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Before taking her own life on a park bench in front of the Nizhny Novgorod police headquarters setting her clothes on fire, Irina Slavina wrote a post on Facebook: “I urge you to blame the Russian Federation for my death.”
Irina Slavina, 47, was a seasoned reporter who started her own online magazine Koza Press in 2016 after being fired from various other outlets. Her local investigative journalism made her known as “the editor-in-chief who is sued at regular intervals,” writes Reporters Without Borders in last year’s report “Taking control? Internet censorship and surveillance in Russia”.
For a while, Irina got Slavina regularly cut the tires on your cars. In the past two years, Irina Slavina has been fined four times, including for participating in demonstrations in Nizhny Novgorod, including on the anniversary of opposition politician Boris Nemtsov, and for posts about the coronavirus.
In the report, Irina Slavina says that her husband still feels confident in the Russian legal system, but that she herself has lost faith in it.
The day before the suicide The police searched Irina Slavina’s home and confiscated all phones and computers in the apartment. The reason was that she was a witness in a lawsuit linked to the opposition organization Open Russia, led by Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
On the independent site Meduza, Irina Slavina’s friends and colleagues describe her as a brave person, whose reporting on sensitive issues led her to a working life under constant pressure from the authorities.
