Two Sundays ago I wrote in the Observer about the last remaining Russian independent TV station, Dozhd (“TV Rain”), and the irrepressible spirit of Natalya Sindeyeva, the woman who pioneered and ran it. Keeping the station alive had cost Sindeyeva her home and her marriage and her health and her security. A dozen years ago when she launched Dozhd she had been a vivid Russian celebrity, a “dancing queen” of Moscow’s elite party circuit, now her mugshot is posted on street corners as a “foreign agent”. The defiant struggles of Dozhd to stay on air and to continue to report the truth in Russia despite years of intimidation and sanction from the Kremlin were the subject of an inspiring documentary, “F@ck This Job (Tango with Putin)”, made by London-based Vera Krichevskaya, which was released in the UK last week and broadcast on the BBC.
A few days after “F@ck this Job” came out, on Friday, the decade-long defiance of Dozhd was silenced, at least for a while, by a brutal new law, passed unanimously in the Russian parliament, which bans news organisations from reporting anything except state approved press releases (it is now illegal for any broadcaster to call events in Ukraine, for example, “a war”). The new legislation, which has also caused the BBC and most other news organisations to suspend its reporting in Russia, will see journalists and media owners who contravene it jailed for up to 15 years. BBC director general Tim Davie said the law “appears to criminalise the process of independent journalism”. Its most chilling effects have been felt among the few surviving liberal Russian media outlets like Dozhd and Novaya Gazeta, whose editor, Dmitry Muratov, winner of last year’s Nobel Peace Prize, announced that the paper’s website had been forced to remove all of its material on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, saying “there is no doubt that the threat [of prosecution] will be realised”.
On Friday afternoon I spoke by Zoom to Natalya Sindeyeva and Dozhd’s deputy news editor, Dmitry Elovsky, and the documentary maker Vera Krichevskaya. They appeared ashen-faced on screen, all still struggling to process exactly what had happened. The law against what the Kremlin inevitably described as “fake news” had, they said, “changed everything overnight” within Russia. How did the authorities define “fake news”? I asked. “Anything that is true,” Sindeyeva said.
Last weekend Sindeyeva had been in London to attend the first sold-out screenings of “F@ck this Job”. She had returned hurriedly to Moscow on Monday after sanctions against Russia had been announced, to be with her children when it first seemed likely that borders might close. On the plane back home, she suggested, she still believed that Dozhd could continue to broadcast to its millions of Russian viewers – at least on the YouTube channel to which it had long been confined.
By Wednesday, that no longer felt possible. Dozhd’s editor-in-chief Tikhon Dzaydko and his wife had been receiving vicious death threats all week, after their contact details had been distributed online. They decided they had no choice but to leave the country. Sindeyeva was hearing a number of reports that “special police forces were heading to our newsroom along with pro-Kremlin mobsters”. Krichevsakya had crossed the border from Finland by car the previous day to attend a planned premiere of “F@ck this Job” at Moscow’s largest cinema. Only a few hours before that event was due to begin she received a call that the premiere – and the screening of the film across the country – had been cancelled in light of bomb threats. When we spoke, the director had managed to escape Russia and get a flight to Istanbul and then another to Tel Aviv. Sindeyeva and Elovsky did not disclose their locations.
Journalists working in the newsroom of Dozhd (Rain TV) in August 2021. Photograph: Denis Kaminev/AP
When Sindeyeva had launched Dozhd as “the optimistic channel” a dozen years ago, during the brief window of greater openness that attended Dmitry Medvedev’s presidency, she sought to create a vivid space in which a vision of a progressive Russia might exist. The channel would celebrate youth and tolerance. It remained a champion of gay rights when new laws were brought in that criminalised the “promotion” of same-sex relationships. It courageously reported from Chechnya and Ukraine and gave a platform to opposition leaders Boris Nemtsov (before his murder in 2015) and Alexei Navalny. Sindeyeva’s inextinguishable sense of a brighter future kept it going. Two weeks ago, she told me “I’ve always been optimistic and I’m still optimistic. For me, this means that the good guys will take over eventually. But also there is one more important thing to say about that. Optimism is not dreaming, it also says, ‘Get your ass up from the chair and try to make things happen.’”
A fortnight on a lot of that spirit had been drained from her, at least temporarily. “Now,” she told me on Friday, “for the first time ever, I have no hope. I cried all morning on Wednesday, before going into the office for the meeting at which we decided to cease broadcasting.” Her tears had given way to characteristic solidarity with her station’s staff who had never before missed a news bulletin despite, over the years, being kicked off networks and hounded out of their offices. They had even for a while set up a full news studio in Sindeyeva’s Moscow apartment. Closing down felt, Sindeyeva said, “like the decision a mother has to make in a war, to hide her kids in the basement”.
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For their last broadcast Sindeyeva joined the entire news team in front of the camera to say goodbye to viewers. “No to war,” she said, as a farewell, with a bleak smile. The station then cut to some old footage from the ballet Swan Lake, an ironic gesture to the films that Soviet state television had once routinely broadcast when news was censored.
By Wednesday night, Sindeyeva and Elovsky were watching the lights go out on information channels and websites in Moscow one by one, first YouTube feeds then Facebook. “It was so sad,” Krichevskaya said, “to wake up on Thursday morning with none of my usual notifications from Dozhd.” Overnight, the only source of independent news in Russia had become Telegram posts on which friends and colleagues shared fears that the borders would soon be closed. A plane on which Krichevskaya’s mother was travelling from St Petersburg was diverted and grounded for 13 hours while passenger details were checked. All the talk between journalists, Elovsky said, was how to effectively erase media histories from phones and computers in light of the new law. “It feels like an iron curtain is returning,” he said.
Sindeyeva, with a weary note of defiance, insisted that she saw the closure of Dozhd as a pause rather than anything more permanent. She had seen imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s call for Russian citizens to take to the streets to protest Putin’s war, but she doubted it had been heard widely. “People are panicking, they don’t know what will happen next,” she said, “And now there is no way for them to hear news that might tell them.”
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