The Russian Constitution tells it straight: censorship is forbidden (Chapter 2, article 29.5). But during the last 15 years, Putin’s regime has worked hard to monopolize the media space. It has us...
Zygmunt Dzieciolowski
journalist and film director
Zygmunt Dzieciolowski is a Polish-born journalist, writer and documentary film director with a particular interest in Russia and other post-Soviet republics. Since the late eighties, Dzieciolowski’s articles have been published by leading European newspapers and magazines (Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Focus, Zeit Magazin, TransAtlantik, NZZ, Tages Anzeiger, Das Magazin, Sonntags Zeitung, Rzeczpospolita, Twoj Styl, Mirror, Courrier International, Ogonyek). He appears often as a commentator on numerous Russian radio and TV stations (TV RAIN, BBC Russian Service, Kommersant FM, Radio Svoboda). In the course of his work he has visited the most remote regions of Russia and interviewed its best-known politicians and intellectuals. He has produced and co-directed a number of documentary films including Contest (2004), which presented a beauty pageant in a Siberian prison labor camp for women. In 2008 he covered Russia-Georgia war as a grantee of the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting. In 2008 he co-founded openDemocracy Russia, the post-Soviet section of the UK-based global affairs network openDemocracy.net and was its co-editor until 2013. His book Planet Russia, the collection of his feature stories, was published in Poland in 2005. In 2013 he founded Media-w-Rosji, a Russian independent media digest published online in Polish.
Since the return of Vladimir Putin to Kremlin in 2012 Russia’s media have been confronted with the heavy pressure from the authorities. Life has become much harder for the few independent media outl...
Investigative journalism is an indispensable instrument of democracy. In Russia dozens of courageous journalists must deal with censure and threats on a daily basis in order to report what state med...