Journalist biography
Dmitry Sokolov-Mitrich was born in 1975 in Gatchina, near Leningrad. However, in early childhood he moved with his parents to the Moscow region. His teenage years were spent in the town of Elektrostal.
After school, he entered Moscow State University to study journalism. In those same years, Dmitry began literary creativity. At first it was only poetry. The first collection, entitled “Envelope,” was published in 1997, when Dmitry was 22 years old. He soon stopped writing poetry, despite the fact that many of his poetic works received high marks from readers and experts.
Working as a journalist
Dmitry Sokolov-Mitrich gained fame in journalistic circles thanks to his work in the Russian Reporter magazine. This publication, part of the Expert media holding, appeared on newspaper shelves in 2007. Less than a year later, young 33-year-old Dmitry got a job there. In a short time he became one of the most famous representatives of the publication. In this format, Dmitry Sokolov-Mitrich came in handy.
“Russian Reporter” immediately began to stand out for its large number of analytical materials, journalistic investigations, and frank reports. Many famous modern journalists have earned a name for themselves in this publication: Marina Akhmedova, Grigory Tarasevich, Yuri Kozyrev.
“Who “resurrects” our dead?”
Sokolov-Mitrich did not limit himself to journalistic work. He began writing his own books, mostly documentaries. His first investigation was written jointly with Heinrich Ehrlich. The book “Anti-grab. Who “resurrects” our dead?” came out in 2006.
It was dedicated to the creator of a new religious cult, who declared himself the second coming of Jesus Christ - Grigory Grabovoi. It gained popularity in the 2000s, mainly after the Beslan school attack, which killed more than 300 people and injured more than 700. For a lot of money, he offered the relatives of the victims to resurrect their relatives.
In 2006, criminal prosecution was initiated against Grabovoi. He was accused of committing fraud by a group of persons by prior conspiracy. Investigators were able to prove 9 episodes in which the victims suffered significant material damage. The Tagansky Court of Moscow sentenced him to 11 years in prison. Then the sentence was reduced to eight years. Grabovoi was released on parole in 2010.
A book written by Sokolov-Mitrich is dedicated to a description of his false teaching and all the vicissitudes that accompanied the Grabovoi case.
“We only have money for building democracy”
Around the same time, another pioneer of the Russian Runet, Alexander Galitsky (now he is a co-owner of a large venture fund Almaz Capital) worked in Zelenograd at the defense NPO ELAS. At almost 30 years old, he was already the chief designer of the area in which the USSR fiercely competed with the United States - he developed image recognition and digital data transmission systems for spy satellites. Today, any child does this using Yandex.Maps, but back then it was fantastic. The first satellites of this kind appeared in America in 1980, and here in 1982.
In the genre of investigative journalism
In 2007, another work by the author was published, also written in the genre of investigative journalism. The book “Net-Tajik girls. Non-Chechen boys" is published by the Yauza publishing house. Writers and poets highly appreciated this work of the special correspondent of Izvestia. The author himself positioned his work primarily as anti-fascist.
It chronicles the crimes that members of ethnic minorities committed against Russians, the ethnic majority in our country. The peculiarity of the book is that the author practically does not pay attention to the arguments of journalism, giving the floor to bare facts. In his opinion, the reader himself must draw the appropriate conclusions. Sokolov-Mitrich's work received a number of awards, including the Nikolai Strakhov Prize.
At the same time, some human rights activists accused Sokolov-Mitrich of exploiting hate speech, creating a deliberately negative image among representatives of national minorities. This position, in particular, was expressed by the famous researcher of the history of Nazism and xenophobia Galina Kozhevnikova. Many writers and poets supported her.
Sokolov-Mitrich, in turn, argued that society has developed a practice where a crime committed by a Russian against a representative of a non-indigenous nationality is considered xenophobia, and in the opposite case often goes unnoticed.
Dmitry Sokolov-Mitrich: “There is nowhere to go”
Our correspondent’s questions are answered by Dmitry Sokolov-Mitrich , ex-deputy editor-in-chief of the Russian Reporter magazine, author of the book Russian Reporter. Why don’t they teach us this at the journalism department?!”
— Who is more interesting for you to communicate with: young people or adults?
“Adults have already formed all their points of view; it’s difficult to shake them up and make them think. Young people are a more appreciative and contactable audience.
- Is this some kind of plasticine?
- No, far from plasticine, they have their own youthful stubbornness, maximalism. There is a lot of protest, objections, there is no indifference, but adults do. When local authorities invite me as a lecturer to advanced training courses for regional newspaper workers. And the correspondents understand, and I understand, that this is all good and necessary, but then they will return to their regional media, and they will continue to be dictated by the administration what to write and how. By and large, this is all useless. Although I see some cynicism and skepticism on some faces, we need to shake them up. To do this, I specifically tell them some provocative thoughts, for example, that I don’t like journalists. Difficult. But the young have everything ahead, they are more alive.
— They say that youth are our future. Where do you see the future of journalism: in television, radio, online media or print?
