U.S. journalist Paul Klebnikov was living in Moscow and investigating the criminal networks of Russia’s business elite as the editor-in-chief of Forbes Russia when he was gunned down outside his office in July 2004. His murder remains unsolved, but his legacy lives on at Columbia, where, according to his widow, Musa Klebnikov, he often conducted research for his stories. In 2011 Musa Klebnikov partnered with the Harriman Institute to start the Paul Klebnikov Russian Civil Society Fellowship. With her generous gift, the institute has brought a total of ten independent Russian journalists for three-week residencies at the Harriman, where they meet with members of the U.S. media and audit classes at Columbia Journalism School. “The hope is that they will come away with an impression of a different kind of journalistic environment,” Klebnikov told me during an interview in 2019.

Since the fellowship’s inception, the Kremlin’s crackdown on independent media has intensified, and, after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, most Russian independent journalists fled the country. In this new context, Harriman, together with Klebnikov, decided to reframe the fellowship. “It was designed for a different time. And the journalistic landscape has changed drastically in the last several years,” said Harriman Director Valentina Izmirlieva.

The fellowship’s new goal is to support independent Russophone media in exile. In partnership with Columbia Journalism School Professor Keith Gessen and Andrew Meier of the New School, and the JX Fund (a European fund that supports journalists in exile), a new program was created, the Global Klebnikov Fellowship, offering online training to help journalists in exile, with an in-person workshop abroad. The first cohort of fellows met in Berlin in the fall of 2024.

The fellowship on campus has continued, too. Ukrainian journalist Nikita Grigorov, a Paul Klebnikov Fellow (PKF) in 2022, and Russian journalist-in-exile Andrei Zakharov (PKF ’24) were the most recent recipients.

I spoke with five former fellows about where their work has taken them since the fellowship.

Svetlana Reiter (PFK ’13)

“The Only Thing Left from the Past is Our Job”

Svetlana Reiter. Photograph by Peter Kollanyi/Bloomberg via Getty Images, 2022

I met Svetlana Reiter over Zoom in September. She paced a courtyard in a European city—for safety reasons, she prefers not to disclose her location—recalling her career details. Currently, she works for the independent, Riga-based outlet Meduza, where she’s been for four years. “The longest time [I’ve worked somewhere] so far,” she said.

Jumping around has been the norm for independent journalists in Russia; the Kremlin frequently censored independent outlets, but new ones popped up in response. Meduza emerged that way, from the ashes of popular independent news outlet Lenta.ru, whose fired editor-in-chief Galina Timchenko and much of her staff founded Meduza in 2014, registering it in Latvia to secure independence.

Reiter worked for Lenta.ru at the time of its demise. From there, she went to the investigative department of RBC, a media outlet then owned by the oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov, which maintained its independence until 2016, when it investigated the assets of President Vladimir Putin and his inner circle. “And so, we faced a lot of repressions,” said Reiter.

From RBC, Reiter went to Reuters, then to a business news startup called The Bell, then to BBC Russia. By the time Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Reiter was working for Timchenko again, this time at Meduza. She left Russia quickly—first for Armenia, then Georgia, and, soon after, a third destination in Europe. She said her memory of that first year is hazy. “We were all working 24–7, and we’re still working a lot.”

Exile has been challenging. “We don’t know what to expect in the future. We don’t know how we’ll manage to work with all these repressions in Russia, with all this blocking of the sites we are working on, with all the repressions we’re facing,” Reiter said. The Kremlin labeled Meduza an “undesirable organization” in 2023. It uses the designation to ban organizations from publishing content in Russia and criminalizes all engagement with them. Last spring, after she published an interview with the late opposition leader Alexey Navalny’s lawyer, Reiter faced prosecution in absentia for her association with Meduza.

Though she lives abroad, Reiter could still be affected by Russia’s case against her. “They give you a warning, and then you need to stop doing what you do, otherwise you’ll be sentenced, even if you’re in exile,” she said. Reiter said she isn’t so worried about herself, since she is in Europe. “What is more important for me—knock on wood—is that my parents are still okay.”

For now, she plans to continue her reporting in spite of the risks. “I think the only thing left from the past is our job,” Reiter said. “We all have new homes, new circumstances, but the job still prevails.”

Maria Turchenkova (PFK ’15)

“We Found Ourselves in Isolation on the Social Level”

Maria Turchenkova. Self-portrait, 2019

Russian photojournalist Maria Turchenkova built her career working for media outside of Russia. She covered Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine for Le Monde, Time, and other outlets, “I had almost no publications with the Russian press. It was just how my career was developing,” she said over Zoom from Paris.

