Vladimir Putin is currently fighting on two fronts: his brutal military assault on Ukraine is accompanied by relentless repression against any hint of opposition inside Russia itself.
His crackdown on Russian civil society started a decade ago, and has peaked since the invasion. More than 7,000 anti-war protestors, including children, have been detained since the start of the invasion, on 24 February. It is also now illegal to use the words ‘attack’, ‘invasion’ or ‘war’ in any publication discussing – well, the war.
Post-Soviet millennials who emigrated to the US in the late 1980s/early 1990s have many memories in common, one of which is of our parents listening religiously to Radio Free Europe (RFE) and Radio Liberty (RL). We learned about the Chernobyl disaster from RFE and RL, not from our government. We got our news from transistor radios. Television was mostly for learning about the next day’s weather (and even those reports were altered – when rain was forecast for Victory Day but the public needed to be brought out to applaud the military parades). Newspapers were for holding sunflower seeds or wrapping fish at the market.
