If something was very difficult, I was taught that you just had to reframe it as a small or insignificant moment compared to the vast eternities and infinities around us. It was a Mormon community, and we were a Mormon family, part of generations of Mormons. I can trace my ancestry back to the early Mormon settlers. Our family were very observant: going to church every Sunday, and deeply faithful to the beliefs and tenets of the Mormon Church.

There's a belief in Mormonism: "As man is, God once was. As God is, man may become." And since God is perfect, the belief is that we too can one day become perfect. 

We believed in perfection. And we were striving to be perfect—realizing that while we couldn't be perfect in this life, we should always attempt to be. We worked for excellence in everything we did.

It was an inspiring idea to me, but growing up in a world where I felt perfection was always the expectation was also tough. 

In a way, I felt like there were two of me. There was this perfect person that I had to play and that everyone loved. And then there was this other part of me that was very disappointed by who I was—frustrated, knowing I wasn't living up to those same standards. I really felt like two people.

This perfectionism found its way into many of my pursuits. I loved to play the cello. Yo-Yo Ma was my idol. I played quite well and had a fabulous teacher. At 14, I became the principal cellist for our all-state orchestra, and later played in the World Youth Symphony at Interlochen Arts Camp and in a National Honors Orchestra. I was part of a group of kids who were all playing at the highest level. And I was driven. I wanted to be one of the very, very best.

I went on to study at Northwestern in Chicago and played there too. I was the youngest cellist in the studio of Hans Jensen, and was surrounded by these incredible musicians. We played eight hours a day, time filled with practice, orchestra, chamber music, studio, and lessons. I spent hours and hours working through the tiniest movements of the hand, individual shifts, weight, movement, repetition, memory, trying to find perfect intonation, rhythm, and expression. I loved that I could control things, practice, and improve. I could find moments of perfection.

I remember one night being in the practice rooms, walking down the hall, and hearing some of the most beautiful playing I'd ever heard. I peeked in and didn’t recognize the cellist. They were a former student now warming up for an audition with the Chicago Symphony. 

Later on, I heard they didn’t get it. I remember thinking, "Oh my goodness, if you can play that well and still not make it..." It kind of shattered my worldview—it really hit me that I would never be the very best. There was so much talent, and I just wasn't quite there. 

I decided to step away from the cello as a profession. I’d play for fun, but not make it my career. I’d explore other interests and passions.

There's a belief in Mormonism: "As man is, God once was. As God is, man may become."

As I moved through my twenties, my relationship with Mormonism started to become strained. When you’re suddenly 24, 25, 26 and not married, that's tough. Brigham Young [the second and longest-serving prophet of the Mormon Church] said that if you're not married by 30, you're a menace to society. It just became more and more awkward to be involved. I felt like people were wondering, “What’s wrong with him?” 

Eventually, I left the church. And I suddenly felt like a complete person — it was a really profound shift. There weren’t two of me anymore. I didn’t have to put on a front. Now that I didn’t have to worry about being that version of perfect, I could just be me. 

But the desire for perfection was impossible for me to kick entirely. I was still excited about striving, and I think a lot of this energy and focus then poured into my work and career as a designer and researcher. I worked at places like the Mayo Clinic, considered by many to be the world’s best hospital. I studied in London at the Royal College of Art, where I received my master’s on the prestigious Design Interactions course exploring emerging technology, futures, and speculative design. I found I loved working with the best, and being around others who were striving for perfection in similar ways. It was thrilling.

One of the big questions I started to explore during my master's studies in design, and I think in part because I felt this void of meaning after leaving Mormonism, was “what is important to strive for in life?” What should we be perfecting? What is the goal of everything? Or in design terms, “What’s the design intent of everything?”

I spent a huge amount of time with this question, and in the end I came to the conclusion that it’s happiness. Happiness is the goal. We should strive in life for happiness. Happiness is the design intent of everything. It is the idea that no matter what we do, no matter what activity we undertake, we do it because we believe doing it or achieving the thing will make us better off or happier. This fit really well with the beliefs I grew up with, but now I had a new, non-religious way in to explore it.

The question then became: What is happiness? I came to the conclusion that happiness is chemical—an evolved sensation that indicates when our needs in terms of survival have been met. You're happy when you have a wonderful meal because your body has evolved to identify good food as improving your chances of survival. The same is true for sleep, exercise, sex, family, friendships, meaning, purpose–everything can be seen through this evolutionary happiness lens. 

 So if happiness evolved as the signal for survival, then I wanted to optimize my survival to optimize that feeling. What would it look like if I optimized the design of my life for happiness? What could I change to feel the most amount of happiness for the longest amount of time? What would life look like if I lived perfectly with this goal in mind?

I started measuring my happiness on a daily basis, and then making changes to my life to see how I might improve it. I took my evolutionary basic needs for survival and organized them in terms of how quickly their absence would kill me as a way to prioritize interventions. 

Breathing was first on the list — we can’t last long without it. So I tried to optimize my breathing. I didn’t really know how to breathe or how powerful breathing is—how it changes the way we feel, bringing calm and peace, or energy and alertness. So I practiced breathing.

The optimizations continued, diet, sleep, exercise, material possessions, friends, family, purpose, along with a shedding of any behaviour or activity that I couldn’t see meaningfully improving my happiness. For example, I looked at clothing and fashion, and couldn’t see any real happiness impact. So I got rid of almost all of my clothing, and have worn the same white t-shirts and grey or blue jeans for the past 15 years.

I got involved in the Quantified Self (QS) movement and started tracking my heart rate, blood pressure, diet, sleep, exercise, cognitive speed, happiness, creativity, and feelings of purpose. I liked the data. I’d go to QS meet-ups and conferences with others doing self experiments to optimize different aspects of their lives, from athletic performance, to sleep, to disease symptoms.

I also started to think about longevity. If I was optimizing for happiness through these evolutionary basics, how long could one live if these needs were perfectly satisfied? I started to put on my websites – “copyright 2103”. That’s when I’ll be 125. That felt like a nice goal, and something that I imagined could be completely possible — especially if every aspect of my life was optimized, along with future advancements in science and medicine.

In 2022, some 12 years later, I came across Bryan Johnson. A successful entrepreneur, also ex-Mormon, optimizing his health and longevity through data. It was familiar. He had come to this kind of life optimization in a slightly different way and for different reasons, but I was so excited by what he was doing. I thought, "This is how I’d live if I had unlimited funds."

He said he was optimizing every organ and body system: What does our heart need? What does our brain need? What does our liver need? He was optimizing the biomarkers for each one. He said he believed in data, honesty and transparency, and following where the data led. He was open to challenging societal norms. He said he had a team of doctors, had reviewed thousands of studies to develop his protocols. He said every calorie had to fight for its life to be in his body. He suggested everything should be third-party tested. He also suggested that in our lifetime advances in medicine would allow people to live radically longer lives, or even to not die. 

These ideas all made sense to me. There was also a kind of ideal of perfect and achieving perfection that resonated with me. Early on, Bryan shared his protocols and data online. And a lot of people tried his recipes and workouts, experimenting for themselves. I did too. It also started me thinking again more broadly about how to live better, now with my wife and young family. For me this was personal, but also exciting to think about what a society might look like when we strived at scale for perfection in this way. Bryan seemed to be someone with the means and platform to push this conversation.

I think all of my experience to this point was the set up for, ultimately, my deep disappointment in Bryan Johnson and my frustrating experience as a participant in his BP5000 study.

In early 2024 there was a callout for people to participate in a study to look at how Bryan’s protocols might improve their health and wellbeing. He said he wanted to make it easier to follow his approach, and he started to put together a product line of the same supplements that he used. It was called Blueprint – and the first 5000 people to test it out would be called the Blueprint 5000, or BP5000. We would measure our biomarkers and follow his supplement regime for three months and then measure again to see its effects at a population level. I thought it would be a fun experiment, participating in real citizen science moving from n=1 to n=many. We had to apply, and there was a lot of excitement among those of us who were selected. They were a mix of people who had done a lot of self-quantification, nutritionists, athletes, and others looking to take first steps into better personal health. We each had to pay about $2,000 to participate, covering Blueprint supplements and the blood tests, and we were promised that all the data would be shared and open-sourced at the end of the study.

The study began very quickly, and there were red flags almost immediately around the administration of the study, with product delivery problems, defective product packaging, blood test problems, and confusion among participants about the protocols. There wasn’t even a way to see if participants died during the study, which felt weird for work focused on longevity. But we all kind of rolled with it. We wanted to make it work.

