Afanasyev said two unknown assailants ran up to him in a schoolyard near his home, hitting him in the head. One of them asked the other “is that him?” and when the second attacker said “yes,” both men pounded him repeatedly until he lost consciousness. The journalists connected the attack with his professional work. According to the Gazeta.ru online newspaper, he did not seek medical attention after the assault.

The editor came to prominence in the days after the deadly disaster at the Sayano-Shushenskaya plant, which killed over 70 workers. On behalf of the victims’ families, Afanasyev publicly questioned the official response to the catastrophe, asking whether there may have been survivors trapped in air pockets within the wreckage of the dam. The journalist also suggested that the official death toll, which was only 10 people at that point, was entirely too low.

Local authorities in the Republic of Khakassia then pressed charges against him for alleged defamation. Sergey Shoygu, who heads the Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations and led the rescue effort, said it was essential to find those guilty of sowing panic after the catastrophe.

On September 1st, the case against Afanasyev was closed, although officials declined to name a reason. Speaking the day before, Shoygu had amended his statement, saying that he was “not asking for the blood” of Mikhail Afanasyev, but that he should apologize.

The same day that Afanasyev was attacked, rescuers recovered the 74th body from the ruins of the hydroelectric station. According to authorities, there is now only one woman who worked at the dam and has yet to be found.

The Sayano Chernobyl
Vitaly Portnikov
August 21, 2009
Grani.ru

I remember the first days after the Chernobyl disaster well. I wasn’t living in Kiev then, but wanted to visit my relatives for the May 1st holidays. The accident had already taken place, but it was absolutely impossible to understand what was happening: the official reports were patchy, Western radio voices were strenuously suppressed, and even they at first had trouble getting a sense of what happened.

The May 1st demonstration resolved everything. It was hard to suspect that it could be conducted in a city that should, to be safe, have been evacuated. That was how I ended up in the post-Chernobyl Kiev. And after several days took ill with a heavy cold. Panic was already wandering the city streets, everyone was picking up [Radio] Svoboda and Voice of America, buying up red wine by the case. The doctors who visited me only shrugged their shoulders: what do you want, radiation, people are dying now like flies… They started washing the tram stops with soapy foam, parents tried to send away their children to relatives in other cities, even under threat of expulsion from the Party and dismissal from work.

And so, in its throes, sneering over its subjects and scornful of them, the empire of lies, whose leadership would declare glasnost just a few months after the Chernobyl nightmare, was on the verge of death. And it seemed that all this would end forever. At least they wouldn’t hide catastrophes from the people. At least in the critical moments, the government would think not about a pretty picture on the television, but about human lives.

It turned out that everything was just starting. The accident at the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric power station, and the willingness of authorities to crush the single(!) journalist who disputed the official version of events, presses this home with complete clarity.

In recent years, many in Russia were sincerely perplexed, [wondering] why the crazy dissenters went to their marches, and independent journalists, instead of describing the color of Kseniya Sobchak’s underwear or the eyebrow movements of yet another high-ranking bureaucrat, tried to make sense of the authorities’ true intentions. As if these people didn’t live in the Soviet epoch and don’t understand what stupefying silence leads to. As if they don’t remember how one could only find out about plane crashes if they happened in the West, how those who tried to relate the execution of workers in Novocherkassk were arrested, how they suppressed the truth about natural disasters, hunger, emergencies.

Ultimately, Chernobyl was the end and not the beginning to the lies. In that same Ukraine in the 30s, newspapers merrily recounted the successes of agriculture to their dying readers in the epoch of the Holodomor. Then, already after the war, an entire section of Kiev went underwater when the authorities tried to backfill Babi Yar, with its hated memory of murdered Jews, and erect a dance floor in its place – and again, to speak about this was anti-Soviet agitation.

They have found just about the same clause for journalist Mikhail Afanasyev. I’m not one to judge the truth or exactness of his information about the possible victims of the accident. I won’t even say that this person is saving the honor of the journalist profession. At least because the workers of the official Russian media and those close to them, who lie to the people daily about what happens in their own country and the world around it, aren’t journalists at all: they are ordinary grey bureaucrats, working for their ration in prescribed conditions.

Were there a different society, then journalists would appear. But in order for this to happen, Russia’s citizens must themselves feel the necessity for honest journalism, which thinks about them, and not the authorities. Not for the sake of abstract freedom and democracy, but for the sake of ordinary safety. So they’ll remember about you, your wife, your son, your mother, when you end up the victim of nature, an accident, terrorism – and not just cast them aside, like soulless debris, for the sake of a pretty television report.

translation by theotherrussia.org