On October 20, 2014, Meduza went live from Riga. Earlier that year, Russia illegally annexed Crimea, and our co-founder Galina Timchenko was fired as editor-in-chief of the popular news portal Lenta.ru, prompting mass resignations in the newsroom. Starting a news organization abroad may have seemed like a drastic way to keep reporting independently on Russia, but Meduza was never timid. Also, in retrospect, it was a prescient move.
Twelve years is an awkward age for anyone, and it’s not so different for a newsroom. We’re no longer a startup, but we’re not exactly an institution that can take its future for granted. We’ve also acquired a collection of official Russian designations that no one would put on a birthday card.
For years, Meduza reported on Russia from outside the country while building an audience inside its borders. Then came the Kremlin’s discriminatory labels. In 2021, the Russian authorities designated us a “foreign agent” driving away advertisers and forcing us to rely on readers for financial support. In 2022, after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the government blocked our website outright, and our remaining staff in Russia were forced to leave. In 2023, the authorities went a step further and declared Meduza an “undesirable organization” effectively outlawing our work in the country we cover most closely.
“Foreign agent.” “Undesirable.” These are bureaucratic phrases for something simple: The Kremlin would prefer that people not learn what we report, and it’s made it dangerous for people in Russia to help sustain our work.
But millions of people in Russia still read Meduza, despite the fear, and we keep giving them ways to do it by circumventing the Kremlin’s censorship. We owe them more than a story about our own resilience. We owe them journalism that helps explain the decisions made in their name, the lives changed by those decisions, and the war Russia has inflicted on Ukraine and spread across Europe.
We also owe readers a picture of the world that isn’t composed entirely of dictators, disasters, and prison sentences. We cover politics and war, but also science, books, music, and ordinary people trying to make sense of extraordinary circumstances. Sometimes the news is monstrous. Sometimes it’s funny. Sometimes it’s both, which isn’t always convenient for those of us writing the headlines.
If you’re reading us in English, most of what you see began as reporting in Russian. Making that work available to a wider audience matters to us. You shouldn’t need to know Russian to follow what is happening in Russia or understand how its decisions affect people far beyond its borders.
So what do we wish for on our 12th birthday? We could ask for an end to censorship, a free press in Russia, and peace in Ukraine. Those would all be good and long overdue, and we encourage anyone reading to deliver them immediately if it’s within your power. Assuming not, however, there’s something more immediate you can help us with: getting to our next birthday.
Our readers in Russia cannot donate to an outlawed organization. That’s why we depend on those of you elsewhere who can. If our reporting has helped you understand this part of the world, please consider a donation — ideally a recurring one. It helps us pay our journalists, keep the news accessible, and plan beyond the next funding emergency.
Meduza is 12, and we aren’t planning on stopping any time soon.
