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.”
Less than an hour later, the newsroom went quiet. The nearly two dozen staff members present saw the same thing come across their screens. Sindeeva, the TV Rain founder and owner, had posted a video on her personal Telegram channel, tearfully confessing that she regretted the decision to fire Korostelev. This, as the staff came to learn, was the moment that the station lost access to officials in the administration of Volodymyr Zelensky. Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to the Ukrainian President, called Sindeeva’s video message “a mockery made all the worse by the fact that we used to trust them.”
Kotrikadze was still on the air when Dzyadko and a couple of other staff members got in a cab and headed to his and Kotrikadze’s apartment, in central Riga; Dzyadko had to relieve the nanny watching their two sons, aged two and eight. He stopped at a wine store near his building and picked up a dozen bottles of Sauvignon Blanc. “I’ll pay for this out of the corporate budget,” he said, waving off one of the reporters with him. “We were planning to have an office holiday party, so we’ll spring for a wake instead.”
About half of the Riga-based staff eventually gathered in Dzyadko and Kotrikadze’s living room. Timchenko, the publisher of Meduza, arrived, having flown back from Berlin, where her publication is establishing an office. The living room was large and airy, with blank white walls. A small pen-and-ink drawing of the Dzyadko family dacha outside of Moscow was propped against a window. A bookcase was half full. Familiar Ikea furniture—a wooden dining table, a plush armchair—shared the room with an open gym bag and a pile of clean laundry. One or two young reporters were smoking in the kitchen. Dzyadko and Kotrikadze’s eight-year-old son came in and out, and no one told him to go to bed. At two in the morning, when almost everyone seemed to be drunk and repeating themselves, I left. In the doorway, I bumped into Andrei Goryanov, a journalist I knew from Moscow. “I’m the head of the BBC Russian Service in exile,” he said, with a laugh that indicated the slight absurdity of his position.