As a kid, I always bubbled with energy too. I talk at triple speed, and people often have to tell me to slow down. My childhood neighborhood, the Abanotubani district, lies beneath a great gorge in Tbilisi. A huge, ruined fortress overlooks our neighborhood —- for centuries, it served as a stronghold for Tbilisi, protecting it against invaders.

Now, views of the fortress are obscured by an even bigger mansion, built by the billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, the richest man in our country. His wealth is about a third of our gross domestic product. Construction on his house began when I was a toddler: a great sea of glass and metal dominating the gorge. I remember looking up and thinking it looked like a Bond villain’s lair. 

Ivanishvili became the biggest philanthropist in Georgia, supporting arts and culture, fixing schools, houses and hospitals. But even as a young kid, I was doubtful that some billionaire was truly going to help our country. 

Protests were the backdrop of my childhood in Georgia. One of my earliest memories is sitting on my dad’s shoulders during the Rose Revolution. I was three. It was a peaceful uprising to oust the then-President Eduard Shevardnadze, ending his reign of chaos that had lasted more than a decade. A man called Mikheil Saakashvili was elected after him and set about trying to rid the country of the corruption that had plagued it for so long. 

While there were problems during Saakashvili’s rule, there was also a huge shift in the country towards democracy and reform. For a while, things felt hopeful. 

Of course, we always lived below our powerful billionaire neighbor — the oligarch Ivanishvili in his spy villain-worthy lair. But I also grew up being aware of another big neighbor, one that sat right above Georgia. On a clear day in the hills above my house in Tbilisi, you could see the Greater Caucasus mountain mange — the natural border with Russia.

I was on vacation in those hills above Tbilisi in 2008 when Russia invaded Georgia. I remember the warplanes buzzing overhead and how my mom went into a panicked frenzy. During that war, Russia occupied South Ossetia, a region to the northwest of Tbilisi. I guess that was when I started to absorb the idea that Russia was not our friend. 

When I was 12, a party called Georgian Dream came to power, backed by Ivanishvili, the billionaire who lived above us. Ivanishvili, like many oligarchs from the former Soviet space, has close ties to Putin. My parents felt uneasy about it all and moved the family to Paris, where I spent my teenage years. 

We lived in the bougie 6th arrondissement. Kids at my school had no idea where Georgia was — I was constantly having to explain that I was from the country, not the U.S. state. The country by the black sea — “la mere noire,” I would intone, again and again. It was Georgia for dummies. People would nod, not quite knowing. One girl literally thought Georgia was a place in the Arctic region of Lapland. If I was giving her the benefit of the doubt, I guess she was thinking of the island of South Georgia in Antarctica. Wrong again. I realized it was often easier to just pretend I was French like everyone else. 

As I grew older, though, I became prouder of my roots. I found a group of friends who came from all over. They introduced me to an important part of French life: going to protests. At those protests, I learned a lesson — my voice matters. 

The French really put the “pro” in protests — they do not mess around. While I was in high school, the cops killed a French activist with a police grenade during a protest. It caused uproar across the country, so I tagged along with older kids to blockade our school, barricading it with trash cans for two weeks to push for justice for the guy who was killed. 

I started to learn that protest actually works in a democracy. I would go between Paris and Tbilisi, taking lessons from my French friends and bringing them to Georgia. “You guys go home too soon when you protest. You stand there and think stuff is going to fall out of the sky,” I would tell my Georgian friends. Last year, though, a new law was proposed in Georgia, and things went full chaos-mode. 

It’s called the foreign agents law. It’s a copycat of the same regulation in Russia. It dictates that any institution getting 20% of its money from abroad has to register with a statewide system as an agent of foreign influence. 

In practice, it makes it easier for the state to crush opposition, get rid of foreign-aided projects that make our life better and stamp out free expression by creating scapegoats. It gives the government arbitrary reasons to arrest anyone they deem a “foreign influence operation.” 

Loads of my friends in Tbilisi work on projects that would be deemed a “foreign agent” by this new law. Whether they work in plastic recycling programs, as independent journalists or as human rights lawyers, they now face extra interrogation by the state. It’s basically a tool for political repression. 

The law’s proposal last year lit a flame under us in Tbilisi. We organized big protests and for a while, it worked — the government didn’t press ahead. But this year, they tried again. 

On April 3, the Georgian Dream party announced plans to bring back the bill. I felt a mixture of anger and hopelessness when I heard. Here we go again, I thought. Here’s undeniable proof of our government blindly trying to follow Russia's lead. I got ready to fight. 

Maybe if you had the privilege of growing up in a first-world country, you don’t understand, but for us this law means the difference between having a functioning democracy and existing as a puppet for Russia. It means losing our freedom of speech. 

On the morning of April 15, the protests began. 

