Member-only story
Russia Is Getting Weird, Even for Russia
There was a time, not so long ago, when Russian propaganda was genuinely good at its job. I remember the early months of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, when even the most committed Russophobes and the most cynical analysts were forced to admit a grudging respect. Russia, they said, was a country that could barely produce a decent car or a working smartphone, but it could produce propaganda of astonishing quality. It was slick, emotionally manipulative, and terrifyingly effective. It was, in its own perverse way, a masterpiece.
Four years later, something has broken. It is as if shifting the entire economy onto a war footing has turned the once-mighty propaganda machine into a rotting pumpkin. The slickness is gone. The emotional manipulation has curdled into something embarrassing. And what remains is a strange, hollowed-out spectacle that nobody — not the state, not the creators, not even the audience — seems to believe in anymore.
I want to take you through this decay, because it tells us something important about where Russia is heading. It is not just that the propaganda is bad. It is that the entire system of meaning-making has collapsed. The Kremlin can still force its citizens into the meat grinder, but it can no longer convince them — or itself — that the grinder is a noble cause. And that is a very strange place for a country to be.
