In ‘Novaya Gazeta’ Case, Moscow Making the Transition from ‘Individual to Collective Repression,’ Kolezev Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Sept. 5 – Until recently, the Russian justice ministry had identified specific media outlets or journalists in compiling its list of foreign agents; but now, with the case of Novaya Gazeta, Dmitry Kolezev says, it is listing a large number of people under this stigma and thus moving from “individual to collective repression.”

            In listing Novaya Gazeta as a foreign agent, the Urals journalist who fled Russia in 2022 says, the ministry included a list of several dozen journalists who were not staffers of that publication but had published there (t.me/kolezev/17888 reposted at echofm.online/opinions/perehod-ot-individualnyh-repressij-k-kollektivnym).

            “Neither de facto nor de jure do these people have anything to do with the publication at the present time,” Kolezev says; but all of them and all at once are now labeled foreign agents at one and the same time and are thus required to identify themselves as such and suffer the restrictions such a label entails.

            According to the Russian journalist now in emigration, this represents “an episode of the transition from individual repression to collective, more massive: people are recorded as enemies already literally lists; and it isone that is likely to spread,” a development that will spread Putin’s repressions more broadlyt and quickly than before.