My friends and I have joined the demonstrations every day, trying to put the lessons I’d learned in France into practice. I believe that if we can inspire enough people to get out on the streets, we can overwhelm the brutality we are fighting against. For now, the state is fighting back hard, with tear gas, rubber bullets, water cannon and by simply beating protesters to a pulp. I’m worried things are going to descend into even more violence, though I hope we can avoid it.

On the night of April 30, I put on a gas mask and assigned myself a task: deactivate as many tear gas canisters as I could. There’s a couple of ways to do this. You can put a plastic cup over the canister before it starts to smoke, which snuffs it out. Or, if it’s smoking already, you can dunk the canister in a bucket of water.

Things escalated fast that night. Protesters surged onto Tbilisi’s main street, Rustaveli Avenue, and as they did, police unleashed a torrent of tear gas canisters onto us from the side streets, scattering the crowd. I ran forwards into the impact zone, grabbing the canisters and submerging them into bottles of water that I had previously set out. It was a race to get to the canisters before they started spinning out of control. 

The police began advancing from the side streets and blasting everyone in the area with water cannon, throwing them to the ground. They didn’t care if they hit protesters or journalists — and they hit both. Officers also beat up anyone they could get their hands on. A no man's land emerged between the protesters and the police. In the buffer zone were journalists — and me. Along with dealing with the tear gas, I was also taking pictures — using loads of flash to annoy the officers — just for my own personal project. I managed to capture several instances of how police laid into the protestors. 

It was time to build barricades, French style, and invoke the lessons I had learned in Paris. I started dragging metal barrier fences together and getting people to help. I then told people to gather up trash cans, just like we did in high school. Five guys started to help me. From that moment on, I was standing in the buffer zone in front of the barricades, directing people like an orchestra conductor. I got them to add umbrellas to the structure — a tactic inspired not by the French, but by pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong — to protect from the water cannon. 

The crowd of police just watched as I directed the resistance. They recorded everything, sussing me out. Then, they mobilized the arresting squad. The police surged forward, grabbing anyone they could — journalists, protesters, they didn’t care. I started to run, but my fashion-victim status let me down, badly. I was wearing my cute new purple Adidas Sambas. But those shoes have no grip, as anyone who owns a pair knows. I slipped on the wet ground. 

A bunch of masked police jumped on me and began beating me mercilessly. At one point I nearly scrambled away, but again my sartorial choices screwed me over. My blazer was tied around my waist and they grabbed it and pulled me back.

By law in Georgia, all police officers have to wear a visible badge number. But during the protests, police hide their badges and mask up with balaclavas, so it’s difficult to prosecute them for brutality down the line.  

They started hitting the back of my head hard, and all I could do was protect my eyes and curl into the fetal position. They dragged me behind the police line and continued laying into me. Then they surrounded me, taunting me, telling me to hit myself and say that I was a little bitch. My legs were like jelly and I could barely stand. I did whatever they ordered, desperate, until they threw me into a van. Already, there was a lump the size of a bar of soap on the back of my head, with deep blue panda rings forming around my eyes. 

They hauled me to prison, but it took them six hours to get me inside. There was already a queue of other protesters they’d caught. My captors waited in the van with me, watching Russian TikToks for hours on end. Honestly, that was almost worse than the beating.  

The atmosphere inside the cells was desperate. People were silently pacing up and down, their spirits hitting rock bottom. Police were bringing in more protesters all the time, their radios crackling. I was in a cell with three other guys. “They beat me like a dog,” one of them said, showing me a bootprint-shaped bruise on his back. I realized we had to get the morale up, fast — and show the guards they couldn’t break us. 

We sang all the songs we could think of — “Bella Ciao,” the European anthem, a bunch of Georgian songs. At one point I even sang the Marseillaise. The police told us to shut up. We kept singing, and cracked terrible jokes that this was a five-star digital detox. 

I got out of jail because a lawyer helped me, pro bono. She works for the Human Rights Center, a group of lawyers here in Georgia that under the new law would be at the top of the state’s list of “foreign agents.” That lawyer, she probably weighs 120 pounds, isn’t much more than 5 feet tall, and she’s formidable. When she goes into the police station, you see the fear in their eyes. She’s the best. If it wasn’t for her and her organization, I would still be in jail. This Russian law wants to take away our access to human rights lawyers like her. 

Two weeks on, and my concussion is getting better, day by day. The nausea has eased and the daily headaches are becoming less intense. 

I’m back on the streets. At these protests, the energy feels different. There’s a crazy electricity in the air. Everyone is singing, fighting, determined not to lose their country. A lot of the protesters are my age — Gen Z. We don’t remember the chaos and corruption of the 1990s. We’re not worn down, like older people, by decades of protesting. We’re also more savvy than our parents’ generation about fact-checking. We don’t just swallow the stream of propaganda that’s fed to us. We’re ready to fight. I spoke with my uncle on the phone about it yesterday morning, just before the law was passed — he told me “my hopes are in Gen Z and a miracle.” 

