Over 100 days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Already the West has grown weary of fuel and wheat shortages and high prices. The eighth year of war. Russia occupying Crimea and Donbass regions, and almost twenty per cent of Ukraine since then, creating a land border, including access to the Black Sea. Catherine Belton’s prescient book is early and late. The modus operandi is in the title.
Ryzard Kapuscinski’s Imperium is instructive how it works. He was writing in 1994. Pre-Putin, the Yeltsin era.
‘The fall of communism in the state occurred relatively bloodlessly, and in ethnic Russia, completely bloodlessly. The great Ukraine announced its independence without a single shot being fired. Likewise Belorussia.
…It is interesting that blood flows only when blind nationalism enters the fray, or zoological racism, or religious fundamentalism—in other words the three black clouds that can darken the sky of the twenty-first century.’
In order to understand Russia and the old Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Ryzard Kapuscinski uses the analogy of another Russian writer, Yuri Borev who compares it to a train journey.
‘The train is speeding into a luminous future. Lenin is at the controls. Suddenly—stop, the tracks come to an end. Lenin calls on the people, for additional, Saturday work, tracks are laid down, and the train moves on. Now, Stalin is driving it. Again the tracks end. Stalin orders half the conductors and passengers shot, and the rest he forces to lay down the tracks. The train starts again. Khrushchev replaces Stalin, and when the train comes to an end, and he orders that the ones over which the train has already passed by dismantled and laid down before the locomotive. Brezhnev takes Khrushchev’s place. When the tracks ends again, Brezhnev decides to pull down the window blinds and rock the cars in such a way that the passengers will think the train is still moving forward.’
Boris Yeltsin brings in advisors from The Chicago School. They tell him to sell the train and the track and give everyone an equal share. Winner takes all. A new train with McDonalds and widescreen TV and a new track.
Putin is at the controls—indefinitely. Episode after episode of him wrestling bare-chested with bears and oligarchs is played on widescreen TV. His henchmen make early-morning visits to those that refuse to pay the market price in roubles for a ticket, or want to change the channel.
Catherine Belton tells the reader how Putin, with the help of the KGB, took over Russia, and threatened the world with nuclear annihilation. She offers a synopsis of who’s who in the Russian orbit that circles their supreme leader. He’s President for life. And the President can dismiss the Prime Minister, and any other public appointed body down to street sweeper. His inner circle get first pick on any deal worth around $40 million. State governors, for example, can haggle and war with each other their share, internecine battles that can lead to imprisonment and death, but one of Putin’s favourite sayings is it’s a private matter. Putin is number one, and unless fealty is paid, it becomes a public matter because that’s a private matter.
The first names on Putin’s inner circle, the siloviki:
Igor Sechin—Putin’s trusted gatekeeper. Like Putin, a former KGB operative from St Petersburg. He took payment of bribes and kept accounts, of who owed what. As Deputy Head of the Kremlin he helped organize Putin’s takeover of the Russian oil sector on which Russia’s wealth is largely based. Known as ‘Russia’s Darth Vader’ for his ruthless plotting against others. The power behind the throne. You don’t get to see Putin without seeing Sechin.
Nikolai Patrushev, former head of Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor to the KGB.
Viktor Ivanov, former KGB, served with Putin in Leningrad KGB.
Viktor Cherkesov, former KGB, who ran the St Petersburg FSB.
Sergei Ivanov, former Leningrad KGB, and one of the youngest generals in Russian’s foreign intelligence.
Dmitry Medvedev—a former lawyer. Deputy to Putin when he ran the administration and kickbacks as Mayor of St Petersburg. Deputy head of Putin’s Kremlin administration. Chief of Staff for Putin’s Presidency, then President, with Putin as Prime Minister. Obama famously thought Medvedev was a man he could work with, in the same way that George W. Bush (junior) looked into Putin’s eyes and said he’d seen his soul.
Putin’s custodians, KGB-connected businessmen.
Gennady Timachenko, former KGB, worked his way through the ranks of the Soviet trade to become the first traders of oil products.
Yury Kovalchuk, former physicist, who joined with other KGB-connected businessmen to take over Bank Rossiya, which according to the US Treasury, became Putin’s bank.
Arskady Rotenberg, former Putin judo partner, who became a billionaire under Putin’s presidency.
Vladimir Yakunin, former KGB, worked undercover in the UN in New York, then joined Bank Rossiya.
The Family—Yeltsin
Valentin Yumashev, former journalist. He gained Yeltsin’s trust while writing his memoirs. Appointed Kremlin chief of staff in 1997. Married Yeltsin’s daughter, Tatyana in 2002.
Tatyana Dyachenko, Yeltsin’s daughter, but also his gatekeeper.
Boris Berezovsky, former mathematician, who made his fortune running trading schemes for carmaker AvtoVAZ. Wangled his way into Yeltsin’s family. Acquired Sibneft oil.
Alexander Voloshin, former economist. He started working with Berezovsky on privatisation of Russian assets. Transferred to the Kremlin, 1997 to work as Yumashev’s deputy.
Roman Abramovich, oil trader. He became Berezovsky’s protégé, but outmanoeuvred him and took over his business. Banker to the Yeltsin family, bowed to Putin after a period of Siberian exile. Sent to London, poisoned (Polonium?) when tried to intervene at the start of Ukrainian war, possibly out of favour, and therefore in danger.
The Yeltsin-era oligarch who crossed Putin’s men.
Mikhail Khodorkovsky, former member of the Communist Youth League. He became one of the most successful businessmen of the perestroika era in the 1990s.
Mobsters and footsoldiers for the KGB—St Petersburgh.
Ilya Traber, former Soviet submariner, who became a black-market antique dealer in the perestroika years. A go-between for Putin’s security services and the Tambov organised- crime group controlling St Petersburg’s most strategic and lucrative assets, the sea port and oil terminal.
Vladimir Kumarin, Tambov organised-crime boss (‘night governor’).
Moscow footsoldiers and mobsters.
Semyon Mogilevich, former wrestler, known as ‘the Brainy Don’, who at the end of the eighties became banker to the leaders of Russia’s most powerful and organised crime groups, including the Solntsevskaya, funnelling cash to the West. Set up a criminal empire for drugs and arms trafficking. Recruited in the seventies by the KGB.
Sergei Mikhailov, (alleged) head of Solntsevskaya organised-crime group—Moscow’s most powerful—with close ties to the KGB. Criminal arm of the Russian state. Cultivated links with Donald Trump in the eighties.
Vyacheslav Ivankov (‘Yaponchik’), dispatched by Mogilvvich to Brighton Rock, New York, to broaden the Solntsevskaya criminal empire.
Yergeny Dvoskin, Brighton Beach mobster. He became a Russian ‘shadow banker’ after moving back to Moscow with his uncle Ivankov. The Russian security services helped them funnel tens of billions of dollars for clearing in the West.
Felix Sater, (Dvoskin’s best friend). A key business partner of The Trump Organisation, developing a string of properties for Trump to cash in and keep the Organisation from bankruptcy, while retaining high-level clearance from Russian intelligence.
The irony of the moron’s moron getting elected in 2016 is not that there was a cause for celebration in the White House, but jubilation and celebration in the Russian White House. Never had there been such a useful idiot in high office. Nigel Farage and little trumpet, Boris Johnson were also a useful gift. Brexit knocking five to fifteen percent off Britain’s gross domestic product and dividing the country. Scotland, for example, didn’t vote to be poorer.
Putin, after Chechnya and Syria, invasion of Ukraine was an act of hubris. Oil and gas goes up in price and pay for his imperialistic adventure. As the West withdraws from Russia, there is a return to the old ways of KGB, and a Soviet world protected by wealth and power that Putin knows well. What emerges from Belton’s book is a cowardly man, much like Boris Johnson, promoted for the wrong reasons, but now he’s in power he intends to stay there. He’s already killed many Russians in the false-flag operations that got him elected President with an overwhelming majority after the Yeltsin perestroika experiment. There’s no reason he will suddenly stop killing citizens of his own country and others.
Will Putin’s People use nuclear weapons? Perhaps you may remember at the start of the ‘action’ his official media were talking about such things; speculation. He took on the West and went on a disinformation spending spree that elected a US President and helped through Aaron Banks fund Brexit for Boris. There is a familiar pattern of saying before doing. And blaming someone else like in the Salisbury poisoning debacle of nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Perhaps, a long-range missile, said to have come from Ukraine—and a ‘tactical, nuclear strike’ in reply. I wouldn’t bet against it. Putin’s a gambler with a grudge who thinks he’s owed big time.
Memory is always being subverted. Tango with Putin begins with the Muscovite fairy-tale princess and her pink car looking for a prince. Natasha and Sasha…and they lived happily ever after in their castle.
James Cameron (reporting on the North Vietnamese):
‘They whispered that I was their dupe, but what they really meant was I was not their dupe.’
The princess wants a toy to play with. And Sasha buys her a television station.
Starvation as a weapon of war. Stalinist policies kill between four and ten million in the Ukraine. War is called peace and stabilisation.
Ashkhabad, a crossroad that became a town when a Russian fort was built in 1881 to help break the Turkmen’s resistance to annexation, disappears in fifteen seconds in 1948. The Turks constitute the largest language group in the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. An earthquake wipes out the city. Only the statue of Lenin remained.
Advisors from The Chicago School came to advise the Communist government how to initiate change in post-Gorbachev Russia. Shares. Every Russian citizen should have shares in the former dead-hand of the Russian economy and state enterprises. ‘You pretend to pay us and we’ll pretend to work’ is the Russian way of life. Job done in the free-market Russian economy. With their new-found shared wealth, former Soviets invested in new businesses. They all lived happily ever after.
