We will be closed, but we will remain

I was one of the first to come to PublicPost, four months before the site opened. I was called to the project a few days after I graduated from the university - on June 1, 2011, having not really recovered from my exams and diploma, I signed my first contract for my first journalistic job.

Four producers, two editors and one film editor—that’s the lineup we launched with. At first we worked from home, and then we moved to a new office, which was still completely empty, without furniture or air conditioning. We had to create a completely new resource from scratch: we collected a database of contacts, came up with a website design, changed the concept every day, tried different genres, made mistakes, argued among ourselves, and to be honest, sometimes we didn’t even believe that what we were doing when -will appear online. The entire first summer we wrote on the table, trying to decide on the format and just getting our hands on it. I remember with what enthusiasm each new section was developed, how, introducing ourselves to the speakers, we explained that “PublicPost is a new joint project of Interfax and A. Venediktov from Ekho Moskvy,” and how the entire editorial staff rejoiced when they brought us an orange a sofa in the color of the logo... And on September 1, the site opened, and on that day we updated the main page every five minutes, watching the first eye-views very slowly appear under our articles...

The project was launched under the motto “PublicPost is a living country” - focusing on the regions, we wanted to show that beyond the Moscow Ring Road there is also life with its own news, heroes and stories, no less fascinating and important than in the capital. We found bloggers from different cities and persuaded them to write for our new resource, which was still unknown to anyone.

To some extent, it was possible to unite people from all over the country thanks to the protest movement, the first wave of which coincided with our launch. One of my first outings in the field was the Solidarity rally on Chistye Prudy on December 5, at which Navalny’s very call to “go to the Kremlin” was heard. That evening, for the first time, I saw Navalny himself alive, heard the slogans “Russia without Putin,” “Putin, go away,” and “Bring back fair elections!” chanted by an angry crowd in the pouring rain, and for the first time I ran half the night from riot police through the blocked off center of Moscow.

And the next day there wasTriumfalnaya with Nashist drummers, riot police batons and paddy wagon sirens. I came home at two in the morning, set up a Twitter account, where I added all the journalists and human rights activists, and the next day I cried for a long time in the editorial office, recovering from the shock I had experienced.

Then there was a rally on Sakharov Avenue, where I froze my hands while running with a voice recorder after Navalny, a rally on May 6, at which I stood on the other side of the river from Bolotnaya, covering my mouth with one hand in fear, and with the other trying to photograph the bloody head of a protester. And finally, Occupy , which we all attended every day after work. At some point, I realized that I had completely stopped communicating with my old university friends (some of whom, by the way, went to work in the press service of the Ministry of Internal Affairs), and in their place were activists, journalists and human rights defenders from street rallies, with whom I was connected not only by work, but also by a common civic position.

In the winter of 2011/2012 on PublicPost we followed the protest activity of our compatriots abroad . I corresponded with the organizers of rallies “For Fair Elections” in Berlin, China, Tel Aviv, Washington and other cities. They sent us photo reports from actions against the backdrop of the Eiffel Tower or a Shinto shrine in Tokyo, and I, in between, asked them about life in exile and their attitude towards their homeland. I subsequently managed to meet some of them in person during my trips abroad.

In the wake of the rallies, the genre of socialist art and protest art that I loved was revived. When there were no Cossack detachments and the law “On the Protection of the Feelings of Believers”, an exhibition of the protest poster “You Can’t Even Imagine Us” was peacefully held at Artplay, where I met Artemy Troitsky, Pyotr Verzilov and the artist Anton Glotov (Tank Man), with with which we later made a costume together for an action in support of Pussy Riot .

Protest art became my specialty. With the German Arthur Van Ballen we made a giant inflatable saw for the last rally on Bolotnaya, and the artist Pyotr Pavlensky (who, as a sign of support for Pussy Riot, stood with his mouth sewn shut in front of the Kazan Cathedral, and thenshackled himself in barbed wire in front of the registry office in St. Petersburg) told us about the history of the persecution of the classics of world painting . At the initiative of our colleagues, we decided to organize our own exhibition of protest street art, “Voice of the Streets,” where independent street artists could express their civic position. We managed to travel with her to Kaliningrad and St. Petersburg. However, in St. Petersburg we even directly encountered censorship - we were asked to remove one work depicting Putin and Medvedev as saints from the exhibition .

But, probably, most of all I was inspired by the interviews with simple people far from politics that we did for the “Portraits of Russia” column. In St. Petersburg, I went to visit Kolya Vasin , a Beatles fan who sincerely believed in the immortality of John Lennon and dreamed of building a Beatles temple, and in Novosibirsk, artist Ivan Dyrkin showed me a house in the shape of a ball , which he built for his mother. Each such conversation about the life, dreams and thoughts of ordinary people with an unusual story was a breath of fresh air for me, after which, it seemed to me, I became a little wiser and more humane.

PublicPost ceases to exist, but this does not mean that we (the editors) will no longer write about what is happening in the country - we will not go to rallies, call human rights defenders and activists on weekends, and will not travel around Russia in search of new stories and interesting characters. Some of us will continue to do this for other publications, while others will do it purely for themselves, out of habit. After all, what we did at PublicPost these two years was something more than just work... For me it was a way of life.

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