By Luka Gviniashvili as told to Isobel Cockerell

Correction: This article has been updated to correct the name of the lawyer's association that advised Gviniashvili. It was the Human Rights Center, not the Young Lawyer's Association.

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A frantic international effort is underway to preserve Ukraine’s digital history and Russia’s media archive. The stakes, say internet archivists, include how the war and contemporary Ukraine are remembered.

A team of over 1,300 volunteers at a newly launched global initiative called Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online are racing to preserve hundreds of thousands of websites. Archivists from the National Electronic Archive of Ukraine, the Internet Archive, the Library of Congress are trying to save copies of news publications, digital archives of museums, local government pages, exhibitions and more. 

Archivists are able to save copies of websites through capturing a website’s code with a number of what are called “crawling” tools.

“As far as we can tell, no one has done web archiving at this scale in a war before,” says Quinn Dombrowski, a project administrator at Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online and a technology specialist at Stanford University’s Library. “Our goal is not to create an archive that people will study somewhere safely in the West. Our goal is to repatriate this data back to the Ukrainains.”

The war between Russia and Ukraine has opened the door to the wide scale destruction of their internets — for very different reasons. Ukraine's digital record faces annihilation from military invasion; Russia's internet destruction has been ordered from within. But people in both countries are now grappling with a shocking reality: their online records can disappear. The reality is now dawning that that their nation’s internet is fragile and impermanent

Websites are going offline in Ukraine for a number of reasons, from power outages, to local servers being destroyed by shelling, to hosting bills going unpaid. “When you get right down to it, it’s cables, it’s hardware, it’s things that exist in the physical world even though we think of the internet as a different sphere,” said Dombrowski.

Dombrowski’s archiving initiative has set up a list of websites for volunteers to archive, prioritizing websites for organizations located in cities under siege or with active air raid warnings.

Their efforts point to one of the internet’s best kept secrets: the fragility of the internet.

Christopher Lee, a professor at the University of North Carolina’s School of Information and Library Science says he often encounters misconceptions about the internet’s durability. “What happens is people get shocked on both ends of the spectrum. Things that you thought would be persistent, go away. And things that feel like they should be ephemeral, stick around. Both of those things are true.” What lives on is determined by “power and resources,” he says, with a lot of what we think of as “junk” data, such as our browsing history and other user behavior information, actively maintained by governments or companies using it for revenue.

The archiving of websites and databases for the most part has not been incorporated into disaster or military preparedness. In the U.S., emergency digital archiving initiatives have sprung up after events like Ferguson in 2014, Hurricane Maria in 2017, and the election of President Donald Trump. After these events, volunteers captured websites, social media posts and federal databases before they were lost or they were taken down by government officials.

There is a growing awareness among the public for the importance of web archiving, according to Abigail Grotke, assistant head of the digital content management section at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

Grotke joined the Library when it first began web archiving in the early 2000s. Today, the Library’s digital archive is one of the largest of any government body. By the end of 2021, over 100 web archive specialists have captured 21.7 billion digital documents or 2.827 petabytes.

The Library of Congress is in the process of switching their operations to a digital first approach. “In the past if something was available in both print and digital, we would prefer the print. But we’re switching focus now where digital is preferred,” said Angela Cannon, a reference specialist at the Library. Last summer the Library had to freeze its social media archiving work due to persistent barriers enacted by tech companies and the technological challenges in archiving content from private profiles and accounts.

“It’s been frustrating but it’s not just our problem,” said Grotke, pointing out that it’s something archivists around the world are trying to solve.

Cannon, the reference specialist at the Library, says this becomes especially important in regions around the world where public figures and politicians almost exclusively use social media for messaging.

“Increasingly politicians are not bothering with websites,” Cannon said. “If you’re not talking to traditional newspapers, and you’re not going on television, it is most definitely going to matter in the future. That’s a gap in our collecting, so how do we document that for our researchers?”

When Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine began, Grotke and Cannon say their team’s first step was to increase the frequency of “crawls” for Ukrainian government sites and selected Russian sites.

While many governments, including Ukraine’s, have dedicated national digital archives, Russia is one of the few that does not. Instead, Russia has Ivan Begtin, a transparency advocate in Moscow who for over a decade has led a small team of archivists. Their work has new urgency as the Kremlin erases swatches of the Russian-language web.

“In the next month and a half many publications and cultural websites can disappear entirely,” said Begtin.