We took baseline measurements, weighed ourselves, measured body composition, uploaded Whoop or Apple Watch data, did blood tests covering 100s of biomarkers, and completed a number of self-reported studies on things like sexual health and mental health. I loved this type of self-measurement.

Participants connected over Discord, comparing notes, and posting about our progress. 

Right off, some effects were incredible. I had a huge amount of energy. I was bounding up the stairs, doing extra pull-ups without feeling tired. My joints felt smooth. I noticed I was feeling bulkier — I had more muscle definition as my body fat percentage started to drop.

There were also some strange effects. For instance, I noticed in a cold shower, I could feel the cold, but I didn’t feel any urgency to get out. Same with the sauna. I had weird sensations of deep focus and vibrant, vivid vision. I started having questions—was this better? Had I deadened sensitivity to pain? What exactly was happening here?

Then things went really wrong. My ears started ringing — high-pitched and constant. I developed Tinnitus. And my sleep got wrecked. I started waking up at two, three, four AM, completely wired, unable to turn off my mind. It was so bad I had to stop all of the Blueprint supplements after only a few weeks.

On the Discord channel where we were sharing our results, I saw Bryan talking positively about people having great experiences with the stack. But when I or anyone else mentioned adverse side effects, the response tended to be: “wait until the study is finished and see if there’s a statistical effect to worry about."

So positive anecdotes were fine, but when it came to negative ones, suddenly, we needed large-scale data. That really put me off. I thought the whole point was to test efficacy and safety in a data-driven way. And the side effects were not ignorable.

Many of us were trying to help each other figure out what interventions in the stack were driving different side effects, but we were never given the “1,000+ scientific studies” that Blueprint was supposedly built upon which would have had side-effect reporting. We struggled even to get a complete list of the interventions that were in the stack from the Blueprint team, with numbers evolving from 67 to 74 over the course of the study. It was impossible to tell which ingredient in which products was doing what to people.

We were told to no longer discuss side-effects in the Discord but email Support with issues. I was even kicked off the Discord at one point for “fear mongering” because I was encouraging people to share the side effects they were experiencing.

The Blueprint team were also making changes to the products mid-study, changing protein sources and allulose levels, leaving people with months’ worth of expensive essentially defective products, and surely impacting study results.

When Bryan then announced they were launching the BP10000, allowing more people to buy his products, even before the BP5000 study had finished, and without addressing all of the concerns about side effects, it suddenly became clear to me and many others that we had just been part of a launch and distribution plan for a new supplement line, not participants in a scientific study.

Bryan has not still to this day, a year later, released the full BP5000 data set to the participants as he promised to do. In fact he has ghosted participants and refuses to answer questions about the BP5000. He blocked me on X recently for bringing it up. I suspect that this is because the data is really bad, and my worries line up with reporting from the New York Times where leaked internal Blueprint data suggests many of the BP5000 participants experienced some negative side effects, with some participants even having serious drops in testosterone or becoming pre-diabetic.

I’m still angry today about how this all went down. I’m angry that I was taken in by someone I now feel was a snake oil salesman. I’m angry that the marketing needs of Bryan’s supplement business and his need to control his image overshadowed the opportunity to generate some real science. I’m angry that Blueprint may be hurting some people. I’m angry because the way Bryan Johnson has gone about this grates on my sense of perfection.

Bryan’s call to “Don’t Die” now rings in my ears as “Don’t Lie” every time I hear it. I hope the societal mechanisms for truth will be able to help him make a course correction. I hope he will release the BP5000 data set and apologize to participants. But Bryan Johnson feels to me like an unstoppable marketing force at this point — full A-list influencer status — and sort of untouchable, with no use for those of us interested in the science and data.

This experience has also had me reflecting on and asking bigger questions of the longevity movement and myself.

We’re ignoring climate breakdown. The latest indications suggest we’re headed toward three degrees of warming. These are societal collapse numbers, in the next 15 years. When there are no bees and no food, catastrophic fires and floods, your Heart Rate Variability doesn’t really matter. There’s a sort of “bunker mentality” prevalent in some of the longevity movement, and wider tech — we can just ignore it, and we’ll magically come out on the other side, sleep scores intact. 

The question then became: What is happiness? I came to the conclusion that happiness is chemical—an evolved sensation that indicates when our needs in terms of survival have been met.

I’ve also started to think that calls to live forever are perhaps misplaced, and that in fact we have evolved to die. Death is a good thing. A feature, not a bug. It allows for new life—we need children, young people, new minds who can understand this context and move us forward. I worry that older minds are locked into outdated patterns of thinking, mindsets trained in and for a world that no longer exists, thinking that destroyed everything in the first place, and which is now actually detrimental to progress. The life cycle—bringing in new generations with new thinking—is the mechanism our species has evolved to function within. Survival is and should be optimized for the species, not the individual.

I love thinking about the future. I love spending time there, understanding what it might look like. It is a huge part of my design practice. But as much as I love the future, the most exciting thing to me is the choices we make right now in each moment. All of that information from our future imaginings should come back to help inform current decision-making and optimize the choices we have now. But I don’t see this happening today. Our current actions as a society seem totally disconnected from any optimized, survivable future. We’re not learning from the future. We’re not acting for the future.

We must engage with all outcomes, positive and negative. We're seeing breakthroughs in many domains happening at an exponential rate, especially in AI. But, at the same time, I see job displacement, huge concentration of wealth, and political systems that don't seem capable of regulating or facilitating democratic conversations about these changes. Creators must own it all. If you build AI, take responsibility for the lost job, and create mechanisms to share wealth. If you build a company around longevity and make promises to people about openness and transparency, you have to engage with all the positive outcomes and negative side effects, no matter what they are.

I’m sometimes overwhelmed by our current state. My striving for perfection and optimizations throughout my life have maybe been a way to give me a sense of control in a world where at a macro scale I don’t actually have much power. We are in a moment now where a handful of individuals and companies will get to decide what’s next. A few governments might be able to influence those decisions. Influencers wield enormous power. But most of us will just be subject to and participants in all that happens. And then we’ll die.

But until then my ears are still ringing.

This article was put together based on interviews J.Paul Neeley did with Isobel Cockerell and Christopher Wylie, as part of their reporting for CAPTURED, our new audio series on how Silicon Valley’s AI prophets are choosing our future for us. You can listen now on Audible.

The post When I’m 125? appeared first on Coda Story.

Every morning at about 6:30am I catch the trolley car from my home in downtown San Diego up to the hospital where I work — a place called La Jolla. Southern California isn't known for its public transportation, but I'm the weirdo that takes it — and I like it. It's quick, it's easy, I don't have to pay for parking, it's wonderful. A typical shift is 12 hours and it ends up being 13 by the time you do your report and get all your charting done, so you're there for a very long time. 

Most of the time, I don’t go to work expecting catastrophe — of course it happens once in a while, but usually I’m just going into a normal job, where you do routine stuff.

I work in the neuro-intensive care unit. The majority of our patients have just had neurosurgery for tumors or strokes. It’s not a happy place most of the time. I see a lot of people with long recoveries ahead of them who need to relearn basic skills — how to hold a pencil, how to walk. After a brain injury, you lose those abilities, and it's a long process to get them back. It's not like we do a procedure, fix them, and they go home the next day. We see patients at their worst, but we don't get to see the progress. If we're lucky, we might hear months later that they've made a full recovery. It's an environment where there's not much instant gratification. 

As a nurse, you end up relying on intuition a lot. It's in the way a patient says something, or just a feeling you get from how they look. It’s not something I think machines can do — and yet, in recent years, we’ve seen more and more artificial intelligence creep into our hospitals. 

I get to work at 7am. The hospital I work at looks futuristic from the outside — it’s this high-rise building, all glass and curved lines. It’s won a bunch of architectural awards. The building was financed by Irwin Jacobs, who’s the billionaire owner of Qualcomm, a big San Diego tech company. I think the hospital being owned by a tech billionaire really has a huge amount to do with the way they see technology and the way they dive headfirst into it.

They always want to be on the cutting edge of everything. And so when something new comes out, they're going to jump right on it. I think that's part of why they dive headfirst into this AI thing.  

We didn't call it AI at first. The first thing that happened was these new innovations just crept into our electronic medical record system. They were tools that monitored whether specific steps in patient treatment were being followed. If something was missed or hadn’t been done, the AI would send an alert. It was very primitive, and it was there to stop patients falling through the cracks. 

Then in 2018, the hospital bought a new program from Epic, the electronic medical record company. It predicted something called “patient acuity” — basically the workload each patient requires from their nursing care. It’s a really important measurement we have in nursing, to determine how sick a person is and how many resources they will need. At its most basic level, we just classify patients as low, medium or high need. Before the AI came in, we basically filled in this questionnaire — which would ask things like how many meds a patient needed. Are they IV meds? Are they crushed? Do you have a central line versus a peripheral? That sort of thing. 

