Whenever TV Rain, Russia’s last independent television channel, was broadcasting live, the lights in its vast loft were dimmed and conversations were hushed, because its studio was cordoned off from the rest of the space only by partial-height glass partitions. When I got to the loft just before ten on Tuesday night, the lights were low, as usual, but the noise level was veering into risky territory.
Mikhail Fishman, who hosts a Friday-night news-analysis program, was in the studio with TV Rain’s editor-in-chief, Tikhon Dzyadko. Fishman had decided to help host the newscast because his colleagues had been working long shifts since last Thursday, when Russia invaded Ukraine. Fishman was offering some observations on the state of the war. “Vladimir Putin didn’t believe that the Ukrainian state and the Ukrainian nation exist. . . . He started a war against Ukraine to prove his point, and he has proved the opposite.” Fishman then directed viewers to a quote from a Guardian column by the historian Yuval Noah Harari, who enumerated the stories of heroism and resolve that Ukrainians had racked up in just a few days: “The president who refused to flee the capital, telling the US that he needs ammunition, not a ride; the soldiers from Snake Island who told a Russian warship to ‘go fuck yourself’; the civilians who tried to stop Russian tanks by sitting in their path. This is the stuff nations are built from. In the long run, these stories count for more than tanks.”
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While the quote was on the screen, Fishman looked at the news feed on a laptop in front of him. It said that the Russian prosecutor general’s office was demanding that the Web sites of TV Rain and the radio station Echo of Moscow be blocked. Both media outlets were guilty of violating a ban on calling the war a war, the invasion an invasion, and the aggression aggression.
No sooner had Fishman and Dzyadko read out the news item than another item showed up: the editor-in-chief of Echo of Moscow, Alexei Venediktov, had announced that the station had been taken off the air. For years, Venediktov had successfully negotiated for the survival of the station by setting boundaries on oppositional content and giving a platform to a bizarrely broad range of views; that longtime understanding with the regime was, apparently, now moot. At TV Rain, Dzyadko retrieved the prosecutor’s letter from a colleague and read it on air. The letter spelled out the basis for the order: “Intentional and systematic posting . . . of content containing false information about the nature of the special military operation in Ukraine, its form, the military methods employed, the Russian military’s losses, the targeting of and the fatalities among the civilian population, as well as calls for public (mass) protests on the Russian Federation’s territory.” Around this time, Russian Internet providers blocked access to TV Rain’s Web site.
Fishman and Dzyadko continued the news broadcast, now available to viewers in Russia only on TV Rain’s YouTube stream. People—current and former staff members and a couple of friends of the channel—started gathering in the loft. Vassily Azarov, a muscular, bespectacled twenty-eight-year-old editor, had left work around eight, read the news on the metro, and returned. “My wife and I have been arguing about what’s going to happen here,” he said. “I think it’s going to be more like Iran, and she thinks it’s going to be more like North Korea.” The difference is that it’s possible to leave Iran. This is a discussion that many opponents of the Putin regime are having right now; the substance of it is, Should people rush to leave while it’s still possible, or can they wait? Azarov wants to wait, in part because he has a new job lined up at a popular-science Web site. Friday, March 4th, was supposed to be his last day at TV Rain.
On the screen, Fishman was speaking with Vera Krichevskaya, a producer and co-founder of TV Rain, who has directed a documentary about the channel and its owner, Natalia Sindeeva. Krichevskaya, who lives in London, had just flown to Moscow for the long-awaited première of the film, called “F@ck This Job.” She had just learned that nearly every showing of the movie in Russia had been cancelled. Speaking by Skype from the airport, she said, “But compared to the fact that the Russian Internet regulator has blocked TV Rain and, also, if one rewinds another four hours, to the strikes that hit the Kyiv TV tower that stands right above the Babyn Yar memorial—compared to that, none of this is as important.”
“So they’ve blocked TV Rain and they’ve blocked the movie about TV Rain,” Fishman said. “If there were a movie about the movie about TV Rain, they would have blocked that, too.”
The control room laughed.
“This is a film about how, over these twelve years we survived,” Krichevskaya said. “About how we managed, in these dark times, to preserve something of ourselves that was real.”
“What did we know about dark times?” Fishman said, to more laughter.
“We had so many opportunities over these years—so many chances that we had, that the country had—to prevent what is happening now, to prevent the bombing of Kharkiv,” Krichevskaya said, choking up. “And we pissed away all our chances.”
Offscreen, banter similarly careened from giddy laughter to tears. Vasily Polonsky, a correspondent wearing a “F@ck This Job” hoodie, was sitting on the couch, scrolling through the news. “This is it!” he exclaimed. “Nike won’t ship to Russia anymore.”
A cacophony of voices joined the joke. “That’s the last drop!” “I kept wondering, How would we know that it was over?”
Masha Borzunova, a correspondent who had recently returned from the Rostov region, which borders Ukraine, kept asking, “Wait, has something happened?” to great comic effect.
“You may be having fun now,” Sonya Groysman said. She is a twenty-seven-year-old TV Rain alumna, who left a couple of years ago to work for an investigative outlet called Proekt. Last year, Proekt was declared an “undesirable organization”—making it a crime for Russian citizens to work for it—and Groysman herself was branded a “foreign agent.” The founder of Proekt, Roman Badanin, left the country to avoid arrest. Groysman eventually made her way back to TV Rain. “It’s going to get worse,” she continued. “You are still thinking that you’ll be able to preserve all this in some way, but when they start going after you, they go to the end.”
