I haven’t read Vasily Grossman’s best-known novel, Life and Fate. It took around twenty years after his death for Soviet authorities to sanction its publication in the 1980s. His stature as one of the Great Russian writers seemed confirmed. But he was born 12th December 1905 in the village of Berdichev to a Jewish family, which is a Ukrainian town. His mother and family and the large Jewish population of over 41 000 of an aggregate population of around 54 000 were murdered by the Nazis outside their town. ‘Shoah with a gun’, Grossman termed it.
Ironically, Grossman would surely have followed the same fate by the Soviet authorities he served. Stalin’s Jewish purge after the so-called doctor’s plot was on its second wave, which would have swept him away if Stalin hadn’t died.
His article, The Hell of Treblinka, he termed ‘Shoah by gas’ was approved by Soviet authorities. He also wrote about the siege at Stalingrad being the turning point of The Great Patriotic War.
His highly acclaimed short fiction, such as In the Town of Berdichev was admired by other Soviet writers such as Isaac Babel. And Babel appears in a later story, Mama. The latter was a kind of warning, not to get too close to those in power who are themselves purged as Babel was by the forerunners to the NKVD.
I was largely unmoved by Grossman’s fiction. I know I was meant to feel some kind of awe. The historical weight also added a kind of taken-for-granted consensus that this was great fiction. I get it that. I’m meant to like stories and plays like Anton Chekov’s The Lady and the Dog and The Cherry Orchard, but really they just bore me like something you had to revise for some exam I’ll never pass. Life is more than that as Grossman understood.
I prefer his essays and reports. The Hell of Treblinka, based on first-hand experience and second-hand reports to him from those that had been in Hell, was ahead of its time. It told how it is and how easily the world slipped into Fascism. For the moron’s moron Trump and his supporters, it sounds a familiar clarion call to hate and despise others based on eugenics and geography.
People became unpeopled. In the conveyor belt of Treblinka, they were robbed of citizenship, their home and their freedom. They were transported to a wilderness. Penned and squeezed into a station and robbed of their belongings, papers and photographs of loved ones. They were stripped naked and shaved. No one was sure what human hair was harvested for, but psychologically, it pushed them into compliance. Lined up in rows of five. Surrounded by barbed wire on ‘The Road of No Return’ with the black uniform of SS guards on one side and grey Wachmanner conscripts on the other. They were beaten with the butts of machine guns and rubber hoses. Alsatian dogs trained to attack the genitals were released. For the guards this was just another day. 20 000 to 60 000 unpeople were piling up and carriages shunted down the tracks were waiting to be brought for processing into the station. Schneller. Schneller.
Grossman suggests that Stalingrad did not change the way—mostly—Jews were murdered, but how they processed the raw material, their bodies. Himmler himself visited Treblinka and had a look at the hundreds of thousands of rotting corpses covered over in pits. He ordered that they should be exhumed and burned. Germany and Germans who had participated in and committed these atrocities were no longer sure they would not be held to account. The un-people might be given a voice. Himmler’s strategy was to burn the evidence.
Some monsters were more monstrous than others. SS Sepp, for example, delighted in murdering small children.
‘Evidently endowed with unusual strength, it would suddenly snatch a child out of the crowd, swing him or her about like a cudgel and then either smash their head against the ground or simply tear them in half.’
Others carried sabres and whips and heavy gas piping. They would fling children still alive to roast on death pits.
‘We hear of women trying to hide little babies in heaps of blankets and trying to shield them with their own bodies.’
Ironically, as an atheist, who disavowed his Jewish heritage, Grossman finds consolation in the image of hope in humanity of The Sistine Madonna. He avows it shows, although tortured and crucified, ‘what is human in him continued to exist’.
I hope it continues to exist in us, but I get less sure. Amen. Read on.
The Nazis estimated there were around 11 million Jews in Europe. In their calculations they included Jews in Britain and other nations that had not yet been murdered. Much is made of myth making. Pluckly little Britain with its Kinder transports of around 10 000 Jewish, middle-class children, for example. America, land of the free, with the Statue of Liberty epitomising ‘The Mother of Exiles: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”. But all nations closed their borders to refugees. Charles Lindbergh, a national hero, with global fame and acclaim, was a fan of Adolf Hitler and his anti-Semitic policies. A spokesman for American Bund and fascist parties. American isolationism carried widespread public support in both Houses of Congress for letting in fewer Jews and no refugees in general. Industrialists such as Henry Ford also supported Hitler and kept his factories running full tilt in Germany as they prepared for war.
Pearl Harbour made such viewpoints less popular. Around 150 000 US serviceman lost their lives in the European arena. Russia, in comparison, lost millions. But old prejudices remained. Assistant Secretary of State, Breckinridge Long, for example, lied to Congress and continually thwarted any attempt to help Jews even after it had been shown that around 4.5 million men, women and children had already been murdered. There was blood on his patrician hands. American reporters such as W.H. Lawrence dismissed the massacre of over thirty thousand Ukrainian Jews at Babi Yar as fake news. And many bought into the story as war propaganda. America remained open for business but largely closed to Jews, even after the war had ended.
Polish nationalist politician’s attempts to make it a criminal offence to claim that their citizens were involved in the mass murder of Jews doesn’t even make good fiction in the mould of Robert Harris’s Fatherland. It’s as stupid and dangerous as followers of the moron’s moron and 45th American President at Charlottesville—‘those very good people’—drinking pints of milk, slapping their bare chests and chanting as they marched, ‘We will not be replaced by the Jews’.