Maps of the world. American National Geographic Society cut the USSR in half place it in the fold where no child could find it. Moscow’s Institute of Geography prints a different map. Putin’s map shows Russia in a central spot. Former Soviet States in the middle. The United States is an appendage, cut in half and down to size.
Russia has a shrinking and ageing population. From 150 million 1914 to around 140 million. Natural wastage. Around 20 million, a generation lost in The Great Patriotic War. Around 24 million ethnic Russian’s live outside the former Soviet System, but not all is lost. It maintains the criterion of blood purity. Russia for Russians. Muscovites queued for hours to enter Lenin’s mausoleum. Another queue formed to get hamburgers, ketchup, fries and Coke. They came together. Closing McDonalds in Moscow helps maintain imperial isolation. Paradoxically, the second element is land. But the more land the former Soviet States claim, the greater the dilatation of Russian ethic purity. Ukraine provides an ideal fix. Population 44 million. The former breadbasket of Russia (and Germany) is ethnically pure. Many of the battles fought in the Great Patriotic War were fought in and around Ukraine. Many Russian troops that died and continued to die in wars such as Afghanistan were also Ukrainian. You will see old Ukrainian comrades in news reports disparaging Putin’s claims that the Ukrainian people are Neo-Nazis or terrorists.
Stalin’s road to heaven. An ounce of gold is worth an ounce of bread. Auschwitz, Treblinka, Hiroshima, (Kolyma) Magadan. 11th November 1931, the Central Committee of the Communist Party create a trust to mine for gold, silver and other metals in Siberia. 160 gulags. Three million slaves don’t make it home. Permafrost maintains the expression on their faces when they died.
Russian’s console themselves, ‘Don’t despair, it was worse in Kolyma’.
There are no heroes in the camps, only survivors. Slave labour creates the long corridors underneath the Kremlin, Moscow Underground and Ukrainian Underground. Deep enough to shelter from bomb blasts, but not intrigues. The Georgian Stalin tried to destroy the old Moscow, but succeeded in only creating the new Moscow on the bones of the old.
Perestroika stretches only as far as the Kremlin walls: six comrades protest in Red Square about the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968. No one asks a victim of the gulags were they have been for five, ten, twenty or twenty-five years. To ask questions is to leave yourself open to answers. Spies and informers are part of the state apparatus. Only those in power ask questions. The guilty are punished. The innocent fare worse for they have committed no crime. Truth is relative. Hunger ever-present. Minsk to Pinsk. Identification of comrade citizens is no longer easy. Mass deportations, famine, colonisation. Some regard themselves as Georgian, but not Russian. Chechen, but not Russian. Ingush, but not Russian. Uzbek, but not Russian. East German, but German. Ukrainian but not Russian.
The bounty system. The NKVD would inform locals when a prisoner had escaped from the camps. Bring a prisoner’s hand to match their fingerprints. Their reward was a sack of flour. Political prisoners were gullible. He would be taken along with a group of escaping prisoners and eaten. One less political. They lived happily ever after.
T.D. Allman: ‘Genuinely objective journalism not only gets the facts right, it gets the meanings of events right. It is compelling not only today, but stands the test of time. It is validated not only by ‘reliable sources’ but the unfolding of history.’
Notes.
Jim Morrison: ‘Whoever controls the media controls the mind.’
By the end of Vladimir Putin’s second term in 2008, all Russian television was under state control.
Before this story begun, I spent 15 years working on independent television. News and political talkshows were my main passions. After all independent television had been destroyed in my country, I found myself at this house, where I spent many months in discussion of a new enterprise.
Putin 2009. [Cheering] The elections for the President of Russia are over. And our candidate, Dmitry Medvedev, is clearly in the lead.
Back in 2008, Russia still looked like a land of business opportunity. For Natasha Sindeeva, the owner of that white mansion and this pink car, every road was another adventure. And every adventure was her excuse for another party.
The top executive of a Moscow music radio station, Natasha was the dancing queen of the city.
In Putin’s Russia, former music radio producer Natasha Sindeeva dreams of becoming famous and decides to build her own TV station to focus on pop culture.
‘Without any false modesty, I’m going to sing and dance. So be prepared to be sick of me on stage, today. Because today is all about me Natasha Sindeeva.’
Natasha knew how to make things up. She even dreamed up a husband, to be precise—a prince. I remember this moment. I was falling asleep, thinking: ‘I’ve been so good. I deserve a prince. To love me and cherish me. To bring flowers and gifts. A handsome, tall, smart guy with character. I literally painted Sasha’s portrait in my mind.
Their wedding was a literal palace. The Russian Versailles. Natasha spun around the fountains with the world-famous Russian ballet behind her.
And there was a new president too: Dmitry Medvedev. Just like Natasha he saw the world through rose or rather pink coloured glasses, but his partner was more czar than prince.
Alexander Sasha Vinokurov (Natasha’s husband and investor)
Do you remember when he was asked about the most important thing in life?
Suddenly, the Russian President said ‘Love’. If we had a president that talked about love being the most important thing Russia would be a perfect country. But he enjoyed it. Here’s my iPhone, here’s my iPad. Here I am meeting with American entrepreneurs. He enjoyed being the good guy.
Dmitry Medvedev:’ The principle of freedom is better than non-freedom. These words are a distillation of human experience.’
It seems naïve now, but when I watched that clip I wanted to cry. Like: ‘Look Americans, this is what our President is like’.
There was no room for politics in my life. We didn’t vote. We just didn’t.
The economy was booming, as if on steroids. It seemed that anything was possible. It was going to keep growing.
Sasha made money banking, during Russia’s boom years and could finance a crazy idea. So Natasha had one. To build her very own tv empire. And that’s where I came in.
Vera Krichevskaya (tv producer)
We started at the most expensive real estate uptown (Moscow). Natasha loved the view.
I remember having talks with Natasha. ‘Why isn’t there tv for normal people, why don’t we make it?’ That’s how it started. It was as simple as that.
What’s the date today? Ah, the 30th. It’s July 30th. The 31st. 2008 and our television station is on its way to being built.
Here it was. The American Dream. The definition of a start-up. ‘Where’s your business plan?’ We’ll finish our business plan later. That’s the reality we lived at the time.
Natasha was a big dreamer. She already had a name and colour palette for her tv station.
DOZHD: Optimistic Channel.
Big, obnoxious.
That was the first time fate intervened.
Radio broadcast: What’s happening on Wall Street… traders say…
Sasha’s bank had not survived the recession of 2008. And from uptown we came down to earth and downtown.
Downtown Moscow. The cheapest building… in ‘Red October’. An old chocolate factory named after the revolution of 1917. Our floor smelled of caramel and rats.
I love that. Those incredible pillars and windows. So the sofas could go here. We thought so too… We’re going to have a TV station. We’re going to do this.
‘All the elements are based on truth, this real life.’
So everything and everybody must be themselves as much as possible. Life must be as authentic as possible.
Anna ‘Forsh’ Forshtreter. Executive Director.
We came to the office to meet Natasha. And then at one point, this girl walks in and gives Natasha this bundle. Natasha takes this new baby and opens her shirt. And without missing a beat, Natasha starts breastfeeding her. I understood immediately these were great people. I really liked them.
Anna Anya Mongayt. (Journalist)
That was the first time I saw Natasha in person. She made a great impression on me because she was only wearing purple. Purple knee-high boots. Purple leggings. And a purple sweater. And she was wearing this ring with a huge stone.
Right away she made a big impression on me.
They switched on all the lights at once above our main news desk. From afar it looked like an operation table that was incredibly bright. There are people all around the table. The cameras are rolling. The screens are on. Vera is yelling out orders from the control room. So it looks like we’re going to have a tv station after all.
In English, ‘Dozhd’ translates as rain, TV rain.
Only God knows why Natasha picked that name. In truth, the most accurate name for this enterprise… would have been The Adventure Channel.
April 2010 [opens] Dozhd TV goes on air.
The first broadcast looked hideous. Totally DIY.
I was afraid of running into my old colleagues from the real tv stations.
We were the industry’s biggest joke. But Natasha loved it. The parties I hated were great from the start.
Alexander Sasha Vinokurov (Natasha’s husband and investor)
When the project started, Natasha knew nothing about tv news. How it works. What it’s for. And so on… her initial concept was very different. She wanted to have lots of nice conversations. Things like that.
Statement: Regardless of sexual orientation. Regardless of age. Regardless of health conditions. Of hair and eye colour. Of faith and political views. We are always yours.
Renat Davletgildeev Deputy Editor-in-Chief.
When I came to Dozhd, I instantly felt not to lie to myself. To be honest with myself. Because at that point I was still accepting myself as gay.
Mikhail ‘Misha’ Zygar Editor in Chief.
I had ten years’ experience reporting from war zones. I wanted…I don’t know, I wanted an adventure.
Apparent suicide bombing in the hall of the Domodedovo Airport. On TV, people are outraged the CNN and Twitter already has images. Apparently 70 dead. While Russian channels, federal channels have nothing.
Suddenly we found ourself in a different reality to other tv stations. Sometimes I felt that we lived in two disparate countries. The news we talked about were ignored by all State controlled media as if it didn’t happen.
In the last year of President Medvedev’s term we launched a weekly sketch show in which, with the help of the classics of Russian poetry, we staged scenes between the President and his Prime Minister Putin.
