When a regime has finished with the newspapers and the television studios, there is always one frontier left, and for the Russian state that frontier is now the internet itself. The old press was strangled long ago; the last registered liberal outlets were blocked in the first week of the full-scale war, and the editors were given the standard choice between prison and silence. But none of that reached the place where most people had quietly gone to find out what was actually happening — the open net, with the handful of platforms that still carried information and opinion diverging from Kremlin propaganda. Two of them mattered above the rest: Wikipedia, and, towering over everything, YouTube. The campaign against these is not a continuation of the old censorship by other means. It is a qualitatively new project: not to bend the platforms but to wall the country off from them, to sever an entire population from the global information space and seal it inside a managed enclosure. This is the digital iron curtain, and it is being lowered in plain sight.
It helps to begin with a number, because the number tells you what kind of state we are dealing with. Over a recent ten-year stretch, Russia issued roughly sixty percent of all the content-takedown demands that Google received from the entire planet — more, by half again, than every other country in the world combined. This is not a country that occasionally censors. This is the world’s leading exporter of the impulse to delete, a state for which the reflex to erase is not an exception but a founding tradition. One of the Kremlin’s louder propagandists, Sergei Markov, once compressed the whole mood into a boast: we beat Napoleon, we beat Hitler, we’ll beat YouTube. The line is ridiculous, but it is also honest. It tells you that the platform is understood not as a service to be regulated but as an enemy army to be defeated, and that the people running the policy genuinely imagine the open internet as a hostile power to be conquered and occupied.
The machinery of the walled garden
The conquest has its machinery, assembled piece by piece over years, and it is worth looking at the parts because each one is a brick in the wall.
It did not begin with YouTube, and it did not begin with the messengers. Long before the state reached for the platforms it is throttling now, it had already swept the big foreign social networks off the table. Facebook and Instagram, both under Meta, were blocked, the parent company branded “extremist” and ordinary users prosecuted for what they posted; Twitter, since rechristened X, was choked off in the same season; and later the reach extended to WhatsApp as well. The pattern was set early: the foreign platform is not a service to live alongside but a beachhead of the enemy, to be cleared.
There is the legal apparatus of designation. Russia built a decentralized censorship engine in which any of more than two thousand ordinary courts can unilaterally declare a text, a film, or an artwork “extremist” and feed it onto a single federal list. That list has metastasized — from fourteen entries in 2007 to well over five thousand within fifteen years — and there is no structural reason it cannot one day swallow whole platforms the way it swallows pamphlets. There is the “landing law,” in force since the start of 2022, which compels foreign technology companies to localize on Russian soil, planting an office and a legal body inside the jurisdiction precisely so there is something to pressure, fine, and ultimately seize.
And there is the newer, deeper method that does not need a court at all. The state has installed deep-packet-inspection equipment directly on the networks — the filtering boxes known by their Russian acronym, the ТСПУ — and with them it can read and shape traffic at the level of the wire. This is what makes the throttling possible: the deliberate, technical strangling of a platform’s speed until using it becomes an exercise in frustration, a way of killing a service without the political cost of formally banning it. The same equipment is turned against the tools people use to climb the wall, hunting and choking VPN connections at the network layer rather than merely adding sites to a court’s list. Censorship has moved from the registry to the infrastructure itself.
And there is the brute method underneath all the others: simply switching the internet off. In recent stretches the connection has gone dark for days at a time in Moscow and across dozens of regions — at one point mobile internet was cut across more than forty regions at once, reaching something like seventy percent of the population, breaking the taxis, the bank cards, the ATMs, the ordinary machinery of daily life, with small businesses in the capital reportedly losing on the order of a billion rubles a day. The promised “white list” of essential services that were supposed to keep working did not work. These outages are usually explained as a tool aimed at some security threat, but that explanation is too small. The real driver sits higher up, in a leader who by his own cheerful admission barely uses the internet — who says of himself that he “presses a few buttons” — and who appears to want the whole country deprived of it. Once the blocking stopped aiming at particular channels and began to hit the connection itself, the design became visible: the goal is not to silence one channel but to turn the country into an informational black hole, receiving no signal from outside and emitting none, on the North Korean model, where a state can announce that it has won every medal at the Olympics precisely because no contradicting signal can ever get in.
It is no accident that the impulse intensifies as the battlefield disappoints. A regime with real successes to report does not need to seal the borders of perception; it can let the cameras in. It is the absence of anything genuine to show that makes the black hole attractive. If nothing real can be reported, then the country must be closed, so that the unreal can be reported instead and no one inside can check.
