It exists in headline-grabbing instances of journalists brandishing anti-war signs on the evening news and thousands taking to Russia’s streets. And even in the middle of this awful war, there is some good. When I stumble on positive stories I embrace them. Kopilka’s aims are twofold: to challenge Putin’s propaganda and to keep the poems safe from the Kremlin’s destructive arms.Īt Index on Censorship, where I am editor-in-chief, bad-news stories are our bread and butter. Kopilka translates from Russian as “piggy bank”, and Julia Nemrovskaya, one of the organisers, told me they consider their efforts to be “throwing a tiny copper coin into a bigger kopilka: the collective effort to defeat Putin”. The Kopilka Project, an online repository of anti-war poetry from over 100 Russian speakers, was launched a few months ago in the form of a live Googledoc to which readers can request access. Resistance isn’t always in the form of hard-hitting news. Stepan Khlopov, the editor-in-chief, said he hoped people would leave the newspaper lying around for passersby to pick up. When their site was blocked in early March they began publishing a weekly text edition on their Telegram channel in an A4 format that could be easily printed out. Some are fighting the information war by merging the modern with the old, such as the team behind Zvezda, an independent digital publication. Its message is clear: we’ll find ways to get information in and out. RFE/RL – which has suspended operations in Russia after pressure from police and politicians – is still working with journalists there and breaking important stories. The method was the typewriter, the means people’s hands – now upgraded to the internet and its offshoot of tools such as virtual private networks (VPNs) and the encrypted apps Telegram and Signal.Įven TikTok was recently used by US-backed news organisation RFE/RL to track the movements of troops across the country as they made their way to the front. Samizdat, the Russian word for clandestine material, was highly influential in the USSR, helping spread a mass of protests, banned work and documents. What he and the other people in this space actually operate is a modern-day samizdat network. He jokes that from Putin’s perspective he’s running “a criminal spam operation”. He spearheaded the campaign (first doing so in 2014 when Crimea was invaded) and now works with Baydachenko. Rob Blackie is one of the directors of Free Russia, a campaign to bring independent news about the war to Russians through ads. Last month alone, hackers have turned the mobile version of news radio station Kommersant FM into a jukebox of Ukrainian anthems and have placed an appeal to end the war on, the main website for accessing state-run TV channels and radio stations. This is just one example in a growing list of people and organisations exploiting digital loopholes in Russia to challenge Putin’s control. “Informational resistance works,” Baydachenko says with confidence, adding that she believes pushback to the war from mothers of Russian soldiers is partly because of the campaign. Baydachenko reckons that their ads have reached hundreds of millions of Russian internet users. Instead she was part of a bigger network and through this network money began to come in. If all else failed she’d try to take on Putin through porn.īaydachenko wasn’t a lone ranger. These sites were perfect – little moderation, huge audiences and people behind them whose allegiances were with the highest bidder. And so Baydachenko moved into a darker one too: the world of online gambling and pornography. The introduction of Russia’s “fake news” law catapulted the country’s internet into a darker realm. But with each passing day the task became harder. At first Baydachenko targeted the usual suspects – Google, YouTube, Facebook and other sites with high traffic.
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