As Pussy Riot Trial Continues, Music and the Web Become Tools of Free...
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August 6, 2012, 12:00 PM ET
ByKevin M. F. Platt and Karina Sotnik
MOSCOW — “Sorry to take so long—I had to swing back home. A
guest called to change his time slot and asked me to bring one of
these.” Misha Kozyrev, veteran Russian media impresario, was
pointing at the guitar case in the back of his Land Rover. We were
on the way to the studios of the upstart Internet television channel
TV Rain (Dozhd) for a ten-hour marathon of music, interviews and
debate in support of “Freedom of Choice”—political choice, that is. It
was February 19, two months after rigged parliamentary elections
had provoked mass protests unlike anything seen in Russia since the
fall of the USSR, and two weeks before Russians would vote again
to elect Vladimir Putin for a new term as president in another fixed
contest. Rain is the only outlet for free political expression in
Russian television. Kozyrev is one of its leading personalities.
The guitar in the back of Kozyrev’s car was at the request of Andrey
Makarevich, the front man of the Soviet-era band Time Machine.
Kozyrev has any number of guitars in his collection—signed gifts
from Sinead O’Connor, Chris Isaak, Courtney Love, and others. That
day he grabbed the one that Makarevich himself had given to him
Kevin M.F. Platt
Music and television personality Misha Kozyrev on the
set of TV Rain, February 19, 2012
years ago. “Now he’ll have to sign it again, with a new date,” said
Kozyrev as we crashed through slush, past the Kremlin, to the studio
located in the heart of Moscow. His mood was upbeat, if a bit
nervous that the “Freedom of Choice” marathon had so far earned
only 9000 likes on Facebook.
Since that day in February, the new Russian political opposition has not lost its momentum, as the recent public
outcry in Russia concerning the trial of members of the female punk band Pussy Riot demonstrates. Members of the
group staged a protest against Putin in Christ the Savior, Moscow’s main cathedral. The women face seven years in
prison, and sentencing is expected as soon as this week.
Yet Russian television viewers see very little coverage of political unrest in Russia. During mass protests in Moscow
on June 12, TV Rain, along with the sites of leading independent print publications and radio stations, was shut down
by sustained cyber attacks. Similar attacks were leveled at the same sites on May 6, when violent demonstrations in
Moscow greeted Putin’s inauguration. As both Kremlin strategists and opposition activists realize, Russian politics
are at a crossroads. Support for Putin, who by all accounts still enjoys great popularity, is dependent on Kremlin
dominance of the media. TV Rain is a tiny, non-conformist island in a sea of state-controlled television. Its position is
as precarious as that of the opposition movement itself.
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So how is it that a tiny entertainment channel, with only six cameras in its studios and a shoestring budget, has
become a main forum for Russia’s political theater? How has a rock and pop music producer come to occupy center
stage? And what will happen to both station and producer as the contest between the Kremlin and the Russian
opposition movement develops?
***
Mikhail Kozyrev was born in 1967 and grew up in Russia’s largest rust-belt city, Ekaterinburg. His parents were
Jewish intellectuals—rich in content, poor in money. Kozyrev recalls that the family never owned a car and that he
thought everyone’s family life featured dinner-table debates over whether von Karajan was a greater conductor than
Bernstein.
At the end of the 1980s, as the Soviet Union was coming to its unexpected end, Kozyrev was preparing for a
respectable career as a physician. Yet it was an era of biographical detours. Study in the USA led to a job teaching
Russian at Pomona College, where Kozyrev ran a show on the college radio station. When he returned to Russia in
1994, he leveraged this minimal experience, along with his innate chutzpah and fluent English, into a job at the
leading rock and pop station Radio Maximum. This was Russia’s first American-Russian joint media venture, a
partnership of Westwood One and the leading progressive newspaper the Moscow News. Within a few weeks of
being hired, Kozyrev had been appointed as the station’s program director. Within a few years he had become
Russia’s leading music promoter.
In the late 1990s, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. (which now owns the Wall Street Journal), in partnership with Boris
Berezovsky, one of post-Soviet Russia’s original oligarchs, hired Kozyrev to lead a new entertainment media empire,
including radio stations, production studios and music festivals. The crown jewel was “Our Radio,” a network of
stations devoted to Russian rock and pop. Yet Our Radio proved to be a short-lived phenomenon, dependent on
Berezovsky’s political clout, which eased acquisition of stations and broadcasting licenses. Following the Putin’s first
election as president in 2000 the oligarch was forced to flee abroad. Within a few years, Kozyrev parted ways with
the now hobbled enterprise.