And True Glory came. Our audience doubled every week. In April, 2011, we lauched a new episode of our viral show in which our father of the nation, Putin, decides not to give his heir Medvedev a second term.
…But the episode never went live.
Natasha:
Because I think there are boundaries of constructive criticism. And occasionally drift towards personal criticism. That crossed the line. So I found it impossible to broadcast.
Vera Krichevskaya (tv producer)
Everybody on social media shamed us for selling out. Federal media popped champagne. Opposition activists turned of Dozhd. I saw it as self-censorship. Then, in two weeks, I learned that President Medvedev wanted to visit out humble station. At that point, I felt we had run out of independence. Natasha was busy preparing for the visit. But, for me, it was the end of our fairytale. Then I quit.
Mikhail ‘Misha’ Zygar Editor in Chief.
When the broadcast finished [after Medvedev’s visit] we all had the feeling of having done well. And I remember for the rest of that week, I would come to work and see people crying at their desks. Our audience thought this was all part of some big pact. Natasha kills our satire show in order to host Medvedev as a guest. Vera quit in protest. And now we’re all playing Judas…For Natasha, it wasn’t a pact.
Q to Natasha. What did you say to Medvedev?
A You’re a really cool dude. You should run for re-election.
CONGRESS
Medvedev : ‘I think it’s right that Congress should support the candidacy of our party leader, Vladimir Putin for the post of president of our country.
Renat Davletgildeev Deputy Editor-in-Chief.
Now, I’m going to scare you a bit. The thaw is over Medvedev represented political moderation. Now the screws will be tightened.
We’re living inside an experiment. An experiment in stopping time. Is it possible to survive 12 more years without change?
Alexander Sasha Vinokurov (Natasha’s husband and investor)
So I just hoped. Little by little, things would improve. That hope turned out to be completely naïve. It’s a shame, my hopes. All my hopes were wasted on this.
4 December 2011.
Legislative Elections
Mikhail ‘Misha’ Zygar Editor in Chief.
The parliamentary elections are coming up. There are no battles. And the only way out I could think of was to get credentials [Parliamentary] for all our editorial staff. I got them all accredited as members of the electoral commissions at various polling stations.
Renat Davletgildeev Deputy Editor-in-Chief.
‘Hi Misha, I’ve only got a minute, we’ve opened the first electoral ballot box. There are stacks of 9-10 votes for United Russia that are for sure cast together. We’ve just found 3 huge stacks, 20 ballots wrapped in other’s ballots. Wonderful. There’s no way to drop those in together by accident.
Alexander Sasha Vinokurov (Natasha’s husband and investor)
When I went to that protest [against Putin] I expected to see some weird people, to feel a little awkward or even scared. But many of the people I found there were my friends. They’d say, ‘Hi, so, you’re here as well. Look—so and so is here too’.
Vera Krichevskaya (tv producer)
Ironically, Sasha and I ended up in the same crowd. I was shooting my first documentary at the protest. Sasha was led there by voter fraud.
Renat Davletgildeev Deputy Editor-in-Chief.
The last thing we heard was one of our Dozhd reporter, Ilya Vasyunin was arrested. We’re still trying to reach him now. We can see him in the police van. We should reach him soon.
Anna Anya Mongayt. (Journalist)
You said it was normal to be running from a police van.
Natasha
At first, I thought it would be a cultural, intellectual, lifestyle channel. But when I began to learn more, when I found myself on this wave of information, I realised just how much injustice was around us, which I hadn’t seen before. I honestly didn’t see it. Didn’t know it existed. I couldn’t keep not having an opinion about it.
When the protests started, Mr Gromov, an official from Putin’s administration called me for the first time. He was screaming at me, ‘What do you think you are doing? How dare you! You’re spreading US State Department lies.
I remember I told him, ‘You know, I don’t work for you. I’m not part of the state media. We work in the way we think is right.’
Then he said, ‘We’ll ruin you.’ Something like that. It was a very nasty conversation.
6th May 2012.
Boris Nemtsov, opposition politician.
Today, Putin proved that he was elected illegally. The sheer number of special forces and military. This hasn’t happened in the centre of Moscow since 1993.
[crowd chanting: New elections]
Timur Olvesky, war correspondent.
My first live broadcast was at the elections on May 6th with everything that happened there.
‘It looks like a stampede. Nobody is planning to leave. They are breaking through police cordons. Unfortunately, I can’t see what’s happening.
[Pulled down from his platform by riot police]
Polina Koslovskya Digital Director.
It looks like Boris Nemtsov is getting arrested too. The stream is unavailable. No one expected us to be attacked like that. At the time, it was the job from hell. Because I was negotiating with different platforms. So that people could watch our broadcasts. On other websites if they got hit. So during life broadcasts most of the work we had to do was sending people to the right website on time. The cyber-attacks always came. We were sure they would come and we couldn’t avoid them.
Vera Krichevskaya (tv producer)
I clearly remember May 6th, Putins third inauguration. That was the day I switched on Dozsd again.
Our online broadcast has partially stopped. I’ll remind you that today we have been cyber-attacked. The station I’d left just didn’t tell you what’s really happening around you, it also makes you feel less alone.
Q Natasha what are you afraid of?
A I’m afraid that after all the effort and emotions invested into this, something out of control it gets closed down, dies, or gets taken away. I don’t know. It’s not that I’m afraid of it. I just don’t want it to happen. Because I’ve put a lot of personal feelings into this. There’s a lot of my heart in this.
3rd Inauguration: Stately event.
Cf
Protest and chants, ‘Russia will be free.’
11th June 2013.
The law criminalising ‘gay propaganda’ passes with just one abstention.
The lives of many Russians will change. The problem with these homosexual propaganda laws is that for the first time in Russian history they are legally introducing the idea of the second-class citizen.
This law touched Dozhd more than other organisations. The newly inscribed second-class citizens made up more than half the team. When the bill was passed, it hurt us all.
Renat Davletgildeev Deputy Editor-in-Chief.
When the Afisha issue came with my interview came out, I was very afraid. Back then, I think, I was the first person with some level of recognition. To publicly come out as gay. And among journalists I was probably the first. Really, I should have approved the interview with Natasha Sideeva or Misha Zygar. I was, after all, a face on the station. The station had stuck my face onto buses as part of a promo campaign. Natasha took me into her office. Sasha, her husband, was there. They hugged me, poured me a glass of wine. Sasha brought out a copy of the magazine he had found and asked for my autograph. I signed it. Then they told me I did the right thing. And I burst into tears.
Natasha.
If nothing bad happens with advertising budget, maybe this year we’ll break even.
Sasha, her husband
By the summer of 2013, we had essentially reached out goal. The station was popular. Many advertisers were eager to work with us.
Anna Anya Mongayt. (Journalist)
We were the voice of a new era. People admired us. We felt like the media of the future.
Mikhail ‘Misha’ Zygar Editor in Chief.
In interviews with prospective employees would say, ‘what we are offering is not a job. We’re offering you a dream. ‘
Behind me is the ‘Sosny’ Holiday Homes Cooperative. The gates of which just closed on our camera crew. Holiday homes owned by Vyacheslav Volodin, Putin’s First Deputy. Chief of Staff, Sergey Prihodka, Head of the Government Apparatus. And prominent United Russian Party members.
Aleksei Navalny (Opposition Leader)
We’re demanding that all of these people explain where they got their money for such luxurious lifestyles. Where did they get that money?
The level of luxuries they have is not at all compatible with their actual incomes.
KYIV [loud explosion]
Meanwhile, at the independence square, protests continue. They are targeting the Ukrainian government, which refused to sign the deal with the European Union.
[Ukrainian protester] Please tell Russians that we are not against them. We are not against you. Not against Russians. We love them. We just don’t love Putin. That’s all.
Timur Olvesky, war correspondent.
I realised we were witnessing an event that was not only historical but one that was also determining our future. And I begged Misha to send me there.
From Kviv.
We have a breaking story. Both sides are firing live rounds. Some have been detained. It’s an absolute shitstorm over here. It’s a real war.
19th June 2014 was the first fight on Kyiv’s streets. At that point, everything split into Russian reporters on federal TV who’d talk about fascists burning down the SWAT teams, and Dozhd which covered it from a different angle.
6 Days later (25th June)
Natasha:
Good afternoon, It’s 8.37pm, you’re watching amateurs broadcasting live.
Mikhail ‘Misha’ Zygar Editor in Chief.
On the day, the show’s theme was the anniversary of the Leningrad siege ending. They mentioned this quote by a great Russian general, Victor Astafyev
‘Maybe Leningrad should have been given to the Nazis, so that thousands of lives could have been saved.’
[cf Moscow given to Napoleon]
Natasha:
Should Leningrad been given to the Nazis to avoid hundreds of thousands of deaths? Should it?
[commentator, people can answer this?]
Yes, I understand there’s already a debate on twitter.
Mikhail ‘Misha’ Zygar Editor in Chief.
An avalanche falls.
[announcement on air]
About an hour ago, Dozhd tv was dropped from the NTZ and cable package. Dozhd was replaced onscreen by darkness.
Alexander Sasha Vinokurov (Natasha’s husband and investor)
Nobody thought they would use it as a pretext to shut us down.
[screenshot of other stations] this question was morally and ethically beyond the pale for other people. The station crossed the line of what is acceptable.
Renat Davletgildeev Deputy Editor-in-Chief
The next day, on Tuesday, I think the State Parliament releases a statement chastising Dozhd tv. And on Wednesday, the expulsions begun.