Since the war, dozens of independent Russian media sites have been blocked by the Kremlin for violating censorship laws banning the use of the word “war” in coverage of Ukraine. More quietly, hundreds of smaller publications, Russian cultural websites and online projects have gone offline as many western hosting services stopped accepting payments from Russia.

The list of websites archived by Begtin and his team of three in the past few weeks gives a snapshot of the current shattered state of freedom of expression in Russia. He prioritizes content that “forms our contemporary history, what people are going to use to write books and textbooks one day.”

The National Digital Archives, Begtin’s self-funded project, has captured content from independent news publications such as the Insider, Colta, Tjournal, Paper — all now blocked in Russia — along with websites like the “Forum of Kostroma Jedi,” a chapter of Star Wars enthusiasts that was recently listed as an “undesirable” organization by federal authorities; and dozens of historical memory projects from Memorial, Russia’s oldest civil rights group shuttered in December 2021 by court order.

The work is grueling and dangerous. “How much longer I can keep this up for, I’m not so sure,” said Begtin.

For years Russia’s internet existed as an unregulated bastion of free speech, pirated films, music and software. Its transformation into one of the most censored corners of the internet in the world has gone hand in hand with the transformation of Russian politics, said Begtin.

“This is a story of the erosion of your sense of freedom, the erosion of democracy, the erosion of people’s faith in themselves. Because many thinking people in Russia today speak in these words: there is nothing I can do to change what is happening.”

Begtin’s one-man crawl of the Russian web is a far cry from the wave of initiatives backing up Ukraine’s digital records. Dombrowski, the technology specialist at Stanford, says there is a much broader international conversation that has to happen around digital archiving, cultural heritage, and conflict.

“It’s inspiring when everyone comes together to do something to support this effort,” she said. “On the other hand, it represents a fundamental failure of infrastructure. It should never come to random people archiving Ukrainian websites on their laptops.”

Of all the work Dombrowski, who studied medieval East Slavic languages, managed to preserve in the past few weeks, one site was especially vivid: the website of a small museum in the Ukrainian city Novhorod-Siverskyi dedicated entirely to the medieval epic poem, The Tale of Igor’s Campaign, famously translated into English by Vladimir Nabokov. The poem’s original manuscript was destroyed in 1812 when Moscow burned to the ground during the Napoleonic wars.

“I studied the poem in grad school and when I saw what this museum was about, my heart just stopped,” Dombrowski remembers. “Our automatic processes had failed so I manually went through each page on their website. There were 83 pages. I clicked on every image. I downloaded everything I could and saved the file. The thought of this beautiful museum being under attack, I immediately burst into tears.”

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Jailed for a Like tracks cases of Russians who have been prosecuted or imprisoned for their posts, shares or likes on social media.

The post Jailed for a Like | Episode Six: The Lucky One Percent appeared first on Coda Story.

The plush blue curtains open, revealing a cluster of cheap eateries. The cameras focus on a young man who stumbles onto the set. He glances around, declaring the place perfect. He is planning a birthday party for a millionaire, he says, and his client will love celebrating in this “style of poverty.” The studio audience erupts with laughter.

Filming is underway for another episode of “Once Upon a Time in Russia,” a popular comedy show on TNT, one of Russia’s most watched TV stations. But the producers are not satisfied.

“No, no! We’ll have to do this again!” says Sasha, whose job is to encourage the crowd. “Clap and laugh like you mean it,” he chides the audience of around 100 people, most of them women. “We want the whole country to see how great this is, how much fun you’re having. I repeat: the whole country.”

The internet may attract more eyeballs than it used to, but Russia is still first and foremost a television nation. And it is state-run or state-connected channels that have most of the audience. The Kremlin has long used that power to manage public opinion by controlling the output of daily news programs. But as President Vladimir Putin looks set to run for a fourth term next year, his administration is taking no chances with popular perceptions by showing a new zeal for managing the message from entertainment programs as well.

Such control echoes Soviet times when art was sanctioned and approved by the state. And in the state-owned GlavKino studios on the outskirts of Moscow where “Once Upon a Time in Russia” is filmed there are many reminders of that past, with subtle updates. The famous Soviet image of a woman with a red kerchief holding a finger to her lips and warning “Do not blab!” adorns the wall of one of the studio cafes — except now it has the words “Filming in Progress” underneath.

Similarly, there are two sides to comedies like “Once Upon a Time in Russia.” The storylines poke fun at contemporary Russian life, but in a way that justifies rather than attacks the country’s widespread corruption. The Russian leadership is mocked, but only lightly.

Putin’s impersonator

In another much-loved show, “Comedy Club,” the actor Dmitry Grachev does a chillingly accurate job impersonating President Vladimir Putin himself. In one episode, he upstages a Donald Trump character, dressed up with a parody version of the U.S. president’s hairdo.