This determines whether a patient was low, medium or high-need. And we’d figure out staffing based on that. If you had lots of high-need patients, you needed more staffing. If you had mostly low-need patients, you could get away with fewer. 

We used to answer the questions ourselves and we felt like we had control over it. We felt like we had agency. But one day, it was taken away from us. Instead, they bought this AI-powered program without notifying the unions, nurses, or representatives. They just started using it and sent out an email saying, 'Hey, we're using this now.'

The new program used AI to pull from a patient’s notes, from the charts, and then gave them a special score. It was suddenly just running in the background at the hospital.

The problem was, we had no idea where these numbers were coming from. It felt like magic, but not in a good way. It would spit out a score, like 240, but we didn't know what that meant. There was no clear cutoff for low, medium, or high need, making it functionally useless.

The upshot was, it took away our ability to advocate for patients. We couldn’t point to a score and say, 'This patient is too sick, I need to focus on them alone,' because the numbers didn’t help us make that case anymore. They didn’t tell us if a patient was low, medium, or high need. They just gave patients a seemingly random score that nobody understood, on a scale of one to infinity.

We felt the system was designed to take decision-making power away from nurses at the bedside. Deny us the power to have a say in how much staffing we need. 

That was the first thing.

Then, earlier this year, the hospital got a huge donation from the Jacobs family, and they hired a chief AI officer. When we heard that, alarm bells went off — “they're going all in on AI,” we said to each other. We found out about this Scribe technology that they were rolling out. It’s called Ambient Documentation. They announced they were going to pilot this program with the physicians at our hospital. 

It basically records your encounter with your patient. And then it's like chat GPT or a large language model — it takes everything and just auto populates a note. Or your “documentation.”

There were obvious concerns with this, and the number one thing that people said was, "Oh my god — it's like mass surveillance. They're gonna listen to everything our patients say, everything we do. They're gonna track us.”

This isn't the first time they've tried to track nurses. My hospital hasn’t done this, but there are hospitals around the US that use tracking tags to monitor how many times you go into a room to make sure you're meeting these metrics. It’s as if they don’t trust us to actually care for our patients. 

We leafletted our colleagues to try to educate them on what “Ambient Documentation” actually means. We demanded to meet with the chief AI officer. He downplayed a lot of it, saying, 'No, no, no, we hear you. We're right there with you. We're starting; it’s just a pilot.' A lot of us rolled our eyes.

He said they were adopting the program because of physician burnout. It’s true, documentation is one of the most mundane aspects of a physician's job, and they hate doing it.

The reasoning for bringing in AI tools to monitor patients is always that it will make life easier for us, but in my experience, technology in healthcare rarely makes things better. It usually just speeds up the factory floor, squeezing more out of us, so they can ultimately hire fewer of us. 

“Efficiency” is a buzzword in Silicon Valley, but get it out of your mind when it comes to healthcare. When you're optimizing for efficiency, you're getting rid of redundancies. But when patients' lives are at stake, you actually want redundancy. You want extra slack in the system. You want multiple sets of eyes on a patient in a hospital. 

When you try to reduce everything down to a machine that one person relies on to carry out decisions, then there's only one set of eyes on that patient. That may be efficient, but by creating efficiency, you're also creating a lot of potential points of failure. So, efficiency isn't as efficient as tech bros think it is.

In an ideal world, they believe technology would take away mundane tasks, allowing us to focus on patient encounters instead of spending our time typing behind a computer. 

But who thinks recording everything a patient says and storing it on a third-party server is a good idea? That’s crazy. I’d need assurance that the system is 100 percent secure — though nothing ever is. We’d all love to be freed from documentation requirements and be more present with our patients.

There’s a proper way to do this. AI isn’t inevitable, but it’s come at us fast. One day, ChatGPT was a novelty, and now everything is AI. We’re being bombarded with it.

The other thing that’s burst into our hospitals in recent years is an AI-powered alert system. They’re these alerts that ping us to make sure we’ve done certain things — like checked for sepsis, for example. They’re usually not that helpful, or not timed very well. The goal is to stop patients falling through the cracks — that’s obviously a nightmare scenario in healthcare. But I don’t think the system is working as intended.

I don’t think the goal is really to provide a safety net for everyone — I think it’s actually to speed us up, so we can see more patients, reduce visits down from 15 minutes to 12 minutes to 10. Efficiency, again.

I believe the goal is for these alerts to eventually take over healthcare. To tell us how to do our jobs rather than have hospitals spend money training nurses and have them develop critical thinking skills, experience, and intuition. So we basically just become operators of the machines.

As a seasoned nurse, I’ve learned to recognize patterns and anticipate potential outcomes based on what I see. New nurses don’t have that intuition or forethought yet; developing critical thinking is part of their training. When they experience different situations, they start to understand that instinctively.

In the future, with AI, and alerts pinging them all day reminding them how to do their job, new cohorts of nurses might not develop that same intuition. Critical thinking is being shifted elsewhere — to the machine. I believe the tech leaders envision a world where they can crack the code of human illness and automate everything based on algorithms. They just see us as machines that can be figured out.

The artwork for this piece was developed during a Rhode Island School of Design course taught by Marisa Mazria Katz, in collaboration with the Center for Artistic Inquiry and Reporting.

The post I’m a neurology ICU nurse. The creep of AI in our hospitals terrifies me appeared first on Coda Story.

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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I came to the U.K. with my family when I was a young kid, fleeing a civil war. I went to preschool, high school and college here. I’m in my thirties now and have a kid of my own. I don’t know anything about the country I was born in — England is all I know. 

I got my permanent residency when I was little. I remember my dad also started applying for our British citizenship when I was younger but never quite got his head around the bureaucracy. 

When I got older, I got into a lifestyle I shouldn’t have and was arrested and given a criminal sentence and jail time. The funny thing is, just before I was arrested, I had finally saved up enough to start the process of applying for citizenship myself but never got around to it in time.

In the U.K., if you’re not a citizen and you commit a crime, the government has the power to deport you. It doesn’t matter if you’ve lived here all your life. So now, I’m fighting the prospect of being kicked out of the only country I’ve ever known. 

When I finished my sentence, they kept me in prison under immigration powers. When I finally got bail, they said I’d have to wear a GPS-powered ankle tag so that I didn’t disappear. I couldn’t believe it. If I had been a British citizen, when I finished my sentence that would be it, I’d be free. But in the eyes of the government, I was a foreigner, and so the Home Office — immigration — wanted to keep an eye on me at all times. 

My appointments with immigration had a strange quality to them. I could tell from the way we communicated that the officers instinctively knew they were talking to a British person. But the system had told them to treat me like an outsider and to follow the procedures for deporting me. They were like this impenetrable wall, and they treated me like I was nothing because I didn’t have a passport. They tried to play dumb, like they had no idea who I was or that I had been here my whole life, even though I’ve always been in the system.

I tried to explain there was no need to tag me and that I would never abscond. After all, I have a child here who I want to stay with. They decided to tag me anyway.

The day came when they arrived in my holding cell to fit the tag. I was shocked by its bulkiness. I thought to myself, ‘How am I going to cover this up under my jeans?’ I love to train and keep fit, but I couldn’t imagine going to the gym with this thing around my ankle. 

It’s hard to explain what it’s like to wear that thing. When I was first released — after many months inside — it felt amazing to be free, to wake up whenever I wanted and not have to wait for someone to come and open my door.

But gradually, I started to realize I wasn’t really free. And people did come to my door. Not prison guards, but people from a private security company. I later learned that company is called Capita.  When things go wrong with the tag, it’s the Capita people who show up at your home.

The visits were unsettling. I had no idea how much power the Capita people had or whether I was even obliged, legally, to let them in. The employees themselves were a bit clueless. Sometimes I would level with them, and they would admit they had no idea why I was being tagged.

It soon became clear that the technology attached to my ankle was pretty glitchy. One time, they came and told me, ‘The system says the tag had been tampered with.’ They checked my ankle and found nothing wrong. It sent my mind whirring. What had I done to jolt the strap? I suddenly felt anxious to leave the house, in case I knocked it while out somewhere. I began to move through the world more carefully. 

Other times, Capita staff came round to tell me my location had stopped registering. The system wasn’t even functioning, and that frustrated me. 

All these issues seemed to make out like I was the one doing something wrong. But I realize now it was nothing to do with me — the problem was with the tag, and the result was that I felt harassed by these constant unannounced visits by these anonymous Capita employees. 

