ensorship within Russia is pretty much inspired by the censorship during the Cold War of the Soviet Union. One key part of communism was the indoctrination of making people believe there is only one truth as there is only one piece of information. Cutting down any external sources of information was pretty easy back in the day due to the lack of television and especially the internet at the end of the 20th century. Every time the Soviet Union or today’s Russia was placed in the news around the world as the “bad dog” they would start a censorship campaign where the truth would be bent the other way, accusing those who made the allegations in the first place.
One of the major issues that have been dominant in Russian society is the categorization of two different groups of civilians. The younger generation is open-minded and has access to external information (internet) and the elder generation which had been raised (indoctrinated) in communism and only has access to internal information that is heavily censored (radio/television/some Russian blogs).
The first time such an act became obvious was in 2017 when a photo of Drag Putin had been made illegal in Russia. This image was used to protest the ban on gay propaganda. Putin had seen this as the western society infiltrating their culture too much and took action.
Let’s be honest here as Russia had never in its history been a country to aggregate free speech and most probably never will, and this is simply because of the way the culture had evolved since the Soviet Union times. You can maybe bring some capitalism and consumerism into a post-communist country, but you can’t take away its communist culture, at least not overnight. These people have been indoctrinated for so many generations that they will follow their leader till the end no matter how harsh the quality of living may become.
The current war that is taking place has been quite the mark when it comes to censorship. Any media portraying Russia as the villain never actually makes it to the public as this would be disastrous. Russia is even working on implementing online IP algorithms that will block similar types of content to avoid the young generations from knowing the truth.
None of these images have made it to the public of how many war crimes Russia had committed through the killing of civilians or launching rockets next to civilian populated zones.
Some Russian news blogs which have been deleted actually used these images as if these were rockets launched by the Urkaininens in Russian-populated zones.
The Russian censorship implied by the government had been taken so far that it has become illegal in Russia to address the conflict in Ukraine as a war. They prefer a political misunderstanding. Many Russian online news channels have been forced by the government to respect very strict guidelines based on what they present. Others were forced to put Russian in a divine light whilst some had disappeared off the internet for good.
Six people have devised a clever technique to smuggle the Pride flag into Russia during the World Cup as a protest against the nation’s severe regulations on advocating for LGBTQ rights and openly discussing homosexuality.
God “forbid” anyone from calling these censorship actions a communist regime as I do not want to know the repercussions. Russia is now reverting back to the use of a few media outlets run by the government just like during the good old Cold War. The only difference here is that this is not a Cold war anymore, as people are dying and those in Russia do not know who they are supporting.
Many believe that society has evolved in the past 20 years of this decade, whilst the geo-political patterns show that not only is history repeating itself, but we hardly learned anything from it.
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