Notes
Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people—usually defined as an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group—in whole or in part. Raphael Lemkin coined the term in 1944,[1][2] combining the Greek word γένος (genos, “race, people”) with the Latinsuffix-caedo (“act of killing”).[
After decades of open borders, a xenophobic backlash prompts the United States to pass laws restricting immigration. In Germany, Hitler finds support for his anti-Semitic rhetoric, and the Nazis begin their persecution of Jewish people, causing many to flee to neighbouring countries or America. Franklin D Roosevelt and other world leaders are concerned by the growing refugee crisis, but they fail to coordinate a response
After Kristallnacht, Germany’s Jews are desperate to escape Hitler’s tyranny. Americans are united in their disapproval of the Nazis’ brutality, but remain divided on whether and even how to act as World War II begins. Charles Lindbergh speaks for isolationists, while FDR tries to support Europe’s democracies. The Nazis invade the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust begins in secret.
The first reports of the killing reach the United States. A group of dedicated government officials establish the War Refugee Board to finance and support rescue operations. As the Allies advance, soldiers uncover mass graves and liberate German concentration camps, revealing the sheer scale and horror of the Holocaust. The danger of its reverberations soon become apparent.
The Homeless. The Tempest Tossed (1942–
Daniel Mendelsohn writer:
There are already people that think every Jew died in the Holocaust died at Auschwitz, died in a concentration camp, died in a gas chamber. No there’s whole chapters of this story.
There was another round-up, which was the biggest round-up in my family’s town. 2500 people. And my great-aunt, Esther. And the youngest girl, Bronia, who was 13 at the time. They kept them, this huge group of people in a square outside the city hall. And there were a lot of atrocities that took place. Mostly against children.
There were some Soviet documents that came to light, including a report, and they listed all the children that had been shot. Jager Bronia Samyelna 1929 was the first child listed. This was in September 1942. You know they were throwing children off the balconies of the city hall. Real terrible stuff. Whoever survived the couple of days of the roundup (Belzec memorial) were shipped to Belzec. And that’s where my great aunt, Esther died in the gas chambers.
I was able to find out that Schimiel was hiding with his second daughter, Fritka. And that was because there was a Catholic, Polish boy that was in love with her. And he was helping to hide her in the home of his local schoolteacher. And for some unknown amount of time they were being successfully hidden. The father and daughter in an underground dugout. Until someone betrayed them. Then they found them and took them and shot them both. Then they killed the schoolteacher too.
The oldest daughter, Lorca, joined a partisan group that operated with Polish partisans in a nearby forest. She was killed when the whole partisan group was wiped out. Except for my poor great Aunt, Esther, nobody was killed in a camp. They were killed in all different ways and all different manners and I think that is already being erased. The particularity of what happened.
Deborah Lipstadt, Historian.
Here’s the tragedy. Millions of people could not be rescued. They were in the hands of the Germans. They were deep into Eastern Europe. They’re in Germany and Austria and France, Belgium, Netherlands. But there were people who’d got to Portugal. Who got into Spain. There were people who eventually get to North Africa. If you had taken more people from those places, maybe more refugees could have come in. Are we talking of rescues of hundreds of thousands? No. But if it’s your family it doesn’t matter if it’s one.
Just before the US entered the war, Germany barred the emigration of Jews from any country it had captured. For them occupied Europe had become a prison to which Adolf Hitler held the key.
Americans were still in no mood to welcome immigrants. The anxiety about alien subversion that preceded Pearl Harbour only intensified afterwards.
FDR declared the West coast a military zone. And forced 120 000 persons of Japanese descent to live there in internment camps. Most of them were citizens.
The justice department also interned so-called enemy aliens. German and Italian immigrants suspected to fascist sentiments.
This war can end in two ways Hitler insisted in early 1942. Either the extermination of the Aryan peoples or the disappearance of Jewry from Europe.
Within a few months the first report emerged that the Nazis had systematically started murdering every Jewish man, woman and child on the continent.
Deborah Lipstadt, Historian.
The mantra was we’ll rescue these people by winning the war. The problem was, and many people knew this, certainly within government circles, by the time the war would be won, very few of these people would be alive.
But the dominant idea in the American government is any act of rescue will be a diversion from the war effort. Both could have been done at the same time. But clearly nobody wanted these people.
It’s not one of those things that will go down in the long annals of good things America did. It goes in a different book.
Diary of Anne Frank (in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam). Otto and Edith Frank struggled to provide for their family.
12th June 1942. Daughter Anne’s 13th birthday. Among the gifts was a diary.
Eva Geringer, Amsterdam, neighbours.
The first few weeks nothing much happened. And we thought maybe they don’t want to do anything. The Dutch people were very eh, typical. They said you belong to us. We are going to protect you. You don’t have to worry about anything. But they didn’t really count on the measures the Germans were going to take.
In the first year it became a nuisance. It interfered with our way of life, but it was not dangerous. We were not allowed on public transport, for instance. But we all had bicycles. But then you had to hand in your bicycle. And then we had to wear the yellow star. Which means that people walking the street are recognisable as Jews. That started to become really dangerous. Because people just disappeared.
I didn’t want to wear it. I was stubborn. I know I’m a Jew. But why do I have to wear a star. For everybody had ID cards. And on Jewish ID cards it said you were a Jew. Sometimes a J stamped on it. So if you were stopped without wearing a star, and you asked for your papers, you would have been deported, immediately.
