Fardwor, Russia!: A Fantastical Tale of Life Under Putin

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you can just about see the metal rod the first man is holding, hidden in a bouquet of flowers, on the surveillance tape as he follows Oleg Kashin near the writer’s home in Moscow. As Kashin approaches a gate, a second man appears, and the two proceed to beat him violently for a solid sixty seconds. The flowers fly off, exposing the metal rod. There’s no sound in the grainy black-and-white footage of Kashin’s attack, just an image of him writhing on the ground, trying to roll away from his pursuers and shield himself with his hands, then crawling unsteadily forward after the men leave him, alone in the dark, and tumbling onto the pavement.

The attempt on Kashin’s life on November 6, 2010 was unmistakably provoked by his work at Kommersant, then Russia’s top daily newspaper; symbolically, the two men worked over his hands, as if to ensure he couldn’t write anymore.[1] Kashin lost the tip of his left pinky finger in the attack and spent several days in a coma with a concussion, multiple fractures, and a broken jaw. It was only the latest of dozens of attacks on journalists in Russia over the past few decades, an act that has become all too commonplace—as has the inevitable cover-up. Intrepid reporters anger government officials by exposing wrongdoing, and those same officials then order the assaults and manipulate the justice system they control to avoid punishment.

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