I read the whole amazing article. It paints (maybe the last) vivid picture of life in Russia under a repressive regime.
It concentrates on the horrifying changes since the invasion started in 2022, but she still recognizes Putin’s 25 year regime as a continuous ride towards tyranny.
The outlook is extremely bleak.
Many writers, journalists, scholars, artists, IT specialists, and other white-collar workers who disagreed with the Kremlin’s interpretation saw no point in protesting and fled the country. Most everybody else pretended to fall in line. In December 2021, according to the independent pollster Levada, less than 50 percent of Russians believed the country was going in the right direction. In March 2022, 70 percent tamely reported their support.
Russia is not the USSR. It has no ideology to bring the public together. The government only continued to placate its citizens with capitalism and Western lifestyles because the fighting was supposed to be brief. When the conflict turned into a multiyear war, Moscow began demanding the population make sacrifices. But few want to make sacrifices without a reason, and so there are attempts at developing an ideology that can provide one.
No one in Russia quite knows what is forbidden and what is still allowed; the Orwellian reality is full of holes. The gray area leaves people in a state of perpetual uncertainty and becomes a form of oppression itself, encouraging individuals to police their own behavior.
At this point hardly anyone will express their criticism in official ways, but it’s heartwarming to see the little ways:
Roberto Carnero’s biography of the beloved Italian poet and director Pier Paolo Pasolini, who was openly gay, ran afoul of the new LGBTQ policy. Its brave Russian publisher circumvented censorship and released it in 2024. Instead of simply cutting the forbidden parts, the publisher made the book look like a Cold War–era CIA dossier, with hundreds of pages blacked out, showing the reader the ridiculousness of the regime.
One bookstore chain reported that 1984 was its most stolen book in 2023. In the first half of 2025, according to the same bookstore, it was surpassed only by theft of copies of the Russian constitution, which forbids censorship and guarantees freedom of thought, the right to speak, and access to information. “We read Orwell for his reflection of reality, and the constitution as a beautiful utopia”, Russians grimly joke.
Walking the grounds of the Saint Savior Transfiguration Monastery in Yaroslavl, an ancient town 160 miles north of Moscow, one encounters a large stone on which someone painted a bird in yellow and blue—the colors of the Ukrainian flag. In the town of Murom, 200 miles east, a clothing store attracts visitors by displaying clusters of balloons in eye-catching colors—black and purple, white and red, and yellow and blue. When I asked if the last pairing was deliberate, a saleswoman winked and said, “Well, if an official comes in, I’ll do a Marilyn Monroe smile and say, ‘These colors look so pretty together.’”
Yes. Well, depends how you define viral. Even more yes if you look at the Fediverse as a whole.