Propaganda

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 are moments in history when evil stops being an abstraction and acquires a face, a pulse, a fixed address. Most of the time the malice that drives a war is genuinely distributed — across institutions, ideologies, bureaucracies, the cold inertia of millions of people doing their small assigned part. You cannot point at it. You cannot, in any literal sense, end it. But occasionally the architecture of a regime tightens around one man so completely that the distinction between the man and the machine collapses. When that happens, a question arises that polite society prefers not to ask aloud: if the war flows from a single living person, is killing that person a legitimate way to stop the war? I want to take that question seriously, because I think the honest answer is yes — and because the reasons we treat one such man as a candidate and another as untouchable have nothing to do with morality and everything to do with fear. ...

A dictator cannot shoot lasers from his eyes. He cannot personally pull every trigger, sign every death warrant, or stand over every soldier as the order is carried out. He is one aging man in one body, and yet at his word entire armies march, entire populations fall silent, and people who fear nothing in battle suddenly lose the will to resist. This is the puzzle that sits underneath every tyranny, and it deserves a serious answer rather than a lazy one. The lazy answer is that some nations are simply born servile, that obedience is written into their blood. I want to argue the opposite. Obedience is not a national trait. It is manufactured, deliberately and methodically, by a machine that any sufficiently ruthless regime can build — and that almost any nation, however cultured, can be made to feed. ...

There is a question that recurs in every honest conversation about this war, and it is almost never answered honestly: how many Russians actually support it? The number matters, because so much else hangs from it — questions of guilt, of resistance, of what kind of country will remain when the killing stops. But the number is also a trap, and the way people reach for it usually says more about what they want to believe than about what is true. Some want the figure to be near zero, so that the war can be blamed on one man and his clique, and the rest of the population absolved. Others want it to be the whole hundred and forty million, so that an entire people can be condemned and the bookkeeping of conscience closed for good. Neither of these is the truth, and the truth, when you look at it squarely, is more uncomfortable than either, because it refuses to let anyone off the hook and it refuses to let everyone be hanged together. ...

There is a recurring question that comes up whenever people try to take the measure of the men who currently dominate the headlines: can a figure like Putin, or like Trump, actually change the course of history the way a Lenin or a Genghis Khan once did? The instinct is to answer by ranking personalities — to argue that these two are smaller men than the world-shakers of the past, or that the historical conditions simply aren’t ripe. I think that instinct, while not entirely wrong, misses the decisive point. The scale of a personality matters, yes. But what truly separates the man who reshapes the world from the man who merely disrupts it is not raw force of character. It is whether he carries an idea in his head — a developed picture of a future he intends to build. And it is precisely here that both Putin and Trump are empty. ...

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. ...

Every administration leaves behind a signature product. Some leave laws, some leave wars, some leave a reshaped economy or a redrawn map. The current American administration leaves something stranger and harder to name, because it is not a policy at all. Its product is chaos. The tariffs that appear at fifty percent on Monday and thirty on Tuesday, the ceasefire demanded one day and abandoned the next, the deadlines that never arrive, the loyal allies turned overnight into traitors and back again into friends: these are not the debris of a plan that has not yet matured. They are the plan, if a thing this incoherent can be called one. The man stirs up the turbulence and then goes off to play golf, and within that turbulence everything else of consequence quietly proceeds. To understand the present moment, you have to stop looking for the strategy hidden behind the chaos and accept that the chaos is the strategy’s stand-in. There is nothing behind the curtain except the curtain. ...

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 lazy reflex, common to people who consider themselves sober, to file every new political ugliness under a familiar heading. We say “populism,” we say “the right turn,” we say “the usual demagoguery,” and having named the thing we feel we have understood it. I want to resist that reflex here, because I am convinced that what we are watching in the United States is not a louder version of something old. It is a genuinely new political organism, and like any new organism it deserves to be looked at directly rather than translated back into the vocabulary we already had. My claim is blunt and I will defend it slowly: Trumpism is a form of fascism. Not a metaphor for fascism, not “fascism-adjacent,” but a real, postmodern variant of the disease — one that has discarded the old machinery of violence and replaced it with an engine of lies, and one that, for the first time in history, has seized control of a country that is genuinely free. ...

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. ...

A regime that can offer its people no future does the next available thing: it seizes the past. This is not a metaphor. On his inauguration day in May 2024, Vladimir Putin signed a decree on the “Foundations of State Policy in the Sphere of Historical Enlightenment,” which quietly accomplished something no free country would attempt — it defined history as a state-regulated activity. A presidential commission was created. Disputed historical questions — the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Katyn massacre — could now be referred upward, to bodies like the Security Council or the State Council, for adjudication. Read that sentence again, because it contains the whole disease in miniature: in Russia, what happened in the past is now, in principle, a matter to be decided by the same organ that runs the secret police. ...

There is a comfortable way to talk about the Russian Orthodox Church and the war, and it goes like this: the Church is an ancient faith, a reservoir of belief and consolation, and the regime — cynical as ever — has simply co-opted it, draping its tanks in incense the way it drapes everything else it touches. On this view the institution is a victim of the state, a sacred thing put to profane use. I want to argue that this picture is not just incomplete but backwards. The Moscow Patriarchate is not a faith that the regime co-opts. In its present form it is a creation of the state’s security organs, and in this war it has made itself something more specific and more terrible than a propaganda asset. It is the metaphysical engine of the aggression — the apparatus that takes the killing of one nation by another and returns it to the killers as holiness. ...