The Trump administration’s decision to take a hammer to the funding for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty might be legally dubious, but politically pretty safe: Its programming wasn’t intended to reach American audiences, so who would miss it, really?
In September 2022, I came to Prague, in an unusual role of a volunteer media expert, to observe the operations of the Russian-language TV channel and online news portal, Current Time — one of the many brands under the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty umbrella. An American from Latvia whose native language is Russian, I had spent much of the previous decade trying to build bridges between the U.S. and Russian TV industries, a dream wiped out overnight with the full-scale invasion of Ukraine earlier that year. Current Time had become an indispensable source of news for an audience misled by their own state media. Six months in, war coverage had pushed out almost all other reporting and fatigue was setting in. I wanted to be useful. If my knowledge of the Russian media could somehow help Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, I was happy to share it.
Not to mention the fact that, as a lifelong fan of the band R.E.M., I’d never pass up a chance to visit the organization that helped inspire their debut single, “Radio Free Europe.”
The organization’s headquarters was an imposing gray cube, just east of the city center. The general aura reminded me of a U.S. Embassy. It might be an editorially independent nongovernment entity, but its cultural and literal footprint was always that of an American values bulwark.
I soon found I had landed in the middle of a philosophical debate. Would showing anything other than atrocities constitute catering to Russia? At the time of my arrival, the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty staff was considering starting a second channel that would run hard-hitting documentaries about Russian history and cruelties. I wondered who would be the audience for such depressing programming. A better tactic, I thought, would be to try to appeal to the persuadables, an audience many of whom had tuned out watching the news but retained a sense of right and wrong; an audience that Alexei Navalny, Russia’s opposition leader, had sacrificed his freedom — and, soon, his life — trying to reach.
The walls of the headquarters were lined not only with photos of the likes of Henry Kissinger and Hillary Clinton, but also Duke Ellington and Tom Jones. Indeed, the older generation of Soviet citizens retained warm memories of the “enemy voices” (as Radio Liberty, Voice of America, and the BBC’s Russian Service were known) not because they delivered news from the West, but because they’d play jazz and rock ’n’ roll. Pop culture was the draw.
I went back to the hotel and wrote out an email positing just that: What are the new areas of cultural scarcity? What have censorship and militarism taken away from the average young Russian? Some answers: uncensored stand-up comedy, freewheeling talk shows with no verboten topics and music by artists who hold opposition views. (Some, like my acquaintance, the rapper Ivan Dremin, a.k.a. FACE, were even declared “foreign agents.”)
This initiative would also serve a secondary purpose. Since the start of the war, hundreds of thousands of Russia’s most promising and conscientious citizens had left the country, many forgoing their careers in the process. This new platform I imagined could provide a lifeline to the artists among them and a diversion for the rest. And it should be a streaming and video-on-demand platform, functioning as a site, a mobile app, and a production hub using the artists’ own YouTube channels for distribution.
It turned out that someone at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty had been harboring a very similar vision. That someone was Stephen Capus, former president of NBC News and adviser to the United States Agency for Global Media, who had recently come onboard to consult for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Within weeks, we had written a proposal for this new media brand. It was approved almost instantly.
It also created a fissure among the staff members, some of whom balked at “entertaining Russians.” My volunteer effort became a job.
The platform began in April 2023. Its earliest offerings included a concert film by FACE (naturally), who alternated hedonistic raps with serious statements and at some point unfurled a Ukrainian flag; a stand-up set by Ariana Lolaeva, a rising comedian from North Ossetia who had a criminal case against her back in Russia; music by Boris Grebenshchikov, a rock ’n’ roll veteran with a Bob Dylan-like stature; and a Ukrainian documentary series about animals in war, anchored by Patron, the famous mine-sniffing dog.
The last one, oddly enough, made the most important statement of all. It was one of the first instances of a Ukrainian collaboration with a Russophone media brand since the start of the war. Its very existence thus proclaimed two things: that a state was not its people, and that a Russian cultural platform could be unbound not only to Vladimir Putin but even to the Russian language.
The name we picked for the service was Votvot. In Russian, the phrase “vot-vot” means both enthusiastic agreement, akin to “exactly” or the German “genau,” and something like “any minute now,” which some chose to read as a cheeky prediction of systemic change. The platform had an unofficial motto: “If the Kremlin hates it, we have it.”
There is, certainly, room for discussion on whether financing foreign-facing media is a proper use of U.S. taxpayer money. In order to have this discussion in good faith, however, it’s necessary to establish what kind of money we’re talking about. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s entire annual operating budget in 2024 was $142 million, which covered a staff of more than 1,700 and services reaching 47 million weekly users in 27 languages. Votvot cost around $2 million a year, including all content and salaries. (For context, this is about 1/9000th of Netflix’s projected content budget this year).
The Votvot team consisted of far-flung freelancers in places including Tbilisi, Georgia; Barcelona, Spain; Belgrade, Serbia; and Berlin. Several of them worked from Ukraine. We had more than a few editorial meetings from which someone had to excuse themselves early to head to a bomb shelter. One young woman was still in Moscow at the time of her hiring. I was gingerly explaining the risks of working with “foreign agents” over a Zoom when she lifted her hand into the frame to adjust her hair. Her fingernails were painted the blue and yellow of the Ukrainian flag. Here, I knew, was someone utterly fearless. Within a few months, the job allowed her to leave Russia.
On Feb. 20, 2024, the Russian authorities declared all of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty an “undesirable organization.” This designation was an escalation from “foreign agent” and just below “extremist organization.” (Instagram is also seen as extremist.) This meant that, while it was now illegal to share or comment on the content. Imagine trying to go viral when your viewers might be fined or jailed for pressing “like.”
Worried about the safety of both our creators and our audience, we put up new content without advertising it.
As time went by and the war dragged on, the chasm between the Russians who stayed and the Russians who left kept growing. Many of those on the inside began to think of the ones on the outside as privileged and out of touch. A common critique of all media projects headquartered abroad is that this is just the diaspora talking to itself. Yet only those outside of Mr. Putin’s reach could sing, play or joke without being censored or censoring themselves.
Votvot launched its first proper publicity campaign in September 2024. At that point, the content streaming on its platform included the Oscar-winning documentary “20 Days in Mariupol,” to which it held rights in 15 countries, and dozens of exclusive films, concerts and shows. Two months later, the United States restored Donald Trump to the presidency.
Soon after his inauguration, Trump realigned America’s policies towards both Russia and Ukraine, and also decided the service is no longer worth paying for. It’s reasonable to infer that the real issue, in the administration’s eyes, is probably not the cost of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s programming, but what they called its far-left values (this, about an organization whose entire existence is based on fighting Communism). Starting on April 1, about half of its employees have been furloughed, freelancers dismissed and the Votvot experiment frozen. At the end, it had well over a million unique users. The satellite services that broadcast its programs to Russia were turned off on April 4. Mr. Capus, who had become the organization’s president in January 2024, is spearheading the effort to save its funding.
But it’s not just the consumers of our content that have lost. Having worked for an “enemy,” many of the creators could face repercussions at home, and their ability to stay abroad is often dependent on their employment-based visa status. Some are probably safe in Spain and Germany; others are in Georgia and Serbia, countries that could very well be more susceptible to Russian influence.
For a short while we were able to empower fearless creators to speak up against war and push back against censorship. Some may see this as government waste. I happen to see it as a smart investment in a generation that will one day run a post-Putin Russia — and is instead learning a lesson in American duplicity.
Michael Idov is a Latvian American novelist and screenwriter who co-founded the nonprofit Russian-language streaming platform, Votvot.
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