The same week the Franks disappeared (to their hiding place). The Geringer’s disappeared too.
Hans was 16. He’d been called up (like the oldest Frank daughter, who was the same age) for what the Nazi’s called labour service. My father called us together and my father said we are not going to send Hans.
Members of the Dutch resistance provided them with false papers. And places to hide. But the constant dread of raids by the Gestapo forced the Geringers to temporary split up. Eva to hide with her mother. Hans with her father.
I didn’t want to. I was very much attatched my brother and my father. But my father explained. If we are in two places. The chance to survive is very much bigger. That’s the first time I really realised it’s a matter of life and death. And that’s quite scary when you’re 13-years-old.
What do you mean? We will be killed? About once a week, in the night, there was a knock on the door. People had to open up and let them search their homes. So that we had been moving around. In another house the beds were still warm. So they demolished the whole apartment until they found the people. And, of course, the hosts were taken away as well. So when you hear stories like that people were saying we can’t take this tension any longer. You have to move. So we moved about 7 times my mother and me to different places. My mother used to be like a lamb. But suddenly she became like a tiger, protecting her children. My father when we went into hiding said, ‘don’t worry, it won’t be long. By Christmas the war will be finished’. End of 42, but, of course, it wasn’t.
Deborah Lipstadt, Historian.
Chicago Tribune, late June 42, reports the mass killings of Jews (printed one million Jews killed). Like many others, the Tribune puts it on page six or seven, in a tiny little article. You either missed it. Or if you saw it you think the editors don’t think this is true. If they thought this was true, this article would be on the front pages.
Commentaor: Some papers did put the story on the front page. Including the Pittsburgh Courier. An African-American newspaper which said the Nazis could even teach Southern whites a few lessons.
3 years after their aborted voyage to Cuba, Sol Messinger finally made it to America, June 1942.
Sol Messinger, Buffalo New York.
Our sponsor was a man in Buffalo who had a furniture store. And he was a relative or a relative of a relative whom we knew in Berlin. He was the one that sponsored us. It was great to the in the United States. Not to be afraid of policemen. To be with relatives—who I never knew—but who obviously loved us. And you could feel or see how people were more or less relaxed. They weren’t worried about being picked up by the police and so on. It was just amazing.
Leon Silver. He was one of one and a half million kids killed by the Germans, including all my cousins.
Six killing centres.
Deborah Lipstadt, Historian. Gas chambers served one purpose and one purpose only. To kill as many people as efficiently as you can (Zyclon gas around a penny a victim).
Himmler so impressed with initial results promoted Hess and accelerated the programme every month.
Scholte, in Switzerland on a ‘business trip’ , was determined to get the story of the death camps out. He told his story to a Gerhart Riegner, World Jewish Congress in Geneva.
Rebecca Erbelding, Historian.
Riegner hears this third hand. The Nazis have a plan to gather the Jews together in the East and murder them before the end of the year. He obsesses over this. It keeps him up at night. Finally, 8th August 1942 he decides that he is going to spread this to the world. He is going to get the Allies to do something about this. So he goes the US consulate in Geneva and explains what he’s learned to the vice-consul there.
‘This morning Gerhart M Riegnar, Secretary of the World Jewish Congress, called in great agitation. He stated that he’s just receive a report from a German business man of considerable prominence, who is said to have excellent political and military connections in Germany and from whom reliable and important political information has been obtained on two occasions, the effect that there has been and is being considered in Hitler’s headquarters a plan to exterminate all Jews from Germany and German controlled areas in Europe after they have been concentrated in the East (presumably Poland). The number is three-and-a-half and four millions and the object is to permanently settle the Jewish question in Europe. The mass execution if decided upon would allegedly take place this fall.
Reigner said that according to his informant the use of prussic acid was mentioned as a means of accomplishing the executions. When I mentioned that the report seemed fantastic to me…’
But his [the vice-consul’s boss] was dismissive and added a covering note, [12th August 1942] warning Washington that Riegnar’s story had all ‘the earmarks of a war rumor’. That the Nazi persecuted the Jews was undeniable. But the notion that the Nazis were preparing to kill them was simply impossible for many in the State department to believe.
Rebecca Erbelding, Historian.
State Department official decide this is not good information. And this is crucial, they say even if this was true, there was nothing we could do about it. They believe they are doing all they can to assist the Jews, and that any sort of rally or petition or protest asking them to do more would be diverting resources from the war effort.
Many of these people were racist and anti-Semitic. And nativist… and you have to wonder if some of their concerns or annoyances are to do with the fact that they are being asked to help Jews.
But Riegnar had also told his story to a British consul official. Who passed it onto a Jewish Member of Parliament. (Care Mrs Schreebener). Who passed it onto Stephen Wise. The best know Rabbi in the United States.
Weiss took it to under-secretary of state, Sommner Wells who asked him to say nothing until he could find out how much truth was in it.
Wise was nearing 70, exhausted from over-work and in declining health. He told a friend these were the unhappiest days of his life. They have left me without sleep (he wrote). And I am almost demanded with grief about my people’s grief.
Over the next 2 months, reports from the Vatican, the Red Cross, from other witnesses supplied by Riegnar suggested that the horror he described was real.
[6000 killed daily]
Wells summoned Wise back to Washington again and gravely told him that the evidence justified his worst fears.
Rabbi (Dr) Wise called the associated press. There can be no doubt now. Two million Jews were already dead he told reporters, which would turn out to be a gross underestimate. Four million had already been killed. And the Nazis intended to go on killing Jews as long as there were Jews to kill.