The lights came on at ten-fifty. Fishman, a boyish, fit forty-nine-year-old with shaggy salt-and-pepper hair, went to his desk in the middle of the loft, took off his white button-down shirt, and pulled on a black T-shirt. We sat down in a corner to talk. “It’s over,” he said. “I have no doubt. TV Rain has ended.” Technically, the block didn’t mean that TV Rain had to stop producing content and posting it on YouTube or other social media. But Fishman was certain. “I’m not going to have a show on Friday.” He planned to leave the country in the morning. “I had decided that I wouldn’t leave as long as they didn’t shut down TV Rain. That wouldn’t be right. But now there is nothing to hold me here.”
Meanwhile, some of the younger staffers were leaving the loft, casually waving on their way out and saying, “See you tomorrow.” About twenty people stayed, waiting for Dzyadko to speak to the staff. It was almost midnight when he emerged from the green room, looking pale under a thick layer of television makeup.
“Wait, did something happen?” Borzunova asked again. Everyone laughed. Dzyadko began speaking softly. He asked me not to publish what he said, but in truth he didn’t say much. While he was speaking, Svetlana Gulyaeva, a former longtime producer at TV Rain, noticed that the station’s sole security guard, who had been sitting in the reception area, had come in and motioned to her to have a quick word. She conferred with him and then spoke loudly, cutting Dzyadko off.
“Everyone run! Special forces are coming.”
Russian police have been known to storm the offices of media outlets and other organizations, seizing phones and laptops, smashing equipment, roughing up staff, and often, in effect, taking hostages. In seconds, everyone who had been in the loft, led by a group of women reporters and producers in their twenties, had piled down a set of back stairs, cautiously exited through a fire door, and scurried into a dark corner of the parking lot. There were no police in sight. As people made their way across the street, to a former bread factory now converted to a mall with bars and restaurants, it became clear that there was no immediate threat. No one, however, was going to return to the office.
Most people went to a craft-beer pub. Dzyadko stood some distance away from the others, making phone calls. His staff members milled around outside the pub, clutching cold pint glasses. “The worst part is, I have to talk to my wife now,” Azarov, the editor, said. “She always believes in the worst possible outcome, and I have to explain how I ended up leaving work without my jacket.”
“Wait, did something happen?” Borzunova asked.
After twenty or thirty minutes, the staff drifted over to Dzyadko. He spoke softly again. He said that he was leaving the country and so should the rest of them. Then he got into a cab.
The logic of his decision was clear to everyone present. Two days earlier, the prosecutor’s office had announced that it would start applying a dormant and arcane law that makes it possible to charge anyone with high treason for virtually any reason. The law makes it a crime to provide “financial, material, consultative, or other assistance” to foreign or international organizations, punishable by twelve to twenty years in prison. At least two different calls had warned of a coming police raid at TV Rain; after the site was blocked, the false alarms regarding police seemed like a warning shot—leave or face arrest and charges of high treason.
People stayed in the light of post-industrial bars and restaurants, searching for flights on their phones. They sounded out names of cities: Bishkek, Tashkent, Yerevan, Almaty, Istanbul. There weren’t a lot of options, or a lot of tickets. Gulyaeva, the former TV Rain producer, and Polonsky, the correspondent in the hoodie, are married, and they invited the group, which was now down to twelve people, to their nearby apartment. They live in a small one-bedroom with a clear view of the Ostankino broadcasting tower—a marvel of Soviet architecture and a symbol of Soviet and Russian propaganda. It was illuminated with the colors of the Russian flag.
The group stood around a black granite kitchen island and held video meetings with other staff members, including Dzyadko and Sindeeva, the owner. They discussed logistics. Could people get paid sooner than their regular payday? Could the staffers work remotely once they landed somewhere else?
Shortly after one in the morning, Kseniya Mironova, a twenty-three-year-old correspondent, whose fiancé, the journalist Ivan Safronov, has been in jail since July, 2020, made an announcement. “I want to say that this was the worst year and a half of my life, and the best. I don’t know what I would have done without all of you.” If something were to happen to her in the coming days, she had some requests. Would people look after her mother? And if the police came for her mother—Russian police have been known to detain parents and siblings of activists—then would people please feed the cats? “I love you all very much,” she said. Many people cried, even as several people filmed the scene.
I talked to Sindeeva on the phone. “If we are legally allowed to work, we will work,” she said. “If there are people around to work. If most of the crew decide to leave, I will support that decision. Then we will not be able to continue working.” At the moment, she had no plan to leave Russia. She was planning to work in the morning.
At 5 P.M. on Wednesday, TV Rain resumed broadcasting, on YouTube. The host, Anna Nemzer, was abroad; the connection froze in the first minute, and for a while it looked like it may not work at all. Meanwhile, a bill was introduced in the Duma that would make dissemination of “fake” information about the Russian operation in Ukraine punishable by up to fifteen years in prison. Sindeeva texted me, “If they pass the law, it will be the end of the channel.”
