Russiangate

» see russiangate.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Russiangate published for about fifteen months and i did not read a word of it while it was running. It wrote in Russian, for readers in Russia, about Russian officials, and the only version of it that ever reached me was a summary in English written after it was already dead.

It started in the autumn of 2016 under Alexandrina Elagina, who had come from the magazine The New Times. About twenty people worked there. Almost everything went out unsigned, with only Elagina and one colleague putting their names on copy, and the subjects were the property and the families of people close to power. The governor of St Petersburg was one. So was the son of the speaker of the Federation Council. The newsroom named Meduza and the RBC investigations desk as its models and spent a fair amount of energy arguing that Alexei Navalny's foundation did its work badly, an odd fight for the smaller newsroom in that comparison to pick.

On 23 January 2018 at six in the evening it published a piece on undeclared real estate belonging to Alexander Bortnikov, the director of the FSB, and his deputy, in an expensive settlement at Sestroretsk. Russiangate put the market value of the land and house at 200 to 300 million rubles against a cadastral value of 48.6 million. The owner's name had vanished from the state register's public view in July 2016, but the paper said it came back if you took the official extract and ran it through a plain code editor.

~ the case file ~

~ four hours ~

At ten that night Roskomnadzor blocked the site without going to a court, using the article of the information law that lets the Prosecutor General order a site dark for incitement. The reason recorded in the register was a prosecutor's decision dated 4 December 2015, which is more than nine months before Russiangate existed. Neither agency explained the gap, or anything else.

Elagina said there had been no complaints of any kind before this. She would not guess publicly whether the trigger was the Bortnikov story or something older in the archive. The block came off the next day, by which point the investigation was no longer on the site: the investors had told the technical team to take it down, and the journalists found out afterward. Their stated reason was that they could go to prison.

~ the stop list ~

After it was over Elagina described an agreement she had made with the money: no stories about the president's immediate circle, and none about the Orthodox Church. In the autumn of 2016 she had told interviewers the opposite, that Russiangate had no stop list and the investors held no veto. Both versions are on the record. Only the later one was ever put to a test.

On 24 January the investors told her the financing had ended and so had her job. A few hours later she announced the closure herself. The site had been unblocked for less than a day.

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