The story finally made the front page of the New York Herald Tribune. With a report from the Polish government in exile, which described Jews in the ghetto
‘Half of the people arrived dead at the destination. Those surviving are sent to special camps at Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor. Once there they are mass-murdered’.
Rebecca Erbelding, Historian.
Riegnar’s message, when it finally reaches the American people in 1942, is the first information the American people really have verified that the Nazis have a plan to kill all the Jews of the earth.
The news was widely circulated by the Associated Press. Though its impact was lessened by the news of fighting in North Africa. Where American troops had just landed. And from Stalingrad, where the Soviets had finally broken the German siege (on 200-mile front).
CBS correspondent, Edward R Murrow perhaps the country’s most respected broadcaster was unsparing in his broadcast.
‘What is happening is this,’ he said. ‘Millions of human beings. Most of them Jews are being gathered up with ruthless efficiency and murdered.’
Jewish organisations worldwide declared 2nd December 1942, a day of mourning.
8th December, Stephen Wise and three other Jewish leaders met with the President. Unless action is taken immediately the Jews of Europe are doomed they told him.
FDR said he was aware of the Nazi horrors. But he had no remedy at hand. We are dealing with an insane man, he said. Hitler and the group that surrounds him are psychopathic. That is why we can’t act towards them with normal means.
He always maintained Hitler’s victims included all sorts of people. Not specifically Jews.
Rebecca Erbelding, Historian.
The War Department doesn’t even want American soldiers to know about the Jews because they feel like the soldiers won’t fight hard if they think they’re secretly being sent to save the Jews.
And Jewish organisations are very sensitive to this. They don’t want Americans to perceive this as a war for the Jews.
Still, 9 days after FDR met with Rabbi Wise the Allies joined in Joint Declaration (United Nations) issued simultaneously in London, Washington and Moscow. Protest on ‘Cold-Blooded Extermination’. Reiterated those responsible would not escape retribution. And would press on with necessary practical measures to this end. But no specific practical measure were recommended, other than victory in the battlefield.
Daniel Greene, Historian.
What does that declaration say?: We’re going to punish the perpetrators. Full punishment. We do rally as a nation to defeat fascism. We just don’t rally as a nation to help the victims of fascism.
Peter Hayes, Historian.
Three-quarters of the victims of the Holocaust are dead before ANY American soldier is in Continental Europe. 90% of the victims of the Holocaust die in the North East quadrant of the European continent. Poland, Ukraine, and today Belarus, but then the Soviet Union. They are all out of the reach of American aircraft and Great Britain. There is no way that American aircraft could have flown to those death camps and impeded the killing process, while it was at its most intense in 1942 and January 1943. I think the only thing they could have done was publicise what was happening more and organise behind-the-scenes resistance. But they were always inhibited about this. Remember Nazi propaganda was that Roosevelt and Churchill were the tools of the Jews. They were fighting the war for the Jews. And the Nazis used this propaganda to great effect and anything the Allies did that seemed explicitly defending Jews ran the risk of playing into the hands of that propaganda.
Despite the front-page coverage. Despite the Allies declaration, a Gallup poll taken in early 1943 showed that fewer than half its respondents could bring themselves to believe that the Nazis could possibly could have killed as many as two million Jews. Let alone, four million.
In early 1943, the tide of battle turned against the Nazis. At Stalingrad, the Soviets, armed and supplied with American trucks and tanks and aircraft had destroyed the entire Sixth Army.
In North Africa, British forces had captured 250 000 German and Italian prisoners. And saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews who had lived or sought sanctuary there.
Meanwhile, the pace of the Nazi slaughter or Jews slowed. Largely because so few survived to be killed. Those who did survive were needed for slave labour and lived mostly in Romania and Hungary. Countries that were allied with, but not controlled by the Nazis.
In America agitation for action against the killing accelerated (United Jewish War Effort). Rabbi Wise and the heads of other well-known Jewish organisations continued to offer advice to the FDR administration. But that advice had been rejected or ignored before. And they were soon faced with a rival group, more militant than them.
Its name kept changing but its philosophy remained the same. Its founder was Peter Bergson. A recent arrival from Palestine. And a member of the Irgun. A Zionist military group, who would dismiss Rabbi Wise and most of his allies, as timorous American’s of Hebrew descent. Not authentic members of the Hebrew nation.
Rescue now became Bergson’s cause. (A Proclamation on the moral rights of the stateless and Palestinian Jews). With help from the screenwriter Ben Heck, he produced an avalanche of newspaper advertisements. Charging the administration with ignoring the plight of Europe’s Jews.
9th March 1943, he filled Madison Square Garden twice, with an elaborate pageant called ‘We Will Never Die’. Told largely from the viewpoint of the dead, it featured 200 rabbis and cantors and an all-star cast that included Edward G. Robertson, John Garfield and Paul Muni. The show would go on to Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Chicago and the Hollywood Bowl. It’s composer Kurt Weill, himself a refugee from the Nazis was pleased by the big crowds it drew, but felt the pageant didn’t achieve much. All we have done is make a lot of Jews cry, he said. Which is not a unique accomplishment. But it did impress the First Lady and scored of Congressmen.
While the show was still touring, word came that some of the 70 000 Jews still alive in the Warsaw ghetto had risen up against the Nazis, rather than be deported to Treblinka. They had already buried artwork, diaries, poetry and final notes in steel milk cans in the ground. One teenager wrote, ‘he hoped to alert the world to what happened in the twentieth century. May history attest for us.’
