Russia Media Climate Said to Be Chilling

It is well past closing time at the small cafe where this small city’s hip young men and women often meet for an after-dinner espresso. The waitresses are steering patrons out the door, but Yuri Bagrov waves them off.

“Don’t worry,” he tells his guests, settling in again over his tea. The waitresses smile indulgently. Bagrov is what you might call a man about town -- he hasn’t left Vladikavkaz, in the Caucasian republic of North Ossetia, in more than a year.

The brash, 29-year-old journalist is engaged in a war of nerves with Russia’s Federal Security Service, and so far, the FSB is ahead. Agents confiscated his internal travel documents in August 2004, leaving him a virtual prisoner of the city.

“This is really getting tough to bear,” said Bagrov, known for his often-controversial stories for Radio Liberty and, formerly, Associated Press, in Russia’s troubled north Caucasus region.

Human rights leaders say that in President Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia, journalists increasingly face a campaign of intimidation by the authorities and corrupt business interests. The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists complained in July that “Russia’s poor press climate is declining at an alarming rate.”

Twelve journalists have been slain since 2000, most recently Magomedzagid Varisov, a prominent writer and political analyst who was gunned down June 30 in the Caucasian city of Makhachkala in Dagestan. Pavel Makeev, a reporter for the Puls television station, was found dead near the southern town of Azov on May 21 after he set out to film an illegal drag race competition there. His video camera was not found.

The number of criminal cases against journalists, accusing them of libel and insulting public officials, is increasing, in addition to the 6,000 to 8,000 civil defamation cases filed every year in which the burden of proof is on the accused, said Oleg Panfilov, head of the Moscow-based Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations.

“Under Putin, unfortunately, the criminal code has started getting used incredibly often. On average, we have counted 30 to 35 cases a year. That is an incredibly high number,” he said. “Russia is probably the only country where criminal cases against journalists are opened that often.”

Bagrov said his problems began after a series of stories he wrote about smuggling and corruption. The most sensitive, he said, was a piece for Associated Press describing the disappearance of a local prosecutor who had been investigating possible links between the FSB and the disappearance of dozens of young men in the Caucasian republic of Ingushetia.

Not long after, he said, 10 FSB agents arrived at his doorstep at 8 o’clock one morning and searched his house, car and office. The warrant said they were looking for materials used to forge official documents, as well as weapons, ammunition and drugs. But they took every piece of paper in the house.

“At 4 p.m., I was taken to the FSB,” Bagrov said. “The investigator told me to write an explanation of how I’d gotten Russian citizenship.”

Bagrov was born in Tbilisi, which became the capital of independent Georgia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He carried an old Soviet passport long after he moved to Vladikavkaz, his mother’s hometown, in 1992. He exchanged it for a Russian passport in 2003, but authorities said there was no registered court record of it, fined him $526 and briefly threatened him with deportation.

Then scarier things started to happen.

“There were phone calls to my wife, who was pregnant,” he said. “The caller would say, ‘May I speak to the widow of Mr. Bagrov?’ It was more than once that this happened.”

With no identity documents, Bagrov was unable to leave Vladikavkaz or apply for new press accreditation to do his job. Excruciatingly, he missed the biggest story of his career, when militants attacked a school in Beslan, just 10 miles away.

He has applied for a new passport, but the application has been stalled. Now the passport agency says it will be February at the earliest when it can issue a new internal travel document. His application for a foreign-travel passport is in even deeper limbo.

Early this month, journalists from around the world descended on Beslan for the one-year anniversary of the school hostage crisis that left 318 hostages dead, but Bagrov was not able to get a credential to cover the story. He was briefly arrested when he tried to go to Beslan.

And authorities have moved to halt his work in Vladikavkaz as well. When he was interviewing protesters at an anti-government demonstration in May, Bagrov says, he was stopped by an FSB officer who told him he needed a press credential.

“I tell him, ‘I can’t get it because I don’t have the documents which you yourself have confiscated from me,’ ” Bagrov recalled.

“I say, ‘What law am I violating?’ He says, ‘You want problems, you got ‘em.’ I tell him, ‘I’ve been seeing you too often lately. What’s your name? You see, I’ve recorded the whole thing, and I’m planning to put this on the air, on Radio Liberty.’

“But I no sooner get back to my office than he bursts in and says, ‘Were you recording our conversation?’ I say, ‘Yes, I was.’ He says, ‘Erase the tape.’ I said, ‘I won’t.’

“The answer I heard convinced me to erase the recording,” Bagrov said. “He said, ‘If you don’t erase it, I swear you will have very big problems, and you do not need that when your wife is about to give birth.’ ”

Thus Bagrov remains a habitue of all the best places in Vladikavkaz and travels to Moscow only in his imagination.

“For another year, I am not going to be allowed out of the city,” he said. “All of the officials, all of the bureaucrats acknowledge the situation is absurd. But they all say there’s nothing they can do.”