what kind of stories this newspaper did? And a lot of people just said, “They printed the truth.” That’s it. They printed the truth. And to people, that was so important because they hadn’t had that before. And now, that truth is being silenced because of these very, very chilling murders. And it sends a message to people about that time of possibilities, of opening up, of greater freedom of expression. That time seems to be closing down now.

MISHAL HUSAIN: How much interest, do you think, we should take in the Western world in the state of press freedom in Russia? Is it something, for instance, that the United States should be more critical about?

ANN COOPER: The Committee to Protect Journalists believes that the United States and other Western governments should very much be putting pressure on Russia and other states that deny freedom of the press, that try to control critical voices out there. Unfortunately, there is not much said about Russia. And what often happens is that a government’s decision to speak out, or not speak out, about a human-rights issue is not based so much on pure human rights, but on geopolitics. You know, what’s the strategic importance of this country?

MISHAL HUSAIN: There were concerns especially around the time of the presidential elections this year. Colin Powell, for instance, when he went to Russia, did do exactly that, criticize the press freedom.

ANN COOPER: Right, and that’s something. That’s a message that needs to be heard loud and clear. And it needs to be heard repeatedly. Because, you know, Russia may be more stable than it has been, or than it was throughout much of the 1990s, but it’s not really going to achieve a stable democracy if it doesn’t have a free press. And that’s a message that, I think, the United States and other Western governments need to deliver very strongly and very loudly to the Russian government.

MISHAL HUSAIN: Doesn’t criticism like that hurt Russia’s image in the rest of world? Reflect badly, personally, on President Putin?

ANN COOPER: Well, I think it’s important for Western governments to say that these issues — human rights issues, press freedom issues — these are very important to us, and if you want to be a key player in the international community, there are certain standards that need to be met. And, you know, here’s where we find you falling down.

MISHAL HUSAIN: So how does the state of media freedom in Russia compare to the reality of other parts of the world?

ANN COOPER: Well, in May of this year, when we put together our annual listing of the ten worst places to be a journalist, Russia was on our list. Along with Iraq, Cuba, China, Bangladesh, Turkmenistan — some pretty awful company on that list. Some of those countries have, literally, dozens of journalists imprisoned because of their work. The Russian government, Putin’s Kremlin, has not really needed to rely on that. There have been some cases of jailings of journalists, but the real issues here are the impunity and the murders of journalists. In the last four and a half years, 13 journalists have been killed because of their work. Several of those in Chechnya, in conflict situations. But the others were murdered, hunted down because of their journalism. So, it’s a deadly place for journalists. Particularly provincial journalists. And the other thing that we see in Russia is a more subtle form of control. You know, we don’t have lots of journalists being thrown in prison because of their work, but administrative pressures on newspapers. The local governments can use control of advertising, control of news print — use these as levers to pressure a newspaper that they think is, maybe, getting a little too independent or feisty in what it’s writing.

MISHAL HUSAIN: What are your fears, then, for democracy in Russia, for Russia’s future, if this strong, independent media is not something that’s going to be celebrated?

ANN COOPER: Well, I just don’t think that you can have a strong democracy anywhere in the world if you don’t have a strong, independent, free press. Because that press is your check on government, on elected governments. It’s what keeps politicians honest once they get into office. You know, it keeps an eye on corruption. It reports to the public about their performance, gives them a report card on how they did. What did they do that was good? What was bad? Now, you, the voter, decided you want to keep this person in office, or do you want to choose an alternative? If you don’t have a free press, the public isn’t going to get that information, and that choice is taken away from them.

MISHAL HUSAIN: Well, did you feel any kind of danger while you were on this trip to Togliatti, after everything that’s happened?

ANN COOPER: We didn’t feel in any personal danger while we were there. Our profile was pretty high, we did have some official meetings. People knew exactly why we were there. We met with the families of the murdered journalists. We met with other journalists. We had a press conference to talk about our concerns, and to renew our calls for justice in these terrible cases. And the press conference almost turned into a therapy session with the journalists who were mighty discouraged — and not just those from that newspaper.

MISHAL HUSAIN: I think in the film you see Sidorov’s wife — obviously, you know she’s lost her husband through all of it, but I think she says something like, “You know, it just wasn’t worth it.”

ANN COOPER: It wasn’t worth it, yeah.

MISHAL HUSAIN: It’s a tragic state of affairs.

ANN COOPER: On one level, you have the families questioning. We’ve lost our family member, and, you know, was that worth it? So it’s a very human loss. But, there’s also this sort of intangible loss for the entire city. And that is what we’ve been talking about. That ability to criticize, to speak out, you know? If you see this happen to these two editors, what do you think about the next time you want to say something critical?

MISHAL HUSAIN: Has it been followed in Moscow, and, you know, elsewhere? Did it become a big national issue?

ANN COOPER: I don’t have the impression that it has particularly. There’s only a handful of papers that are still somewhat national in scope, and pretty muckraking: NOVAYA GAZETA, which Anna Politkovskaya works for, KOMMERSANT, MOSCOW NEWS. We heard that KOMMERSANT was supposed to have a big article on the case last Monday, but we couldn’t find KOMMERSANT in Togliatti. I don’t know that they kept it out of the city on that day, but people said, “It’s hard to get those newspapers in Togliatti.” Very few copies come. If you don’t line up early in the day, you’re not going to find it. And I didn’t hear anything about national TV doing stories. It doesn’t mean to say they haven’t been there, but they’re certainly not down there covering this trial.

MISHAL HUSAIN: Ann Cooper, thanks for being on WIDE ANGLE.

ANN COOPER: Thank you very much.