It may be a belated lament or a redundant rebuke, but I'll tell you one thing: when you attack a journalist, you don't attack an individual, you attack a society.
A journalist, with his who, what, where, when and why is as much part of society as the next person. Perhaps even more so than the next person. Because after all it is the teller, the messenger who shapes the facts, who shapes the story.
So when Oleg Kashin, one of Russia's most sharp-tongued reporters, was nearly killed on his doorstep two weeks ago, I was shocked.
I have to be careful here. Even to say, half-heartedly, that journalism is about truth, or half-truth, and so represents the reality, is to court a frisson of disbelief and a vein of disapproval. I don't know if there has ever been a journalist truth ratings poll in Russia, but if there has been, the number of people trusting journalists could not have been more than one-third.
Why so, I don't know. Maybe because the image of a journalist condemning human rights abuses or endemic corruption in a country obsessed by an overblown messianic idea is seen as... um, unpatriotic?
These days, this is what passes for patriotism. 'Keep your mouth shut, cut the complaining!' Now, let's listen to what the man says:
"A journalist's goal is to tell the truth about people and events in the country, and to do it professionally and honestly," in President Dmitry Medvedev's own words, as quoted in the Kremlin's mouthpiece, the Rossiiskaya Gazeta newspaper.
To tell the truth, eh?
Okay, let's get it straight: few people had heard of Oleg Kashin before the 30-year-old reporter was brutally beaten with an iron rod outside his home in the early hours of November 6. Fewer still did so much as ask themselves, why did it happen? Why him? Why not somebody else?
Kashin, who until recently had been in an induced coma, was a commentator on sensitive social issues for one of Russia's most respected newspapers, Kommersant. Those issues included a controversial road building project, the criticism of which cost another reporter, Mikhail Beketov, a leg and the power of speech two years ago.
I'm not going to talk about who did it, because this much is clear. Nor why they did it, because this, too, is just as obvious. Someone decided Kashin had gone a little too far in criticizing the jingoism of government-backed youth groups such as Molodaya Gvardiya (Young Guard) and that was that. Not exactly "off with the man's head!" as in the days of yore, but "off with some of his limbs!" for sure.
This is not to mention what goes on outside Moscow, "in the regions," as the official phrase has it. Feudalism is still the rule of the day there. God forbid you dare implicate a regional chieftain - man, you're done for. It's either you're another brick in the wall or you're a dead man. Take your choice. So far, there have been dozens of unsolved killings of journalists since the collapse of the USSR in 1991, with investigations leading nowhere. Still pending is the case of Anna Politkovskaya, one of the Kremlin's fiercest critics, who was shot dead in her apartment block on Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's birthday four years ago.
Okay, so we get the idea. Time for the big question now: Isn't there perhaps something severely amiss with such state of affairs - or I am just being naive? I mean, it's all very well for Medvedev to say Kashin's attackers "will be found no matter who's behind it," but really, would you believe such nonsense?
Still, handling the case will be a test for Russia's ruling tandem, especially for Medvedev's human rights agenda, which has been gnawed away at by those very same youth groups and Putin-linked pundits for the past two years. And for all I know, I don't see why it can't be eaten altogether.
The views expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.
MOSCOW, November 16 (RIA Novosti, Alexei Korolyov)
