IT IS normally pretty slick, Dozhd. But the Riga-based Russian independent TV station earlier this week seemed to broadcast bumps, jolts and clicks.
Journalist Katya Kotrikadze was trying to present a show on the future of the channel, which had just been told it would lose its Latvian licence.
And everything was going wrong, technically at least. “I don’t think there is any conspiracy,” she joked. “It is just that even the equipment senses the tension.”
Dozhd lasted another day or so on air. Latvia – and then Lithuania and Estonia – pulled the plug.
One of the station’s presenters had clumsily suggested stories highlighting equipment shortages would help Russian soldiers at the front. The staffer was sacked. But his gaffe – if that is what it was – proved too much for regulators.
Dozhd – marketed as the “optimistic channel” when it first launched in Moscow a decade ago – was forced to quit Russia early this year for criticising Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Now, thanks to Baltic media watchdogs, it is relegated to YouTube, effectively an internet refugee.
This is one of the biggest stories in Europe right now. We are after all talking about a rare independent outlet broadcasting in the continent’s most spoken language.
Was Latvia right to revoke Dozhd’s licence? Not according to the Latvian Association of Journalists. They said the move was a “disproportionate” and urged authorities to work with the channel to make improvements.
I agree, for what that is worth. Dozhd – designated a “foreign agent” by the Kremlin – does great journalism and makes terrific TV. It is a vital counterweight to Putin propaganda.
But Latvia’s crackdown on Dozhd is part of a maybe bigger long-term story. And that is there are quite a few eastern Europeans, not just Ukrainians, who do not like Russian liberals very much. Or trust them.
Maybe at our end of the continent that feels counter-intuitive. Surely, you might ask, Latvians or Ukrainians or Poles would see Russian independent journalists and political opponents of Putin as allies? Well, some do. But there are tensions, and resentments too. And these have deep roots.
A little detail from the Dozhd row helps illustrate these. Execs from the station reportedly turned up to a crunch meeting with Latvian regulators without a translator. In other words, they expected their hosts – the people who gave them refuge – to speak Russian.
This might not sound like much. It is for Latvians who had the language of their occupiers shoved down their throats for decades.
Micro-aggressions – such as demanding to being served in Russian in a Baltic bar – are very different to supporting a genocidal war. But they speak to the reality that many Russians, even some liberal ones, have not reckoned with their history of imperialism.
Indeed, it is worth bearing in mind that Russia waged the first Chechen war when supposed liberals were in the Kremlin and the media was far freer than today.
We know how long it takes for a nation to come to terms with crimes carried out in its name. Britain has not done so, not entirely, anyway. Last week the President of the European Union, Ursula von der Leyen, appeared to liken British rule in Ireland to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This was perfectly reasonable: imperialism, after all, is imperialism. But some snowflake nationalists still managed to find offence in her words.
It is really hard to think of your own country, whatever that is, as the “baddies”. So some of us find little crutches to let us hobble past uncomfortable truths.
Some British people – despite the overwhelming evidence of slavery and exploitation – still lie to themselves that their empire was not that bad, that it was civilising, or that it benefitted only the rich.
Some Russians have adopted similar coping measures for the current conflict.
Veteran Lithuanian journalist Rimvydus Valatka summed this up in a blistering attack on Dozhd, on what he clearly saw as its bad faith. “The problem with most of these so-called liberal Russians is that they don’t want to admit that it is not Putin, but Russia, which is waging a criminal, larcenous war,” he wrote in Delfi, a Baltic-wide news-site.
Putin really has made this Russia’s war. It is very hard to know how many of his people support him. Recent Kremlin surveys leaked to another vitally important independent Russian media outlet, Mediazona, suggest millions and millions do not. There is an opposition, even if it is disorganized and in a minority.
Now there is a view among some foreign policy commentators that these people just do not matter.
It goes something like this: Russian liberals are not a political force. Their mass demos in 2012 – when Dozhd was born – got nowhere. Their leaders are in jail or exiled.
Change, if it comes, goes this school of thought, will be within a ruling elite.
Maybe.
But that should not mean the collective West – or, more specifically, eastern Europeans – giving up on Russian democrats. Because in the long run, they are our best hope of long team peace and stability on this continent. And they are Russia’s best hope too.
That does not mean there cannot be some frank and open discussions between Russian liberals and nervous and suspicious eastern Europeans. Both sides might need to work a bit harder to get along, and understand each other a big better.
There are things to say about some of those residual imperialist attitudes and about the rights and wrongs of collective responsibility for the invasion of Ukraine. Ironically these are the kind of topics aired on Dozhd.
I hope the Latvians will relent on the channel. I hope Dozhd staff – for whom I personally have huge respect – will make a bigger effort to get where their hosts are coming from.
This episode has already done damage. Vladimir Solovyov, the hateful propagandist who holds forth on Russia’s main state channel, mocked Dozhd for taking shelter in Riga. “For them there is no such thing as good Russians,” he lied about Latvians. “For them a good Russian is a dead Russian.”
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