Moscow: Natalya Sindeyeva, one of the founders of Russian television news channel TV Rain ( Dozhd) said, ” No to war” before she walked out of the studio with other employees.
The telecommunications regulator in Russia had already blocked the TV Rain channel last week. A few of the employees of the channel have already fled the country fearing their safety. The channel delivered their news segment on YouTube and the Swan Lake moment happened right then.
The channel has also reported on Thursday that they would stop operations due to the intense pressure from the Kremlin. Natalya Sindeyeva in her statement said, “We need strength to … understand how we can work from here. We really hope that we will return to broadcasting and continue our work.”
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 the 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.
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.
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”? “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.
She has escaped to another location.
Sindeyeva’s wedding took place at the Peterhof Palace in St Petersburg in 2006. She was the founder and voice of a celebrated non-stop music radio station and a fixture in style magazines; her new husband, Alexander “Sasha” Vinokurov, was part of the fabulously wealthy post-communist oligarchy, the young multimillionaire head of an investment bank who lived on a great estate outside Moscow.
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.
She would create an independent television channel that championed what she saw as a new youthful exuberance in Moscow society. The promotional launch of the new channel featured her dancing barefoot on a rooftop in the rain.
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 the news was censored.