List of Journalists Killed in Russia

List Of Journalists Killed In Russia

The dangers to journalists in Russia have been well known since the early 1990s but concern at the number of unsolved killings soared after Anna Politkovskaya's murder in Moscow on 7 October 2006. While international monitors spoke of several dozen deaths, some sources within Russia talked of over two hundred fatalities. The evidence has since been examined and documented in two reports, published in Russian and English, by international organizations.

А wide-ranging investigation by the International Federation of Journalists into the deaths of journalists in Russia was published in June 2009. At the same time the IFJ launched an online database which documents over three hundred deaths and disappearances since 1993. Both the report Partial Justice (Russian version: Частичное правосудие) and the database depend on the information gathered in Russia over the last 16 years by the country's own media monitors, the Glasnost Defense Foundation and the Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations.

In its September 2009 report the Committee to Protect Journalists repeated its conclusion that Russia was one of the deadliest countries in the world for journalists and added that it remains among the worst at solving their murders. The Anatomy of Injustice (Russian version: Анатомия безнаказанности) offers an account of the deaths of 17 journalists in Russia since 2000. They died or were killed, the CPJ is convinced, because of the work they were doing and in only one case, it notes, has there been a partially successful prosecution.

The IFJ report focuses on the capacity of Russian law enforcement agencies, over a longer period of time, to identify and detain those who have killed journalists. It adopted a broader approach than the CPJ study, and offered more analysis of change over time. This permitted Partial Justice to reveal a telling contrast between the rising and successful rate of prosecution for those who have killed journalists in ordinary cases of homicide and the persistent failure to prosecute or convict those responsible for murders linked to the work of journalists.