THE tagline for the Dozhd (“Rain”) television network is “the optimistic channel”. Launched in 2010 by young producers who had previously fled state-run stations, Dozhd gained a quick following. Its programming is fresh, energetic, and (very rare for today’s Russia) sincere—even if at times that sincerity can manifest itself in shows that are overeager or unpolished. The channel now reaches 18m homes across Russia; several million people more watch on the internet every month. But these days things at the “optimistic channel” are not looking good. One by one, all in the span of several hours on January 29th, cable providers across Russia announced they would not carry the network. Up to 15% of its audience may have already lost access, station managers say. Natalia Sindeeva, Dozhd’s general director, fears that advertisers will flee as the channel loses viewers, threatening the newsroom’s fiscal health and putting the channel on the “direct route to death”.

The ostensible reason for Dozhd’s troubles is outrage over a poll the channel put to viewers as part of its coverage of the 70th anniversary of the end of the Leningrad blockade. (Between 1941 and 1944, the German army laid siege to the city; up to 1.5m people died, many of starvation.) In short, Dozhd asked, should the wartime Soviet leadership have given up Leningrad so as to save hundreds of thousands of lives? The station quickly took down the poll and apologised, but the storm of reaction had already taken shape.

If in America and much of western Europe, the memory of the second world war has entered the realm of history, in Russia, the experience of surviving, and defeating, the German invasion is an ever-present national condition. Victory in the war is proof of the virtue and legitimacy of the state—at first Soviet, now that of President Vladimir Putin. Any unflattering details of that victory are rarely discussed.

Yet the survey was merely a convenient pretext for those in the Kremlin who long wished the channel ill. Even though its reach and viewership pales compared with that of the country’s main federal channels, Dozhd is a visual genre the Kremlin’s image-conscious political handlers care about to an obsessive degree. It is by default friendly to the opposition, if for no other reason than its willingness to air critical reports. Figures banned from state television, like Alexei Navalny, the popular anti-Putin leader who ran for Moscow mayor in September, are regular guests.

That has led many in power to see Dozhd as a headquarters of opposition agitation. The station’s critics, says Ms Sindeeva, often ask, “Why are you rocking the boat? Why are you so critical?”. She insists Dozhd only appears that way compared with the other offerings on Russian television: “It’s not that we’re so critical, just that others don’t talk about certain things and keep quiet, or simply lie.” Mikhail Zygar, the station’s chief editor, puts its plainly: “We’re not an opposition channel. We’re a normal channel.”

The station’s independence meant it had powerful enemies inside government from the beginning. As state television has become more conspiratorial in its propaganda offerings, Dozhd has begun to look ever more the dangerous outlier. The final affront, suspect Ms Sindeeva and her colleagues, may have been a segment aired in late November, which reported on allegations made by Mr Navalny about luxury country-homes belonging to several officials, including Vyacheslav Volodin, a top aide to Mr Putin. Ms Sindeeva says that in recent days she has spoken with several cable executives who tell her they received phone calls with “a direct order to find any excuse to shut us off.”

Taken together, according to a business daily, Vedomosti, the four main cable providers that have shut off Dozhd represent a third of televisions in the country. On January 29th, Beeline announced that it, too, was turning off access. (Another large provider has sent Dozhd a warning letter about its “incorrect content policy”.) The channel’s problems may only get worse. Mr Putin’s spokesman has hinted it acted “beyond the limits of the allowable”. Prosecutors in St Petersburg say they are considering criminal charges; and in a histrionic discussion in the Duma, Irina Yarovaya, a deputy from the pro-Kremlin United Russia party, compared the Leningrad survey to “restoring Nazism”.

The backlash, however cynical, is emblematic of the narrowing space for allowable discussion. These days, the language of Russia’s official politics, and thus what shows up in state media, carries the expression of ideological purity. Mr Putin’s current presidential term is marked by an ascendant majoritarianism, in which certain understood truths (pertaining to everything from gay rights to the Orthodox church) have taken on official, canonised forms. People and institutions who disagree are not only marginalised, but discredited. In such an environment little room is left for Dozhd's optimism.