No

Former special correspondent at Meduza, investigative reporter. Works for BBC Russian Service. Winner of several journalistic awards

Here’s the thing I don’t understand and never will: who do you have to be to hate your own people so much? My colleagues and I wrote about some national project, aimed at fighting for active aging. As it was described in the project’s official literature, it would help increase Russia’s population by 175–185,000 people, or something around there. I have nothing against the anti-aging project, but how is your head screwed on? Russia’s losses in the war surpassed 185,000 a long time ago.

That’s not even hatred for your own people, it’s thinking of people as numbers. Soldiers, pensioners — they’re just data, columns of figures required for important, global geopolitical objectives.

The dictator’s methodology is the creation of controlled chaos. You sow chaos, and people lose control over their lives and run around panicked, and then you send them, like lab rats, through some gate.

What kind of person could benefit from this? Who would like it? Okay, so you turned a blind eye to repression. You don’t see how police pin people face-down on the floor at gay clubs. But you go to the store and see butter sold at astronomical prices. You want to take out a mortgage and you can’t.

I understand how it’s possible to live in these conditions, I lived through the Soviet Union. I saw what it was — how you’d say one thing in the kitchen and another at work. My parents disliked the Soviet authorities, but they hardly gave a thought to how and when it would end, and simply tried to live according to their consciences.

[Since the start of the war] people in Russian haven’t changed — it’s just that they’re now living in a different paradigm. Look, I’ll give you my favorite example. We wrote a piece about the Institute of Internet Development (IID), a state-sponsored Russian non-profit that finances propaganda content and is on the E.U.’s sanctions list. The IID gives money to just devilish propaganda and, at the same time, to cultural and scientific projects. Imagine that you’re the editor-in-chief of a magazine. Your team left Russia as a sign of protest against the war — but you need to keep paying their salaries. And then, you go to the Institute of Internet Development for money. Are you going to regard yourself as the person gathering shoes outside the gas chambers? No, you’re going to think that you’re helping people who left in protest against the war.

My colleagues who continue to work in Russia and, unlike me, have not cut ties with their relatives, say, "We’re trying to do journalism, and we’re slipping beneath the current." Someone else might say, "No, you’re not trying at all." But it does seem like they really are trying. I’m not talking about people who are working anonymously, from inside Russia, for "foreign agent" publications, they are absolute heroes. I’m talking about people who work for publications that are fully within the system and who nonetheless are producing quality materials, and there are some of them.

I have friends left in Russia who made the choice for the benefit of their fathers, mothers, or kids. Should we play ping-pong with them now? No, of course not. I tell them, "Guys, I understand, you did everything right." And they say to me, "We understand you, too, you also did everything right." We are without reproach for one another.