Press Release, 7.10.2024

On 5 October, the Yabloko party activists in Tatarstan laid flowers at the monument to the victims of political repression in memory of journalists Anna Politkovskaya and Irina Slavina. Yabloko in Kazan annually honours the memory of the murdered journalists. This year, the memorial event was obstructed by police officers and the Main Directorate for Combating Extremism.

Anna Politkovskaya was a journalist for Novaya Gazeta who worked in the Chechen Republic, where she covered the war and human rights violations. Politkovskaya was killed in Moscow on 7 October, 2006. The names of those who ordered the murder have not been officially announced.

Irina Slavina is a Russian journalist, public figure, and editor-in-chief of the online publication Koza.Press. On 2 October, 2020, Slavina set herself on fire near the Ministry of Internal Affairs building in Nizhny Novgorod. Before that, she wrote a post: “Blame the Russian Federation for my death”.

At the memorial event for the journalists, civil activists were not allowed to install the photographs of the journalists on the memorial, and they were also prevented from laying flowers. The police also handed Ruslan Zinatullin, Chairman of the Tatarstan branch of Yabloko, and a number of other activists warnings about the inadmissibility of committing an offense.

An hour later, the improvised memorial to Anna Politkovskaya and Irina Slavina near the monument to the victims of political repression was destroyed.