The Russian government wrote a letter to the OPC’s Freedom of the Press Committee, providing a typically legalistic and bureaucratic non-response to an urgent question: Was Ivan Safronov, pictured right, the fourteenth journalist to be murdered since Vladimir Putin became president of Russia?
“The investigator…decided to close the investigation due to the ‘lack of any criminal event.’ There is no reason to change this decision at this time.”
So went the Russian government’s letter to the OPC’s Freedom of the Press Committee, a typically legalistic and bureaucratic non-response to an urgent question: Was Ivan Safronov the fourteenth journalist to be murdered since Vladimir Putin became president of Russia?
From the beginning, Russian authorities seemed determined that the mysterious death of Safronov, a seasoned investigative reporter for the feisty newspaper Kommersant, was a suicide. On March 2, 2007, Safronov had returned to his Moscow apartment from a grocery shopping trip and walked up the stairs; his body was found below the fourth-story window of the stairwell. His bag of groceries lay on the landing beside the window; oranges had rolled down the stairs.
Safronov had infuriated Russia’s military establishment with exclusive stories about corruption in military contracts. Most recently, he had broken the story that a new intercontinental ballistic missile had failed to launch for the third straight time. Military commanders denied any problems with the missile and threatened Safronov with legal action.
After the death, prosecutors immediately suggested that it was suicide. But according to his colleagues, Safronov was a happily married father of two with a successful career and everything to live for. Andrei Vassilyev, Kommersant’s editor, told Reuters: “I have known him for 10 years and this [suicide] is absolutely not in his character. Everything was fine with him.”
The OPC committee wrote Putin on March 6 to ask for a full investigation of the death, reminding him of the toll of murdered journalists since he came to office, including the indomitable Anna Politkovskaya in October 2006. The OPC called on Putin “to find out, urgently and definitively, whether Ivan Safronov’s name must be added to that tragic list — and if so, to bring his killer to justice.”
The committee repeated its concerns about Safronov in three further letters protesting other cases during the year. When Russian newspapers reported that the investigators had indeed ruled the death a suicide, the committee warned Putin that until all the evidence in the case was disclosed, “suspicion will persist that there was foul play.”
A reply, dated October 5, 2007, arrived in the OPC office on February 5. The words above were signed by E.V. Chetagurov, who identified himself as an overseer of branches dealing with internal events and the law.
Sadly, it is what we have come to expect from Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Putin came to office with promises to install democratic institutions, specifically including press freedom. He has repeated those promises many times, as recently as his press conference a year ago, when he said: “For our country…the issue of journalist persecution is one of the most pressing. And we realize our degree of responsibility in this. We will do everything to protect the press corps.”
Less than a month later, Ivan Safronov was dead.