05.02 Forecast Grim for Russia’s Free Media as Dozhd TV Falls

MOSCOW, February 5 (Alexey Eremenko, RIA Novosti) – An ill-conceived poll posted online for just 12 minutes is all it took to precipitate the latest turn of the screw on Russia’s constricted independent media scene.

As of Wednesday, Dozhd – named after the Russian for “rain” – a youthfully dilettantish television station that has since its creation in 2010 relished in thumbing its nose at the authorities, had been dropped by all the country’s major cable and satellite providers.

Dozhd owner Alexander Vinokurov says the station has shrunk its footprint of potential viewers to 2 million, down from the previous 17 million, a development certain to send advertisers fleeing.

“We believe this is an attempt to shut down the channel while saying that it wasn’t shut down,” Vinokurov, a 44-year old investment banker who created his own media holding in 2009, said Tuesday.
Causing Offense

The triviality of what caused Dozhd’s downfall speaks volumes about the scant room for contrarian views in a climate in which, critics say, the state monopolizes the message, as well as the medium.

On January 26, during a studio discussion on World War II, the station’s social media team posted a poll inviting viewers to vote on whether they thought the Soviet Union should have surrendered Leningrad – now St. Petersburg – to invading Nazis to prevent mass deaths, rather than endure a 900-day siege.