These shows give the impression of being self-critical, but are ultimately about “building support for Putin’s regime,” says Maxim Alyukov, a researcher who analyzes television output at the country’s independent Public Sociology Laboratory.

And as the economy has floundered — partly as a result of Western sanctions imposed after Russia’s annexation of Crimea — the Kremlin has seen patriotic TV programming as a way of diverting popular attention away from the “protracted crisis,” Alyukov says.

Putin himself is known to be a fan of Grachev, and has been seen on television howling with laughter at his performances. The Russian leader has even given his blessing for a film about the impersonator — revealing both for the fact such approval was needed, and that the Kremlin sees potential benefit in this kind of satire.

And such shows are hugely popular. “Once Upon a Time in Russia” is watched by 1 in every 15 television viewers according to Russian market research firm Mediascope. And although the show’s producer, the TNT network, is nominally private, there is no disguising its ties to the Kremlin. Its ultimate owner is the media arm of the state energy giant Gazprom. TNT also makes “Comedy Club.”

As Russia’s relationship with the West has worsened, producers have found a soaring audience for shows using the tensions as a storyline. In the reality TV show “Made in Russia,” now in its third season on the state-run Moscow channel 360TV, young couples ditch their European-made cars and clothes in an act of defiance against U.S. and European sanctions.

Russia responded with its own counter-sanctions, including a ban on European food imports. The move initially hurt Russian consumers, but ended up boosting the domestic market. And in this vein, the couples in “Made in Russia” — whose logo is a bar code made of strands of wheat — discover that Russian products are better quality anyway.

Russia’s 007s

And for now, it looks like Russia and the West are locked into a standoff over Ukraine and other issues. “It’s impossible to give back Crimea,” says a senior FSB officer contemptuously in “Adaptation,” another TNT hit. “Everything else is possible,” he jokes. The intelligence officer is one of the lead characters in the series, a Russian version of “The Americans,” and it has been an enormous success. The network will start filming a second season this winter.

TNT declined repeated requests for comment or interviews.

But the narrative message from these shows is clear. Russia is an emboldened country that is winning at home and abroad against the West. “An important part of Russian TV propaganda is to de-legitimize Western opponents,” says Maxim Alyukov.

Spies are also the focus of state broadcaster Channel 1’s series “Sleepers,” which premiered in October. In this Russian version of the James Bond formula, a 007 type character working for the FSB grapples with terrorists and other adversaries while always beating the CIA at the espionage game.

Though Putin is widely expected to run and win a fourth term in next year’s vote, he is finding it harder to achieve the 80 percent-plus approval ratings he had after annexing Crimea in 2014. A growing opposition movement led by anti-corruption crusader Alexei Navalny has gathered momentum, attracting tens of thousands to the streets to protest Putin’s rule.

As a result, politics are seeping into entertainment television more than at any time since the Soviet Union broke up, media watchers say. On “Spotlight: Paris Hilton,” a popular satirical talk show on Channel 1, the four male hosts have traded their usual frivolous banter on current events for chit-chat that directly reinforces the state narrative. The show, whose name never had anything to do with the eponymous American socialite, returned earlier this year after a five-year break due to popular demand.

The four sit at a table covered with newspapers and make light of various political events where Russia has deemed itself triumphant. One striking example took place in April, when comedian Yuri Stoyanov burst into folksy song in tribute to Russia’s deputy ambassador to the United Nations, after he had subjected the British envoy to a patriotic tirade.

The Russian’s outburst came after the British ambassador to the United Nations, Matthew Rycroft, had accused Russia in a security council meeting of supporting a “barbaric” Syrian government. “Look at me! Don’t you look away from me!,” Vladimir Safronkov, the Russian diplomat had screamed. “Don’t you dare insult Russia again!”

For the hosts of “Spotlight: Paris Hilton”, the incident was pure comedy. Plucking at an acoustic guitar, Stoyanov belted out the words “Look into my eyes” as the men around him hopped about and gently sang “Sa-fron-kov”.

The first year of Donald Trump’s presidency has given Russian TV’s patriotic drive a further boost. Schadenfreude has long been the Kremlin’s default reaction whenever the West — especially the U.S. — fails to live up to its idealistic rhetoric. And President Trump has provided a steady flow of chaos and controversy to exploit — whether it be neo-Nazi marches in Virginia and his polarizing response or his missile barrage on Syria, a conflict Russia considers its own turf.

“The U.S. today reminds me of the final days of the Soviet Union, and that’s dangerous,” says Maxim Zabelin, a producer at small film company Zadornoe Kino. “They are blind and don’t see how the rest of the world is changing. They only think of themselves.” His production company is working on a new film parodying U.S.-Russian relations written by the satirist Mikhail Zadornov, whose disdain for the US made him a household name in Soviet times.

