August 25, 2021

Russian government requires journalists to register as foreign agents

topic:	Freedom of Expression
located:	Russia
editor:	Andrew Getto

Last time I was travelling abroad, I felt something was going wrong. It took too long for the immigration officer to process my passport. She was staring at her screen, frowning even harder than you would expect for a Russian official. I imagined that next she would lead me to a security room to interrogate me: was it you who wrote this article?

Of course, this is nonsense - the officer was just tired and border control was processed as usual.  A friend told me she had felt the same eerie feeling when returning to Russia recently, although she is a member of Pussy Riot - a vocal enemy of the Kremlin - and I am just a  law abiding citizen, more or less.

It’s difficult to grasp what is considered illegal in Russia, where the parliament is known as the “mad printer” for producing outrageous laws, one after another. It’s sort of hard to grasp what’s considered illegal in Russia. The parliament is known as the “mad printer” for a reason: it produces outrageous laws one after another. One of the most notable examples is the legislation against “foreign agents.”

Under this law, any organisation or individual that publishes any information online and receives any funding from abroad must register as a foreign agent. It does not matter what this information is or what the funding is for. 

People who fail to register receive a fine; people who fail to register repeatedly can be imprisoned for up to five years. Anyone who “participates in political activity,” which is purposefully vague, is considered a foreign agent.  Even anyone who reposts something published by a foreign agent online is considered a foreign agent. Effectively, this blanket legislation brands millions of Russians as agents of some foreign power.

Of course, even the Russian authorities realise the absurdity of this policy. But it’s one of the government’s methods of signaling to people that the thin red line past which one is considered an enemy of the state is shifting once again. 

The Kremlin has showcased this crackdown on the few remaining independent media outlets.

The regulation first targeted Meduza,  the most popular source of independent news. The status of a foreign agent threatened Meduza’s funding as advertisers looked away from it. But the Meduza team are known rebels, who have been legally operating as a Latvian company in the first place. 

In a more unexpected move, the earmark was put on Russia’s last independent TV channel.

TV Rain was founded in 2010, shortly before the first mass protests since the early 1990’s. Over the next decade, the channel was doing the impossible - uncompromising journalism. It was airing protest rallies and interviews with both opposition figures and officials as high-ranking as then-President Dmitry Medvedev. Retrospectively, the Kremlin’s effort to control such an independent voice seems inevitable. 

The authorities gave many explanations, all of them laughable. TV Rain received some funding from abroad - but so did RT, TASS, and other government-owned media. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova compared the regulation tot the US Foreign Agent Registration Act - but there is not a single journalist or media outlet on the list, only lobbyists. 

It’s obvious that the only reason for the 1937-esque “foreign agent” label is TV Rain’s quality independent journalism, which is intolerable for the ruling regime. That’s why the list is constantly expanding: there are currently 43 individual journalists and media outlets, all of whom are legally required to accompany everything they publish, online and in print, with an awkward caption. Chances are, I will soon have to use it as well - so here it is, the gauge of independent journalism in modern Russia:

THIS MESSAGE (MATERIAL) WAS CREATED AND (OR) DISTHETRIBUTED BY A FOREIGN MEDIA OUTLET, EXECUTING THE FUNCTIONS OF A FOREIGN AGENT, AND (OR) RUSSIAN LEGAL ENTITY, EXECUTING  FUNCTIONS OF A FOREIGN AGENT.

Photo by Lianhao Qu

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