MOSCOW — After the most recent attack on Sergei Kanev — attempted garroting — his editor visited him and delicately suggested that he take a six-month sabbatical from crime reporting.
But Kanev is the kind of reporter who sleeps with a police scanner beside his bed. Without work, "I would die of boredom," he said.
A specialist in police corruption and organized crime, he crosses powerful people and half expects to be killed for it. He has rigged up two cameras inside a bag he carries with him, so there will be a record if someone comes for him. His most recent girlfriend long since threw up her hands, so only his parents are left to beg him to quit the job, saying fear for his safety is wrecking their old age.
"I understand them," said Kanev, who is 46. "I have no answer for them."
This has been a brutal year in Russia, not just for muckraking journalists, but also for human-rights workers and a whole network of advocates who investigate public officials and extremist groups.
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In the past year alone, the Committee to Protect Journalists has documented three killings of journalists and 19 work-related assaults. Amnesty International has documented one killing of a human-rights worker and 16 attacks during the same period.
Kanev is not the most obvious standard-bearer for press freedom. Stout, ruddy and a chain smoker, he might be mistaken for a Russian beat cop or a bandit circa 1992, the kind with "a raspberry-colored sport coat and a huge mobile phone," said Dmitri A. Muratov, editor in chief of Novaya Gazeta, where Kanev works as a freelancer. Novaya Gazeta is a newspaper known for two things: its pugnacious assaults on the Russian government and the number of its staff members who have been murdered.
The amiable chaos of the newspaper's office froze up in January when a masked gunman fatally shot Stanislav Markelov, the newspaper's lawyer, and a young reporter, 25-year-old Anastasia Baburova.
That made five employees who had have died under violent or suspicious circumstances since 2000, and the first since investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya was found shot to death in her elevator in October 2006.
Kanev, for his part, shrugs off the idea that protection is even possible.
"Look, if you want a safe job, work in a library," he likes to say. In the meantime, he goes about his workday with what can only be called joy.
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