the times | Friday March 18 2022 5cover story
chart her journey from then to now.
“My personal journey doesn’t look
surreal to me,” she says. “My journey
has been interesting, turbulent and
complicated. But it was a journey that
the entire country experienced
together. Whereas now, where we’ve
stopped? This place, this war, looks
completely surreal. We cannot accept
this war.”
The film also depicts Sindeeva’s
successful treatment for breast cancer
in early 2020, and I wonder what she
does during these impossibly stressful
days — she’s in hiding for her life —
to stay calm and healthy. Easy, she
says. “I look to the future. I do not
have the capacity to process and to
analyse what has happened to us. And
so I focus on tomorrow. I am full of
energy and ideas of how to save the
team and how to relaunch ourselves. I
am again, today, full of optimism and I
believe that we will be able to build
back our tomorrow.”
“Natasha and I are completely
opposite people,” Krichevskaya says,
deadpan. “I never feel any of that
optimism and I hate all that optimistic
channel stuff.” Sindeeva hoots with
affectionate laughter at this.
Krichevskaya, seeing her friend laugh,
starts to cry. “I’m starting to cry now
because, um, ah, I’m trying to find
sources for hope, but I don’t have any.”
I ask if they’re serious about putting
together a new “media production”
and they hum and haw awkwardly
until Sindeeva says: “We cannot
say anything now. It’s too early
to reveal. But all our thoughts
and efforts now are to make
something really new and
greater than it was before, with
the same mission.”
Which is?
Sindeeva thinks about it,
rubbing her forehead
vigorously for a full ten
seconds before replying. “So
many people have left the
country,” she says. “They’ve
left everything behind —
friends, families, properties,
everything. And that’s not just
the journalists. There’s doctors
and IT people who, like us,
have left everything. And
there are those who cannot leave, but
have the same values. And we have to
unite all of them, the ones who’ve left,
who cannot leave, who are inside,
who are outside. Because we all share
the same basic values. We cherish
freedom and we all want to remain
human beings.”
Tango with Putin is on BBC iPlayerhad to delete our archive’
COVER AND BELOW: VLADIMIR VASILCHIKOV; SOPA IMAGES LIMITED/ALAMYVera Krichevskaya, the
director of Tango with
Putin, and its star,
Natalia Sindeeva, also
top, owner of the TV
channel Dozhd. Both
women have fled RussiaThe underground truth-tellers
Yevgenia Albats
Investigative journalist, broadcaster
and editor-in-chief of the
independent Russian language
political magazine The New Times,
Yevgenia Albats, 63, has vowed to
stay in Russia, saying “it’s too late
for me to be afraid”. Although The
New Times was blocked on February
28 and the liberal radio station
Echo Moscow where she had a show
has been shut down, Albats is
determined to keep speaking out on
YouTube and over Zoom to foreign
publications about the situation in
Ukraine and Russia.Yury Dud
Yury Dud is a 35-year-old journalist
and blogger with millions of
subscribers, known for interviewing
famous Russians. After the invasion
he started posting on Instagram
about his opposition to the war
before the site was banned in
Russia. He then had to move to
Telegram, an instant messaging app
founded by the Russians Nikolai
and Pavel Durov that still allowsbacktrack on this statement to
ensure the platform does not get
shut down. However, he and his
colleagues are still sharing
information about the war on
Telegram to their 480,000
subscribers.Pravdamail.com
Set up by the Estonian IT services
provider e-Estonia, this website has
amassed contact details for more
than a million Russian citizens,
encouraging foreign users to email
them to inform them about the war.@ironcurtainlyf and
@natashasrussia on TikTok
After the suspension measures
imposed by TikTok in Russia last
week limiting user access to non-
Russian content, it became more
difficult for anti-war voices to share
their message. But with the use of
VPNs and different phones,
accounts such as @ironcurtainlyf
and @natashasrussia are starting to
chronicle the day-to-day reality of
life in Russia and counteract
disinformation.
Blanca Schofieldfree speech, where he has shared
anti-war messages and information
about how to set up a virtual private
network (VPN) — encryption
software that allows users to access
foreign content.Meduza journalists Galina
Timchenko and Alexey Kovalev
Established in 2014 in Latvia by
Galina Timchenko, 59, after she
was fired from the news website
Lenta.ru for not being pro-Kremlin,
Meduza is an independent Russian
news publication that has now been
banned. As a result, Timchenko and
the investigative journalist Alexey
Kovalev are trying to spread
information about the war to
Russians from abroad via Telegram.Sergey Smirnov, editor, Mediazona
The independent media outlet
Mediazona was founded in 2013 by
two members of the punk rock
protest group Pussy Riot, Nadezhda
Tolokonnikova, 32, and Maria
Alyokhina, 33, after they were
released from prison. While Pussy
Riot left Russia in 2021, Mediazona
editor-in-chief Sergey Smirnovstayed until March 4 when he
decided he had to flee to Lithuania
to avoid prison. From Vilnius he is
now working with other exiled
journalists over Zoom to broadcast
news about the war via Telegram
and video game chat rooms.Tikhon Dzyadko, editor, Dozhd
Owned by Natalia Sindeeva, Dozhd
is an independent TV channel,
below, which also had to halt
operations in recent weeks because
of its coverage of the war. Fearing
arrest, the editor-in-chief of the
channel, Tikhon Dzyadko, 34, fled
the country and is working on
educating Russians from abroad
through Telegram.Novaya Gazeta
The Nobel peace prizewinner
Dmitry Muratov, 60, is editor-in-
chief of this independent newspaper
known for its investigative
journalism. Though in the first few
days of the invasion Muratov
promised the newspaper would
openly cover the war, he has had toSindeeva as a former socialite and
Moscow It girl who began a TV station
on a whim, hoping that it would
become a sexy lifestyle brand, but was
gradually forced, almost accidentally,
to become a beacon for free speech in
dark times. I ask her if it’s surreal to