On Tuesday, Charlie Bonkowsky attended “A Conversation With Galina Timchenko of Meduza,” hosted jointly by the Harriman Institute and the Columbia Journalism School.

Meduza is the largest remaining independent Russian news outlet. It’s not an easy task. The Russian government has cracked down and tried to stifle independent news for years, and Meduza itself has had to work from exile for the past nine years. The newsroom is bombarded with cyberattacks, the website is blocked inside Russia as an “undesirable organization,” and journalists must content with the threat of being poisoned for their work. Yet Meduza still reaches millions of people inside Russia and provides invaluable information to its Western readers. How does it manage this?

Galina Timchenko is the co-founder, CEO, and publisher of Meduza, but she didn’t start in journalism. When she was growing up in the 60s, her mother told her that there was simply no way to be an honest journalist under the Soviet government, and so Timchenko studied medicine instead. But she stayed interested, and, with the fall of the Soviet Union, began looking for ways to get involved in the news industry.

In 1997, she joined the staff of the newspaper Kommersant as an editor. It was, she said jokingly, the “happiest time of my life”: in print newspaper, printing begins at 10 pm, and then your work is done for the day. But in Internet media, the work never ends. After two years at Kommersant, she was invited to join the staff of the online newspaper Lenta.ru, and eventually became its editor in chief.

From her position at Lenta.ru, she could witness the rolling back of freedoms under Putin’s government. The 90s were not so scary, she said. The head of the Kremlin at the time, Pavel Borodin, could call their newspaper demanding that an article be removed—and they could tell him that “we don’t give a damn about your demands.” But Putin began to impose state control on Russian media—first print newspapers, then television, and then trying to take control of the Russian Internet.

In 2013, the oligarch Alexander Mamut acquired Lenta.ru—and Timchenko could tell immediately that something changed, because a new worker appeared in Government Relations. Then, in March 2014, during the Russian annexation of Crimea, the paper sent a reporter to Kyiv to interview Ukrainian politicians. The paper’s owner called Timchenko and told her she was fired under direction from the Kremlin administration. Most of the remaining staff were either fired as well or resigned in protest to support Timchenko.

With Lenta.ru falling under the heavy hand of the Russian government, what to do next? Timchenko, Ivan Kolpakov—the current editor in chief of Meduza, also present at the event to answer questions—and other former members of Lenta.ru realized that there was “no chance to start new media in Russian.” So they began their new project, Meduza, from Latvia instead.

The vision, Timchenko said, was that “we wanted to build a small pirate ship…a survival kit for news.” During the annexation of Crimea and the invasion of Donbas, she’d watched the anger and shouting on Russian state TV. She didn’t want that for Meduza. She wanted something calm and measured, with minimal emotions but also a sense of humor where necessary. She also wanted that readers could interact with the newspaper, even play games, because “when readers can laugh, there is no possibility of being scared.”

She told us how Putin’s press secretary had a habit of answering all questions in one of three ways: “Putin knows”, “Putin does not know”, or “I do not know whether Putin knows or does not know.” So Meduza set up a system where readers could attempt to match the news of the day to which of those three answers the press secretary had given.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 changed, necessarily, how the newspaper functioned. They shut down their merchandising and infotainment rubrics, and evacuated all of their journalists and staff writers from Russia. Meduza had been designated a “foreign agent”—and then, in January 2023, an “undesirable organization”, meaning that anyone found to be associating with the newspaper could face years in prison. There are still freelancers in Russia who write for Meduza, but the newspaper can’t take the risk of having full-time employees there.

Reporting in Ukraine has its own difficulties. All reports from Ukraine are made by female journalists, because Ukraine has banned Russian men from entering the country, and even then, there are few visas for Russian citizens. Sometimes they can circumvent those restrictions by finding journalists of different nationalities—Kolpakov spoke about how they’d sent a Georgian reporter last year to Ukraine—but it’s still a difficult, fraught assignment to report from a war zone, and a testament to the fortitude of their journalists.

But running a newspaper is impossible without money to do so, and with Meduza labeled an “undesirable organization” inside Russia, all of their advertisers pulled their support from the site. Meduza now relies mostly on its Western readers, through crowdfunding and the support of international journalism organizations, because it’s dangerous for Russian citizens to financially support them under current laws.

It’s impossible to get accurate readership numbers from Russia, since citizens have to visit the site through a VPN or find other ways to avoid its official blocking (Meduza’s mobile app offers several ways to do so). But certainly millions of Russians read it despite the pressures otherwise, and Meduza, starting from just 14 people in Riga, has expanded to nearly a hundred employees across Europe—a “cloud Meduza” in case something goes wrong in one city. Ultimately, Timchenko said, the “Russian Internet was born free. They have tried to put us in a cage, but still we are resisting.”

Meduza logo via Meduza