Afterword

I remember it was a cold Moscow autumn. I recently returned from another country, wrote a little for different publications, and moved from fee to fee. There were some fragmentary offers to work in editorial offices, but there was a feeling that everything was not right. That's when PublicPost fell on me. At that time, editor-in-chief Nikolai Klimenyuk noticed me somewhere in the vastness of young Russian media and suggested meeting me. Appointed in the khinkalnaya. I thought that this was the beginning of something good - at least I always loved khinkal ones. We talked for a long time - I drank a little oriental coffee, talked about my historical research and the dissertation that I am trying to write in between journalistic work, and about this very work too. The first task was unexpected - I had to write about tuberculosis . I was going to see tuberculosis patients, and my mother, a doctor, frightened me of infectious diseases and advised me to wear two respiratory masks at once when meeting. And I answered defiantly: “Mom, I’m a journalist. I shouldn’t be afraid of anyone - not riot police, not skinheads, not tuberculosis patients.”

The next time I came to the planning meeting as a correspondent for PublicPost. The first texts were a failure. The editor told me: “Imagine a reader, you are writing for him, not for me and not for yourself.” And then I sat in front of the computer and painfully imagined our reader - after two weeks the image took shape. It was then that the first large and serious materials began to come out - I called Browder in London and talked to him about the “Magnitsky list”, then called Astakhov and asked about the Russian response to the “Magnitsky list” - in fact, then the whole story with the ban on the adoption of Russian children began Americans, which we covered from the beginning to the very end.

By the way, the calls were a special story. I remember well the first time I called Limonov . For some reason, calling everyone else was easy and simple, but before picking up the phone and calling Limonov, I sat with my eyes closed for several minutes - I thought that he would answer me and how not to blurt out something stupid. At the other end of the phone there was a tired man saying the same thing for the hundredth time.

At that time, I wrote mainly about politics - the State Duma, Zheleznyak, another law that was difficult to imagine a month ago. Maybe this was wrong, but then I had the feeling that there was a war going on in people’s minds - with hands shaking with anger, I called deputies, asked tough questions and waited that now I would finally hear something that would prove that this was all a cynical political game , in which people are just bargaining chips. They often tried to get rid of me with patriotic pathos, sometimes they openly told me to go to hell, and sometimes they tried to explain something, but they didn’t succeed. Over time, the bitterness began to pass - either because nothing changed and everything was repeated day after day, or because with each new note came a new experience. My goal was to keep journalism as close to reality as possible. I went to protests many times. It was especially difficult in winter: during a rally in Lubyanka, my hands turned blue from the cold, and a bully riot policeman pushed me against the fence and pressed me down so that it seemed like I was about to suffocate. I barely made it out then. That evening I drank hot tea at home for a long time, I don’t remember what I was thinking about.

Gradually, a project matured in my head, which I consider to be my main success in all the months of working at PublicPost. As a schoolgirl who came to Moscow from Armenia, I thought who these people are who don’t like people like me, like my mother, how they can beat people for the color of their hair or the shape of their eyes. Over the years, fear of nationalists gave way to anthropological interest. And now I had the opportunity to meet with them and ask why I didn’t please them so much. I first met Belov-Potkin at the Oblomov restaurant: he was charming with me, treated me to dumplings and talked about how guest workers rape Muscovites. On the same day, I met with Thor in his office - he offered me tea, but never poured it, he was serious and, against the backdrop of a map of Russia, outlined a plan for an ideal national state and, of course, about “stop feeding the Caucasus.” A few days later I went to Demushkin - it was a long walk from the Alma-Atinskaya metro station, in the end he took me to some garage where they were preparing barbecue, and behind a nameless door there was a cafe for their own people. We drank tea, he talked to himself with pleasure, but, it seems, he was the only one of all who tried to admit that much was a mistake. He told me how he was going to travel around Russia. Then his friends came and we talked a little about the latest iPhone.

The series of interviews was completed by Yegor Prosvirnin from Sputnik and Pogrom - he promised to meet me many times, he even planned to invite me to an Armenian restaurant for his birthday, but in the end he talked to me on Skype - several times he joked inappropriately about Hitler and the Holocaust, and then , when I read the material, he was very dissatisfied - he said that I did not understand anything about his project. All of them have long ceased to believe in what they say, but there is no longer any possibility of stopping speaking.

Sometimes I brought bad news, and I always felt uneasy afterwards. On the evening when it became known about Balabanov’s death, I called the editor-in-chief of “The Art of Cinema” Daniil Dondurei . He was in Cannes and knew nothing. I think it was the first time I heard real shock and bitterness in my voice. I heard him quietly say to the other members of the Russian delegation: “Balabanov is dead,” and it was so awkward that it cannot be described.

One of the latest was a large piece about what happened to the National Bolsheviks and who these people actually were. They turned out to be humanly good: seven heart-to-heart conversations about how this amazing movement was built. The editor said that this was wrong, and one should not go to them with romantic ideas about young, beautiful revolutionaries. But they still touched me. The article was read poorly, but they themselves thanked me for writing everything honestly, without twisting a word. And I was grateful to them too - behind the movement, which many, perhaps rightly, consider cruel and inhumane, were real people with great human stories.

You can say that I am grateful to the editors for the experience, for new friends, for moments of fun, success, small journalistic joys. You can say that I will miss our jokes and strong invigorating coffee in the morning. And all this will be true. And we can say that any ending is the beginning of something new. PublicPost, of course, will no longer exist, but this does not mean that there were not a dozen really good materials, a team of excellent journalists and two years of work, as my editor said, “for the reader.”

List of materials