The Internet editorial office of Radio Liberty has been dissolved; new director Masha Gessen denies any involvement in this decision

On September 20, the editor of the Radio Liberty website Lyudmila Telen wrote on her Facebook that the online editors of the publication had been fired and this was the decision of the new director, Masha Gessen.

“Today at 10 am, without a declaration of war, the entire online editorial office of Svoboda was fired. People who, over three years of work, increased site traffic almost 10 times, raised the citation index of Svoboda to second place after Echo (from 4 -5), in six months they brought 17 thousand people to Svoboda’s FB account and more than 21 thousand to Svoboda’s Twitter. Without a penny of additional investment, these people came up with and broadcast Khodorkovsky with his last word, and conducted a live video broadcast from the trial. Velsk, where Platon Lebedev was considered for parole and a lot of other things were done,” Telen wrote.

Former editor-in-chief of the magazine Around the World, and now director of the Russian edition of Radio Liberty, Masha Gessen, said that she did not make a decision to dismiss the radio station’s Internet editorial office. Gessen wrote about this on her Facebook page.

According to Gessen, in May, as a consultant, she wrote a letter to Radio Free Europe in which she “described the general situation in the Moscow editorial office and made a number of recommendations with the proviso that decisions regarding specific people would have to be made by the new director, whoever I didn't."

“The management of RFE responded in the sense that thank you very much and everything, of course, is correct, but waiting until a new director appears is a luxury that we cannot afford: we need to reform the service yesterday,” Gessen writes.

She claims that all personnel decisions made this week were made not by her, but by the previous management of the radio station. “By this moment (appointment to the post of director), the reform plan, including the staffing table, had been worked out - I was called precisely to the post of director of the reformed service, and it was this job that I agreed to. I have no reason to doubt the correctness of the decisions made: everything that I know about the decision-making process makes me think that the decisions were correct. The fact that they were not made by me is just a historical fact,” writes Gessen.

On September 1, Masha Gessen was fired from Around the World because of her refusal to cover Vladimir Putin’s trip to the Siberian Crane Rescue Expedition , and on September 13 she was approved as director of the Russian Service of Radio Liberty.