A strain of melancholy Slavic clarinet creeps into the soundtrack of this otherwise breathless documentary about Dozhd TV, the hip young gunslingers of Russian independent broadcasting. It’s as if it’s reminding us that this tale – hopeful foray into western-style liberalism is crushed by autocratic forces – has played out many times in Russian history before. Except that Dozhd (“rain”), founded in 2010 and still in business, hasn’t quite been crushed yet. With its live broadcasts of protests Putin would rather the public didn’t see, it shows remarkable persistence in the face of harassment and intimidation in this closely embedded account by one of its former producers, Vera Krichevskaya.
Dozhd’s status as thorn in the side of the Kremlin is all the stranger given its founder, Natasha Sindeeva, was a Moscow noughties good-time girl with no interest in politics. But the channel – with its gay-friendly work culture, funky branding and cheeky satire – quickly picked up a following. Dmitry Medvedev, when he was president, appears to have been a fan. But covering the protests that followed Putin’s third-term election in 2012, and its continued links to opposition politics, put the channel on the official shitlist: removal from lucrative national cable packages, harassment of its staff, eviction, legal prosecution and being labelled as “foreign agents” have all been used to keep Dozhd marginal.
