Natalya Sindejeva has smashed quite a few plates in the past 12 years. This is how you open a television studio according to Russian tradition. And since Sindejeva runs Russia’s only independent TV channel, she has often had to flee to a new studio. Yet the plate that Sindejeva smashed last Monday was special: it was her first plate in Amsterdam.
It’s all total, but also real totalturned out differently than she had imagined when she was in 2010 Dozhd – optimistic channel opened. It was not her intention at all to run a TV channel that would show the Russians what was really happening in their country while the state channels played nice weather. She just wanted an intellectual lifestyle channel for the new middle class.
Don’t worry: a channel for people like themselves. Smart, enterprising, optimistic. Sindejeva (51) belongs to the Russians who knew what to do with the arrival of capitalism. She left her mathematics degree in the drab provincial city of Mitshurinsk and moved to Moscow in 1992 to look for work in the fledgling Russian entertainment industry. One of her successes: a radio station that broadcast western pop music.
While Putin laid the foundations for his regime in his early terms, Sindejeva danced through the new Moscow. Some of Sindejeva’s hobbies: pink Porsches, Italian dresses, tango parties. It was a good thing that she had hooked up a very wealthy banker: the money for her dream channel had arrived. She was the only one who understood the station’s name: dozhdRussian for ‘rain’, stood for adventure according to her.
Medvedev
In 2011, she proudly showed the then president Dmitry Medvedev around her studio in a former chocolate factory. Sindejeva called Medvedev, who at the time was still seen by many liberal Russians as an Obama light, “a really cool guy.” Her appreciation for Medvedev went so far as to forbid the editors from broadcasting a satirical program mocking the president, who had turned out to be a Putin hand puppet.
Her own editors woke her from her pink dream. Because of events in Russia – a bomb attack, protests, repressive laws – they thought it was not time for glamour, but for journalism. At that time, Sindejeva only noticed injustice outside her Moscow bubble. “I didn’t know about that, really not,” she says in F@ck This Job, a documentary about Dozhd from 2021. “And then I couldn’t keep my mouth shut.”
Dozhd broadcast what Russians could not see on any other channel. Evidence of vote fraud, prosecutions of opposition politicians, protests against Putin. A reporter reported live from a detainee van. At its peak, Sindejeva’s channel had 13 million viewers per month (a quarter of the largest state channel).
With the growing reach came the repression. Sindejeva got a call from a direct aide to Putin, who threatened to destroy her channel if she continued to spread “American propaganda”. Sindejeva ignored him. In 2014, the Kremlin . threw Dozhd of the cable.
Giving up is not à la Sindejeva. Thrown off the cable? Then continue online. Thrown from a building? Then broadcast from her own flat. Labeled as a foreign agent by the Kremlin? Get on.
breast cancer
Sometimes she did think of termination, to protect her employees. That doubt disappeared in 2020, when she was treated for breast cancer. “When they cut that disease out, it felt like unnecessary ballast had disappeared,” Sindejeva says in the documentary. She wouldn’t let her life’s work be destroyed, even if it caused even bigger problems. ‘This is life and that’s how I want to experience it.’
Her fight for Dozhd had a price. Her husband put all his money into the transmitter. Sindejeva and he broke up last year.
The war still threatened to mean the end of the station. The Kremlin blocked the website of Dozhd and put jail terms on reporting the war. In March, Sindejeva and her editors said goodbye to the viewers during a emotional live broadcast. “This decision hurts me incredibly,” Sindejeva said. “But this is only a temporary goodbye. We won’t let you down.’
In July the lights went on again. Dozhd broadcasts from Latvia, Georgia, France and now also from the Netherlands. Sindejeva wants to reach her left-behind viewers via YouTube, which is not yet blocked in Russia.
Amsterdam is her base for the time being. Close to her son, who goes to university there, and her daughter, who studies in Austria. But her stay is temporary, she says. Sindejeva, as optimistic as ever, believes that she and her expatriate compatriots will be able to go back in time to build the Russia of the future together.
This time the board shards should bring good luck.
3x Natalya Sindejeva
Sindejeva was raised by her grandparents. Her parents were almost always away from work as dentists in the Soviet army.
Her main hobby is tango dancing. The Russian news site Cholod recently asked her if it is ethical to dance during a war. Sindejeva replied that she struggles with that question, but that you can be happy sometimes as long as you don’t close off the war. “I’m dancing one minute and crying at night when I see air strikes on Ukraine again.”
She wrote an open letter to former friends in March who are now calling on Russians to support the war, including Margarita Simonjan, editor-in-chief of Kremlin broadcaster RT and Maria Zakharova, spokesman for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Sindejeva: ‘You go on stage ‘for Russia’, but that no longer means that you are for the president, but for death. For the deaths of girls and boys who played tag in front of the house two weeks ago and were read to by their mothers at bedtime. Do you want them dead?’