In modern Russia, state TV news presenters are more familiar, and their outlets are where the Kremlin first perfected its narrative control techniques. The leaders of this genre are the evening news shows on state-owned channel Rossiya 1, featuring the middle-aged, male propagandists Dmitry Kiselyov and Vladimir Soloviev, who delve into the chosen topics of the week with braggadocio.

They are widely seen as Kremlin mouthpieces who receive their instructions from the very top, and the West is usually the main target of their acerbic attacks. (Kiselyov once said Russia could turn the U.S. into “radioactive ash.”) According to MediaScope, their viewership is huge. Kiselyov’s “News of the Week” program is watched on average by 1 in every 6 Russians.

Heroic narrative

The Russian government is as concerned with the past as the present. Films about the Soviet victory in World War II have been a staple since the 1950s. Over the past few years the Kremlin has put renewed emphasis on the war as a subject for TV shows, especially those with a heroic narrative. The ministry of culture last year ordered more funds be given to productions about Russian military history and other patriotic subjects.

The Soviet Union has been given a new gloss as well. A new Rossiya 1 series called “The Optimists” centers on a team of young Soviet diplomats in the 1960s. Created by Michael Idov, a Latvian-born American journalist and screenwriter, it portrays the USSR as glamorous and unblemished, even idyllic. Russia’s sharp-tongued foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, was among those who praised the series, saying he hoped it would encourage young people to enter the diplomatic service.The effort put into creating the TV shows is evident: the plotline of “Adaptation” makes for easy viewing, and “The Optimists” was beautifully filmed.

But half-way through “The Optimists,” the mood changes and the characters are increasingly disenchanted with the system they represent and become immersed in a well of disappointment with the Soviet regime.

Idov says he did not feel any government restriction on his work, but admits he was surprised “not to be censored.” Yet he says Rossiya 1 most likely changed the show’s scheduling after the shift in narrative to a more skeptical take on the USSR became clear. It broadcast the entire 13-part series in one week, with some episodes — each over 50 minutes in length — shown well after midnight. “They just wanted it to go by as quickly as possible.”

The writer says he is not sure why this happened, but concedes that his portrayal may either have ruffled some important feathers — or Rossiya 1’s bosses were just playing safe. Russian television has become “more demonstrably loyal to the Kremlin and fearful of criticism” in recent years, Idov says. “A lot of Russian censorship is based not on orders from above, but underlings trying to capture the mood in the air.” The Kremlin is taking no chances ahead of presidential elections due next year.

That may have been what happened when a U.S.-made TV show was altered this year — to fit official Russian tastes. In “Fargo,” the TV series loosely based on the popular 1996 Cohen Brothers movie, a Ukrainian character in the third season talks about Putin. This was removed by Russia’s Channel 1 when it broadcast a dubbed version of the series in the spring. Putin’s name was replaced simply with “a boy.” References to corruption and a comparison between Russia and North Korea were also removed when the show aired on state TV.

Paradoxically perhaps, the Russian state has traditionally been happy to have Western and especially American-made shows on the channels it controls. Russia’s default position may be criticism of the West, but it also seeks its approval. “Russia has a very confused pop culture,” says Idov, where it has ended up defining itself in the context of “its love-hate relationship with Western pop culture.” But that insecurity is showing through more clearly, with alterations such as those “Fargo” underwent becoming more common.

Even Putin himself has shown a talent for flipping things around. The Russian leader is a known fan of the Machiavellian U.S. series, “House of Cards,” reportedly telling his defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, to watch it in order to learn how Washington works, according to a book on Putin by Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar.

When Putin met Trump for the first time this year, he appeared to re-enact an encounter between Viktor Petrov and Frank Underwood, the U.S. and Russian presidents in the series. The Petrov character is clearly based on Putin and is portrayed as cunning and suave. And when the real-life U.S. president extended his hand in greeting, the Russian leader surprised him by staying still except to spread his legs and glance downwards at Trump’s hand, just as Petrov did in “House of Cards. ”

The moment went viral on social media. And just like that, Putin had turned the tables and appropriated a slice of American television to get one up on the United States.

This piece was produced with support from MeydanTV.

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Sokolovsky was arrested in September, placed under house arrest and later confined to pre-trial detention for five months. Last week the prosecutor demanded a three-and-a-half year sentence for the 23-year-old for the Pokemon video and several other videos from the Sokolovsky’s “atheist” blog, saying that otherwise other young people will feel a sense of impunity.

“Ruslan didn’t offend anyone with anything. He simply expressed his opinion with words,” Sokolovsky’s mother told Coda in the first installment of Jailed for a Like, a video series that tracks cases of Russians imprisoned for their activity on social media. “He was shocked that for some cartoon you can be jailed or fined 500,000 rubles [$8,390].”

