Sevastopol-born Nastia Baburova would have turned 32 years on November 30, 2015. A journalist of Russian Novaya Gazeta, she was killed, together with human rights activist and lawyer Stas Markelov, by neo-Nazis in Moscow six years ago, on January 19, 2009, after a press conference about the trial of sadistic Russian special forces soldier Colonel Yuri Budanov. Baburova and Markelov actively opposed the nascent neo-Nazism in Russia. The perpetrators of the murder were then caught and punished. However, it has appeared ever since that the Russian authorities are not going to combat neo-Nazism, but rather see it as part of their base.
Baburova was born in Sevastopol in a family of intellectuals and was a very talented student at school. Her homeroom teacher Yevhenia Sytnikova told our reporter (read more in Mykola Semena’s article I Pray, Love Me, Please!, published in Den, February 13, 2009): “She was alone at the top of her class, and therefore wanted to achieve more. Where to look, then? All residents of our city had one answer to this question, and it was exactly like one given in Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters: ‘To Moscow!’” However, just six months of working in Moscow were enough for her to radically change her opinion of the Russian authorities. In 2008, a year before her death, she wrote to her parents in their native language, and according to her mother Larysa, requested that the parents replied in Ukrainian as well. Then the tragedy occurred, which, unfortunately, was ignored by Ukrainian media. Actually, Baburova’s father Eduard Baburov once said that Den was the only Ukrainian media to respond to the tragedy that befell not just their family, but the entire country.
Film director Valery Balaian told Baburova’s story in the film Love Me, Please! (the title quotes a phrase used by the journalist in one of her last letters home). In a conversation with The Day, Balaian (by the way, he was granted Ukrainian citizenship recently) said: “I called the Baburovs at their Sevastopol home on November 30 and talked to Larysa. The parents visited the cemetery and remembered their daughter on that day. Of course, time passes, it is already six years since she died, and fewer people remember this. All events that subsequently occurred in the country have pushed this story to the margins, as it usually happens.”
“Still, I think that the trial of the killers, I mean Nikita Tikhonov and his accomplice Yevgeniya Khasis, revealed some very important details, which, unfortunately, never entered Russian mass conscience,” the director and journalist believes. “A year after he received a life sentence, Tikhonov suddenly changed his testimony to point to people who were directly connected with Vladislav Surkov (the head of the Kremlin administration at the time): he was saying now that they received instructions from him and passed these orders on to Tikhonov. Of course, the authorities tried to hush up this information. However, we see with growing clarity by the day that the murder was planned, and planned at the very top of the Russian state. It is important that Ukrainian public also understand it. The whole story of the emergence of neo-Nazism in Russia was a top-down affair. I lived in Russia for 30 years and I know that the Russian people as in ‘average Russian in the street’ is not prone to xenophobia on its own. It all takes a lot of incitement. Targeted propaganda and brainwashing of population through TV broadcasts has brought a major change, inciting the worst and lowest feelings that previously existed only in the lumpen, marginal stratum. I see that it influences my friends as well, who are intelligent and educated people, not to mention average Russians. The ongoing fascist transformation of Russia has now reached a certain climax. Fascism, which was a marginal phenomenon at the end of the 2000s, has moved to the government level. The current phase is when the fascist ideology engenders the use of military force. It was done to Ukraine at first, after it managed to avoid a similar fate through the efforts of the Euromaidan protesters. Now this plague is spreading to the whole world.”
“So, of course, the story of Markelov and Baburova was a very early warning sign,” Balaian said. “To be precise, such signs appeared earlier still, under Boris Yeltsin (the first murders of independent journalists happened then), but it has acquired gigantic proportions under Vladimir Putin. Against this background, the deaths of Baburova and Markelov do not seem that important, but for me, this example of a Ukrainian girl who went to Moscow and lived with her eyes open (as opposed to the people who lived in Russia for a long time and suffered from imperceptibly growing vision aberration), is very revealing...”
