One of Golunov's most explosive investigations was about pavements in a Moscow park. So why did the arrest of this brilliant, but very local journalist rock Russia?
I'm sitting at a café near Moscow's Kursk railway station on a dark winter afternoon with Ivan Golunov, the top Russian investigative journalist who was arrested, tortured—and then, incredibly, released in the wake of mass public and media protests, earlier this week. But this is earlier still, December 2017. Ivan is not yet world-famous; he's merely extremely dogged, highly respected by fellow journalists and incredibly good at what he does.
Consider parks, for example. The enormous Zaryadye Park opened in September 2017 in the shadow of the Kremlin at an official cost of 14 billion roubles The figure is jaw-dropping enough in its own right, but Ivan suggests I don't know the half of it."It's impossible to tell how much [Zaryadye] really cost because of the intricate financing structure. Shall I explain it to you?"
To top it off, the Russian importer was a dummy company registered to a schoolteacher in the town of Pushkino in the Leningrad region."She had an unusual surname, so it wasn't hard to find out her telephone number," Golunov told me."She had recently had her passport stolen and had no idea that there was a company registered in her name, let alone a company that had built something in Zaryadye.
On Monday, three of Russia's best-respected and normally very docile newspapers ran identical front pages featuring the headline"I am/We are Ivan Golunov". The anchors of Russian state TV's flagship"60 minutes" propaganda show made a strongly-worded appeal on Golunov's behalf, as did the notorious CEO of the emphatically pro-Kremlin Russia Today, Margarita Simoyan.
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