‘Hello, my name is Anna Mongayt. Today I’m hosting the show ‘Online’. Our plan was to devote this hour to the life to Sochi in the lead up to the Olympics. But the situation has changed. Today, for the first time, the show will be devoted only to ourselves.’
It was interactive tv, you’d talk only to people that called in.
‘Can you hear me?’
When I started the show, all the providers were carrying us. But by the time I finished the show, everybody had dropped us.
[cable audience around 8 million drops exponentially to around 60 000 listeners]
A short break while we tell you who else has switched off Dozhd.
Vera Krichevskaya (tv producer)
That night for the first time since I left, I called Natasha. Sasha picked up the phone. They were hosting a late-night meeting with the newsroom at home. Natasha was smoking in silence. In one day they had lost most of their 80% of their audience and most of their advertisers. Right away, we began again. We started to brainstorm new plans. It was like we had never split up.
Renat Davletgildeev interview on Dozhd with Natasha.
What is going on? What is happening now?
They were looking for some excuse, and now, it seem, we have given them one. In confidential conversations, meaning off the record, for all these providers told us today that they were ordered to find any excuse—technical, ideological, commercial, legal—to terminate these contracts with us. And everyone who switched us off, confirmed it, just not as a public statement.
[cut to Putin announcement]
‘Dozhd is an interesting station. With a good young team. But, as you said yourself, one that’s made some mistakes. To put it bluntly, not simple mistakes, but an offence to many of our citizens. But you need to own up to it, which you’ve done, and figure out how to proceed.’
Renat Davletgildeev
‘Today we’re holding a press conference for Dozhd TV’s CEO Natalia Sindeeva. And Dozh TV’s investor Aleksandr Sasha Vinokurov.’
Anna Mongayt
I could tell how difficult it was for Natasha. She was a mess. She looked as pale as a ghost. You could see it was hard for her because it was all about to collapse. All of Sasha’s fortune had gone into it. You could see how hard it was on their relationship. She was completely lost. She’d come to work grief-stricken. Looking like a widow.
Q ‘Arkady Orstrovsky, The Economist Magazine: ‘Will you appeal to Vladimir Putin without whose approval this expulsion likely wouldn’t have happened?
A Natasha: I think in that situation I would appeal to Putin, because I will fight to the end for this station, for this business, for this baby, for the right to work in an independent media.
I remember being at their house. Sasha always grilled steaks. Natasha always danced around the pool. We drank champagne with strawberries and imagined our TV future. I recited chapters of the Russian Constitution on citizens’ freedoms and quoted Harvey Milk on the need to fight for your rights. Natasha kept saying: ‘We won’t lose anything.’ We were so fucking stupid.
Sasha.
An opportunity came to sell the house. Without a second thought we invested the money into the station. We sold several properties.
Natasha.
What happened, yes, consequentially led to all doors closing for Sasha. He’s become toxic because he is owner of Dozhd tv.
Sasha
There came a point when we had almost no money left for ourselves. When we trimmed our expenses down, life became more fun.
Natasha.
For Sasha, the bad consequences of the station are elsewhere. For Sasha…he lost me.
[report]
Mr Putin, Anton Zhelnov, Dozhd TV, the key tv players cable and satellite providers are saying there is no command, the situation’s getting worse.
Putin: Maybe they’re fooling you. You think I give commands to cable people and all your advertisers?
Q Well, they’re saying abstractly. There’s no command, so may I ask, who this command has come from?
Putin: I don’t know. I don’t give such commands. I didn’t tell the cable providers to stop working with you and I don’t think I have the right to tell them to start working with you.
Q You work with them you yourself?
[cut to Natasha]
As of now, we have a month left to live. These are not just words. We have to shut down in a month. There’s a little bit of hope in today’s staff meeting, where I will ask the whole team if I can cut their pay and our expenses by quite a lot. If the team agrees we might be able to last another two or three months. So much as I’d like it to be, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows.
PAYWALL.
Anya Mongayt
It’s a pressing topic for us here, because we have decided to take some unusual measures. So, why is Dozhd going to sell its content?
Anna ‘Forsh’ Forshtreter
The audience paying for our content gives us freedom. It provides independence. What we’re putting behind the paywall is the live broadcast: $26 for annual subscription.
That’s something you’re probably going to miss, but it will be reasonably priced.
Anya Mongayt
It’s truly a way for us to be independent. It’s a new way for us to survive. If you are in the same boat, you’ll understand why we are doing this.
[cut to]
What? When are we going on air? Anya get ready.
July 2014.
News feature on the shooting down of a Malaysian passenger plane. Ad lib. Responsibilty give an advanced surface to air missile to terrorist fighting against Ukraine in Ukraine who did not understand the system.
[cut to]
Mikhail ‘Misha’ Zygar Editor in Chief.
Natasha has gone on vacation. Summer.
And suddenly, real combat operations begin in Donbass. And the first information comes in about Russian soldiers participating in real combat operations. I tasked all Dozhd staff with calling all Army recruitment offices to find out whether any Russian soldiers had been killed in Donbass. And to find out their last names.
[in office]
Renat Davletgildeev
We are making a list of people to call urgently. Some of them possibly on air.
[cut to Putin]
So the question is, ‘Is our army present in Ukraine or not?’ I’ll answer you directly. The Russian Army is not present in Ukraine.
[cut to] Timur Olvesky, war correspondent.
Also today, reports of strange disappearances of Russian soldiers. Reports are coming from other cities. On this list: Saratov, Kostroma, Pskov. Our reporters are trying to find out how many soldiers were buried in the town’s cemeteries.
Today, my colleagues and I, and other journalists were repeatedly attacked after trying to talk to the families of the people most likely being buried in Pskov’s cemetaries.
[cut to Army reservist jumps in front of their car]
What do we do?
Wait. What do they want?
[voice outside the car] they will break your camera.
You slashed our tyres.
Guys! We’re leaving.
They’ve slashed our tyres. We’re being attacked. We can’t drive away. I was asked to come here. Wait. Wait. Wait. We’re being attacked by two young unknown men who have threatened us. The said there are many bogs around Pskov and that if we continue asking questions we’ll simply disappear.
[cut to]
Mikhail ‘Misha’ Zygar Editor in Chief.
Natasha has come back from holiday and asks me: ‘Am I imagining things, I was walking here from home and this black car seemed to be following me as if I’m being tailed.
I say, you know, I don’t think you are making it up. Look, this is what we’re up to.
[cut to news]
Today, a Ukrainian press centre posted videos of four Russian soldiers captured by Zarleny village, near Donetsk.
[cut to press conference featuring a roomful of captured Russian soldiers]
[address them] ‘Hello, I’m Timor Olevsky, a reporter from Russia’s Dozhd TV.
Q When did you understand who had detained you?
A When we were captured, we were told we were on Ukraine’s territory and were being held captive.
[fellow captive]
A We didn’t know what was going on here. So we believed what the news showed.
Mikhail ‘Misha’ Zygar Editor in Chief.
We saw a jump in subscribers form around 15 000 to 50 000 in four days.
A month later, we got evicted.
Natasha.
Option 1, we get our stuff together and move somewhere, where? Option 1 is to move to some factory.
Mikhail ‘Misha’ Zygar Editor in Chief.
The idea of eviction at first seemed incomprehensible. It seemed terrifying for it to come true. If we got evicted we’d completely perish.
[cut to]
Vera Krichevskaya (tv producer)
I never again became part of the team, but I always stayed close. At that point, I realised how much I wanted to help Dozhd survive. In between my filmmaking projects, I try to make up for lost time. Back then, our goal was to keep the news on air, no matter what. But how? We had absolutely nowhere to go.
[cut to newroom]
My name is Mikhail Fishman. It’s 8pm on the 31st October and I’m hosting the last ever broadcast from this great Dozhd studio.
I was thinking about what these years at Dozhd means to me. I can tell you one thing, that it’s clear to me after all these years that Dozhd is a big deal and will be around a long time. Why am I alone? Come along. Join me guys.
Anna ‘Forsh’ Forshtreter
We would drive around looking at places for days on end. Five or six places a day. Someone from our side would start the initial discussions. Everything would be a good fit, then—the size, the price, the condition. Then we’d tell them we were an actual TV station. That was the moment they’d understand who we really were.
Two days later, we’d get a ‘no’.
This was right before Natasha was planning to go to the United States.
[cut to]
I really miss everyone. Life is really hard over here.
[rejoinder]
I’ve heard life overseas is hard. Don’t know why you even bother going. Should have stayed with us.
It’s awful, the way they treat black people. Terrible.
Natasha, let’s talk business because there’s a ton of people here and we need to get moving on schedules.
[cut to]
Natasha
This was the first time I’d given up hope. I said, ‘That’s it. I can’t beat the machine.’
Anna ‘Forsh’ Forshtreter
So, one night, I called Natasha, I had this idea. I said, I know a place that’s perfect from a legal point of view. We can move in and nobody can stop us.
The view. That’s the Patriarch’s Pond there. Cool. Right?
Yeah.
This was Natasha’s flat in Central Moscow, which was not just unsuitable for a studio, but even for family life, because it was very much a bachelor pad. So, I go to this apartment with our engineers.
[cut to]
The mattress. Let’s lean it a bit.
That’s it.
We go into the bedroom and I say, ‘This will be the control room.’
Dec 2014
Natasha’s Appartment.
Secret Office.
Vera Krichevskaya (tv producer)
In the same building, the floor below Dozhd, housed an illegal brothel. Just like that. Two of the world’s oldest professions accidentally collided in the heart of Moscow. In a building owned by the Ministry of Defence.
