Unerased: Vladimir Putin’s government is trying to scrub critical journalism from the internet. The Russian Independent Media Archive is standing in its way.

Fresh from a reporting trip to Moscow, just days after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Masha Gessen took a seat at a board meeting of PEN America in New York City. A few nights earlier, Gessen had been in the Moscow studios of TV Rain, Russia’s last independent TV channel, when the government blocked the channel’s internet feed. Phone calls to the station warned of an imminent raid by security forces. Everyone in the studio, including Gessen, fled, leaving behind jackets, broadcast equipment, and personal computers. Most began searching for airline seats to Yerevan, Tbilisi, or other points outside of Russia; remaining in the country meant risking arrest because, as Gessen described in an article for The New Yorker, “the prosecutor’s office had announced that it would start applying a dormant and arcane law that makes it possible to charge anyone with high treason for virtually any reason.”

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