The uprising was the largest Jewish rebellion of the war. It would take the Germans over a month to crush it. Level the ghetto and send the survivors to their deaths.
Fredya Kirkway, The Nation magazine. In this country, you and I, and the President, and the Congress and the State Department, are accessories to the crime and share Hitler’s guilt. If we had behaved like humane and generous people, instead of complacent, cowardly ones, the Jews lying today in Poland and Hitler’s other crowded graveyards would be alive and safe. And other millions, yet to die, would have found sanctuary. We had it in our power to rescue this doomed people and we did not lift a hand to do it. Or perhaps it would be fairer to say we lifted just one cautious hand. Encased in a tight-fighting glove of quotas and visas and affidavits. And a thick layer of prejudice.
Gerhart Reigner, whose report from Switzerland had alerted America to the ongoing Nazi policy of extermination, sent Washington another desperate message. Tens of thousands of Jews deported by the Nazis were now trapped in Northern Romania without warm clothing. They had just endured another hard winter. With help from the International Red Cross, Reigner thought he could keep them alive. He also thought he could help Jewish children still hiding in France, escape across the Swiss and Spanish borders.
Rebecca Erbelding, Historian.
Reigner had many connections with underground organisations and partisan organisations in these different countries. And his idea was if he could get the money he could funnel that money into France and into Romania to people that could buy clothing and food, who could buy fake documents, or pay off border guards to allow children to escape over the border.
Reigner’s organisation, The World Jewish Congress, could provide the money. But Reigner would need a special license from the Treasury Department which routinely prohibited all financial or commercial arrangements within enemy territory. On 23rd June 1943, Reigner’s request reached the desk of 34-year-old John Pehle, who ran the foreign funds control department at Treasury.
John Pehle U.S. Treasury (speaking now) The State Department was quite negative. It worried about funds falling into the hands of the Germans. However, we decided we could go back and put safeguards in the procedures so no foreign exchange could go to the Germans.
Pehle granted the license and sent it along to the State Department for transmission to Switzerland, assuming it would reach Reigner quickly.
But the staff of Assistant Secretary of State, Breckinridge Long, who had been adamantly opposed to helping refugee Jews from the beginning, quietly shelved it.
By the beginning of September 1943 (Allies Invade Italy) when American and British troops finally landed in Italy and gained their first foothold in Europe, John Pahle insisted the US government should take an active role in trying to rescue Europe’s surviving Jews. And he would do everything he could to help.
Rebecca Erbelding, Historian
John Pahle was the child of a German immigrant. His father had come when he was a teenager from Germany. And his mother was the child of Swedish immigrants. He grew up in Omaha. He went to college there. Then ended up at Yale. But came from a family that did not always have a lot of money. And was an immigrant family. And I think that made him a little more sympathetic to the plight of people who did not come from wealth or privilege. He also thinks the US is a force for good in the world. And a force of good for mankind. And that comes through a lot of his decisions. The US cannot be isolationist. We are part of a global community. That we need to treat everyone as a fellow citizen of the world.
28th July 1943. The Ambassador of the Polish Government in Exile brought a man named Yon Kosky(?) to the White House for a meeting with President Roosevelt. Jan Karski was a Catholic courier for the Polish underground who had survived Gestapo torture and had managed to smuggle himself in and out of the Warsaw ghetto. And a transit camp that exported Jews to a transit camp at Belzac. Roosevelt questioned him closely about the situation in Nazi-occupied Poland.
Karski: ‘Mr President I have also a mission from the Polish Jews. Without outside help, the Jews will perish in Poland. ‘
Before he left Karski asked what message he had for the Polish people.
You will tell them that we will win this war. You will tell them that the guilty will be punished. Justice and Freedom will prevail. You will tell your nation they have a friend in this House.
Daniel Greene, Historian.
FDR also tells Karski to meet with Felix Frankfurter (Supreme Court Justice) who’s on the Supreme Court at the time. Frankfurter is Jewish. He tells Frankfurter what he’s seen in Warsaw and other parts of occupied Poland.
‘He only tell me, do you know I’m a Jew? Tell me what is happening to the Jews in your country? There are conflicting reports here. After I finish, he said I’m unable to believe what you told me. The Ambassador, you can’t tell him to his face that he is lying? Mister Ambassador, I did not say this young man is lying. I said I’m unable to believe what he told me.’
Deborah Lipstadt, Historian
The Soviets bring a group of reporters to Babi Yar where one of the early mass killings of Jews took place. And they are walked through by two people the Soviets say are survivors of this massacre. And they walk them through these fields where these killings have taken place. And there’s bits of bones and broken eyeglasses and teeth and all sorts of things that indicate what has happened.
Headline. ‘50 000 Kiev Jews reported missing. Soviet Atrocity Group Hears Nazis machine-gunned group in September 1941’.
There were American reporters in the story of Babi Yar and one of them (W.H.Lawrence) wrote a report that was so riddled with doubts, so riddled with questions (‘Remaining Evidence is Scant’) if I were a person reading that and I harboured the least bit of scepticism about the veracity of what was going on I could dismiss this as war propaganda. As atrocity stories. And atrocity stories are shorthand for fake news. I’m sitting at home in Chicago, De Moines, St Louis, New York, wherever it might be, and I’m reading those kinds of reports, and I’m saying this can’t be true, can’t be true.
In early October 1943, Heinrich Himmler attended a meeting of his SS commanders. By then nearly 4.5 million Jews had been murdered.