In theory, the Home Office would call to warn you of Capita’s visits, but often they just showed up at random. They never came when they said they would. Once, I got a letter saying I breached my bail conditions after not being home when they came around. But I’d never been told they were coming in the first place. It was so anxiety-inducing: I was afraid if there were too many problems with the tag, it might be used against me in my deportation case. 

The other nightmare was the charging system. According to the people who fit my tag, the device could last 24 hours between charges. It never did. I’d be out and about or at work, and I’d have to calculate how long I could stay there before I needed to go home and charge. The low battery light would flash red, the device would start loudly vibrating, and I’d panic. Sometimes others would hear the vibration and ask me if it was my phone. Being around people and having to charge up your ankle is so embarrassing. There’s a portable charger, but it’s slow. If you want to charge up quicker, you have to sit down next to a plug outlet for two hours and wait. 

I didn’t want my child to know I’d been tagged or that I was having problems with immigration. I couldn’t bear the thought of trying to explain why I was wearing this thing around my ankle or that I was facing deportation. Whenever we were together I made sure to wear extra-loose jeans. 

I couldn’t think beyond the tag. It was always on my mind, a constant burden. It felt like this physical reminder of all my mistakes in life. I couldn’t focus on my future. I just felt stuck on that day when I was arrested. I had done my time, but the message from the Home Office was clear: There was no rehabilitation, at least not for me. I felt like I was sinking into quicksand, being pulled down into the darkness. 

My world contracted, and my mental health went into freefall. I came to realize I wasn’t really free: I was in an outside prison. The government knew where I was 24/7. Were they really concerned I would abscond, or did they simply want to intrude on my life? 

Eventually, my mental health got so bad I was able to get the tag removed, although I’m still facing deportation.

After the tag was taken off, it took me a while to absorb that I wasn’t being tracked anymore. Even a month later, I still put my jeans on as if I had the tag on. I could still kind of feel it there, around my ankle. I still felt like I was being watched. Of course, tag or no tag, the government always has other ways to monitor you. 

I’ve begun to think more deeply about the country I’ve always called home. This country that says it no longer wants me. The country that wants to watch my every move. I’m fighting all of it to stay with my child, but I sometimes wonder if, in the long term, I even want to be a part of this system, if this is how it treats people.

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Hundreds of Uyghurs fled China in 2014, as the Chinese authorities launched a crackdown on the Muslim-majority ethnic group native to the northwest region of Xinjiang. The aim, the government said, was to stamp out extremism and separatist movements in the region. The authorities called it the “strike hard campaign against violent terrorism” and created a program of repression to closely monitor, surveil and control the Uyghur population.

The authorities bulldozed mosques, saw any expression of religion as extremist and confiscated Qurans. By 2018, as many as one million Uyghurs had been sent to so-called “re-education” camps. Across the region, an extensive high-tech system of surveillance was rolled out to monitor every movement of the Uyghur population. This remains the case to this day, with the Chinese police in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, reportedly requiring residents to download a mobile app which enables them to monitor phones. 

Back in 2014, Uyghurs seeking to flee the burgeoning crackdown were forced to take a notoriously dangerous route, known as the “smugglers’ road,” through Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand into Malaysia — from there, they could reach Turkey. Though Malaysia had previously deported some Uyghur Muslims to China, in 2018, a Malaysian court released 11 Uyghurs on human rights grounds and allowed them safe passage to Turkey. By September 2020, despite Chinese anger, Malaysia declared it would not extradite Uyghurs seeking refuge in a third country. 

But before they could make it to Malaysia, many Uyghurs were detained by the immigration authorities in Thailand and returned to China. Human rights groups condemned the deportations, saying that Uyghurs returned to China “disappear into a black hole” and face persecution and torture upon their return. 

Hashim Mohammed, 26, was 16 when he left China. He spent three years in detention in Thailand before making a dramatic escape. He now lives in Turkey — but thoughts of his fellow inmates, who remain in Thai detention, are with him every day. This is his account of how he made it out of China through the smugglers’ road. 

Hashim’s Story 

On New Year’s Day, in 2019, I was released from immigration detention in Istanbul. It was late evening — around 10 p.m. It was the first time I had walked free in five years. And it was the end of my long journey from China’s Uyghur region, which I ran away from in 2014. 

It started back in the city of Urumqi in Xinjiang, 10 years ago now. I was 16 years old and had recently begun boxing at my local gym. In the evenings, I started to spend some time reciting and reading the Quran. The local Chinese authorities were beginning their mass crackdown on Uyghurs in the name of combating terrorist activity. Any display of religious devotion was deemed suspicious. 

The local police considered my boxing gym to be a sinister and dangerous place. They kept asking us what we were training for. They thought we were planning something. They started arresting some of the students and coaches at the gym. Police visited my house and went through all my possessions. They couldn’t find anything.

After some time, the gym closed — like lots of similar gyms all over the Uyghur region. People around me were being arrested, seemingly for no good reason. I realized I couldn't live the way I wanted in my hometown, so I decided to leave. 

At that time, thousands of Uyghurs were doing the same thing. I had heard of a smugglers’ route out of China, through Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand and eventually to Malaysia. From there, I’d be able to fly to Turkey and start a new life. We called it the “illegal way.” It’s very quick once you leave China, it only takes seven days to get to Malaysia. 

At the border leaving China, we met with the smugglers who would get us out. They stuffed around 12 of us into a regular car, all of us sitting on top of each other. I was traveling alone, I didn’t know anyone else in the car. 

I remember one guy, Muhammad, who I met in the car for the first time. He was from the same area as me. He was with his wife and two kids and seemed friendly. 

The road was terrifying. There was a pit of anxiety in my stomach as the smugglers drove through the mountainous jungle at night at breakneck speed. I watched the speedometer needle always hovering above 100 kmph (about 60 mph), and I couldn’t help thinking about how many people were in the car. We heard about another group, crossing the border into Cambodia in a boat, who nearly drowned. After just seven days, we reached Thailand and the border with Malaysia. We sat in the jungle, trying to decide what to do — we could try climbing the border fence. 

But we also saw a rumor on WhatsApp that if you handed yourself in to the Thai border police, they would let you cross the border to Malaysia and fly onward to Turkey within 15 days. People on the app were saying some Uyghurs had already managed it. At this point, we’d been sleeping outside, in the jungle, for days, and we believed it. We handed ourselves in, and the police took a group of us to a local immigration detention center in the Thai jungle. 

Fifteen days slipped by, and we began to realize that we’d made a terrible mistake. With every day that passed, our hope that we would get to Turkey slipped away a little further. No one came to help us. We were worried that the Thai authorities would send us back to China.  

I was put in a dark cell with 12 guys — all Uyghurs like me, all trying to escape China. Throughout our time in jail, we lived under the constant threat of being deported back to China. We were terrified of that prospect. We tried many times to escape.

I never imagined that I would stay there for three years and eight months, from the ages of 16 to 19. I used to dream about what life would be like if I was free. I thought about simply walking down the street and could hardly imagine it. 

There were no windows in the cell, just a little vent at the very top of the room. We used to take turns climbing up, using a rope made out of plastic bags, just to look through the vent. Through the grill, we could see that Thailand was very beautiful. It was so lush. We had never seen such a beautiful, green place. Day and night, we climbed up the rope to peer out through the vent. 

We knew that the detention center we were in was very close to the Thai border. One guy who I shared the cell with figured out something about the place we were in. The walls, he said, in this building built for the heat were actually very thin.

We managed to get hold of two tools. A spoon and an old nail. 

We began, painstakingly, to gouge a hole in the wall of the bathroom block. We took turns. Day and night, we had a rota and quietly scraped away at the wall, making a hole just big enough for a man to fit through. There was a camera in the cell, and the guards checked on us frequently. But they didn’t check the bathroom — and the camera couldn’t see into the bathroom area, either. 

We all got calluses and cuts on our hands from using these flimsy tools to try to dig through the wall. We each pulled 30-minute shifts. To the guards watching the cameras, it looked like we were just taking showers. 

The guys in the cell next door to ours were working on a hole of their own. We planned to coordinate our breakout at the same time, at 2 a.m. on a Sunday. 

We dug through as much of the wall as we could, without breaking through to the other side until the last moment. There was just a thin layer of plaster between us and the outside world. We drew numbers to decide who would be the first to climb out. Out of 12 people, I drew the number four. A good number, all things considered. My friend Muhammad, who I met on the journey to Thailand, pulled number nine. Not so good.

That Sunday, we all pretended to go to sleep. With the guards checking on us every few hours, we lay there with our eyes shut and our minds racing, thinking about what we were about to do.