The substitutes nobody wants
A wall is easier to build than a world to live in behind it, and here the state keeps stumbling on the same stubborn fact: you can take a platform away, but you cannot make people accept what you offer in its place. For years the regime has tried to stand up home-grown replacements for the foreign services it is strangling, and one after another they have failed for want of users willing to switch.
RuTube, the would-be national video platform, has consumed a fortune — a dead, billion-ruble flop that no amount of state money and promotion has been able to bring to life. VK Video was relaunched as the official “YouTube killer,” built up under a grandson of one of the inner-circle Kovalchuks and propped up with audience figures that do not survive contact with reality: a claimed user base of around sixty-eight million that appears to have been simply faked, while the real YouTube, the one supposedly being killed, quietly keeps tens of millions more — on the order of thirty million above the domestic pretender. Even outlets loyal to the regime go on posting to YouTube, because that is where the audience actually is. The latest project is Max, a state-blessed messenger co-owned by a nephew of the president himself, pushed as the patriotic answer to the foreign chat apps — and met, like the others, with a shrug. Import substitution in the information space keeps failing for the most ordinary of reasons: ordered to prefer the domestic analog, Russians decline. The walled garden has no flowers anyone wants to look at.
The electronic dictatorship
Behind the technical machinery lies a fantasy, and the fantasy is the more revealing of the two. It is worth being precise about its provenance, because it is not an enacted program of state but the speculation of an ideologue. The clearest statement of it belongs to Vladislav Surkov, the Kremlin’s longtime backroom theorist, who in a piece of futurology foretold what he called the coming “death of parliaments” — the idea that the network could replace, rather than inform, the institutions of representation, and usher in a new and purer autocracy. It is a vision that circulates in certain circles close to power, and it deserves attention not because it is policy but because it is the dangerous daydream toward which the machinery tends.
The reasoning, where it has been written down, runs like this. The internet has become the modern version of the ancient agora, the public square where the whole demos can in principle assemble and vote directly. If every citizen can be polled instantly and continuously through the network, then what need is there for a parliament — for elected representatives standing in for a public that can now, supposedly, speak for itself? On this logic the legislature becomes a fifth wheel, an obsolete relic of an age before the network, and one could simply throw the Duma overboard from the ship of modernity. Russia, which has pushed electronic voting further than most states, could even imagine itself leading the planet into this post-parliamentary future — abandoning representative government altogether, and presenting the abdication as innovation.
One should be precise about what is monstrous here. It is not the technology; it is the substitution. Direct electronic plebiscites administered by an unaccountable center are not democracy intensified but democracy hollowed out — a permanent referendum whose questions are written by power and whose answers are tallied by power, an electorate manufactured rather than consulted. The same tools that could in principle deepen participation become, in the hands of a regime, instruments for crushing it: the network as a mechanism for reading the population’s mind, predicting and pre-empting protest, and fabricating consent on demand. The agora is invoked to abolish the very thing the agora was for. A plebiscite without a free press, without genuine alternatives, without any independent count, is not the voice of the people. It is the ventriloquism of the state.
The net frees no one automatically
It is tempting, against all this, to fall back on a comforting belief: that the internet is inherently on the side of freedom, that the regime owns the television but the network belongs to the opposition, and that the open platforms will therefore route around the censor and liberate the country whether the state likes it or not. This belief is an illusion, and worth dismantling, because clinging to it leads to passivity.
The uncomfortable truth is that the regime dominates the digital space too, and nowhere more completely than on Telegram. Survey the very top of the Russian audience rankings on that platform — the twenty largest channels by reach — and you find the voices of the regime almost without exception: Medvedev, Volodin, Simonyan, the channel run in Kadyrov’s name, ministers and speakers of parliament and television stars and regional strongmen, with essentially no pro-Ukrainian or independent voice among them. When a particularly grotesque lie needs to be seeded — the false claim, say, that some Russian atrocity was actually a “provocation” staged by Kyiv for maximum effect — it saturates the online space through exactly these channels, pushed by exactly these figures, Markov among them. The state’s information troops have not neglected the net; they have invested in it more heavily than in the old broadcasters, and the organization built to run online operations now reportedly commands a budget exceeding the combined budgets of the regime’s flagship international television outlets. The internet, in other words, is not a neutral liberating force. It is contested terrain, and on much of that terrain the regime is, for now, winning. A platform can carry facts at odds with the propaganda, but it does not generate them; whoever organizes, funds, and floods the space most aggressively shapes what most people see there.
This is precisely why the regime treats different platforms so differently. Where a platform’s audience and ownership structure work, on balance, to its advantage, it is left alone; where they work against it, it is throttled, listed, and slated for blocking. The decision is not about the platform’s neutral branding but about which side, in practice, it serves.