Heinrich Himmler : ‘Most of you know what it means when 100 bodies lie together, when 500, or 1000 lie there. We have carried out the most difficult task for the love of our own people. And we have suffered no harm to our inner self, our soul, our character, in so doing. This is a chapter of glory in history that had never been written, and which will never be written.’
Himmler was doing all he could to keep that chapter from being written. He ordered his men to dismantle and disguise the killing sites at Sobibor, Belzec and Treblinka, where more than 1.5 million human beings had been killed. And he insisted that prisoners be forced to dig up the dead. Burn their corpses and grind their bones to powder. Then he had the prisoners who done the ghastly work shot. So no one would ever tell what they had seen or done.
Meanwhile, on the Eastern Front, special exhumation squads were now retreating ahead of the Red Army. Seeing to it that the mass graves the Einsatzgruppen and their accomplices had murdered back in 1941 and 1942 were emptied as well.
But in Nazi-occupied Poland two killing centres continued their daily, deadly, work. Majdaneck and Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Daniel Mendelsohn, Writer.
Interviewing survivors, one that could give first-hand accounts, where young adults when this happened. You hear things that…you think you’ve heard it all and you haven’t heard it all. Trust me. There are… ‘there is no bottom’, as one of my survivors said of the things that people will do to one another. The structures of what we like to think of our civilised lives, they fall apart very easily. Surprisingly easily.
‘I left behind me a few photos of my nearest ones. In the hope that somebody will find them while digging in the earth. And this person will be so kind to transmit them to one of my relatives or friends in America or Palestine. If there will still be any of them left. My name is Freda Nevselovitch, born in Vigova.’
Two days after Himmler’s secret speech, and three day before Yon Kippur, The Jewish Day of Atonement, Peter Bergson arranged for 400, mostly orthodox Rabbis, to march to the Capital. For fear of encouraging anti-Semitism, FDR’s chief speech writer, Sam Rosen and most of the members of Congress had opposed their coming.
The Rabbis sang The Star Spangled Banner, recited the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead and met with Vice President Henry A. Wallis
Rabbi Wolf Gold made a speech appealing to FDR to save the remnant of the people of the Book, the people of Israel.
The President did not see the Rabbis. But they had an impact, nonetheless.
Several Senators and Congressmen introduced a resolution calling for a new commission tasked with somehow saving the surviving Jewish people of Europe. Assistant Secretary of State, Breckenridge Long attempted to fight against it for four hours behind closed doors. He said, ‘There was no need for such a commission. The State Department had welcomed 580 000 refugees to America since 1933.’ It was not true. The real refugee number was one-third that.
Deborah Lipstadt, Historian
Breckenridge Long in his testimony, clearly misrepresents, some would say, lies. The best you can say is it’s a total misrepresentation of America’s record. He was crazed about preventing any refugees from coming here.
Newspaper Headline: Assistant Secretary Accused of Misinforming Congress.
The resolution stalled in the House. And when Long’s testimony became public, a couple of weeks later, Brooklyn Congressman Emmanuel Celler asked Long to quit.
At the end of 1943, Gerhart Reiger was still waiting for the license he needed to help Jews in Romania and France, which John Pahley had approved 5 months earlier. Breckinridge Long and his staff continued to stall. Using every possible potential barrier. Even though the President himself was on record favouring it.
John Pehle U.S. Treasury.
The State Department seemed such that rather than facilitating entry of refugees. Obstructions were thrown in their way. It’s as simple as that.
Treasure Secretary Henry Morgenthau Junior was the President’s close friend and upstate neighbour. As well as the only Jewish member of his cabinet. All through the Hitler years he had been careful to be seen not to be seen seeking special treatment for his fellow Jews. But this was too much. He confronted Long and the Secretary of State Cordell Hull. The license was finally issued. But an investigation of the reason for the lengthy delay Morgenthaus’s staff found that the State Department had deliberately suppressed Reigner’s reports from Switzerland about the extermination of the Jews.
John Pehle U.S. Treasury.
People in the State Department were saying don’t send any other messages over about what’s happening to the Jews.
Rebecca Erbelding, Historian
The State Department were being deliberately obstructionist. They had been delaying relief money that could have went to Jews in occupied Europe. And lying about it. So people would stop rallying. Stop protesting. And they’d stop asking the government to do more.
Morgenthau’s outraged aides wrote an internal report setting forth the evidence of the State Department’s deceit.
‘It appears that certain responsible positions of this government were so fearful that this government might act to save the Jews of Europe, if that gruesome facts of Hitler’s plans to exterminate them became known that they attempted to suppress the facts. We leave it for your judgement whether this action made such officials Hitler’s accomplices in this programme and whether or not these officials are not war criminals in every sense of the term.’
Treasure Staff entitled the document: Report to the Secretary on the acquiescence of this government on the murder of the Jews.
But Morganthau, who understood his boss better than most, toned down the accusatory rhetoric and named it simply: Personal Report to the President.
Morganthau’s own father, who had been the Ambassador to what had been then The Ottoman Empire, between 1915-16, had tried unsuccessfully to persuade President Woodrow Wilson to intervene on behalf of hundreds of thousands of Armenian civilians, who were being systematically massacred by Ottoman troops. He had called it race murder.
