The last part of the broadcast was another non-apology apology from Sindeeva, TV Rain’s owner. “Can one feel sympathy for the conscripts?” Sindeeva said. “Everyone decides for themselves. I know I do.” A producer near me let out an exasperated sigh.
Mongayt, who was wearing a tight silver dress, left the studio around nine o’clock. She looked exhausted. She, her husband, and their two school-age sons had spent the last nine months living in exile, first in Georgia and then in Riga. After arriving in Latvia, she learned that most local families had been affected by mass deportations carried out during the Soviet occupation. She had come to feel a constant sense of discomfort and shame, for being from Russia, for speaking Russian in stores and restaurants. “I’m always wanting to explain myself,” she said. “To tell people around me that I have nothing to do with the state that’s waging this war—not the country itself but its government.”
Two weeks earlier, the Kremlin had branded Mongayt a “foreign agent,” a punitive designation applied to about two hundred and fifty individuals who annoy the Russian government. Both of Mongayt’s parents are prominent figures in Moscow. Her father is a media executive, and her mother is the head of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts. But Mongayt spent the first nine years of her life in Odesa, and still deeply identifies with Ukraine. The war, she told me, had felt “like an autoimmune illness, like one part of your body is attacking another.”
Odesa had been shelled that day, and Mongayt had asked some of her friends to come on air to talk about it, but the city had no electricity. “And I know that, as a Russian citizen, I will never be able to go back there, will never again visit my grandparents’ graves,” she said. “It’s like Odesa is a different planet, and rockets no longer go there.” She caught herself. “Except artillery rockets.”
Mongayt is not the only senior TV Rain executive for whom identifying as Russian is a conscious choice. Ekaterina Kotrikadze, the news director, is Georgian. When she was ten, her mother, a nuclear physicist, decided to leave Tbilisi, which had been devastated by civil war, and move to Moscow. In 1999, their Moscow apartment building was destroyed by an explosion. Kotrikadze, who was then fifteen, was in Georgia visiting relatives; her mother’s body was never found. The Russian government blamed the explosion on Chechen terrorists, a security threat that Vladimir Putin, who was then Prime Minister, seized upon in his campaign for the Presidency. Independent investigations have suggested that the Russian secret police may have been involved.
After college, Kotrikadze moved back to Georgia to work as a journalist, then to New York to join a Russian-language broadcasting network. In 2019, she married Tikhon Dzyadko, who was a deputy at the network, and followed him to Moscow, where they both went to work for TV Rain. Dzyadko, now the station’s editor-in-chief, comes from a family of dissidents. His grandparents were political prisoners who were freed by Mikhail Gorbachev; his mother is a human-rights activist and journalist still working in Moscow. In Soviet Russia and Putin’s Russia, Dzyadko and his family were pariahs, but to Latvians he, like Kotrikadze, is simply Russian. “I have always known that I was Georgian,” Kotrikadze said. “But now, when journalists ask me who I am, I tell them that I’m a Russian journalist.” She and Dzyadko had both recently been designated “foreign agents” by the Kremlin. Kotrikadze told me, “I felt that I had finally been recognized as a real Russian citizen.”
The next morning, December 6th, the National Electronic Mass Media Council of Latvia convened to discuss the case of TV Rain. In the past, the station’s executives had been invited to attend such sessions. This time, the council met behind closed doors, and by 9 A.M. had announced its decision: TV Rain was “a threat to national security,” and its broadcast license would be revoked. Cable providers in Latvia had forty-eight hours to drop TV Rain—a loss of audience and some revenue for the station, but not a mortal blow. The decision also meant that TV Rain employees, most of whom had entered the country on one-year visas, would be unlikely to obtain more permanent status.
TV Rain shared studio space with TV3, a commercial channel.
“I’d almost forgotten what it feels like to be an outcast,” Valeria Ratnikova, a twenty-three-year-old news anchor, told me. I’d last seen her the previous spring, just after she left Russia; I’d sat next to her at a café in Istanbul as she told her parents, in Moscow, that she would not be returning. From Istanbul, she went to Tbilisi, then to Riga. Now she would likely have to move again. “At least I don’t have to pack on an hour’s notice,” she said. “It’s been great to be able just to go to work and come home, and not worry every day that your apartment is going to get raided.”
This sense of safety came with a dose of discomfort: compared with the millions of displaced Ukrainians, not to mention the millions in cities shelled by the Russian military, Ratnikova was privileged. “I have felt I have no right to complain,” she told me. She thought a lot about another kind of privilege, too: Ratnikova has interviewed the wives and sisters of conscripts; she could imagine being one of them, had she been born in a different family and in a different city. “I see them as people, people who have never experienced anything good in life,” she said. “Sure, there are some monsters among the conscripts. But many of them don’t even realize that they’re being taken to kill Ukrainians. This is no justification—as soon as they fire their first shot, there can be no forgiveness—but to me they are people, not orcs.” (Orcs, the name of a population of malevolent creatures in J. R. R. Tolkien’s novels, is the term Ukrainians have popularly adopted for Russian troops.)
Identifying with your subject and your audience is, under normal circumstances, one of the essential elements of journalism. Kotrikadze told me that TV Rain’s troubles in Latvia “happened because we still own our sense of belonging to Russia.” We were in a small conference room, where none of the more junior staff members could see her. Kotrikadze started to cry—and immediately stopped herself. “Why am I crying?” she said. “We are fine.”
She meant that her city wasn’t being shelled and her loved ones hadn’t been killed—a litany that, a year into the war, no longer required articulation. Russian journalists in exile are constantly aware that they are lucky to have fled for fear of arrest and not in fear for their lives. They are lucky to know that their apartment buildings back home are intact, even if they can’t return to them. They are lucky to be able to talk on the phone to their parents or siblings, who have electricity and don’t need to shelter in basements. Kotrikadze resolved that in her weekly international-affairs show, which would air that night, she would not discuss TV Rain; she would focus, as she had for months, on Ukraine.
Since the 2014 Russian occupation of Crimea, TV Rain reporters and producers have spent a tremendous amount of time building relationships with Ukrainian sources. Now the biggest worry in the newsroom—more immediate than the worry about moving again—was that Ukrainians would stop speaking to them. A number of frequent guests had turned down requests to appear on TV Rain as a result of the controversy. Kotrikadze read out one response: “I’m sorry, but I’m in the process of moving to Italy for the winter.” Dzyadko, seated across from her, said, “We are in the process of moving, too—we just don’t know where we are going. Sorry. Just kidding.”