Mikhail ‘Misha’ Zygar Editor in Chief.
Stop, Stop my friends, us posing a legal issue. We’re gonna invite guest here. Roughly, every third guest will rat us out to everyone. But the KGB will find out about this on Tuesday…They already know. That’s all.
Hello, we were stopped the Anti-Corruption Office where we are sitting on a windowsill next to Aleksei Navalny
I wanted to say, I’m very happy to be in your studio again.
But I’m very happy you dropped in and today our studio is a windowsill.
Natasha
I could feel a provocation coming on. People were afraid to leave the office at night. And my intuition came true. I called Forsch in the evening and said, Anna, pack up the studio, ASAP, I feel some shit’s going to happen.
Natasha to workforce.
The locks were covered in some sort of resin. They were shoved full of bolts. Basically, it took professionals, four hours to open the doors. No one has left us yet. Just as they are watching us, they still are. When it comes to work, we don’t have issues. But everything to do with your personal or political stuff…Just keep in mind it might become public.
[cut to]
Toast. A new life.
February 2015.
Flacon
Anna ‘Forsh’ Forshtreter
Miracles happened to us all the time. Our new office found us by itself. I got a call. ‘Hello, We’ve got a 1000 square meters and we know you’re Dozhd.’
I said. ‘OK, when can I come for a viewing?’
‘How about right now?’
‘Of course.’
We had to move everything ourselves. We didn’t have a moving company. It was just us. Misha was here, carrying boxes.
Mikhail ‘Misha’ Zygar Editor in Chief.
We would always say we became very much like a cult. That we all felt this familiar cultish atmosphere. It wasn’t a cult in the name of Natasha. It was in the name of… I don’t know. The name of freedom.
Anya Mongayt
People got lost here. Their whole life is here. Few people here have functional families.
Evgeniya ‘Zhenya’ Voskoboynikovia (Journalist)
At some point you stop distinguishing your work from your life. And you don’t notice the moment of this transition.
Natasha.
Hello, this is Dozhd TV, from our new home and location.
Anna ‘Forsh’ Forshtreter
It wasn’t just for Natasha to keep her dream project. It wasn’t about her dream. It was mainly about saving [Dozhd] as a source of information. It was for the cause. We had to save our cause.
Evgeniya ‘Zhenya’ Voskoboynikovia (Journalist)
I want my country to look like the faces of these people. I think this is important.
[cut to]
Natasha.
Well, to a happy new life for us in Flacon.
Timor Olevsky
After that we were a family. Just a family.
Mikhail ‘Misha’ Zygar Editor in Chief.
We are the chosen ones. Everyone wanted to be us.
Alexei ‘Alien’ Navalny.
Nadya ‘Alien’ Pussyriot.
Natasha ‘Alien’ Sindeeva.
Attention! Foreign Agents.
Putin:
We’re ready to talk to the opposition. We’ll continue to have a partnership with civic society, in the most expansive meaning. We always listen to everyone who constructively criticises any action or inaction of the government. That is on, any level. This kind of dialogue, this partnership, is always healthy. They are absolutely necessary for any country, including our own.
[cut to]
Dozhd is back with an emergency broadcast. My name is Vladimir Romensky. We’re currently on Moscow City centre on Zamoskyvorosky bridge, where Boris Nemtsov has been murdered. He was shot, it’s not yet known by whom, right on this spot
[cut to newsroom]
I’m Pavel Lobkov here with the main news. Boris Nemtsov’s murder.
Natasha
There was a point when I got scared and I thought: This place is wide open and I don’t have security guards. I do everything myself. For a while I lived with this fear. And the fear ate me alive. I kept looking back in case I was being followed, or somebody was waiting for me. I don’t dwell on it because I don’t know how to change my life so that it doesn’t happen. Probably, shut down the station and leave the country. So I don’t think about it. If anything, I’m afraid to think about it, because if I do, it will definitely happen.
Anna ‘Forsh’ Forshtreter
When the battle is over When you’ve carried all the wounded to the rear and fixed them up. It’s over. And now you don’t know what to do next.
All the boys and girls. All the young hipsters have all gone grey. All the ‘light’ news pisses them off. Civilian life pisses them off.
Natasha.
We all started to have conflicts. We all started to hate each other. That was it, when we met at briefings, it was impossible.
[cut to broadcast] Pavel Lobkov
Q to Natasha.
There’s a sense of despair, I’m not going to be positive. I’m not going to say everything is great here. I want to say that we’re sick. We’re sick with narcissism. And all of this dancing. You can’t fake that smile for five years. We had good times, but like we had this pigskin-pink colour. Enough. There’s a dissonance now.
Natasha.
We’re not trying to replace serious journalism, and what we do with dancing. Nothing has changed. You know this.
[cut to outside broadcast, face against a police van window]
‘Russia without Putin! Russia without Putin!’
Excuse me I’m on Dozhd TV, could you please tell me if you’re being released today? [faces camera] Unfortunately, the police aren’t talking to us yet, but we’re still here. Just to remind everybody, there’s eight of us here. It’s unclear what will happen next.
Natasha
In a county of 140 million, only 60 000 are willing to pay for independent news. The paywall keeps Dozhd alive. But you cannot change the world with such a small audience. Over these five years we won small battles, but the war was lost. Our grand adventure failed to change the world for the better. As long as you are invisible behind a paywall and never break even, you are not a threat to the state.
Evgeniya ‘Zhenya’ Voskoboynikovia (Journalist)
We are all really believed in this bright future. It hasn’t come. It’s time to admit it.
Anya Mongayt
I recently watched a film about the great Russian writer Sorokin. It has this very depressing but spot-on phrases. He says: ‘Russia shouldn’t hope for things to get better in the future. Russia’s present is Russia’s future.’
[cut to Putin and dog, barking in front of two Japanese dignitaries. Putin gives the dog a treat. ]
Anya Mongayt
She gathered us all in a room and said, ‘You have to make me happy’. She said, ‘If you don’t make me happy in a year. I’ll shut the whole damn thing down.’
Mikhail ‘Misha’ Kozreyv, Music Programming Producer: TV-Host.
I took it in the most pessimistic light. Maybe the last deadline had already past. And the decision to sell us off was fast approaching.
Vera Krichevskaya (tv producer)
It felt like the end. ‘If this is it,’ I said to Natasha, ‘I’m going to film it.’ But, as always with Dozhd, nothing went according to plan.
July 2019.
Moscow Summer Protests.
[cut to] We are unarmed. We are unarmed. ‘Hello to all Dozhd veiwers from this police van to which I was admitted during the process against the barring of opposition candidates from participating in Moscow City Council elections.
[cut to] PROTEST FOR ALLOWING INDEPENDENT CANDIDATES TO RUN FOR OFFICE.
We are unarmed. We are unarmed [chant]
[cut to newsroom and back to protest]
Masha we are going to leave you a second to go to Romensky. Right-now, they are trying to destroy the sit-in. People are being grabbed.
[cut to Natasha in studio]
We decided to hold this emergency broadcast late last night.
[cut to protest]
‘I’m a reporter. I’m a reporter.’
Natasha
We saw this was all completely lawless and unjust. And realised we had to do something. So, we’re taking down the paywall for our broadcasts.
Today you’ll be allowed to watch Fishman’s show for free. Please share and talk about it.
[cut to crowd, Fishman’s show]
‘They were pushing forward very roughly. Still, I’d never seen anything like this.’
Fishman:
We must be very open. We must be accessible. We must report things as we see them. This is our social mission as journalists, if you will.
After opening of paywall figures jumped. 18 000 viewers to 25 million (roughly).
Anya.
Sorry to interrupt [coverage] but Dozhd TV is being raided. You can see it live. Police have entered our offices. Right next to Natasha Sindeeva there are policemen, who are talking to her as we speak.
There’s a cyber-attack happening against all of Dozhd’s internet channels. We have no internet connection. We can’t stream pictures from Trubanya Street or anything else that requires the internet.
Natasha.
[cut to] Hello Dad, sorry, did I wake you?
No worries.
I just thought I’d call. You must have read the news. I wanted to call, so that you didn’t worry. You were called in for questioning? You got a subpoena? I’m on my way to the Investigative Committee. Don’t worry, it’s about the protests.
OK. Thanks for calling. Good luck and good bye.
To say I was nervous was an understatement. This was my first time. This was my baptism of fire. This was my first subpoena, even with all of Dozhd’s difficult years and situations.
In the morning at the Investigative Committee my hands were sweating. This had never happened before.
[cut to Natash outside and her report]
I can tell you first they asked about how we covered the protests on July 27th. How we worked and who funded Dozhd TV. That’s it. There weren’t any other questions.
Q You came as a witness on the case? A witness?
[cut to Anya in studio]
The Moscow case isn’t over for our television station. Today, Natasha Sindeeva was called in for another interrogation
Sasha.
I was worried. Of course. And the kids were even more worried. Because they didn’t understand what was going on. The night before, we had a long conversation about it. What to watch out for. What her strengths and weaknesses are. What to be wary of, what not to worry about, what to expect.
Natasha.
I was nervous. I didn’t sleep all night. I’d never been that scared before.
Sasha
It’s very difficult to decide what’s important to do in life—go to war and die heroically? Or live a long live and die from some common sickness? Both scenarios are possible for a person, or a TV station.
December 2019.
Natasha.
Right now people are unsubscribing for two reasons. First, they’re dissatisfied with the content etc, but that’s only a small part of it.
