Tag: russia

“Our family is like a small Russia,” Ms. Druzhinina said in an interview. “Russia took in four territories, and the Druzhinin family took in four children.”

Another is that “Granit” was just one artifact in a whole trove of content — memoirs, comic books, travel videos — that is variously referred to as the Wagner subculture, the Wagnerverse or the Wagner Extended Universe. Not unlike old American mercenary magazines, all of it puts a righteous and alluring face on going off to kill and die in unofficial operations aligned with Kremlin interests

Unlike more technologically savvy counterparts in China, where internet surveillance is more automated, much of the work of Russian censors is done manually, the documents show. But what Russia lacks in sophistication it has made up for in determination

Brittney Yevette Griner grew up in Houston, Texas, the daughter of a homemaker and a cop. It was a fairly ordinary upbringing, except that it quickly became clear to Griner, and to everyone else, that she was not ordinary. “I guess I started feeling different when everybody started telling me I was,” she writes in her memoir, “In My Skin.” “At home, I was a carefree, curious, mischievous little girl. At school, I was a freak.”

At one point during the service, Leonid Slutsky, who leads the (misnamed) Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, called out, “One country, one President, one victory”—an almost exact translation of the German Nazi Party’s slogan Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer. The historian Timothy Snyder has coined the term “schizofascism” to describe this sort of rhetoric: people acting like fascists while calling their enemies fascists, as the Russian propaganda machine continues to do with Ukraine

“Not everyone is rich enough to escape to Europe and to eat pain au chocolat in the morning,” she wrote. “For many people, a Lada is essential, as is the fact that they can get to the cemetery to talk to their son.”

What is called corruption in Russia would be more correctly called a system of incitement and blackmail. If you are loyal and if the president is pleased with you, you have the right to steal — but if you are disloyal, you’ll be thrown in prison for theft. It’s no surprise that in recent decades only a few individuals inside Mr. Putin’s system have spoken out publicly against it. Terror is always more persuasive than anything else.