Two a.m. rolled around. Quietly, carefully, we removed the last piece of the wall, pulling it inward without a noise. The first, second and third man slipped through the hole, jumped down and ran out of the compound. Then it was my turn. I clambered through the hole, jumped over the barbed wire below me and ran.

The guys in the next cell had not prepared things as well as us. They still had a thick layer of cement to break through. They ripped the basin off the bathroom wall and used it to smash through the last layer. It made an awful sound. The guards came running. Six more guys got out after me, but two didn’t make it. One of them was Muhammad. 

The detention center we were in wasn’t very high security. The gate into the complex had been left unlocked. We sprinted out of it, barefoot, in just our shorts and t-shirts, and ran into the jungle on the other side of the road, where we all scattered. 

I hid out for eight days in the jungle as the guards and the local police tracked us through the trees. I had saved some food from my prison rations and drank the water that dripped off the leaves in the humidity.

It’s impossible to move through the undergrowth without making a lot of noise — so when the police got close, we had to just stay dead still and hope they wouldn’t find us. At one point, we were completely surrounded by the police and could hear their voices and their dogs barking and see their flashlights through the trees. It was terrifying.

Finally, after days of walking and hiding in the undergrowth, we made it to Thailand’s border with Malaysia. It’s a tall fence, topped with barbed wire. I managed to climb it and jump over — but the guy I was with couldn’t make it. He was later caught and sent back to detention.

In total, there were 20 of us who had managed to break out of the Thai jail. Eleven made it to Malaysia. The others were caught and are still in the detention center in Thailand. 

After spending another year in detention in Malaysia, I was finally able to leave for Turkey. After two months in Turkish immigration detention, I walked free. I had spent my best years — from the age of 16 until 21 — in a cell. I feel such sorrow when I think of the others who didn’t make it. It’s a helpless feeling, knowing they’re still in there, living under the threat of being sent back to China. 

Now I have a good life in Istanbul. Every morning, I go to the boxing gym. I’d like to get married and start my own family here. But half of me lives in my home region, and my dream is to one day go back to my home country.

Muhammad, my friend who I met on the smuggler’s road, is still in the Thai jail. He’s such an open and friendly person, and he was like my older brother inside. When the hope drained out of me and I broke down, he always reassured me and tried to calm me down. He would tell me stories about the history of Islam and the history of the Uyghur people. I’ll always be grateful to him for that. I think about him, and the other Uyghurs still trapped in Thailand, all the time.

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This has meant that 26 million people have been locked indoors under the strictest conditions, not allowed to go out for groceries, fresh air, or work, for weeks on end. Residents have complained of running out of food. Government deliveries are scant, and delivery apps are booked up with millions of people all trying to get groceries brought to them. 

Social media apps like WeChat and Weibo have fizzed with dissent, and have been quickly wiped by online censors. 

In recent days, workers in hazmat suits swarmed the city erecting green metal barriers outside buildings and across streets, sealing people inside their homes and neighborhoods. 

China operates a QR health code system that the government uses to track and contain the spread of the virus. Everywhere citizens go throughout the country, they are required to scan the code, adding an extra layer of tracking and surveillance to their every move. When scanned, the code shows whether the phone user has been in contact with a positive case or tested positive themselves, and they live in fear of a “pop-up” message which informs them they may have had contact with a positive case, or traveled through a risky area. Even buying painkillers or fever medication can mean the app flags an epidemiological risk. A pop-up severely limits movement.

For those who live in Shanghai, the restrictions are crippling. But people from outside the city face extra difficulties — unless they’ve been placed in state-sanctioned quarantine facilities, they have nowhere to go. They face the prospect of sleeping out on the streets, struggling to get even the most basic necessities to stay alive.

Isobel Cockerell spoke to one Beijinger who flew from the U.S. to Shanghai in late March, and was forced to make a dramatic escape. His account has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Shanghai is a city in collapse. These past few weeks have left me with a constant fear that I might lose my freedom. That I might not survive this. I can’t quite believe that a person like me — full of life, full of dignity — was forced to live like someone on the run.

It all started in late March, when I came back to China after visiting my family in the United States. Omicron had been raging through the U.S. and flights back to China were very difficult to book. You had to go through a rigorous testing process with two China-approved PCR tests before the flight, and then arrange for 14 days’ hotel quarantine when you arrive. 

I’m from Beijing, but the capital was sealed off from international flights — it was impossible for me to fly directly home. So I had to pick another city to fly to and quarantine in, before traveling on to Beijing.

I was nervous about what the conditions might be like during state-sanctioned hotel quarantine, and I decided that Shanghai, with its cosmopolitan feel and western-style living standards would probably be the best option.

It turned out to be the wrong decision.

I took all the tests I needed to, got the green QR code I needed, booked the hotel, and managed to board my flight out of the U.S. 

I was taken straight to the quarantine hotel. They didn’t tell us where we were going, or give us an address. As soon as I arrived at the hotel, I had a bad feeling. The guy at the front desk gave us such a dirty look. His whole demeanor seemed to say “you’ve come here to bring toxins into our city, to poison us with this virus from abroad.”

I felt so uncomfortable. My family in America reassured me, telling me not to worry. I would just be there for a couple of weeks. I would be okay.

I still didn’t know where I was — there wasn’t any notebook or anything like that in the hotel room with the name of the place. I’m not that tech-savvy, and I couldn’t check the location on my phone. When I was on the phone to my family, I looked out the window and told them what I could see. They checked the location on Google maps and tried to pinpoint where I was. They managed to figure it out. But it was still disorienting.

A few days later, towards the very end of March, news began to spread that the government was going to lock down the city. The plan was to do it in phases, with the east side going into lockdown first. Our hotel was on Shanghai’s west side. We thought maybe it wouldn’t be such a big deal. But when the other side went into lockdown, news trickled out that people weren’t getting any food. We were still getting three meals a day, provided by the hotel. 

One morning, my breakfast just didn’t come. There was no knock at the door. Silence in the corridors. I just sat there, waiting to eat. But I wasn’t allowed to leave my room. 

I called my family. “You can’t just starve yourself,” they said, telling me to go and ask someone what was happening.

I steeled myself to leave the room — it meant breaking the law. I opened my bedroom door. Nobody was there. I went downstairs, padding through the silent hotel and found a security guard. I asked him where my breakfast was. 

The security guard looked at me. “Where have you just come from?” he said. 

I told him I had come from the U.S. The guard jumped out of his skin and yelled at me. “Get away, get far away from me! You guys are the ones bringing the virus here!” 

People in Shanghai see you as the cause of the city’s lockdown and all their trouble. They treat you as if you’re an animal bringing the virus. And if you’ve come from the United States, you’re the worst of all. 

I went back to my room, and finally got my breakfast. But starting from that moment, the food supplies started to dwindle.

There was a WeChat group for everyone locked in the same hotel as me. Messages began pinging in the group with people complaining, asking where their food was, or lamenting over the pitiful amounts. Finally, a quarantine coordinator admitted they simply didn’t have enough supplies to cook for us. After that day, we got less and less food and the quality got much worse. The number of meals went from three, to two, to one. 

We took PCR tests almost every day. During the three and a half weeks I was in Shanghai, I took no fewer than 17 PCRs. They always came back negative. 

After 14 days in that first hotel, we were allowed to leave and go back to our homes. 

The only exception was if you were from Beijing, like me. Beijing has an additional requirement that you stay another seven days. That meant you had to transfer to a different hotel and do an extra week of quarantine. The government is really trying to protect Beijing, so it has this additional layer of Covid security. 

By this time, the whole of Shanghai was in full lockdown. But I managed to find another state-sanctioned quarantine hotel that took me in. The food was not great there either, but I figured I would live. I started not to expect too much, so long as I could survive.

I waited out that last seven days, and bought a high-speed rail ticket to Beijing. By now it was mid-April. I thought the nightmare was nearly over: that I would be able to hop on a train and get home. I had passed all my PCR tests, and my phone had the right Covid pass on it  — a green QR code that meant I should be able to board the train easily.

I got to the train station and a group of epidemic prevention staff met me. They scanned my phone. A message popped up that I hadn’t seen before, with a solid block of text. It informed me that “according to Beijing’s epidemic prevention policy and data, you may have had “temporal spatial” relations with epidemic risk areas, risk points, or risk personnel inside and outside Beijing. A risk investigation is required.” 

“This pop up window cannot be cleared until the epidemic risks are controlled,” the window said.

