TV journalist to protest
“Now Enemy Number One”
03/17/2022, 00:51
With her war protest in the main Russian news, the journalist Marina Ovsyannikova puts herself in great danger. Now anything can happen, she says in an interview, but she is at a point where there is no turning back. With her opinion, she is not alone in the state media, many would think like her.
Russian TV journalist Marina Ovsyannikova, who protested against the war in Ukraine live on the evening news, does not want to leave Russia. She is now the “enemy number one here,” she told the “Spiegel”. But she is a patriot, and her 17-year-old son is a much bigger one. “We definitely don’t want to leave, emigrate anywhere,” she said in reference to an offer of asylum from French President Emmanuel Macron.
She’s scared, she told the magazine. She is currently hiding with friends, her two children are safe in Moscow. “Anything can happen, a car accident, anything they want, I’m aware of that.” But she has “already passed the point of no return. I can now speak openly and publicly.”
In an interview, she describes how she went about her protest action on the evening news. She painted her protest poster on Sunday and started her work on a Monday like any other day, observed in the studio exactly where the cameras are, how they move, where she can stand. “I was very afraid that everything could end up being in vain if nobody saw me,” she tells Der Spiegel. Then she quickly ran into the studio: “Past the policeman who is always on duty with us.” He couldn’t react anymore.
After the action, she quickly returned to her workplace and waited. “Then a lot of bosses came up to me – everyone was like, ‘Was that you?’ Nobody really wanted to believe that.” The officials who interrogated her had long suspected that she had not decided to protest herself: “They kept asking how I was connected to the West, who had influenced me. I only have my position as a citizen expressed.”
Slow politicization
Owssjannikova attests to a “cognitive dissonance”. For a long time she suppressed her growing dissatisfaction with Russian politics and never went to demonstrations. Meanwhile, the screws continued to be tightened. In the beginning there was the restriction of free elections, followed by the events in Ukraine and the proclamation of the ‘people’s republics of Donetsk and Luhansk’, and finally the poisoning of Alexei Navalny. At the same time, the independent media were gradually switched off. “The beginning of the war against Ukraine was the point of no return for me,” says the 43-year-old.
Most people who work for state television understand very well what is going on, Ovsyannikova explains. “They’re constantly struggling internally between work and their own moral compass.” However, they are under financial pressure and know that they cannot find another job at the moment. Her own life will now be completely different, according to the journalist: “I don’t know what will happen. Who knows in times of war.”