FROM THE ARCHIVES: The Reporters Who Knew and Were Brave — Dawisha, Barrett, and Politkovskaya

A tribute to real reporting. It is imperative their names and their work live on

***Originally published on January 4, 2023. I am republishing today as a reminder to honor real investigative reporting.***

‘Stealing from the Very Beginning’ — A Tribute to Karen Dawisha

I first came across the work of Karen Dawisha while watching the 2015 Frontline PBS documentary, Putin’s Way. It offered so many important links into what would become the TrumpRussia investigation. I consider the film to be one of the bibles to understanding the fight we are in against Putin’s aspirations for global imperialism.

It was Dawisha’s insights that proved to be most vital. Early in the documentary, the Russia scholar and author of 2014’s Putin’s Kleptocracy said:

“Instead of seeing Russia as a democracy in the process of failing, we need to see it as an authoritarian system in the process of succeeding..if that’s correct, when did that start? And that’s what took me to the ‘90s - they were stealing from the very beginning.”

The filmmakers then return to St. Petersburg when Putin was Deputy Mayor - the link to the mafia ring that stole millions in food relief money aimed for starving citizens.

Toward the end of the documentary, Dawisha does the math of Putin’s massive theft:

“The median wealth for the average Russian is $871, according to Credit Suisse (Median wealth in India, over a thousand dollars)..The other number is 110—110 individuals own 35 percent of the wealth of Russia. They are the most unequal country by far in the world.”

Stealing from the very beginning.

That phrase has echoed in my investigative work for the past four years like a mantra that gives me focus. It helped me keep laser focused on Trump’s thefts, which I documented in 2019 here. Confirming just this week that he came into the presidency* broke escalates the urgency of the national security implications.

In Dawisha’s obituary in The Guardian, Luke Harding wrote:

Her 2014 book, Putin’s Kleptocracy – Who Owns Russia?, is a definitive account of how Russia’s president and his friends grabbed and consolidated power. Along the way they became among the richest people on the planet, and the beneficiaries of what Dawisha called “a kleptocratic tribute system”.

Dawisha’s earlier articles and books were highly regarded. But it was her later work on Putin that was written with clarity, moral passion and bravery, at a time when critics of Russia’s president were dying in murky ways. Putin’s Kleptocracy came out, by chance, just months after Putin annexed Crimea, ushering in a fresh crisis with the west.

It is important to note that Dawisha, who died of lung cancer in 2018, called her book’s rejection by her longtime publisher Cambridge University Press as “pre-emptive book burning.”

I often say that source material is where it is at, and when Putin’s Kleptocracy was published by Simon & Schuster in 2014, it contained hundreds of pages of source citations.

Her tenacious reporting often came from the wayback machine - she reanimated articles that had been wiped from the Russian internet. One document she uncovered from 1999 mapped out plans to use the FSB to destroy independent media and state opposition.

‘A Detective for the People’ — A Tribute to Wayne Barrett

When I first began reporting on TrumpRussia in 2016, taking my research straight to Twitter, I felt very much like a P.I. for the people and said so. When I learned that Wayne Barrett called himself a ‘detective for the people’ I was very moved.

The veteran investigative reporter - who spent 37 years at the Village Voice before being laid off a decade ago - was the first reporter to cut through the public relations veneer of Trump and reveal his lies and deception. His reporting resulted in investigations against Trump’s business practices and his books on Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and Ed Koch make it clear that someone was paying close attention to the dark reality that lurked beneath the glitzy showmanship. (Author’s note: his work informed my American Monster series.)

Aside from a handful of investigative reporters like Craig Unger, New York media as a whole continues to do a disservice to the nation in its normalizing coverage of Trump, who Barrett exposed as a con man decades ago.

As Unger said in an interview with me two years ago, “I was at New York Magazine back in the ‘80s, and I saw Trump’s reputation being built up. And I thought it was horrible the way he was puffed up by publications I worked for.”

Unger said ‘access journalism’ and lucrative tabloid sensationalism was the beginning of the end for truth in reporting.

Barrett’s Twitter feed at “BarrettNation” is frozen in time, stuck permanently at the end of 2016, with his reporting on Trump an ominous foreshadowing to all that was ignored. His last tweet on December 1, 2016, he quotes himself from an interview in New Republic:

“There’s no check on Trump except reality.”

In the article, the authors note of Barrett’s work, “It was all there for us to see. If only we had known to look.” They wrote that Barrett nailed Trump’s fatalism as a clear and lasting danger.

Six years later, the reality-check Tweet has a mere three comments.

I spent yesterday writing about the fake reality created by technocrats in Russia, warning that we still have time to prevent a fake reality from taking root in America. I predicted today’s congressional shitshow months ago, and in yesterday’s post, I wrote:

Recall, that creating unreality and selling conspiracy theories are key strategies of fascism.

We still have a chance to beat them back before a fake version of reality sets in.

Our response must no longer be, ‘How could they or why would they…’ It must be a cynical and measured assessment that they are simply Russian propagandists in American drag.

Wayne Barrett died of lung disease a month after that final tweet. He noted his death was ironic, as he never smoked.

In Barrett’s New York Times obituary, Sam Roberts wrote:

Mr. Barrett was once asked to explain to students at his son’s elementary school just what raking muck actually meant in terms of a day-to-day job. To appear in character, he put on a trench coat, pulled up the collar, withdrew a pad from his pocket and defined that special breed of investigative journalist this way: “We are detectives for the people.”

He added, “There is also no other job where you get paid to tell the truth.”

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‘All We Have Left is the Internet’ — A Tribute to Anna Politkovskaya

Investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya did not die of a mystery lung disease like Dawisha and Barrett. She was assassinated for her work. She was poisoned previously and intimidated and harassed for years before her shooting at point-blank range on Putin’s birthday in 2006.

Her burial on the outskirts of Moscow was attended by 1,000 mourners.

She was born in New York City to Ukranian parents who were Soviet diplomats to the United Nations. She spent most of her life in Moscow, and began her reporting career in the early 1980s. Much of her work focused on human rights abuses and social justice issues, and from 1999 to 2006, she wrote biweekly columns in Novaya Gazeta, where she won awards for her coverage of the Chechen war and published multiple books, among them Putin’s Russia - Life in a Failing Democracy.

She tried to warn the West about the corruption of Putin, and the human rights abuses committed by the Russian military, abuses we are seeing repeated today in Ukraine.

In a 2004 article in The Guardian she wrote:

We are hurtling back into a Soviet abyss, into an information vacuum that spells death from our own ignorance. All we have left is the internet, where information is still freely available. For the rest, if you want to go on working as a journalist, it's total servility to Putin. Otherwise, it can be death, the bullet, poison, or trial - whatever our special services, Putin's guard dogs, see fit.

I know from my reporting that Putin was already in the process of manipulating the internet, pushing the Russian people away from liberal democracy and toward totalitarianism. By 2016, his experimenting on his own people and other former Soviet countries had been refined to the point that he could sick his guard dogs’ fangs into America, effecting the outcome of an American presidential election.

Let the brave reporting and the dire warnings of these three journalists and scholars not be lost under the avalanche of distraction and fake reality.

Let their words be beacons to help the West see a clear path forward.

I do this work because I believe in it - I believe those who possess words of truth in a time of mass deception are necessary.

I will never forget their work and their bravery. I will always cherish the decent.

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