MOSCOW – About a month ago, after the marred parliamentary elections and the December protests shook Moscow, after everyone went away for the New Year's holiday, and after everyone came back, 27-year-old Duma deputy Robert Shlegel decided to do some digging. This enterprising young man, a star of the pro-Kremlin youth Nashi movement, was curious: Who, exactly was financing these opposition protests?
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"There was lots of information floating around; were these protests financed from abroad? Were they not financed from abroad?" Shlegel explained the other day, referring to the claims put forward by prime minister and presidential frontrunner Vladimir Putin -- and then picked up by the loyalist information network -- that the protests were provoked and financed by the U.S. State Department. Shlegel found an interesting, if not totally bizarre, way to investigate. He decided to look into the financing of Dozhd, or Rain TV. This independent, internet-and-cable network, staffed and watched mostly by urban hipsters -- though nobody really knows how many of them ever actually tune in -- has provided unalloyed and often openly sympathetic coverage of December's events. When the protests first broke on Dec. 5, and no one knew what to make of them, Dozhd simply aired a live stream, first of the rally, then of the violent arrests. Compared to the intensely filtered, hard-spun statist agitprop -- if not utter silence -- on state television, Dozhd naturally came to be seen not as the "optimistic channel," as per its logo, but as the opposition channel. Obviously, the views of its staff, many of whom showed up at the protests decked out in white ribbons (the symbol of the protests), play a part.
But that's not what Shlegel was after. "When I looked into how the technical side of the protests was financed, I thought: either Dozhd financed the protest organizers, or the organizers could've helped Dozhd cover the protests," Shlegel explained. I couldn't quite follow his logic, but he went on. "Are these things financed from abroad, or not? This is a politically sensitive issue." It was, he decided, a question for the prosecutor's office. "If you're going to be the conscience of the nation," he said, "why are they hiding where they get their funding?"
So a month after the protests temporarily died down, Shlegel filed a request with the federal prosecutor's office, which, in turn, asked Dozhd for its editorial charter and tax documents, among other things. But Shlegel was looking for more -- and late last week, Natalia Sindeeva, Dozhd's owner, tweeted that she had received an urgent and detailed official request for all kinds of financial documentation. Because Dozhd had been the subject of official pressure back in December -- the government agency overseeing the legal compliance of the media demanded to see all that live footage from those two violent days, Dec. 5 and 6 -- this latest request naturally caused a stir.
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