Date

09/12/2004  

First

Alexei  

Surname

MIKHEYEV  

Sex/Age

M, 40  

Incident

accident  

Motive

J  

Place

road  

Job

journalist  

Medium

print  

Federal District Plus

VOLGA  

Street, Town, Region

district, Penza Region  

Freelance

no  

Local/National

local  

Other Ties

 

Cause of Death

car crash  

Legal Qualification

no information  

Impunity

investigation closed, summer 2006  

(entry revised April 2010)

IN MEMORY OF ALEXEI MIKHEYEV

http://www.penza-online.ru/news.23040.htm

Five years ago our friend and colleague Alexei Mikheyev died in a car accident and the journalist Sergei Stupin, who was behind the wheel, was seriously injured. When they were leaving Penza on the federal highway they collided with the trailer of a Kamaz truck. After ten days in hospital Sergei died from the injuries received then.

The weather was bad that day and they could have stayed at home. However, they set out on a journey of one hundred kilometres because people were expecting them. Above all, they were waiting to see Alexei Mikheyev who wanted to get to the bottom of a complicated story and then publish an article about it. That was his job. He loved it and was a superb journalist. Alexei was one of the few investigative journalists in Penza, and the best among them. He went against the trend in the local media where most of the authors and broadcasters had lost their professional enthusiasm over time and, of their own free will, surrendered to the embraces of the authorities and of business.

The deaths of well-known and respected journalists while they were on assignment for their newspaper stirred concern that this might have been a deliberate killing. The numerous publications in which Alexei Mikheyev exposed the cynicism, rudeness, hypocrisy and unlawful actions of the authorities could serve as a pretext for such a crime. If we recall how much Sergei Stupin did to overcome the lack of solidarity among journalists in the Region, he might also have been a likely target.

For several years the police investigation was constantly halted and then, through the efforts of Alexei’s wife, re-opened again. All it revealed was that the snow was falling, a car crash happened and the two men died. Now we shall never know whether the death of our friends was accidental or the result of a crime.

Alexei never wrote paid articles on behalf of the authorities, although it could have made his job easier and more lucrative. He wrote a great deal about ordinary people who suffered at the hands of the State. Often his articles helped them to find justice. This is a short list of Alexei’s last publications. He described how a drunk FSB officer urinated against a car in the city centre in full daylight and then, waving his official ID, attempted with his fists to calm the outraged driver. He wrote about the contempt with which Russia treated citizens who had served the country faithfully but could be ignored in their hour of need because they had not acquired the right documents. Or how someone who grew up in a children’s home was tormented until he killed himself; how an official drove his elderly women petitioners from his office; and how it was easier for people to die of hunger than to make the authorities respect their rights. Six weeks before his death Alexei Mikheyev received the Larisa Yudina award (In Spite of All), perhaps the most prestigious journalistic prize in our country, for standing up for the rights of citizens and of society.

The State gave him nothing but reprimands. He was excluded from a district courtroom for failing to give prior notice that he would be attending an open court hearing. The district prosecutor’s aide subsequently made the trip from a distant part of the Region to stop the appearance of Alexei’s article about his assignment there. The press secretary of the Penza Region administration who was, at one and the same time, chairman of the regional branch of the Russian Union of Journalists, persistently tried to discourage Alexei from continuing to publish on such “sensitive” subjects. That was how the authorities treated Alexei Mikheyev during his lifetime, just because he was a professional journalist. What justification could there be, after his death, for failing to respect the memory of someone whom all remembered as a good and decent man?

A while after this tragedy some policemen were killed in Penza. Their colleagues then swore that it was a matter of honour for them to solve these crimes. For Alexei it had been a matter of honour to help everyone who turned to him for help. Among those whose good name he helped to restore were also members of the Penza police.

The criminal investigation into the road accident in which the two journalists died was closed because the truth could not be established, closed after 18 months by which time the evidence had been irretrievably lost. Such an investigation might itself be qualified as criminal inactivity. Ever since then Alexei’s widow has been trying to secure at least some intelligible response from those in charge of the police: at first to investigate her husband’s death; now to issue an appropriate punishment to the investigator. All this time her requests have met with excuses which, as time passes, have become increasingly meaningless and insulting.

Alexander Yakhontov
9 December 2009