When journalists faced jail for reporting on Ukraine, Viktor Muchnik closed down his Siberian TV station and left for Armenia
Photograph: Karen Minasyan/The GuardianPhotograph: Karen Minasyan/The GuardianOn the ninth day of Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine, editor-in-chief Viktor Muchnik gathered the staff of TV2 for a meeting at their small newsroom in the Siberian city of Tomsk.
The journalists drained glasses of wine, and almost everybody cried. Then Muchnik signed resignation papers for the entire collective. A few days later, he and his wife, Viktoria, who also worked for TV2 for more than a quarter of a century, packed a couple of suitcases and flew out of Russia, probably for ever.
The channel was the brainchild of Arkady Maiofis, a reporter on Soviet television who wanted to create a place for free debate in 1991 as the Soviet Union was on its last legs. At the time, Muchnik was a young history professor attracted by the idea of making political programmes; the first cameraman was a former policeman
The channel came into its own in August 1991 during the coup from reactionary forces who wanted to restore hardline Soviet rule. As the central television stations went dark, TV2 journalists got updates by calling friends in Moscow and broadcasting the latest news to viewers in Tomsk. Later, TV2 sent a two-person crew to Moscow to film events. The journalists sent the tapes back with pilots flying to Tomsk.
But then, when Vladimir Putin became president in 2000, things slowly began to change. “I didn’t like him from the start. I didn’t like his KGB background, I didn’t like his smile and his way of speaking,” said Muchnik. The channel survived Khodorkovsky’s arrest but the pressure on independent media outlets kept increasing. In 2007, the channel received a series of unofficial warnings from Moscow.
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