Media

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. ...

There is a small irony buried in the Russian calendar that almost nobody notices. The country keeps a generous collection of press holidays. One marks the appearance, three centuries ago, of the first issue of a state gazette under Peter the Great. Another, inherited from Soviet times, commemorates the day in 1912 when the first issue of Pravda rolled off the press. And somewhere in between sits the imported World Press Freedom Day, observed with a kind of polite confusion, as if it were a foreign saint nobody in the house actually prays to. The accumulation is telling. A culture that has to multiply its festivals of the press is usually a culture compensating for something it never had. ...

A comprehensive review of Shura Burtin’s body of journalistic work, focusing on recurring themes, political framing, and his portrayals of Ukraine and Russia. Background on Shura Burtin and His Work Shura (Aleksandr) Burtin is a Russian journalist known for extensive, narrative-driven reportage. Born in 1972, Burtin has a background in biology but built a career in journalism at outlets like Moscow News, Russkiy Reporter, and Colta.ru1. He has received multiple awards for investigative reporting – notably winning the 2019 True Story Award for a Meduza article profiling Chechen human rights activist Oyub Titiyev2. Burtin’s work often appears in independent outlets. In recent years, he has been a contributor to Meduza (a Latvia-based Russian independent news site) and the Swiss magazine Reportagen3. Notably, Meduza is openly opposed to Vladimir Putin’s regime and has been labeled a “foreign agent” by Moscow. This context makes Burtin’s reporting particularly intriguing – his journalism is published by avowedly anti-Kremlin platforms, yet some critics allege it echoes Kremlin talking points. ...

There is a piece of advice that has become so common it now passes for sophistication. You hear it from supporters and critics alike, from people who agree with me on almost everything and from people who agree with me on nothing: “Don’t listen to what he says. Pay attention to what he does.” It is offered as the worldly counsel of someone who has seen through the noise, who refuses to be fooled by speeches and knows that only actions count. And every time I hear it, I object — not mildly, but flatly. The advice is not wisdom. It is a mistake, and a harmful one, because it asks us to disarm ourselves in precisely the domain where the most powerful people on earth do their most consequential work. We live in a world of words and of information. Ignoring what leaders say is not realism. It is a refusal to look at half of reality, and the more powerful the speaker, the larger that half becomes. ...