After hearing on television that playing Pokemon Go in a church was now banned in Russia, Sokolovsky filmed a video where he quietly played the game in an almost-empty church. In The Simpsons’ nineteenth episode of the show’s twenty-ninth season, Homer interrupts a church service while playing “Peekimon Get,” a clear reference to Pokemon Go, and his friend tells the priest that “This game is, or at least was, bigger than Jesus.”

Several Russian Orthodox theologians spoke out against this scene, saying that the newest episode of The Simpsons confirms that Hollywood produces “powerful propaganda” to disintegrate society,” especially in Russia, reported TASS. One of the theologians Andrei Novikov recommends raising the age restrictions for the Fox sitcom which is rebroadcast on the channel 2x2 and also strengthening control over media in Russia.

Another Orthodox cleric from the Ivanovskaya region also told TASS that The Simpsons’ episode could “shake the moral foundations of young viewers.”

“We don’t air content that can compromise the network or cause social controversy, therefore we won’t be showing this episode,” said Anastasia Shablovskaya, 2x2’s PR director to RBC.

The Russian Orthodox Church has not officially commented on the episode.

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On the eve of getting visa-free travel to Europe, Georgia has updated its legislation on sexual assault, removing “sodomy, lesbianism” and “other perverted sexual contact” from its definition but Sputnik presented the updated laws against sexual and domestic violence as encouragement of homosexuality coming from Europe.

Ever since Vladimir Putin positioned himself as a protector of “traditional values” around the world, the narrative of a “morally corrupted” West that promotes homosexuality and erodes families has been a common theme for pro-Kremlin news sites.

Within this theme domestic violence is a new hot topic: Russia recently passed a law that actually decriminalizes domestic violence and in Armenia legislation meant to strengthen laws against domestic abuse was scrapped for being too “European.” Human rights groups in Armenia blamed pro-Russian forces and media for influencing parliament’s decision to drop the bill.

Unlike Armenia, Georgia has an overwhelmingly anti-Russian political establishment and population, which seems to make Russian propaganda here more subtle and creative.

“It’s still unpopular to be clearly pro-Russian in Georgia,” said Tamar Kintsurashvili, the head of the Media Development Foundation in Tbilisi which monitors Russian propaganda. Kintsurashvili says that despite overwhelmingly anti-Russian sentiments, Moscow’s narrative has gained a foothold in Georgia since the country fought a war with Russia in 2008. It happened, she explains, largely because of sites such as Sputnik which offer a mix of entertainment and clickbait news with only an occasional serving of fake news on topics that are likely to resonate, such as the promotion of “sodomy” in the context of Georgia’s relationship with Europe.

Sputnik’s Georgian edition is a great example of why the organization which publishes in 29 languages and has regional offices in Washington, Cairo and Montevideo, has been labelled the “Buzzfeed of propaganda.”

The site publishes a mix of articles about Academy Award upsets, European football scores and a video series about sea lions interested in having sex with penguins. Then, once in a while a piece of fake political news such as “lesbianism and sodomy might be permitted” creeps through.

Sputnik was not immediately available for comment.

“Anyone who shares any news from this freaking Georgian language site, be it about cats or anything else, you are aiding kremlin propaganda,” wrote one Facebook user along with screenshots of Sputnik’s original headline for the piece.

While cats and Russian propaganda may seem unlikely allies for Sputnik the mix of entertainment news, clickbait stories and a political agenda are a potent formula.

The post Disinformation in action: social media users catch Sputnik International accusing Georgia of legalizing ‘sodomy,’ ‘lesbianism’ appeared first on Coda Story.

For Simonyan, who has run the channel since it was founded in 2005, dealing with controversy is part of the job description: RT’s journalists have quit on air in protest of being forced to toe Moscow’s line, the network has been caught redacting its footage to conform to the Kremlin’s narrative of its actions abroad and the western press enjoys pointing out that Simonyan even has a direct line to the Kremlin on her desk.

So why does RT appeal to western audiences?

Despite its reputation, RT is a remarkable success story. Set up to provide a “Russian perspective” on world events, today the network is watched by 35 million people daily in 38 countries with over two million people subscribed on YouTube, many of whom are tuning in from Western Europe and the United States.