Turchenkova has always been drawn to conflict reporting. After visiting New York for the Paul Klebnikov Fellowship in 2015, she covered Yemen’s civil war and Iraq’s war against ISIS. A year later, she married French journalist Benoît Vitkine, whom she’d become friends with while covering Donbas in Eastern Ukraine (she’d saved him from a land mine by asking him to step out of her shot). She settled in Paris the following year and began to question her work. “I didn’t see how my photography was helping to stop this violence or changing the minds of people about what’s going on,” she said.

“I stopped taking photos and concentrated [on] filling myself with ideas and words.”

In 2019, Vitkine, who works for the French newspaper Le Monde, was transferred to Moscow, and she went with him, freelancing as a photographer again and studying philosophy.

When the full-scale invasion of Ukraine started, Turchenkova was four months pregnant. Most of her friends and colleagues were leaving the country, but she and Vitkine decided to stay. Le Monde’s Moscow bureau remained open, and unlike other independent Russian journalists, Turchenkova said she wasn’t worried about repercussions from the Russian government. In their eyes, she said, she was essentially a foreign journalist, and the government seemed neutral toward them (until Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich’s arrest in 2023).

As the war intensified, “I was shocked by how normal everything seemed,” Turchenkova said. She began to withdraw from Russian society. “We found ourselves in isolation on the social level.” After opposition leader Alexey Navalny died in an Arctic prison, she was one of the few reporters to get inside the church to document his funeral (also for Le Monde). “There was this really disgusting moment when people were shouting, ‘let us say goodbye,’ and they were just closing the coffin and taking it out of the church,” she recalled.

In the summer of 2024, Turchenkova and her family moved back to Paris, where she is working on a book about Russian society during the war. “It will frame the state of Russian society today, and freeze this moment in time somehow,” she said. “We don’t know if we are at the beginning of the end or if there will be seventy more years.”

Irina Malkova (PFK ’17)

“After that Mountain Was Russia”

Irina Malkova. Photograph by Alena Kondyurina

Irina Malkova’s visit to New York and Washington, DC, during the Klebnikov fellowship in 2017 marked her first trip to the United States. She met with editors at the New York Times and other media outlets, and all of them asked about the Kremlin’s media censorship. “I had never talked so much about freedom of speech in Russia,” she said in an interview.

It was a subject in which she had considerable expertise, having worked for several business news outlets that eventually came under Kremlin pressure. When she was in New York, she was editor-in-chief of the political magazine Republic (formerly Slon) but was contemplating launching an independent media startup in Russia.

Before the fellowship, Malkova said, she hadn’t fully grasped the precariousness of the Russian media landscape. “When you’re living out a situation and observing it from the inside, you don’t see just how bad it is. You adapt and make do with what you have,” she said. “Looking at it from the outside, I realized that everything is pretty bad and we have to do something on our own because it’s the only guarantee that no one will try to influence [our content],” she said.

Malkova teamed up with two RBC colleagues to start The Bell. “The first couple of years were really difficult,” she said. Eventually, they found their stride, opening an office, hiring staff, and even offering entrepreneurship courses with professors from Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley. “When the [full-scale invasion] began it was the first year we had made a profit. The first and the last,” said Malkova.

After Russia’s invasion, the team quickly left Russia. Malkova and Peter Mironenko (one of the co-founders and now Malkova’s husband) found an apartment in Old Town Tbilisi, which became their new home and The Bell’s new headquarters.

They worried about their safety in Georgia. “I could see a mountain from my window, and after that mountain was Russia,” said Malkova. “It was very close.”

In the spring of 2023, Mironenko took a short trip abroad and wasn’t allowed back in by Georgian authorities. “We didn’t know what to do because I couldn’t leave Georgia [where her son was in school]. I was afraid that they wouldn’t let me in as well,” she said.

After several more attempts Mironenko was allowed to reenter Georgia, but the couple decided it was time to leave.

Malkova, Mironenko, and the rest of The Bell’s team relocated to an undisclosed country in Europe. They don’t know how long they will stay or how long they will be able to continue running The Bell from exile. In hopes of financially securing their survival, they moved their newsletter behind a paywall. “And the results, they give us hope that we can go on,” said Malkova.

