For the past five years, journalist Maria Pevchikh has kept an eye on the political elites of her native Russia from a state of self-exile.
Pevchikh is the head of investigations at the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), a watchdog group created by the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. For this, she tracks the hidden wealth of the country’s oligarchs across foreign bank accounts, compounds and superyachts—work that has been difficult under the authoritarian rule of President Vladimir Putin.
“Investigations when the entire world is against you, this is our daily reality,” she said.
Pevchikh shared her work at an April 8 event organized by the University of Chicago Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression in partnership with Malyi Center for the Study of Institutional and Legal Integrity at the UChicago Law School and the Center for East European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies. Speaking with political scientist Scott Gehlbach, the Elise and Jack Lipsey Professor in the Harris School of Public Policy, Pevchikh was frank about the realities of her style of journalism under authoritarian rule.
She explained that amidst increasing censorship, repression of free speech and legal pressures, independent media was especially important to hold power to account.
“You didn’t hear any contradictory news for 26 years,” she said, urging the audience to stay “alert” when engaging with news media. “Never get used to it [the corruption]; never think that one story is too small.”
Investigating under censorship, after Navalny’s death
For Pevchikh and the FBK, just getting their journalistic work to an audience can be a challenge.
Since 2019, the Russian government has required all internet service providers to install hardware that allows the government to directly block content. Since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, such restrictions have increased, with social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook and Instagram completely blocked.
There are still ways for the population to access these sites, with virtual private networks (VPNs) allowing some Russian users to bypass the internet restrictions. Some sites like TikTok are intermittently accessible even without a VPN.
The FBK is able to get their content out through these windows of accessibility. Pevchikh described it as a “whack-a-mole” situation, with the foundation constantly adapting to shifts in censorship.
“Where are people getting their information from? You take the information to that source, to the people,” she said.
Social media repression within Russia has made the foundation’s work more difficult, but Pevchikh’s self-imposed exile has also created challenges.
In 2020, Pevchikh traveled to Siberia with Navalny for an investigation there. During his flight back to Moscow, Navalny fell ill. He was hospitalized immediately upon landing and medically evacuated for treatment in Germany—where medical officials announced he had been poisoned with a chemical nerve agent.
After months of treatment, Navalny returned to Russia and was arrested upon arrival. The FBK was declared an “extremist” organization and dissolved by the state; Navalny died in a Russian penal colony in 2024.
The events of the poisoning were depicted in the Oscar-winning documentary Navalny, for which Pevchikh was an executive producer. The dramatic turn brought worldwide attention to the FBK’s cause, but also fed Pevchikh’s fear. She left Russia on Navalny’s evacuation flight and never went back.
“What we lost with our exile was our ability to film inside Russia,” Pevchikh said.
In earlier investigations, the FBK had filmed the massive compounds of Russian elites with paragliders and drones. These visuals made the alleged corruption tangible.
“When people got to actually see, that’s when everything changed,” Pevchikh said.
But with the loss of direct access, the foundation has adapted by shifting its focus abroad, investigating the overseas assets of Russian elites.
Pevchikh worked to locate Putin’s superyacht, which she found docked in Italy when Russia first invaded Ukraine. Working on a tip from Pevchikh, Italian authorities seized the yacht and have held it ever since. Since her exile in 2020, Pevchikh and the FBK have been able to prompt the arrest of billions of dollars’ worth of assets.
Gehlbach asked Pevchikh to “connect the dots,” asking what motivates her to keep doing this work.
“I’m after some accountability and some justice,” she said, and “the only mechanism we have to do this is to cut them off from their money.”