Rebecca Erbelding, Historian
Henry Junior, when to Turkey, went to Constantinople, now Istanbul, to see his father as all these event were unfolding. He points to that directly to Roosevelt. He says, you remember what my father saw. Remember what I saw in Armenia. We can’t let this happen again. To be the Secretary of the Treasury, to be in the position to actually point his friend to the past. And to say, we have a chance to do better this time.
After a meeting with Morgenthau and Pahle, Roosevelt issued an Executive Order on January 1944. Establishing The War Refugee Board. The only government agency created by any of the allies, specifically to do what it could for the Jews still under Nazi threat.
Treasury was in charge. And John Pahle was made Director. Determined to perform what he said was a life-saving job.
John Pehle U.S. Treasury.
The most important thing about The War Refugee Board was it dramatically changed the policy of the US overnight.
Rebecca Erbelding, Historian
Five million Jews have already been killed in Europe. But there are millions still there. Who are in hiding. In concentration camps. Who are still, they think, in relative safety. Who could get out. Could get rescued across borders. Could be kept alive long enough to be liberated.
The work taken on by the Board in Europe was improvisational and clandestine. Official US policy forbade paying bribes. Pahle’s men paid little attention.
Rebecca Erbelding, Historian
The first thing The War Refugee Board does is to streamline the license process. Meaning, humanitarian aid organisations can send money into Europe much easier. By the end of the war The War Refugee Board has approved around $11 million in humanitarian aid to go into Nazi Europe. That money was used to buy guns for the underground. It was used to pay off border guards.
The plight of Jews varied depending where you were in Europe. If you were in France you might be able to escape through the border in Spain or Switzerland. And so the US puts pressure on border guards in Spain and Switzerland. If you were in Romania or Bulgaria you might be able to board a ship to Turkey and take a train to Palestine.
So The War Refugee Board works with governments to make that process easier.
And if you are in Poland you might need food packages or documents that would allow you to hide. So The War Refugee Board [WRB] give help with that. And so they had a whole host of different plans that had real impact on the lives of the people who managed to survive.
Much of the Board’s most effective work was focussed on Hungary. Which in early 1944 was still home to some 800 000 Jews. The largest remaining population in Europe. It’s Regent Admiral Miklos Horthy had been a Nazi ally since 1941, when his troops joined the German invasion of the Soviet Union. But most of the Hungarian army had been destroyed at Stalingrad. Because Nazi defeat now seemed inevitable, Horthy began exploring whether a separate peace with the Allies might be possible.
When Hitler got word of it, he sent in troops to occupy the country. And insisted the Horthy cooperate in Hungary getting rid of its Jewish population.
Between May and July 1944, some 440 000 Hungarian Jews would be rounded up and deported. 338 000 were killed immediately at Auschwitz. So many that the four crematoria were not enough. And fire pits had to be dug and tended to dispose of all the corpses.
Members of the Polish underground managed to smuggle a camera into Auschwitz so that five courageous inmates could document what was happening to the Hungarians and other prisoners. While four men kept watch, a fifth snapped four pictures from the hip. Not daring to take the time to focus. The film was smuggled out of the camp inside a tube of toothpaste. They remain the only photographs of the killing process at Auschwitz.
In Hungary the WRB helped orchestrate an international series of threats and condemnations, aimed at persuading Horthy to stop cooperating the with Nazis. [Swedish King Bids Horthy Help the Jews, Stockholm, July 4th ]
Then on 2nd July US bombers hit oil refineries on the outskirts of Budapest. And dropped leaflets on the city promising punishment for the perpetrators.
Five days later, Horthy called a halt to the deportations. Hungary’s provinces had been emptied of Jews. But some 230 000 still survived in Budapest itself. Subject to persecution. Fearful that transports might resume at any time. To protect them and glean first-hand accounts of what was happening in Hungary the WRB called upon neutral nations, including Switzerland, Portugal and Sweden to expand their diplomatic presence in the country.
Their diplomats started issuing so-called protective documents to desperate Jews. Sheets of paper emblazoned with coats of arms and peppered with official looking stamps. Intended to persuade Hungarian police and German officials that the bearer was under international protection.
Timothy Synder, Historian.
It’s no coincidence that the WRB begins to make a difference in Hungary. Because that’s a country that still has a sovereign state and still has diplomats. Where a diplomat can be sent in. With briefcases full of money. And issue documents and make a difference.
9th July, a 31-year-old Swedish businessman named Raoul Wallenberg arrived in Budapest to accelerate that process. Appointed a Swedish attaché. But recruited and partly financed by the WRB, he saw his mission as carrying out an American programme. He established hospitals, nurseries and a soup kitchen. Issued thousands of protective papers. And rented 32 safe houses for those who carried them.
Diplomats from other neutral countries also participated in rescue operations. Most notably the Swiss vice-consul, Carl Lutz.
Soon some 37 000 Jews were living under Swedish and Swiss protection. In what was called the international ghetto.
When Hitler replaced the Horthy government with more ardent fascists who resumed the deportations of Jews, Wallenberg intervened as often as he could to intervene with those with protective or forged papers.
Of the nearly 150 000 Jews in Budapest who would survive the war, some 120 000 are thought to have owed their lives to Wallenberg and his fellow diplomats from neutral nations.
It is impossible to tally how many lives the WRB saved. Directly, or indirectly.
Rebecca Erbelding, Historian
These were American’s who were really trying to do good. And we have forgotten them. Because, in part, we have this longer narrative and trajectory in our memory on the US. Not doing enough. Being indifferent. Being deceitful. Not trying to save people. There is a group of people in the US government who were trying. And who saved tens of thousands of lives by the end of WW2. That is not insignificant.