For several years Kozyrev was at loose ends. He had a reputation for energy and creative leadership, but also for
uncompromising passion that could make him a challenge to work with. Further, his past association with Berezovsky,
now a vilified outcast living in England in order to avoid prosecution, cast a shadow over Kozyrev’s prospects. Putin
was consolidating control over all Russian media, and only trusted friends of the Kremlin were truly flourishing. The
producer’s career was in free fall.
Kozyrev’s years in the desert ended in 2006 with his return to broadcasting as the host of a music and talk program
on Silver Rain radio, whose relatively liberal management took the risk of hiring him. Guests on his show are drawn
from his music world connections, with the addition of writers and public figures of other kinds—from Yoko Ono and
Brian Ferry to David Remnick and Michel Houellebecq. From this relatively humble beginning, Kozyrev has built a new
career as a public personality. The most recent phase has been as one of the regular hosts on TV Rain.
***
Natalia Sindeeva, one of the Silver Rain radio station’s owners, launched Rain TV as an offshoot project in
mid–2010. Kozyrev was part of the planning process for the new station from the start. He hosts a culture and music
talk show called “Downpour” and is a frequent participant in the station’s news analysis and interview shows.
As the station’s editor in chief, Mikhail Zygar, explains, TV Rain was initially aimed at a specific audience—young, hip
and Internet-savvy. The key term here is “Internet.” In Zygar’s words: “For the big stations, the Internet is a toy. For
us it’s our life.” Dedicated to transparency and lacking in programming, market research and experience, TV Rain’s
founders made the process of building the station into its main content, and turned their audience into a partner. The
station was launched as a reality show about starting a TV station, with live broadcasts of electricians screwing in
bulbs and of production meetings, incorporating real-time audience input via social media, email and SMS.
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Rain’s programming is slightly amateurish—but in contrast to the
slick, tightly edited and censored television of Russia’s larger
networks, rough-cut spontaneity grants an aura of authenticity.
Webcams installed throughout the studio give access much of the
time to Rain’s front desk, art-studios, and recording studios. As the
station’s popularity has grown, along with the value of its airtime,
pressure has risen to cut down on live broadcast of production
meetings and post-mortems, but Zygar defends them as essential to
the station’s identity.
Audiences see Rain via a small but growing number of cable
networks and through streams from the station’s website. Rain works
the social media like no other channel—posting announcements of
coming appearances (“Gorbachev already in studio. Interview begins
in five. Post questions now!”) and recirculating recent shows with a
penumbra of viewer comment and critique. No one at the station has
any idea of the actual scale of the audience, either via cable or
Internet—according to Zygar, the station is too small to interest
ratings organizations like Nielsen.
Size may not really matter, however. A decade ago, Russian TV was
wild, risk-taking, and fun. Now, after a decade of heavy-handed state
Kevin M. F. Platt
The TV Rain team at the conclusion of the “Freedom
of Choice” marathon, February 19, 2012
oversight, the big stations are stuffy, predictable, and propagandist.
For young, urban Russians, even having a TV is uncool, let alone watching one. The TV Rain team made it their
business to recapture this audience segment—one of their slogans is “Don’t be Afraid to Turn on the Television.” The
station’s original emphasis on culture, popular music, technology etc.—the kind of content that Kozyrev is known
for—was part of the strategy to appeal to these viewers. Yet as the past year has shown, both cultural figures like
Kozyrev and the hip young audience targeted by the station have a decisive role to play in Russian public life.
It was Rain’s combination of innovative new-old media hybrid and viewer demographics that drove the station’s
unpredictable evolution. To put the matter baldly, politics came to the fore as a result of audience demand. When
Rain went on the air, conventional wisdom was that Russia’s increasingly affluent, well-dressed and sophisticated
young people could care less who was in the Kremlin. In December, these same people exploded that myth by
venturing out in sub-zero temperatures in mass rallies in protest of Russia’s obviously falsified parliamentary
elections.
Rain was ahead of that curve. In a recent interview with Radio Freedom, Rain’s owner Sindeeva recalled her initial
conception of engagement as involving agitation for bicycle lanes, not power politics. Pushed by audience input, by
the start of 2011 the station had adopted a stance of open criticism of Russia’s corrupt political system. Similarly,
when Kozyrev negotiated his deal with Murdoch and Berezovsky in 1998, his explicit demand was that his music
empire would have nothing to do with politics. His business was culture. Yet last fall, Russian culture, and Kozyrev
with it, returned to politics.