I had no idea how I had got this pop up window. But when they told me it meant I couldn’t board the train, my mind went totally blank. I had no idea what I should do. I called my family in the States. “Whatever you do,” they said, “don’t yell at them. Don’t fight. We can’t have you ending up in jail.” Other people were also stopped from boarding. The train station staff told us we couldn’t stay in the station, and that we needed to leave. Everyone was scared. We had no idea what to do or where to go.  

That was when the real hell began.

The thing to understand about our situation is this: Shanghai was in total lockdown. Everyone was inside their homes. Nobody was allowed to be out on the streets. For residents of Shanghai that’s one thing — but if, like me, you’re not from Shanghai, and have no home to go to, you’re utterly stranded. The city of Shanghai considered its responsibility to quarantine me for 21 days over, so they said I couldn’t live in their facilities anymore.

On the streets, I saw people in the same situation as me who weren’t allowed to go back home — mostly migrant workers from the countryside. There was nothing for them to do except stay on the side of the road. Some of them even pitched tents. One day, on my way to the hospital to do yet another PCR test, it was pouring rain. I went through an underground tunnel, and saw so many people down there who had no homes to go back to. They were stuck down there, with nothing to eat or drink, and could only sleep on the ground, seeking shelter from the rain in that tunnel. They asked me for water — I only had one bottle of water on me, and I gave it to them. 

The city felt like something out of the movie "I Am Legend." Everything is just desolate, with not a soul in sight. 

I called several hotels, but they all rejected me. In desperation, I just walked the deserted streets, knocking on the doors of hotels to see if anyone would take me in. At about the fourth or fifth hotel, someone agreed to let me stay. 

It wasn’t a hotel as such, it was more of an internet cafe that had been temporarily repurposed as a motel. But unlike the state-mandated quarantine hotels I had stayed in before, this place had no food. 

Every day, I needed to find a way to feed myself. At first, I had almost nothing to eat. There was a selection of drinks in the cafe refrigerator. I drank every single one of them to survive. My boss back in Beijing managed to get a few pieces of fruit, some cookies and some eggs delivered to me. Otherwise, I was on my own. I persuaded a parcel delivery worker to give me a ride to a small roadside convenience store that was open, where I bought four bags of instant noodles and six pieces of cake to ration out for the next few days. 

When I wasn’t scrounging for food, I was desperately figuring out how on earth I could get out of Shanghai. It was clear I couldn’t go to Beijing – the pop-up message on my phone made sure of that. I was told there was no way for me to appeal it, short of getting a permit directly from the mayor of Beijing. I’m not that special. 

So I just started looking for tickets to go anywhere in China, just to get out of the Shanghai area. But every airplane ticket I tried to book was then canceled. Canceled. Canceled. No city wanted to take people from Shanghai. 

I spoke to a friend on the phone, who said, “nothing is more important than getting out of Shanghai right now. Nothing is more important than your own health. You need to find a way to escape.”

My boss, who has connections with the local government in Beijing, gave me a tip. Somehow, they knew that a particular flight — to a city in the south — would not be canceled. “Book that flight,” she told me. 

I managed to buy the ticket, which was a step in the right direction. But I still had no idea whether I would be able to get out. 

The next hurdle was getting to the airport. Because of the quarantine rules, people aren’t allowed to move around freely. Districts are divided by iron gates, and you need a Covid travel permit to cross from one district to another. Vehicles can only have one person in them, and they need special permission to drive, and must be able to prove they were working in a pandemic-fighting capacity.  

Other people got to the airport by shuttle bus from their official quarantine hotels, or just rode shared city bikes, leaving all their luggage, and cycling to the airport the night before. 

My boss managed to arrange for someone to drive me, secretly. He was a professional delivery driver, who had clearance to deliver “materials related to fighting the pandemic.” He messaged me on WeChat and told me that he would take me to the airport, but I would need to hide on the back seat, beneath a pile of cardboard boxes. I had to leave my two suitcases behind, packing just the essentials into a backpack. 

On the day of my flight, he picked me up before dawn. I lay down on the back seat, and he covered me with empty cardboard boxes, which made it look like we were delivering pandemic-fighting materials. I couldn’t see anything, and just lay in the dark as we drove through the empty city. 

It was dead silent as we drove along. My driver was very nervous — he didn’t utter a single word. The car stopped several times, passing through multiple Covid checkpoints. The guards spoke to the driver, and shined a flashlight into the car. I was terrified of being discovered. 

The journey from the cafe to the airport was only around three miles, but it felt much farther. I started to become afraid I would miss the fight. 

When we got to the airport, the parking lot was sealed off. We drove up to the road for international departures — but that ramp was sealed too. We could not figure out how to actually get inside. 

After driving in circles for a bit, I just got out of the car. I scrambled over a fence and made my way into the airport. 

I felt like a fugitive. Like I was making a dangerous escape, committing a crime. 

But at last, I was getting out of Shanghai. 

I managed to check in, and passed through the security at the airport, waiting to board my plane. I was so exhausted, I just sat on the dirty floor and waited. Meanwhile, my family in America were just anxiously waiting to see if I could get out, watching on the flight tracking apps, waiting for news.

I had another reason to be nervous: my latest PCR result hadn’t shown up on my phone yet. They test you in batches of 20, and I was paranoid the delay in getting my result meant someone in my batch was positive. If that happened, another dreaded pop-up could appear at any time, which would mean I’d get hunted down and made to do an individual test. 

 I told my family not to message me until I had arrived. I was afraid that any activity on my phone might give the border guards a reason to stop me flying. I wanted to remain as unnoticeable as possible. 

I waited, and waited, and waited, until they let us board the plane. I was terrified the plane would just never take off. The minutes ticked by — it was four minutes past the take-off time, then five, then six. It was interminable. 

At last, ever so slowly, the plane began to move. When we took off, it was as if a huge weight was lifted off my shoulders. I was free. 

I’m now in a city in the south, where I’m having to do another 14-day quarantine. When I’m done with this final stretch, I’ll have been indoors, in isolation, for five weeks. 

During this time I’ve been thinking about my childhood during the Cultural Revolution. We lived deep in the mountains, and as the Revolution swept through the country, a local disease affecting the heart also rampaged through our villages. People were going hungry. We were very little at the time, and my mom wanted us children to get out of the village, so she persuaded a local truck driver to smuggle us out of the region, so we could go stay with my aunt. One of my earliest memories is hiding in the back of that truck, lying down, as we bumped along going past checkpoint after checkpoint. 

That happened more than half a century ago. Our country, our people, is in a continuing state of disaster, from beginning to end. I feel that China’s Covid control efforts are completely ignoring scientists. They’re self-defeating. People aren’t treated like humans. And it feels like we’re going right back where we were fifty years ago.

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Now known across Russia as the “Grandson from Tomsk,” Samborsky, 27, had gone to Moscow to knock on the doors of federal authorities to file complaints of gross medical negligence. When it became clear that instead of considering his complaints, authorities intended to arrest him, Samborsky fled to neighboring Georgia.

Sambosky told me his story when we met in Tbilisi, where he says Russian-speaking men have approached him, telling him it’s time to return to Russia. For that reason, he doesn’t share his future plans.

This text is derived from an interview with Sergey Samborsky conducted by Katia Patin. It has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Читайте эту статью на русском.

My grandmother’s name was Yulia Fedorovna. She taught Russian language, literature and history and inspired a lot of bright minds. Many of them are now scientists in our city, have masters degrees, doctorates in language. She is the brightest, most decent person I’ve ever known.

She taught me how to play the piano. She raised me from childhood and was really strict, so that I would become a good person. And here I am, not completely normal, but good enough. My wife, my other relatives, I have never loved them the way I loved my grandmother. I would go through hell and highwater for her. And I have.

In Tomsk I worked as a welder. I had a quiet, normal, calm life and didn’t have any problems. I can’t say I have a lot of friends, but the ones I have are true friends. I lived with my wife, my brother and my grandmother.

Tomsk is a really beautiful city. It’s a university town. They call it the Athens of Siberia because we’re the smartest city in Russia with the largest number of students. I am a patriot of my city and the region where I was born. I know every stream, every part of the forest in a 100 kilometer radius of my village in the Tomsk region. The people there are kind, but the problems begin with the authorities.

People are dying in our hospitals. They are being treated with medications that the WHO does not recommend for treating coronavirus, for example arbidol, gripferon. If you break your leg, or have some other injury, and your temperature is higher than 37 [98.6 F], you are automatically admitted to the Covid ward, even if you’re completely healthy otherwise, and left there. When you call an ambulance and tell them you have Covid symptoms, they will show up at your house in six days. My friend had Covid and called an ambulance. They showed up a month later.