Elena Kostyuchenko (PFK ’18)

“No Culture is Immune to Fascism”

Elena Kostyuchenko. Photograph courtesy of Kostyuchenko

Elena Kostyuchenko (PKF ’18) is a rare breed among Russian journalists: until the Russian government banned the independent outlet Novaya Gazeta in 2022, Kostyuchenko had spent seventeen years working at the same place.

The day after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine started, Novaya Gazeta sent Kostyuchenko to Ukraine (she was one of the few independent Russian journalists allowed in by Ukrainian authorities). After her editors received a tip that she was on a Russian military kill list, she reluctantly left. Novaya Gazeta was banned in Russia soon thereafter, and Kostyuchenko, who then moved to Berlin, started working for Meduza.

In hopes of returning to Ukraine, Kostyuchenko traveled to Munich to obtain a visa. On the way back, she felt sick. The symptoms—nausea, fatigue, stomach aches, swelling—lasted for months. Eventually, a doctor suggested she had been poisoned. German police, along with the investigative outlet Bellingcat, are still investigating the allegation. At first, Kostyuchenko had trouble believing it. In hindsight, she said, it does not surprise her. “I have to admit I was an easy target,” Kostyuchenko said over Zoom. “I stopped taking security precautions as I always did in Russia, I just didn’t feel that I was in any danger and acted accordingly.”

Two years later, after publishing a book of essays called, I Love Russia, which explores how “fascism is growing on our soil, unnoticed,” Kostyuchenko is at a crossroads. “It’s very hard to figure the new boundaries of my opportunities,” she said. “All my life I was reporting on Russia for Russians. And now . . . it doesn’t work anymore. I cannot go back to Russia as a reporter.”

Currently, she is at Harvard University on a Nieman Fellowship for journalists. “My story is not unique here,” said Kostyuchenko—the cohort includes fellows from Syria, Colombia, and China, among others. “My Nieman colleagues also faced incredible things like prosecutions and assassination attempts and exile,” she said.

Kostyuchenko’s fellowship will end in the spring of 2025. She’s not sure what’s next, but she hopes foreign readers of her book, co-translated into English by Bela Shayevich (M.A. in Russian Translation ’08, Columbia University), will learn from Russia’s experience. “I know now for sure no culture, no country, is immune to fascism. It can grow on every soil,” she said. “Rights can be taken away, and you can lose everything you have.”

Maria Zholobova (PFK ’19)

“If I Could Have Stayed and Worked Anonymously, I Would Have”

Maria Zholobova in June 2021, after police raided her apartment in Moscow. Photograph by Pavel Golovkin via AP

Maria Zholobova left Russia after police raided her Moscow apartment in June 2021. At the time, she was a reporter with the independent investigative online media outlet Proekt, about to publish a story on the alleged corrupt business dealings of Russia’s minister of interior. But officers said they were there because of a libel lawsuit brought against her four years before, after an investigation she’d conducted for TV Rain.

This didn’t add up: The statute of limitations for the case had run out in 2019, and, as Zholobova discovered later that day, police had also raided the apartment of a Proekt editor who had nothing to do with the TV Rain story.

Days later, Proekt was deemed an “undesirable organization” and Zholobova’s editors urged her to flee Russia. She begrudgingly went to Tbilisi. “I packed enough for two weeks, thinking the whole thing would blow over by then,” she told me over Zoom from Tbilisi that summer. But, after realizing she would face an eight-year prison sentence in Russia, Zholobova stayed. That winter, her father brought warm clothes and her dog Chandler to Georgia.

Soon after leaving Russia, Zholobova left Proekt and became editor of investigations at Meduza; she was still working there when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Soon, dozens of Zholobova’s friends and colleagues arrived in Tbilisi. Suddenly, the world she’d left behind had come to her. “It felt like all of Moscow had moved here,” she said. But Georgia was only a temporary stop. In October 2022, Zholobova left for Prague to work for the Russian exile investigative outlet iStories.

Since the latest move, Zholobova has focused on investigations related to Russia’s war on Ukraine. She’s partnered with Reuters to trace the global supply chain that enabled the making of Russian-deployed killer drones, and with the German outlet Der Spiegel on an investigation about German companies evading sanctions to supply electronics to Russia. iStories promoted her to editor of investigations, but she feels “skeptical” about becoming an editor again because she loves to write. She said she still misses Russia—if given the chance, she would have stayed and worked there anonymously. But in exile, “I feel less alone than I did in Moscow,” she said recently on the phone. “In immigration, people are more united, more supportive.”◆