Strange as it may seem, it turned out to be a lot more difficult to convince representatives of law enforcement agencies [than it was to convince the gangsters] that freedom of speech isn’t just a paragraph in the Constitution but actually a reality of life in Togliatti. In order to prove it we had to suffer through the initiation of a criminal case by law enforcement after we published a particular article. At the time, the FSB accused us of allegedly revealing a state secret.

It happened in the spring of 1999. By then we were fairly strong. People trusted us, and by that time we had launched a supplement to the paper called, THE TOGLIATTI OBSERVER FOR EVERY HOME. We could already exert real influence on public opinion. The elections were approaching. Due to our total independence we were a cause of real concern for many influential politicians, because nobody could predict our behavior during the upcoming elections. I think it was for this reason that the criminal case was initiated and stayed open for some time. The Togliatti Police Surveillance Department had burned down, which we covered in a small report from the site. It seemed strange to us that the Togliatti Surveillance Department burned down almost immediately after a tragic fire in the Samara Department of Internal Affairs. And that just like in Samara, all documents were also destroyed by fire. It was clear to us that all of it had something to do with corruption cases, and that someone had burned the documents to cover their tracks. If after the fire in Samara, where a huge number of people died, the authorities said it was just an accident, one could try to believe it was an accident. But when one accident is followed by another, it does not sound too plausible. We linked them in a chain and published an article. It upset many people.

If we hadn’t written about this fire, nobody would have ever found out. After the article was published, the Ministry of Internal Affairs started their inspections and we were later told that when the Minister of Internal Affairs came to Togliatti, he was very angry and shouted: “I want this paper closed down!” Some people must have taken it as an order. A criminal case was initiated against the newspaper for allegedly revealing a state secret. That’s when we clashed with the FSB machine. We came out of that clash with a sense of deep respect toward that institution. The FSB had been keeping a low profile for the last few years and we had no idea they had retained their former skills. When they started bringing us in for interrogations and when we learned that our staff was virtually under 24-hour surveillance (it didn’t look like the FSB officials were trying to hide this fact — in fact, they emphasized it), when our imprisonment became a perfectly real possibility, when we saw how systematically and relentlessly they dug up all our connections, when they questioned us on how all our relatives were related to one another going back almost to 1917 and demanded that we provide them with our sources of information, it was then that we realized it was not a joke. We could see for ourselves that they still knew how to do their jobs.

At the same time I don’t think the rank-and-file FSB operatives knew that they were carrying out someone’s political order; they were doing their job in earnest. But to what purpose? If they had been after some criminals, we would have been grateful, but it was all about a newspaper that had committed no crime, and all it was trying to do was provide its readers with honest information about what was going on in their city.

However, in spite of serious pressure, no member of THE TOGLIATTI OBSERVER turned in our information sources. Moreover, we made quite a racket.

We got the State Duma factions to support us, as well as regional and national media, who got interested in our case and came to our aid. We did our own investigations of the activities of some FSB officials, the results of which could quite possibly bring about a huge scandal…

As a result, our regional prosecutor’s office admitted the absence of elements of a crime in the case, and it was closed. Thus we once again stood up for freedom of speech — the right of our citizens to receive truthful information, which by the way we will have to do many times yet.