Second, people don’t have time of Dozhd. They don’t watch it, because they can’t find time.
?
Honestly, for the last few years I’ve had this feeling not only of stagnation, but of death This slow, horrible death, of this station, we all love.
?
If the most optimal way to reach our goal is to kill Dozhd, we need to kill it.
[cut to Natasha at home]
I’m awake at 4am yet again. I can’t sleep. It’s either old age or nerves. Dozhd is the thing that never lets you rest. You’re constantly thinking of where to find the money for all this.
At the beginning of 2019, I set myself a goal. By April 2020. Dozhd’d 10th birthday, I have to answer for myself. Only for myself. This question: What do I want to do with all this? I don’t know how I will answer this question in April.
Sasha believes closing the company is one of the best options. So that it just doesn’t die quietly, you know. But things can’t continue the way they are now.
Sasha
Selling the station to a media group is out of the question. We haven’t lived through our last ten years to end with a shitty thing like that.
Natasha
Sasha asked me, ‘Imagine you don’t have a TV station. It’s all good. Everything is calm. What do you do now?’
And I said, ‘I want to do the tango’.
[cut to Natasha doing the tango in a studio with a young male dancer]
Sasha.
Of course, I want to be the top priority for my wife and kids. But that’s extremely egotistical. It’s stupid and impossible. This is about our relationship. Not Dozhd. Even if not Dozhd, ‘Dancing with Stars’, or something else would have taken her, if not Dozhd. I just wish she could be next to me more often.
Natasha.
It’s unexpectedly hard to clap for yourself and to record. What I’m to say, I feel I must record it. Against the background of discussions and next moves etc. While all this was going on, last night I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Sometimes I think everything happens for a reason. Maybe it’s time for me to stop and think about what’s really important. Are you prepared to sacrifice yourself for some mission or goal?
Where do your priorities lie?
Or, at the very least, this is a chance for me to stop and think.
Anya.
Dozhd means so much—socially, emotionally, historically—that if Natasha decides to shut it down, people won’t forgive her. If, at a certain point, she decided to pull the plug, she will be always be remembered as the person that killed Dozhd. And not even Putin wants that honour.
February 2020.
Freiburg, Germany.
Vera Krichevskaya (tv producer)
Natasha had never been away from Russia this long. She decided to take a break from the news.
Natasha.
I don’t miss it at all. You know I was guided by illusions. For quite a long time, I hoped things would change. But my optimism has run out. I’m not saying that I’m depressed all the time, but…yeah, I’ve reconciled myself to the fact that Putin is here to stay. He’ll be in power as long as he lives. I can’t say I know what to do with the rest of my life. But it’s definitely something I’m thinking about a lot.
Vera Krichevskaya (tv producer)
On our way to radiotherapy we found out that Vladimir Putin announced new constitutional amendments that let him stay in power until 2036, when Natasha will be 65.
[cut to Putin]
Our duty is to protect the Constitution. To respect it, as we respect our country, our history and our accomplishments.
2003.
[cut to Putin speech]
I oppose anyone—however good their intentions—violating the Constitution of our country.
I repeat myself, we should protect the Constituion. I oppose any changes to it.
2007
[cut to Putin speech]
Amending the Constitution to serve a specific person is, I think, wrong.
2018
[cut to Putin speech]
I have never altered the Constitution. I wouldn’t do it for myself, and I don’t plan to, even today.
2020
[cut to Putin speech]
I repeat once again, these amendments have been necessary for a long time, and I’m sure they’ll be useful to this country and its citizens.
Natasha [radiotherapy for her breast cancer]
You understand that nothing’s happening, things are getting worse. You just have to figure out how to live and exist in this. I think we live in a world that is so inverted, unfortunately, where our people get bullied, locked up, arrested, punished, killed, and persecuted and so on. There are very few of them. These people, us who fall prey to this machine. There are few of them. And, in that case, yes, you have to stick with each other. It’s very important. And not to betray your people. Is this journalistic? Probably not. Human. Yes.
I have remained human for ten years, and have never betrayed myself and my values. That’s more important to me. I don’t care whether I remain in history as an unprofessional media manager. But I remained a human with compassion, conscience and responsibility.
Vera Krichevskaya (tv producer)
When we shot the interview, she took breaks every twenty minutes to wash off the sweat. Still, the first thing she did when she got to Germany was finding a local tango teacher.
[cut to Natasha dancing a tango with her teacher]
The worse she felt the more she thought about dancing. Her goal was to ‘master the tango with tricks’ before she returned to Moscow.
April 2020.
Moscow.
What is really going on in the hospitals and in the regions?
Natasha.
Right now, journalists are like doctors. They’ve ended up in the frontlines. Just like doctors have, although neither of them wanted to be. For journalists, this moment calls for an act of bravery.
I completely stopped thinking about what I’ve been thinking about for the past year. About where I should go, leave, stay, or shut this down. I’ve gained a better understanding of why we need Dozhd and why we need to work. Our task to explain that to people, to be a guide in this complex situation. You know, when they cut out this sickness, it felt like they cut out something unnecessary. Something bad has left and I feel lighter inside. And I think, or need even think, I know that Dozhd needs to exist.
[cut to Moscow office]
Natasha.
[champagne] have you looked inside the fridge.
What’s in there?
It’s very beautiful in there. Though there’s less already.
[with friends]
Natasha.
I’ve lost weight. Got in shape. I feel great, I’m ready to fight. I really want to work and think we’re entering another good phase. So, I invite everyone to have a drink. Please make sure everyone has a drink.
[toast]
So to us. We haven’t been together in a while.
Natasha.
Today is 17th June, 2020. And there’s less than 2 weeks until the referendum. I just got a call from the editor-in-chief, who said the police were at Dozhd. To question one of our reporters, who’s been investigating online voter fraud.
Sasha
They can shut the station down at any time. They can put all sorts of pressure on us, literally. Even something directed at the owners of the station. I don’t think anyone doubts that for a second.
Moscow. Eve of the Constitution Referendum, June 2020.
Why won’t they tell people honestly that you want to rule over Russia for 36 years—7 years longer than Stalin? And two years longer than Catherine the Great? [broadcaster]
Natasha.
We want to release this at 3pm, alongside Putin’s address.
Today?
Yes, today.
We’ve grown up. Who are we to know who to love? No. [broadcaster]
Natasha
Hello. Hello, take this [camera phone] I’m here to vote on the constitutional amendments. Let me take this selfie[shot]? That’s it. Ballot paper and vote (camera shot) Not sure if it’s visible?
[cut to outside polling station]
Of course, this is all for show. The amendments have already been approved. I don’t really know why I bothered, but since this is the first time in a long time I’ve got the opportunity to say, ‘NO’ to tick that box. I decided to go.
Sasha.
I decided not to vote. The main reason is that I don’t think the state can be changed by some kind of flashmob. I don’t think it will be changed by elections. It will be changed in some other way.
Results are as follows: YES 77.92%. NO 21.27%.
Natasha.
Dozhd. So for the first time in ten years we’re celebrating in this zoom format.
The station changed us in many ways. The station and the changing times. Being in the middle of all these events and movements really changed us and the way we viewed life. What is or isn’t important.
So, here’s the station, right. I think it had quite an effect on, among others, how we evolved as a family, as individuals, as Sasha, and I.
I think Sasha doesn’t regret it either. And believes all of it was done right.
Q) Vera Krichevskaya (tv producer)
Is Dozhd the right kind of investment or the right kind of loss?
A The right kind of loss.
Sasha
She regards this as her life’s work. Not a responsibility, not a burden, but her life’s work. And if it’s your life’s work, you have to do it well. You need to somehow see it through to the end.
Natasha.
This is my life, Vera. I now understand this is my life, you know. I’m now at a place where I can say, this is my life. And this is how I’m living it.
After the summer of 2020, Dozhd intensified its news coverage and started publishing on YouTube for free. There, broadcasts quickly reached tens of millions and quickly allowed Dozhd to pay off its debts.
In May 2021, Dozhd was banned from the Kremlin’s press corps, ‘for covering the protests in support of Alexey Navalny’.
In August 2021, a month before the Parliamentary elections, the Russian Ministry of Justice labelled Dozhd as ‘a foreign agent’.
In February 2022, Russian troops invaded Ukraine.
In March 2022, after six days of live coverage of the war in Ukraine, the Russian government shut Dozhd down again. Its new is available in Russia again as long as YouTube is available in Russia.
Natasha and Sasha have separated.
Tango with Putin charts Natasha’s journey, from building the station, Dozhd, to recruiting an open-minded team of outcasts who find themselves reporting on some of the biggest and most controversial stories of the day while trying to protect independent journalism in their country.
A poignant voice towards the end of this docu-drama told viewers Sergei Pugachev was likely to be down to his last £70 million (or it might have been dollars $70 million). That was to put things into perspective. I’m not sure if we were meant to feel sorry for him. My Russian stretches to nada. Pugachev had once been worth around $15 billion. He was a Russian oligarch and friend of Vladimir Putin. His portfolio included one of Russia’s largest private banks, shipyards, a coal mine and designer brands. He’d been married but divorced when he employed Countess Alexandra Tolstoy to teach him English.
Tolstoy was still married to Chama Uzikstn, whom she’d met while yomping across Russia on horseback. They were stars of a Russian television series ‘It’ll Never Last’, which proved prophetic. Here we had the English ideal of female beauty celebrated with pale, flawless complexion and rosy cheeks and some dark skinned horseman.