Coda has reached out to over a hundred RT followers in Western Europe and the U.S. to understand why they tune in. Several dozen responded. They were mostly men, of diverse ages and professions: from a university professor in Nebraska to a young journalist in Alabama and a currency trader in Phoenix. Here are four opinions many of them share:

TREND 1: RT is honest about lying

Few claimed that RT was objective or broadcast truth. This didn’t seem to bother them either. Simon Wood, 46, from Manchester, England, believes that by definition RT is biased. The network’s mission statement spells out that RT provides a Russian perspective on world affairs. Simon finds this honesty refreshing and often shares their content on social media as well as reporting from other news sources that present alternative viewpoints. “Is there bias? Most certainly there is - I think viewers are well aware of this,” Simon wrote to Coda. “The same applies to Western media, but their mission statements are misleading -they claim to be ‘fair and balanced’ when they are patently not.” Simon has been residing in Japan for over twenty years now but closely follows the western press and often criticizes its reporting in his blog posts.

Like Simon, Brandon Schmidt, 19, from Alabama is also cautious about what he sees on RT. “I don’t trust their news about what they’re saying about what the Russian government is doing. It’s been proven that they lie.” But he says that he trusts the network’s news about the U.S. and exclusively uses RT’s content for a podcast he runs. He also regularly shares their posts on his Facebook page. Brandon finds that RT constantly breaks stories that he doesn’t see anywhere else, especially international reports on ISIS and the U.S. bombing campaign in Syria. As with many RT viewers Coda spoke with Brandon doesn’t align himself with a political party or news outlet that is perceived as more Republican or Democrat friendly. Instead, Brandon said: “Truth wise I’m smack dab in the middle. I don’t like crap being shoved in my face.” That’s what he says Western media does.

TREND 2: Iraq and Occupy Wall Street drove me to RT

David Pabon, 32, from Brooklyn, New York is still bitter about how mainstream channels covered the Occupy Wall Street Movement, in which he participated. “The mainstream media was calling the Occupy Movement by derogatory names such as dirty hipster,” David said. RT, on the other hand, “was reporting the reasons why we were there instead of sensationalizing it.” The network’s coverage, which likened the Occupy Wall Street movement to America’s Arab Spring, earned RT an Emmy nomination and many fans among left-wing Americans like David.

One of them is Paul Saulburg, 23 from El Paso, Texas who was impressed when RT told him about things that he found shocking about U.S. foreign policy, such as the use of phosphorus for smoke screens in Iraq. “Wow, I didn’t see that anywhere else,” he remembered thinking, “RT does a good job of showing the true face of United States foreign policy.” Paul feels that the U.S. media whitewashes America’s actions abroad and finds the onslaught of criticism against RT from Western media to be hypocritical, especially when it comes to Iraq. He says none of it means that he trusts RT when it comes to Russia’s actions abroad and he is familiar with one case this past summer when RT redacted its footage showing Russian planes bound for Syria armed with cluster munitions, a weapon banned by the UN that Russia has denied using.

TREND 3: Putin isn’t as bad as they want us to believe

Nickoli Schreiber, 28, from Phoenix, Arizona, looks at RT every day and after a year of tuning in he has concluded that “Putin is not a monster as our country portrays him.” Nickoli, a currency trader, now thinks of Putin as “a leader who does not let other countries such as american bully him,” Nickoli wrote to Coda.

Across the Atlantic in Solihull, England, Philip Bullen said he knew nothing about Putin before he started watching RT. “The British news Never reports what he says verbatim,” Bullen wrote to Coda about the Russian president. “We get a ‘version’ of the meaning. Which is usually wrong.” He compares American and British politicians who are critical of Russia to “beavis and butthead.”

Sherrie Dahl from Poulsbo, Washington not only agrees with Phillip, she even has Putin’s photo as her Facebook cover photo. “I chose it, because in this time of ineffective national leaders, Putin stands out...We should be so fortunate as to have an Americanized version of him,” Sherrie wrote on her page last September. Sherrie was pleased with the results of the elections and thinks Americans are fortunate to have President Donald Trump as a leader. “Like Putin, there is resolve and consistency,” she wrote about Trump’s values. “I’m more hopeful than I’ve been in a long while.”

TREND 4: We’re on the cusp of WWIII

One of the most startling themes that emerged from conversations with numerous RT fans, from reading over a hundred public social media accounts of RT followers and from posts from RT viewers in various Facebook groups was fear over the imminent breakout of WWIII. Nickoli from Phoenix believes that “we’re on the cusp of a World War III.” Paul from El Paso shared a link to a YouTube video called “A Vote For Hillary is a Vote For World War 3.” Another RT follower, Aaron Klein from Marietta, Georgia, expressed the same pre-election urgency to Coda in a message. “Everyone around the world is stancing up for ww3 and were sitting here with non stop coverage of a political race that is absolutely ridiculous,” Klein wrote close to the November election.

These concerns seem to have subsided with the election of Donald Trump as president. As one RT fan wrote about RT’s editorial, With Trump’s win we might’ve dodged nuclear bullet: “This election wasn’t only about the U.S., it was about preventing WW3.”

Responses from RT followers to Coda are reprinted as they were originally written.

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