***
The Rain studios are located just down the river from the Kremlin in the former Red October factory. To the western
ear, “Red October” may conjure images of either Sean Connery or the Bolshevik Revolution, but to Russians it
evokes only the chocolate that the factory was known for. The studio consists of a largely open loft that houses
several loosely defined sets and a number of movable partitions, allowing the entirety of the space to be used for
recording—this makes it possible to get by with a minimum of cameras, carted around as needed.
When we arrived with Kozyrev on the morning of February 19, the studios were buzzing with staff and guests. The
“Freedom of Choice” marathon was a perfect illustration of Rain’s integration of new and old media and of its model
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of political expression, in which cultural figures like Kozyrev play a prominent role. For ten hours, musical
performances alternated with panel discussions. Questions posted to the station’s site, and via Facebook, Twitter,
email and sms, were passed through the hosts to the panels, while virtual greetings and comments rolled across the
bottom of the screen in a continuous ticker. A screen behind the hosts displayed the running tally of likes on
Facebook.
The majority of guests in the marathon were public actors and cultural figures, including businessmen, restaurant
owners, rappers, the novelist Boris Akunin, the rock star Andrey Makarevich, and many others. Some spoke in
support of Putin’s party—for although it would be impossible to characterize the station other than as opposed to
Putin’s monopoly on power, Rain is dedicated to polemic rather than promotion of any party line.
The question Kozyrev posed to pro-Kremlin journalist Maksim Shevchenko could be taken as the station’s slogan: “Is
there any position that you would refuse to hear out?” Uncensored, live debate between impassioned guests is what
distinguishes TV Rain from all other Russian television, and it is what renders it oppositional in the current media
landscape. As Sindeeva put it in her interview with Radio Freedom, “Against а general background of lies, the truth
begins to look like opposition.” Sindeeva has been reading Vaclav Havel.
By the end of the marathon that day, it had collected more than 230,000 Facebook likes. The atmosphere in the
reception and waiting area, which looked more like a packed night club than a TV studio, was ebullient. Yet the
election itself, in which Kremlin management of candidates, airwaves and polling stations ensured Putin’s reelected in
the first round of voting, brought a more somber mood at TV Rain. Towards the end of a long day covering the
elections, an exhausted Kozyrev struggled to form a question for one of his guests. “Get on with it,” prompted the
guest. Kozyerev, with a sigh: “OK. Do you feel as shitty as I do?”
Since the election, Russian political life has entered a new, more chaotic and unpredictable phase. The clashes on
the streets in response to Putin’s inauguration were far more violent, and far more violently suppressed, than
anything that took place during the election season. The coordinated raids on the homes of opposition figures last
month and the recent announcement of a new case against opposition leader Aleksei Navalnyi for embezzlement
demonstrate that the Kremlin intends to use all means at its disposal to intimidate its opponents. New legislation has
been adopted, imposing punitive fines on the organizers of demonstrations that turn ugly. In this new climate it is
impossible to predict what the future holds for TV Rain. When we asked Zygar whether the leadership of the station
feels exposed to risk, he answered in no uncertain terms: “Our colleagues in print media consistently underestimate
the significance of what we are doing here. For the powers that be, television is the greatest bugbear.”
Undoubtedly, Putin’s team is working hard to come up with strategies to diminish the political potential of social media
and TV Rain, which seem to have simply taken them by surprise this year. The cyber attacks such as those of last
month are only one of the many pressures the station will face, that may also include legal action, administrative
measures, and economic pressure.
On the other hand, TV Rain has the support of significant interests in Russian society: on May 30 Sindeeva and the
station as a whole were awarded a Teffi award—the Russian equivalent of an Emmy. The ascent of TV Rain recalls,
in some ways, the transformation of televised news in the wake of CNNs revolutionary coverage of the first Gulf War.
We may, in other words, be witnessing the birth of an irrepressible new generation of post-cable televised media.
Rain’s trademark slogan remains: “The Optimistic Channel.”
Kevin M. F. Platt is a professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania. He has just
returned to Philadelphia from a year in St. Petersburg, where he was researching his next book about Russian
historiography as a Guggenheim Fellow.
Karina Sotnik is a serial entrepreneur who currently focuses on helping companies enter international markets, as
well as a translator from Russian into English.
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