President Putin, Pugachev tells us, wasn’t keen on the Russian oligarch marrying an English rose. Putin told him much the same as he (allegedly) told President Trump that Russia had the most beautiful woman and prostitutes, who could piss on anybody’s bed (perhaps not in that order) even his.
Pugachev tells us he defied Putin and married Countess Alexandra Tolstoy and they had three children together with houses all over the world. It’s a happy-ever-after scenario. The education of the children taking place in their home in Kensington, London. Here we have the English-language version of ‘It’ll Never Last’.
Let’s not fall for he married the wrong woman argument. Bill Browder in his book, Red Notice, tell us how he became ‘Putin’s No.1 Enemy’. Pugachev puts himself around Putin’s No. 3 Enemy. He admits he fears with his life. With almost 40 Russian oligarchs dying and the use of Novichok nerve agent on British soil, and the then British Prime Minster, Teresa May, condemned Russian involvement and naming two Russian agents who had perpetrated the crime, he had good reason.
Post-Soviet Russia after the fall of the Berlin wall was cowboy country in which the Chicago School model attempted to transform Communism into Capitalism in one big gulp. Browder estimates that around twenty men ‘stole’ around 39% of the economy. Pugachev was one of these twenty men which took him into the top 1000 richest men in the world (of around 8 billion).
Putin, the little grey man, was pushed forward by oligarchs and regional gangsters and in January 2000, became President of the Russian Federation. Pugachev was still part of the inner circle, still friendly with Putin as others grabbed the money and fled abroad. England, and London, offered citizenship at a fixed price of around £2 million, access to the money-laundering capital of the world and access to Conservative politicians. Pugachev remained in Moscow.
Pugachev’s narrative that he married an English rose and defied his old friend Putin, doesn’t hold. His claim that Putin’s agents took over his bank and demanded $240 million, accused him of $100 million tax fraud and threatened to kill him, his wife and children unless he paid up immediately does. Browder reports the same tactics and his Russian manager was imprisoned and beaten to death in a jail cell. The Russian state used English law to call for his deportation back to Russia (similar to the tactic they had used with Browder). Here Pugachev made a tactical error, his passport was impounded but he fled London to his chateau in France. In absentia, he was jailed for two years for breaking English law.
Here we’re on the English version of it’ll never last. Countess Tolstoy’s parents were related to THE Leo Tolstoy of War and Peace, (perhaps also to the émigré writer and nobleman Alexi Tolstoy favoured by Stalin) and fully supportive of their daughter marrying a Russian billionaire. When things went badly, they remained supportive. Here’s the narrative of the plucky daughter, who although Pugachev was trying to bully her in the same way Putin was trying to bully him into returning home, she would not bend. The lady’s not for turning narrative.
Pugachev had tried to take her passport and imprison her and the children in his chateau in France. Countess Tolstoy said he’d a gun. He was no longer a billionaire, just another millionaire that tried to control his wife and kids and hit her when things went badly. Billionaire wife beater. That sounds about right, although not factually correct.
Countess Tolstoy was paid to appear on Russian telly, the equivalent of Fox News in America, Putin’s channel and confronted with Pugachev’s claim, she wasn’t even a proper Countess.
Fake news turns up everywhere. The wife beating Pugachev remains abroad. Tolstoy returned to Russia in an attempt to make a living. I guess with Covid-19 she’ll be home now. Home being, Kensington, London. Down and out in London and Moscow. George Orwell, eat your heart out.
I wasn’t sure how to structure this. I’d a vague idea about explaining the significance of the tax-credit U-turn by George Osborne and the jibes about Mao’s Little Red Book, a joke that backfired and made the Shadow Chancellor seem the more foolish. I also thought about telling you about my visit to the dentist. We are an ageing nation of shrinking gums. So I guess I’ll start there.
I’m good on nostalgia. The dentist I go to is the same dentist I went to forty odd years ago. We used to scale the wall in the same way we got our teeth scaled and steal the needles from the dustbin. They smelled of different planets and we’d lunge at each other, wild with excitement. Boredom set in quicker than rain. We’d fling them away. Back then the dentist prodded and poked at your teeth with a hooked pick until he found a hole to fill, a tooth to take out, usually, both. It’s the same rooms, upstairs or along the extended hall, with faded white paint, but it’s a practice now, a business, the hook comes out before you’re allowed to see the leading practitioner, or business man, or woman. Receptionists want to know who is going to pay for treatment. There’s different kinds of forms for different kinds of patients. You can get your teeth whitened for £250. An older woman, a pensioner, was told she had the wrong kind of mouth for a plate, and the practice couldn’t be expected to carry the cost.
As surely as my tongue runs over a newly-fitted filing this is the future of the NHS. People will be turning up with the wrong kind of body. An estimated £20 billion is needed to keep our NHS treating patients until 2020. Osborne has fronted some of the money, which is a politically astute move, as it stops some NHS trusts threatening to shut at Christmas. Bah Humbug! But it’s never enough, because too many old people are living to long. Let’s call them bed blockers.
Where do all these bed blockers go when they come out of hospital? Most bed blockers become the responsibility of local authorities. Local authorities have had between fifty and seventy five percent of their budgets cut over the last five years. The Monty Pythonesque leaked letter exchange between out glorious leader David Cameron (with less that twenty-five percent of the electorate voting for him, the ‘great ignored’ as Cameron termed them before the 2010 election, leaves me thinking what we’d call the other 75%) and The Conservative Prime Minister writes to a Conservative council leader Ian Huspeth in Oxford and asks him why he’d made such dreadful cuts to ‘front-line services’ such as care of the elderly. Couldn’t the councillor made savings by sacking people that weren’t needed and not hired people that were needed, and sold off some surplus land or council properties. But says Councillor Huspeth I’ve already cut off our arms and legs, fell on my sword, sacked 2 800 staff, sold off all our ‘surplus property’ to try and make up our £72 million deficit because we get 37% less from central government than we got last year. And this is one of the more affluent front-line areas.
Service cuts are uneven. Even the Conservative-controlled Local Government Association talks of a postcode lottery. Councils in poorer areas can no longer afford home care service for the elderly. Social care is in an inverse relationship to health care.
The Office for Budget Responsibility suggests that the Osborne has to find £22 billion of cuts from 15 departments with a total budget of £77 billion. Here’s the rub. Their budgets have already been cumulatively cut by 30% since 2010, spread unevenly with local authorities’ grants in particular hardest hit and with backtracking on tax credits and policing all signs point towards being cut even more.
This is politics at its basest level. It’s personal and it’s ideological. Beveridge described the five giants on the road to reconstruction. They were poverty, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. All are related and feed into the roots system of the other. Whatever way you measure them they are all on the increase. The idea of welfare has been a stick used to beat us.
I’m with William Keegan on this one: ‘Personally, I always preferred the older term ‘social security,’ which gives a better indication of what the social settlement during those early post-war years of austerity was all about.’
The terrorist attack in Paris dominates the headlines, as it should, when we really are all in it together. Kenan Malik idea of social and political hegemonic influence gets it about right: ‘Evil…is not simply about defining an act of being particularly wicked, it also about defining the space within which we can have a meaningful debate about good and bad, virtue and wickedness’.
France spends around 54% of its GDP on public services. The United Kingdom currently around 38%, spends less that all other G7 countries with the exception of the United States. Trying to balance the books is a good story and achieve a surplus like China is an even better story. It fits in with the Dickensian notion expounded by Mr Micawber’s famous, and oft-quoted, recipe for happiness:
“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen [pounds] nineteen [shillings] and six [pence], result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”
There is an element of truth in this, but only if Mr Micawber didn’t have his own printing press in his basement and wasn’t allowed to print money quicker than the Japanese. Added kudos, if like the most successful company in the world in terms of share value, Apple, they could choose to fund their growth by borrowing at in interest rate of almost 0%. Indeed buying and selling money is what the United Kingdom does best. Before the Crash of 2008 it accounted for almost a quarter of all UK tax receipts. It allowed Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, to build hospital and schools and invest in the infrastructure of the country, which was seen as the common good. This has been turned on its head.
We are not fighting a war against Isis, not yet anyway. Government debt has rarely been lower over the last 300 years, but with every bomb we drop over Syria (if or indeed when Cameron is given his mandate) can we expect to think there goes another public library in Islington. There goes a Sure start Programme in Drumchapel. There goes another mental health unit in Belfast. There goes free school meals. Some wars are more pointless than others. We have been lied to for too long. Shakespeare gets it about right with Shylock’s promise that he will outdo the evil that was done to him.
The quality of mercy is not strained.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven.
William Keegan suggests in the aftermath of financial crisis and fiscal policies pursued since the summer of 2010. ‘If the historical pattern of growth had been allowed to continue, output in the UK would have been up to 20 per cent higher in 2013-14 than proved to be the case.
Martin Wolf of the Financial Times in the 2013 Wincott Lecture: Monetary Policy clearly and decisively failed to promote recovery. Animal spirits were completely destroyed. Demand fell. It was a machine designed to fail.’
Joe Stiglitz notes the same pattern over the other side of the Atlantic. Subsidies for the rich, mass poverty for the poor. A race to the bottom. The Big Mac Index, for example, is an economists attempt to measure the relative expenses of living in different countries. Stiglitz describes working for McDonalds as the income of last resort, with more than a thousand applicants for every job. Martin Ford describes how a worker for McDonalds in October 2013 called his employer’s financial-help hotline, asking for help, and was advised to apply for Food Stamps and Medicaid. Yet, the fast food industry continues to grow, at around £6.9 billion in the UK in 2012.