My grandmother was 84 years old and had Alzheimer’s. I took care of her at home. She was partially paralyzed, she had nearly full muscle atrophy. I would change her diapers, feed her, wash her. On October 21, around 5 p.m. in the evening, I was preparing food for her when she started gurgling. I turned around and she had foam coming from her mouth, her eyes had rolled back and her lips were blue. I called the ambulance.

When I got to the hospital, my grandmother had already been taken away for a CT scan. I walked up to registration, asked where she was and they directed me down the corridor where about 50 people were sitting and coughing. All with Covid. I walked by an elderly woman sitting on a stretcher practically naked with a mask underneath her chin. She was shaking from the cold. I asked a doctor for help and it took 15 minutes for him to find a nurse to get a blanket.

Then I went to find my grandmother. She was in a room with five beds, all Covid patients. The doctor said that she needed oxygen. I took down the phone number of the woman in the bed next to her and left after about an hour. The next day, I called the woman. She said no one had been in to see my grandmother. No one had fed her, washed her or changed her diapers. They had tied her to the bed.

This was really a shock to me. I’m an impulsive person. I got up and went straight away to the hospital. I watched nurses coming in and out of the hospital without even taking off their protective clothing. They would go for a smoke and then walk back in with their dirty shoe covers.

So I walked up to a parked ambulance and bought some protective gear off of the drivers. They aren’t allowed to do that but they sold it to me for double the cost. This is Russia. I walked to the back of the building where there is a small forest and changed. I had a protective suit, a mask and goggles. There was no security, the door was wide open. I started filming, walked in and no one looked at me twice.

When I got to my grandmother, I was horrified. I don’t know why they had tied her to the bed, her entire arm was covered in bruises from the restraints. I checked my grandmother’s diaper, it was filthy. She had her oxygen mask up on her forehead. She has three bed sores, one on her knee, two on her hips. They had changed the bandage on the right side, but on the left hadn’t even touched it.

How to explain this? It’s apathy and laziness. This is not some exceptional case. This is happening across Russia’s hospitals. I’ve had hundreds of people write to me with their own stories since I published my videos.

I spent eight or nine hours a day in the ICU. I would come in and out but for the most part was hiding, not to draw more attention to myself. Some of the other patients would ask me for water or to help with their bedding. I took out the trash.

Sunday, October 25 was the last day I was in the hospital before they discovered what I was doing. I sat down next to my grandmother on the bed and she looked up at me. She said, “Seryozha I love you.” She recognized me for a few seconds. She hadn’t recognized me in over three years. For that, it was all worth it. 

I gave my footage to the local channel TV2. TV2 is an exception in Russia. It’s the best regional channel in the country, they are always covering people’s real problems and telling the truth no matter how many times they’ve been threatened. Within two or three days, my story was all across Russia. At first, I stayed anonymous and was called the “grandson from Tomsk.” After TV2 published my story, the police confiscated their footage and called in their editor Aleksandr Sakalov for questioning.

Next, I thought that Moscow could help me. Moscow doesn’t know what is happening in the regions. Or maybe they know but just don’t acknowledge it publicly. There is this rap group called 25/17 from the city Omsk and they have this lyric: “My Moscow is the capital of your country.” Moscow really is a separate country. There are different people there, different laws. I thought Moscow was my last hope.

So I left Tomsk for Moscow for the first time. I went to the main office of the investigative committee. I offered to show my videos to the person I was directed to. “What’s the point in that?” He was completely unmoved. He said, “You’re welcome to file a complaint but if you get a response, it will take at least a month.”

I went to the federal prosecutor’s office and the office of the presidential administration. From all these places I got the runaround. The investigative committee told me to write to the regional office. The prosecutor's office recommended that I also go to the regional office. I got the same from the office of the president.

When I was in Moscow, the story became national news. A media campaign started against me across the pro-government channels. REN-TV was the worst. It’s a disgusting channel. We had agreed that they won’t publish my full name and will blur out my face, my grandmother’s face and the sensitive footage of her. But they showed everything. I told the truth about medical care in Tomsk and in Russia, the truth about our government. And now all the state channels were trying to drown me.

I’ve been accused of doing all of this for my grandmother’s retirement payments. That I beat her, had her chained to a radiator, starved her, kept her as a prisoner.

In Russia you hardly need to give people a reason to devour you. My story was forcing people to wonder whether their loved one had died from a disease or because of indifference from the system.

When I flew back to Tomsk, I was called in that evening to the local investigative office for questioning. They told me to hand over my phone and said they suspected that the video was fake, that I had edited the footage and made up the whole thing. They threatened to arrest me on the spot and search my home. I refused to hand over my phone.

On October 30, my grandmother died. The official cause of death was pneumonia. Not a single word about coronavirus. I always imagined my grandmother would die peacefully at home, the way we all should. It was her dream to pass in her sleep. But in the end, she died in despicable conditions.

I have a relationship with someone working in the police. He told me, “They are discussing opening a criminal case against you and you have to leave.”

I buried my grandmother, left Tomsk and Russia.

Now I’m in Georgia but I don’t feel safe here. I’m Russian. I still can’t get used to the fact that the police are okay here. I’ll be walking and hear a police siren and get all tense. The aftershocks of living in Russia.

Today is my birthday. We were celebrating last night. At midnight we opened a bottle of wine, had some food, and three people came up to me. They said, “Sergey Samborsky, it’s time to go back to the homeland.” These people aren’t my friends, they aren’t my relatives. My real friends wouldn’t tell me to come back home now. These were people somehow connected to the government.

It’s my 27th birthday today, I hope it’s not my last.

The post I disguised myself as a Covid ICU doctor to care for my grandmother. Now, the Russian government is after me appeared first on Coda Story.

Another, more recent example, was when I found out that I had been swept up in one of Georgia’s biggest political scandals in a decade. Earlier this month, a massive data leak revealed to the nation that state security services had been secretly monitoring the electronic communications of hundreds of journalists, politicians, diplomats, high-ranking members of the clergy — and me.

So, why did a 19-year-old woman, fresh out of university, working her first job at a nightclub, become a target of Georgia’s security services? 

The answers to that question point not just to what Bassiani is, but what it means to many young Georgians. For us — living in a former Soviet country, strongly influenced by the conservative ideologies espoused by older generations and the powerful Georgian Orthodox Church, where LGBTQ people face daily oppression — it was much more than just a club. It was a safe space, where everyone was equal.

I can recall the first time I went there vividly.

I spent pretty much every weekend at the club. Then, in 2017, the founders asked me to join their team. I love music, I’m always on the hunt for what’s new and exciting, and I jumped at the chance. I became the manager of Bassiani’s record label, and handled bookings and promotions for the club.

I thought it would be a cool job. And it was. 

But Bassiani faced regular attacks from right-wing political and religious groups. They started spreading lies about us, saying that we were performing bizarre rituals in the club and selling drugs. Soon pro-Russian groups started attacking us online, calling us “drug addicts,” “gays” and “whores.” One Facebook post in particular went viral, in which a man alleged that a strangely dressed woman could always be found standing near the club’s toilets holding a basket full of drugs that she handed out to anyone passing by. 

The rumors and innuendo turned into an outright attack in 2018, when the police raided Bassiani. In the previous few weeks, five people in Tbilisi had died in their homes after taking adulterated MDMA, bought from a Russian dealer on the dark web. That was all the reason the Georgian police needed to target the club, even though there had been no fatalities on our premises. 

May 12 was just a regular Friday club night, until police clad in riot gear barged in. They pointed guns at dancers and at the DJs who were playing, made us turn off the music, kicked us out and shut down the club. Later, news reports said hundreds of people were arrested. I remember my mom calling me frantically, then rushing to the club to find me.

It’s clear that the raid was a show of power by the government, staged to demonstrate exactly what it thinks of progressive people and their beliefs. So, the next day, we pushed back and announced a rally in front of the parliament building. We set up massive speakers and started playing music. Over 10,000 people showed up. It was one of the best raves of my life — thousands of people dancing in the heart of the city.

The square in front of Georgia’s parliament is the heart of the country’s political life. It is where every protest of any significance has ever taken place. Previous generations had occupied it to demand independence from the Soviet Union. At the Bassiani protest, my generation found the voice it needed to speak up for its freedoms.

Bassiani was closed for a month while the authorities rifled through the club’s business documents. They found nothing to incriminate us and were left with no choice but to let us reopen. I should, however, have known that the matter would not end there. 

I found out that my phone had been tapped just over a year before the leaks made such information public. In July 2020, a few months into the Covid-19 crisis, I received a call from an unknown number. Like so many other businesses, Bassiani had closed in March, and I had left my job to explore other opportunities. I was in my garden at the time and wondered who was ringing me.