Platforms as powers
And here the walled state runs into something it cannot wall out — a fact of the present age that no national censor, however thorough, can legislate away. The giant global platforms have themselves become powers. A network with a billion users is not a company in any ordinary sense; it is a kind of universe, larger in population than almost any state, and it shapes the consciousness of its users more deeply than their governments can. No local propaganda apparatus, however lavishly funded, can match the gravitational pull a platform exerts on the human mind. This is the genuinely new thing, the development that breaks the old analogies to newspapers and broadcasters: a private entity whose reach over what people think exceeds that of the governments under which those people live.
The arrival of this fact has been registered, in fragments, by states scrambling to respond. The European Union built a regulatory regime aimed at the largest platforms; democracies in Asia and elsewhere have opened their own investigations; France detained Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, and Brazil’s supreme court moved to block Elon Musk’s X outright. These are the first, fumbling, incompatible responses to a single underlying problem: humanity has not yet found an adequate answer to the rise of private platforms whose influence over minds exceeds that of national governments. Whether such power may legitimately sit in private hands is, in scale, comparable to asking whether nuclear weapons may be privately owned. Even Google, the avatar of the open web, submits fully to Beijing’s demands as the price of operating inside China — proof that the platforms are not simple agents of liberation, but actors negotiating, state by state, on terms nobody has yet worked out.
There is a sharp irony in the Russian case, and it is the irony on which the whole curtain ultimately snags. The regime does not in fact want to block every platform; it wants to block the ones that carry voices and facts at odds with Kremlin propaganda — YouTube, Wikipedia — while keeping the one aligned with it. That one is Telegram, and the suspicion around it does not rest on the crude parlor question of whether a given founder is or is not somebody’s secret agent. It rests on what can actually be observed: a platform whose top channels are overwhelmingly the regime’s own, whose administration is widely judged to operate under FSB influence, and which the state will therefore almost certainly never block — because you do not destroy your own ally. This is why, for all the noise, the most confident prediction one can make about the digital iron curtain is that it will fall on YouTube before it ever falls on Telegram. The fight over the network inside the regime is not a clean contest between censors and a free press but a collision of appetites — commercial clans that profit from a domestic messenger pushing to kill the foreign rival, security men pushing for total control, a war faction defending the channels its soldiers actually use — all of it resolved not in any parliament or court but in a single office.
The curtain falls on the cartoon-watchers too
It would flatter the audience to imagine that the country had gone online in search of truth. Most of it had not. People went to these platforms the way people everywhere go to them — for the films and the music, for the football, for the children’s cartoons playing on a tablet at the kitchen table. The appetite for entertainment dwarfs the appetite for politics; it is precisely why the regime’s own television, once you strip out the soap operas and the variety shows and leave only the propaganda, collapses into something nobody will watch, a Solovyov shouting into a hall that has quietly emptied. The platforms the state is now strangling were, for the overwhelming majority, not nests of dissidence but ordinary infrastructure of daily life.
That is what makes the curtain so indiscriminate. When YouTube is throttled into uselessness, it is not only the politically curious who lose something; it is the grandmother streaming an old film, the parent putting on a cartoon, the small trader whose card reader has just gone dead in a regional blackout. The wall does not distinguish between the citizen hunting for forbidden facts and the one who only wanted to be entertained — it comes down on both, and it is the second, the great apolitical majority, who never asked for any of it. Even so, the hunger for uncensored information is real and growing: in the years since the invasion the use of VPNs in Russia rose roughly fifteenfold, from something like a million and a half users to around twenty-four million. The curtain, then, fights a war on two fronts at once — against the few who want the truth, and against the many who only wanted their cartoons — and it makes enemies of both.
But the deepest obstacle is structural, and it is the one the regime can neither buy nor jail its way past. You can throttle a service and fine a company and even brick the phones of millions of your own citizens for a few days. What you cannot do, by any decree, is dissolve the underlying reality that a platform of a billion minds is now a force on the order of a state — and that sealing your borders against it does not make it smaller, only makes you blinder. A country can lower a curtain over its own windows. It cannot thereby switch off the daylight on the other side. The digital iron curtain is real, and it will do real damage to the people behind it; but it is being lowered against a world that has outgrown the very idea of a wall, and the state lowering it has mistaken the closing of its own eyes for the putting-out of the sun.
Prepared in the spirit of the “thinking together” principle that Igor Yakovenko follows in his “7-40” cycle on YouTube. The essay nonetheless voices the author’s own opinions, which may diverge from those of Igor Yakovenko.