Taboo Tabu Tabu

This was an impossible task. First, we went to the confidential, not under the record, a conversation to one of the deputy prime ministers of the government, who knows Putin for many years. He changed his face and was able to say only one thing: “I think you need to talk with Dima.” It was about Dmitry Peskov, the Putin press secretary and one of the main characters of this part. He, too, did not confirm anything, only more actively than usual, rotated a little bulging eyes. To his honor, Peskov did not try to interfere in our work.

I still recall the further history with a mixture of pride and bitterness. The leadership of RBC, including the representative of the owner (then they were billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov, the last mediamogul of those who owned the media on his own whim, and not by order of the Kremlin), his top managers and lawyers, gathered for the final advice. Do we should call Katerina Tikhonov the daughter of Putin, do we have the right to do so and are we not afraid of foggy, but precisely bad consequences? We did not have official confirmation, we did not have Tikhonova’s documents, but there was a 99 percent confidence that she was the president’s daughter and no less corrupt official than her father. She defeated self -censorship. Frightened that the Kremlin’s anger will destroy the entire edition, just collected from the country's best professionals, we surrendered under the onslaught of the owner. Self -interest, although not personal, and fear. As a result, we did not name the real name of Tikhonova: I personally deleted the last two paragraphs of the text, where the reader offered a solution - what kind of mysterious stranger who received a lot of money for a large construction - Roman Badanin, Anfisa Voronin, Farida Rustamov. Investigation of RBC: who is behind the expansion of Moscow State University / RBC, January 28, 2015 × . Although the context of the narrative immediately finished everything for us. In the following days, the bloggers are Oleg Kashin. She / kashin. GURU, January 29, 2015 × and foreign journalists, following the trail, named the real name of Tikhonova - the Reuters source called Putin the head of the Foundation working with Moscow State University / RBC, January 29, 2015 × .

Without understanding it, in those days we were faced with the main taboo in Russian journalism. Not only collided, but also, to our current shame, they obeyed him (in the entire history of RBC it was the only fact of pressure on the editorial office to which we succumbed).

The taboo sounds like this: " Not a word about personal ." In subsequent years, we heard this maxim many more times - it turned out to be our considerable surprise that in most of the editorialities dependent on the Kremlin this rule have been guided by this rule for many years. “We do not write about Putin’s family”, “We are not interested in the personal lives of people”, “This is not corruption, there is nothing to illuminate” - these are more or less accurate quotes of several editors of large Moscow publications with which we communicated. Having arisen at the beginning of Putin’s reign, this taboo in subsequent years has grown to completely Rabelazian dimensions, incorporating almost all the information about the president’s life outside the Kremlin cabinet, and at the same time the life of anyone who is somehow connected with it.

When journalist Oleg Blotsky wrote one of the first biographies of the Russian ruler, he was asked not to tell anything about Putin's daughters. At the same time, the girls themselves were not hidden from reporters - they were nearby when the biographers spoke with their parents. The former official who knows Putin explained the origins of this ban as follows: “There was a Chechen war” - an interview with one of the authors, 2015 × .

Indeed, security played a well -known role in the appearance of taboos. Five years before Putin’s coming to power in Moscow in the dormitory of Moscow State University, the soldier of Grigory Yavlinsky, one of the most famous politicians of the country, the State Duma deputy and the leader of the Liberal Party of Yabloko, was the victim of the attack. The circumstances of that incident are still unknown, except for those that Yavlinsky himself considered to be appropriate -an interview with Grigory Yavlinsky in 2011 in the program “Visiting Dmitry Gordon”, part 2 / YouTube channel “Visiting Gordon”, June 19, 2014 × . Apparently, the 23-year-old Mikhail Yavlinsky tried to kidnap: the young guy was cut off or severely damaged the phalanx of his fingers on his hand, and his stepfather was sent a letter (one of the versions, there was also a bloody pasynka in the envelope), which required certain concessions from a politician. It is significant that in such a loud business no official papers were preserved - most likely, because Yavlinsky chose to resolve issues with the kidnappers, bypassing law enforcement agencies. Either did not trust them with professionalism, or the requirements of bandits concerned a too sensitive topic. In other words, the leader of the parliamentary party, a person who took fourth place in the presidential election, can easily lose his child in broad daylight and will be forced to follow the criminals. So Putin in 2000 could quite rightfully worry about the safety of the family.

The thing, however, the fact that the “ban on personal” very soon healed his own full life - entire editions were accelerated under the guise of this taboo (as in the case of the Moscow Correspondent, the first to write about the novel by Vladimir Putin and Alina Kabaeva), literary works were exhausted and the film distribution was censored.