It was the police. 

A man told me that officers had been listening to my phone conversations for the entire summer of 2018, starting from the raid on the club in May. I was frightened and enraged. What had I done to be spied on like this? 

The man said that the police had monitored my phone for three months before shutting down the investigation. They didn’t tell me what they found or what they had done with all the information they had gathered. But, two years later, in the middle of a pandemic, I was being summoned to a police station to sign a document stating that I had been informed that I had been placed under police surveillance.

I remember calling my friends who had also worked at Bassiani. Many had received a similar call. I spoke to my uncle, who is a lawyer. He told me there wasn’t much I could do, except sign the paperwork. 

Months later, the stress of this revelation still hasn’t left me. I don’t remember what I said on the phone back then, whether they were reading my messages and listening to all my calls. I feel like I have no privacy anymore, that someone is still listening to me and watching me whenever I use Facebook, send a WhatsApp message, or speak to anyone on the telephone. Many of my friends feel the same way. And with good reason.

In October this year, I realized that Georgia’s snooping went much much deeper than Bassiani. An anonymous whistleblower leaked thousands of documents online, detailing how the nation’s security services had been systematically spying on a wide range of public figures, from prominent news reporters to foreign diplomats.

The scale of the surveillance was so immense that even Georgia's public ombudswoman, Nino Lomjaria, was taken aback. "We live in a terrible country," she said in an interview broadcast on national television in September. "I could not imagine this kind of monitoring."

Bassiani has been closed for a year-and-a-half now. I miss it deeply. Growing up and going to school, I always felt like an outsider. I was a rebellious kid, who had problems with teachers and some of my fellow students. I felt different from them, showed it in my own way and was bullied for doing so. Bassiani was one of the few places where I have felt at home.

That’s why the rave outside parliament felt so momentous, and why the subsequent surveillance felt so intrusive. It wasn’t just clubbers who were there — our parents showed up, as did every other person who wanted to protest against the government’s decision to raid a nightclub and demonize its patrons. I think we showed them that we weren’t alone and that we have a little bit of power too.

Photos by Hitori O.G

As told to Harsimran Gill  

The post I was 19 years old and working at a nightclub — then I got caught up in a government phone-hacking scandal appeared first on Coda Story.

For years, RIA Novosti had been one of the most unusual media organizations in Russia: a state-run agency with an excellent reputation for balanced and fair reporting. Putin’s decree meant that RIA would be absorbed by a new organization called Rossiya Segodnya (Russia Today). If the English-language RT was meant to bring the official Russian point of view to the West, “Rossiya Segodnya” would focus on domestic audiences. Kiselyov was appointed as its CEO.

Standing in the middle of the newsroom, Kiselyov delivered his vision of the future: “We are supported by the presidential administration and by the government. You know, there is freedom of speech in our country. But the period of impartial journalism is over. Objectivity is a myth that we have been offered; it has been imposed on us. I myself used to abide by these principles, but I went through an internal evolution,” he said.

I quit RIA Novosti a month or so later, and then spent several weeks searching for a new job. Finally, a local TV channel, controlled by the Moscow city government, offered me a reporter’s position. Nothing else was available. During the interview, I made it clear that I would not want to cover any political issues and my editors respected my wish. But I was kidding myself by thinking I could avoid being swallowed up by the propaganda machine.

Once a week, usually on Fridays, all key editors of all the government media-platforms would gather at the Kremlin for an “editorial meeting.” These were mostly led by Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov. A few hours later, a real editorial meeting would take place in the newsroom and, based on the Kremlin meeting, a team of top producers would discuss the upcoming coverage — what issues it would raise and what guests would appear on the evening talk-show.

I tried to sneak out of these editorial meetings. I knew they were a waste of time. I’d say I was too busy working on a report or hide in a beer bar near the office. But once in awhile, I would fail to escape. I remember one meeting that took place shortly after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014. “There is no more time for truth-seeking,” we were told. “Our country,” one of the top editors said, “is back in the Cold War era.”

I focused on reporting issues as far removed from politics as possible. I did stories about how the Moscow authorities built a new metro line, about bad road conditions or the city’s extraordinary traffic jams. On that level, there was no censorship. Sometimes, it even felt like I was doing real journalism. A story I did on criminal realtor schemes helped a family get their apartment back.

But I constantly appeared on the same screen with people who could not be called journalists. And for the most part, I felt ashamed. I never talked about my job with my girlfriend, parents and friends.

Pinned to the wall of our central newsroom was a sheet of paper with the words “Crimea: not ‘annexation,’ but ‘reunification.’” These were the terms TV anchors and reporters were told to use while covering the Crimean annexation. From our studios, we were teaching the entire country a whole new vocabulary: “junta” (the Ukrainian government), “butchers” (the Ukrainian army), the “fifth column” (the Russian opposition).

None of these words were used in private conversations in the newsroom, but, still, working there felt like swimming in a shark tank. We never socialized with each other after work. In fact, we didn’t even talk much. But I had good relations with my colleagues from other TV channels. Like me, they were putting distance between the work they did and their personal identities. We used an old Soviet term, “internal immigration,” to describe this state of mind.

One of these so-called “immigrants” was Andrei. He described himself as a moderate liberal. In Russia, that means someone who doesn’t like what the government is doing and tries to oppose it, but who also thinks that, as a whole, the political system is fine. Pinned to the wall of our central newsroom was a sheet of paper with the words “Crimea: not ‘annexation,’ but ‘reunification.’” These were the terms TV anchors and reporters were told to use while covering the Crimean annexation.

Andrei and I often met up until, one day, he left to report on the war in eastern Ukraine. It was the height of the conflict, and Andrei was embedded with the Russian-backed separatists. When he returned, I noticed that he had changed. Even in a private conversation, his language was now full of the new jargon of Russian state TV.

Idealistically, perhaps, I tried to argue with him. I wanted him to acknowledge the other side, but Andrei had made up his mind. He told me that, at first, he had tried to report “objective” news, but then he realized that there was no truth in Ukraine. “One side is shelling you and the other is protecting you. You get angrier and angrier, day by day. So, you have to pick a side.” My counter-arguments had no effect.

During that period, the professional and personal worlds of many in Russia collided. Not all of these collisions related to the war in Ukraine.

In the summer of 2014, the Moscow authorities decided to fix the city’s horrific traffic problems. Among the changes was a new fee for parking. Muscovites, at least those with cars, were outraged, but my colleagues and I had to cover it in a positive way.

Our building didn’t have its own parking lot, so all employees who had their own cars now had to pay to park on the street. My colleague, Anna, who was assigned to cover the issue, tried hard to hide her own car from the traffic inspectors. Sometimes, when she parked it on the street, she would remove her licence plate so that the inspectors couldn’t give her a ticket. But on TV, she made a U-turn. She took the mayor’s position, argued that the change was good and never interviewed people angry about the new regulations. In fact, it was impossible to find “real people” who were for the reform. And so, state-run companies were told to provide us with an employee or two who would pretend to be local residents. “There is no more time for truth-seeking,” we were told at an editorial meeting shortly after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014.

I think most of us journalists — if I were to guess, maybe about 60 percent of us — wanted to quit. Some, perhaps 25 percent, didn’t give a damn, and the rest actually believed they were doing the right thing.

I quit the station seven months into the job. But who was I to judge those who stayed? Some of these people joined the channel in the early 2000s, when you could speak out on TV and have meaningful debates. Slowly, over the years, compromises, one by one, crept into their lives. By early 2010, these editors and reporters had kids and mortgages and quitting wasn’t an option. The Kremlin’s disinformation campaign depends on such journalists. Not on people who want to change the world order. But rather, on those who hope that their friends and relatives don’t see them on TV.

Alexei, one of my former colleagues, is a case in point. We both started out as reporters, often covering press-conferences and events. But Alexei rose fast through the ranks of the station, becoming the head of a department.

We went out drinking on a recent Friday night at a packed, loud bar in Moscow’s city center. Swinging back whiskeys Alexei told me he had had a tough week at work, much of which was taken up by a particularly stressful interview with Russia’s minister of sport. It always takes a lot of time and effort to make a program which, on one hand, is worth watching and, on the other, does not ask any tough questions.

Alexei’s career at Russian state TV has been a success, but he has his exit plan ready. Recently he moved his wife and two young daughters to Vietnam, where they live in a cottage by the beach. In a year or two he hopes to join them there, open a small hotel and “forget all the things I am covering now.”

The names of all reporters in the piece have been changed.

The post Confessions of a (former) Russian state TV reporter appeared first on Coda Story.