We don’t –as yet- pay directly for our healthcare. But Nicholas Timmins, The Five Giants: A Biography of the Welfare State, noted the paradox of we used to send experts to the United States to advise them how to run health care, but now that has been reversed. Advisers come from the States, with the most profligate health service in the world (see Pickwick) and advise us. It’s no great surprise that Jeremy Hunt, our Health Secretary, doesn’t believe in the NHS. He’s rich and will never need it. Neither will any of his colleagues or friends. Only poor people will (short-hand for scroungers).
A programme was recently shown on BBC 2. Unlike those Jeremy Kyle-type programmes on Channels 4 and 5, and the Hollywood movie Friends With Benefits, it was meant to show the diversity of Scotland and it’s working population. For example, bespoke food from land and sea for the tables of the rich in London. Compare this with the idea of bespoke care for the poor. The elderly poor. It would cost too much. The idea is ridiculous. The difference between a fish farm and a granny farm is one of them is under water. Southern Cross and other ‘caring’ companies threaten bankruptcy unless local authorities give them more money.
Assets such as the buildings in which old folk have been corralled have been separated on the balance sheet from the cost of caring (price) of caring for residents. The problem of liquidity fits into a larger narrative of Freidrich Hayek, the title whose book The Road to Serfdom could be rewritten and neatly quipped as the slippery slope towards totalitarianism any government intervention entails. Milton Friedman and the problem of demand is one of supply. If money is cheap enough demand for it will grow and problems such as unemployment will disappear, but only if the government doesn’t interfere. Chile’s Pinochet was an admirer. After the fall of the Berlin Wall advisers from the Chicago School helped to create a new Russia from the old Soviet Union modelled on Friedman’s principles.
The new kids of the block of the early eighties Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan had won the Cold War and already set out their stall to roll back the state. Simple equation government = bad (totalitarianism). Free market = good (liberalism). The hidden hand, I want for Christmas, had never had it so good.
Why fling good money after bad on a defective product?
But it doesn’t begin and end there. We’re all familiar with the idea of bureaucracy = power. And bureaucracies become bloated and create their own reason for being. Think local government. Think any government. Companies listed on the stock exchange. They are not off the raider. They too are bureaucracies
Predatory lending. Is there any other kind? What does non-predatory lending look like? It looks like James Stewart, a man you could trust. You may remember James Stewart playing someone that was not James Stewart, George Bailey, who looked confusingly, for us old timers, very much like a young Henry Fonda, in a feel-good film, shown every Christmas about the value of non-predatory lending. It wasn’t called The Value of Non-Predatory Lending, but the more striking It’s A Wonderful Life.
It’s a simple equation: Non-predatory lending = It’s A Wonderful Life. ‘Every time a bell rings an angel gets its wings’. Clarence Oddbody, that’s a good name for an angel. The run on Bailey Building and Loan would be something familiar to those over thirty watching this film on telly every Christmas, those living in small-town America of the hungry thirties, or the citizens of modern-day Greece. ‘I’ll stroll, you fly,’ was George’s advice to Clarence, but Oddbody’s however quick he or they travel can’t save Bedford Falls. George appeals to reason, those paying in and having a stake in the Building and Loan were bankrupting themselves. They weren’t just borrowers but lenders. That Tom’s money was tied up in Ed’s house and Ed’s money tied up in Mrs Davis house and when they hadn’t worked for a while George didn’t chase them for repayment. He knew they’d come good. George was just asking for the same consideration for the Building and Loan. He wasn’t asking how much they wanted, but how much they needed to get by. They were shaking the same tree.
George, of course, has hard cash to back up his rhetoric, a thousand dollar bills set aside. He runs a thrift and he’s thrifty. ‘How much do you need Tom?’ George asks the first customer, pushing to the front of the line. ‘$242,’ Tom demands, ‘and that’ll close my account’.
‘Have you no romance in you?’ asks George. The thousand dollars is, of course, money he’s set aside to travel with and for his honeymoon.
‘Yes, I had some, but I soon got rid of it,’ answer Tom.
Tom has made a rational choice and not a romantic choice. Ed, next in line asks for $20. Mrs Davis asks if it’s ok if she gets $17.50. George kisses her on the cheek. State regulations means that the doors of the Building and Loan need to stay open until 6pm. George and Uncle Billy kick out and have a party as they carry two crumpled dollar bills and deposit them in the vault. They have made it through the day without Old Man Potter closing them down.
Henry F Potter is a twisted crocodile. In the opening scenes he rides in a carriage and one kid asks another ‘who’s that? Is he a king?’ He is of course. But a king without subjects. Peter Bailey (senior), at the dinner table, explains to his son George why they should feel sorry for Old Man Potter. Henry F Potter has no future. He is unmarried. No children. ‘What’s he going to do with all that money?’ The message is he’ll get his comeuppance. Later in the film, when Clarence grants George’s wish not to be born Bedford Falls becomes Pottersville. There’s bars on every corner, where people go to get seriously drunk and half-dressed girls spilling out of every club. Full employment and housing to rent. Pottersville sounds like my kind of town.
Old Man Potter is sick and he wants to infect George and the town with his values. He’s tried everything and now he tries buying George. He offers him a salary of $20 000 a year to manage his affairs. George admits the offer is tempting. Cost-benefit analysis. Money’s tight. He’s got four kids now. Around $40 a month. An old barn of a house. Old Man Potter offers George a thick Cuban cigar, time to think about it, reminds him that’s starting salary and if he plays along he could make more. The answers, ‘No’. The answers always no. ‘You spin your little webs,’ George tells Potter.
The problem that Bailey Building and Loan faced was they had the wrong kind of money tied up in buildings and loans. Think of poor Southern Cross and other care companies with properties full of poor people, which they could monetise and sell separately from their services. They had no way of knowing who was going to pay, when they were going to pay and if the Bailey Building and Loan would be there for them to pay into. Modern economists make short shrift of that thrift. Thrift is shorthand for the thousands of Savings and Loan companies spread out throughout the United States and loosely bound by US government support for home ownership, the biggest franchises being Government National Mortgage Association (Ginnie Mae) owned and run by the US government; the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae), around 1 in 10 US mortgages at a very conservative estimate of $100 million mortgages on its books and is backed by the US government; Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporations (Freddie Mac) was a corporation created by Savings and Loan companies were backed indirectly by the US government. These organisation had like the Bailey Building and Loan, which George bailed out with a handy $1000, a problem of liquidity.
Everything is a problem of liquidity if you look at it properly. Let’s get back to George Osborne’s speech to the Conservative Party conference, October 2013, and his claim to have a seven-year plan to achieve an absolute budget surplus before 2020.
How to define it as a problem of ‘idleness’.
Here it is wrapped in the Stars and Stripes with mum’s apple pie: ‘We had the oldest secret in the world, “hard work”’. This from a man endorsed by fellow Texans George W Bush, his father George H W Bush and further afield Bill Clinton. These Presidents of the United States whom Lance Armstrong on speed-dial helped quash an FBI investigation into the activities of the seven times Tour de France winner. Let’s put a figure on Lance Armstrong, career earnings of somewhere between $70 and $100 million. That sounds a lot to me and you (who can forget Margaret Thatcher going to the European Union and crowing that she’d saved Britain a million pounds a year) but Armstrong’s career earnings were the kind of loose change ‘geek’ bond traders such as Michael Lewis of Salomon Brothers could lose without burning anybody important. Perhaps I should put in here that David Cameron was a stockbroker as was his father before him… Lewis tells us that Salomon Brothers the directors boasted that they had the equivalent of $80 billion worth of securities in portfolios every night. Multiply that by 365 and you’ll get an estimate of their annual income. Bigger than the combined profits of all other Wall Street operations. Bigger than the Netherlands GDP. Salomon Brothers, of course, later went to the wall. Financial institutions are the auteurs rewriting the economic script of what is meant be profit and loss, success and failure as they went along. In the years 1977-1986 when Salomon Brothers had almost a monopoly on new bonds they had helped create in regard to housing the trading floor jumped from millions to billions to $2.7 trillion, with ‘mortgages so cheap your teeth hurt’. That was the ‘gospel’ of the rich. What Lance Armstrong was selling was a message rich people wanted others to hear. Compare Armstrong’s message with, for example, the message Aaron Schwartz was selling, and the outcome of the subsequent FBI Investigation into Schwartz’s activities.
Mao’s Little Red Book? Simple. A problem of liquidity. We’ve been giving rich folk billions of pounds every day to help poor folk. We can’t keep doing that (see Pickwick). We’ve being building nuclear reactors since the end of the 1950s, but we’ve asked the Chinese Government to send experts to build one at Hinkley Point. This creates in the region of 25 000 jobs. With or without the Chinese, or any other nationality this creates around the same number of jobs. Crucially, though, the Chinese have agreed to finance it. In the short-term they transfer a few digits from their machine’s finance model, we add it to ours. We agree to the costs of any mishaps and the hundreds of thousands of years it takes to get rid of spent fuel rods. We subsidise the Chinese economy by moving money from the poor in this country to the rich in the Chinese economy. I suppose it makes a little change from subsidising the rich in this country. Win-win. Apart from the far more worrying Balance of Trade deficit. But that’s another story. I’m sure when that nice Mr Osborne will deal with it when he’s Prime Minster in five years’ time. Merry Christmas, Boris Johnson. Now there’s an angel for you. He doesn’t look like Clarence Oddbody for nothing. He winging it for now, but we’ll see how he turns out.
odonnellgrunting 