‘BBC HOMESERVICE, communique number 1. Issued by Supreme Headquarters, Allied Forces.
People of Western Europe, a landing was made on the western coast of France. Troops of the Allied expeditionary force.
This landing is plan of the concerted liberation of Europe. Made in conjunction with our great Russian allies. I have this message for all of you…The hour or your liberation is approaching.’
Diary of Anne Frank: ‘6th June 1944. This is D-Day. The BBC announced it today. The invasion has begun. The best part of the invasion is I feel that friends are on their way. Those awful Germans have oppressed and threatened us for so long that the thought of friends and salvation mean everything to us.’
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.
We think we know the bare bones of the history of the holocaust. Hitler as bogey man and the German nation following him to the abyss, where around six million Jews perished and many more minorities. That was my take on it. Not bad, around a D grade. But Snyder does more than root in the history of the past. He drags us into the present and the lessons are illuminating.
For the German nation the war was portrayed as necessary, a colonial war to maintain food supplies, a war against the inferior Slavic nations, or ‘shitty countries’ are our friend President Trump termed them. But when Lebensraum came unstuck at Leningrad and the Red Army began to roll back German colonial gains the genocidal war against Jews continued and grew even more intense.
‘The Auschwitz Paradox’ the complex of Treblinka, Belzac, Sobibor and Chelmno was a factory in which people were murdered for being the wrong type of people. The gas chambers also stood as a metonym for the evil of a racial policy of mass murder and genocide, but most of the killing had already taken place further East,
‘where tens of thousands of Germans shot millions of Jews over hundreds of death pits over the course of three years, most people knew what was happening. Hundreds of thousands of Germans witnessed the killings, and millions of Germans on the eastern front knew about them…German homes were enriched, millions of times over, by plunder from the murdered Jews, sent by post or brought back by soldiers and policemen on leave’.
Auschwitz processed a lie of left and right, separating the living and dead effectively, and more importantly it allowed a generation of Germans to say they didn’t know. It also allowed the Russians to act as liberators when earlier they had played a large part in the murder of Jews and other Slavic nationals.
The key to survival, then as now was citizenship. Jews in Denmark, for example, retained their citizenship and almost all survived. In contrast, all 963 Jew in Estonia were murdered, not by the Germans, but Estonian citizens. And from the Baltic to the Black Sea people who killed Jews killed others such as psychiatric patients and gypsies. Lithuanian policemen who took part in the killing of 150 000 Jews in 1941, also starved to death the same number of Soviet prisoners.
Similar elements are at work in the Syrian conflict. Putin’s genocidal onslaught in the second Chechnya war helped set the template for what was to follow. Russian troops that committed atrocities were fighting terrorism.
When Russian invaded Ukraine its citizens were deemed to be terrorists. Snyder draws explicit parallels with Hitler’s ideology:
In 2013 Russian leaders and propagandists imagined neighbouring Ukraine out of existence, or presented them as sub-Russians…an artificial entity with no history, culture, and language, backed by some global agglomeration of Jews, gays, Europeans, and Americans…In the Russian war against Ukraine, the first gains were the natural gas fields in the Black Sea…annexed in 2014…The fertile soil of mainland Ukraine, its black earth, makes it a very important exporter of food, which Russia is not.
Bashar al-Assad, Syrian’s dictator, whom Putin brought back from the brink of military defeat, using high-tech Russian jets, chemical weapons that put them outside the Geneva Convention, old-fashioned barrel bombs, artillery strikes on hospitals and schools while classifying these murders as fighting against terrorists. There is no such thing as non-combatants. Women and children are also terrorists.
Three million people in Idib. Three million non-citizens and terrorists. On the Turkish border civilian forces offer a sense of humanity and prepare for a million refugees. Perhaps an overestimate when the Russian fleet offshore are engaged in ‘exercises’. Non-citizens can expect no mercy in a kill-box that would have been all too familiar to Eastern European Jews. Ironically, those fleeing towards Israel in the hope that proximity to another nation state will provide a safe haven of sorts are simply classified as terrorist by another nation state.
Snyder’s template of taking away citizenship as the first step in genocidal murder applies equally to Myanmar’s Rakhine state. In scenes reminiscent of Nazi occupied Poland, on 27th August 2017 Myanmar’s army attacked unarmed civilians and forced more than 700 000 Rohingya to flee to neighbouring Bangladesh.
Ian Figel and Benedict Rogers in The Observer report thousands were killed, thousands of women raped. Children were snatched from their parents’ arms and thrown into their burning homes or drowned. Villagers lined up and shot.
Britain’s response to refugees mirrors that of the Americans during the Holocaust – no entry. The United States and richest nation in the world patted itself on the back for allowing around 5000 Jewish refugees, around the same number that were gassed in Treblinka in a morning’s work. Remember David Cameron talking about ‘swarms’ of them waiting to cross the English Channel. Swarms of children, who we agreed to take, then reneged on the deal. Without the sovereign protection of citizenship those without passports have no rights and can be disposed of.
With global warming the numbers of refugees Snyder argues is bound to increase exponentially and the poorest nations in the world will be hit first and hit hardest. Already we are preparing our defences. The first defence being rhetoric, them-or-us fundamentalism. The warning from history is a lesson we have learned too well. Enough talk produces hate and murder, but no real people die. Only terrorists. Believe that and you’ll believe anything. We often do and justify it to ourselves by saying we didn’t know. Read this book.
odonnellgrunting 