— It seems to me that now there is such a serious breakdown of the traditional business model. The monetization scheme for journalistic work is changing greatly. New forms of content are likely to emerge. And one of them is related to my small startup. In short, my hypothesis is that most media outlets will stop producing content altogether in the coming years; this process is already underway, and it will intensify. The media are degrading to a news feed, colored with cheap journalism. But this does not mean that by degrading they will disappear. The writing business is more likely to be transformed into an industrial sector. After all, cinemas only show movies and sell popcorn, and separate companies produce films. And they make money not only from rentals, but also from attracting investors who want to promote different values and meanings in these films... Or take, for example, television. TV channels themselves do not produce anything except news, and not always, but talk shows, films, and scientific programs are bought from individual production companies. It seems to me that the written media industry is being restructured in a similar way. That is, the era of editorial journalism - the editorial office as a source of content - is passing. Content production and distribution will exist as a separate industry. And now I’m creating such a small business called “Once Upon a Time” Laboratory, which will produce turnkey stories. In essence, I have been doing this all my life, in terms of genre it is called reportage, but essentially it is the production of stories - stories of success, of a person and people, of overcoming something... People carry stories, humanity as a whole also bears history. We will create these stories.
— This will be quality content. But does the modern reader with clip thinking need it? Why don't the media themselves produce it?
“They simply have nothing to publish.” They may be happy, but to create such a studio, they need to invest a lot of money. After all, even a relatively not very labor-intensive story is expensive: it’s a business trip, a week or two of work by a not-so-cheap journalist who knows how to write. Most online media are simply not capable of this, because even if you have millions of traffic, advertising on the Internet is very cheap. So when I say that the media stop producing quality content, it doesn’t mean that they don’t want to do it, they just don’t have the resources.
— Now many people complain that Ukrainian topics in the media are boring. Can you call this information overload?
- This is not information, but propaganda. If you turn on the TV, there is nothing but propaganda; if you go on the Internet, they write with the same frenzy, but from the other side. Neither the first nor the second has anything to do with information or analysis of the situation. And this, of course, is sad. People want to know and understand what is happening in Ukraine. Instead, they are given some slogans, dialogues, while everyone criticizes, distorting the essence. All positions should be heard in the independent press. And from two versions of a lie the truth will not arise.
— I would like to talk about patriotism. The forum is dedicated to the 70th anniversary of Victory in the Great Patriotic War. You are a Russian reporter. Are you not leaving for another country because of patriotic feelings?
“I even wrote a column on this subject called “Nowhere to go.” Firstly, I decided for myself a long time ago that I am not going anywhere, no matter what happens in Russia. Because the most important thing in this life is the meaning of life. A person thinks that he can go somewhere and life there will be better. But the more I travel around the world as a tourist or journalist, the more I love my country. Because in one form or another, all the problems that we have are everywhere. In other countries there may be even more. Moving to another country will not change who you are. It's a big illusion that you're giving yourself a chance. As you know, everyone carries their own hell with them, and people tend to shift responsibility for their lives to their homeland. By the way, most of the people who whine that they “need to get out” don’t actually get out, because they understand that the problem is with them, and not with the country, and there will be the same problems, only there will be no one to blame . I have no plans to leave Russia.
"Yandex. Book"
Dmitry Sokolov-Mitrich, whose books were popular among readers, became famous not only for his journalistic investigations. In 2014, he released a novel in the genre of documentary prose “Yandex. Book". This is a detailed and true story about the creation and its leaders from the very beginning of the 70s of the XX century to the present day.
At the center of the story is a description of the emergence of the largest Russian company operating in the Internet space, as well as the fate of its creators.
The acquaintance of Arkady Volozh and Ilya Segalovich, which took place during their school years, is described in detail. In 20 years, they will be the ones who will create the largest company in the domestic IT technology market. After a short time, they managed to create the largest search engine in the Russian segment of the Internet.
In addition to the success story of the creators of Yandex, the book contains interviews with the most significant domestic Internet businessmen. And in the final chapters, which include an interview with one of the creators of Yandex, Arkady Volozh, attention is paid to the increasing pressure of the state machine on the Internet space.
NET is ours
Fact one. Four years before the official birthday of the Runet, in September 1990, the .su domain began to operate in the country. And this was not the Internet Middle Ages at all: the Soviet cooperative Demos is creating an email system under this domain using addressing that is familiar today. The first union-scale network, Relcom (Reliable Communications - “reliable communications”), appears. Already in the spring of 1991, the volume of internal information passing through it exceeded that coming from outside - that is, the value of internal information exchange from the very beginning turned out to be higher than international. Although, unlike other information channels, there was no iron curtain on the RuNet from the first day. It was through Relcom that future President Boris Yeltsin distributed his appeal to the country during the days of the August putsch, when all other types of communications were blocked.
Fact two. The breakthrough of the early 1990s did not happen suddenly. The Soviet engineering and mathematics school spent a very long time and painstakingly plowing this field. In the 1960s and 70s, dozens of scientific teams across the country worked on this task. For example, the future billionaire and co-investor of Yandex Leonid Boguslavsky, back in the early 1980s, being an ordinary researcher at the Institute of Management Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences, was already involved in the construction of computer networks. Scientists from the Moldavian Academy of Sciences helped him in this. Yes, yes - Moldavian. In Moldova at that time there was science, and even quite of a European level. At the end of the decade, Boguslavsky's team received several contracts to deploy their networks for industrial needs at enterprises in Czechoslovakia.
