{"id":197,"date":"2026-05-30T04:38:24","date_gmt":"2026-05-30T04:38:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/housingnewsamerica.com\/?p=197"},"modified":"2026-05-30T04:38:24","modified_gmt":"2026-05-30T04:38:24","slug":"russias-descent-into-tyranny","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/housingnewsamerica.com\/?p=197","title":{"rendered":"Russia\u2019s Descent Into Tyranny"},"content":{"rendered":"
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After February 2022, when Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his so-called special military operation\u2014a full-scale invasion of Ukraine\u2014the popularity of George Orwell\u2019s 1984<\/em>, a dystopian novel about a totalitarian regime built on mass surveillance and constant propaganda, soared in Russia. As Christmas approached that year, one St. Petersburg bookstore tied together copies of 1984<\/em> as a garland above the cash register. Another set up an entrance display of patriotic books\u2014along with a mug depicting Orwell\u2019s face and a caption referring to the novel\u2019s shadowy, supposedly omnipotent leader. \u201cLet Big Brother think that there is tea in this mug,\u201d it read.<\/p>\n

Read more Why Putin Still Prefers War<\/a><\/p>\n

The trendy Moscow bookshop Respublika placed Orwell\u2019s works all over the store. In a quiet protest against the Kremlin\u2019s demands to reject all cultural products from \u201cunfriendly countries\u201d\u2014including France, the United Kingdom, and the United States\u2014Respublika continued to sell Ed Sheeran\u2019s new album and the Rolling Stones\u2019 old vinyl. Its bestsellers included American and British authors, along with Russians who had fled the country, such as Boris Akunin and Dmitry Bykov. But in the years since the war began, Akunin and Bykov have been accused of \u201cextremism,\u201d their works added to an official list of 5,000 banned titles. Respublika took those books off the shelves and relocated the not-yet-forbidden Orwell to the second floor, in case a government inspector checked in.<\/p>\n

Restrictions of all kinds have expanded over the past four years\u2014not just book bans but reduced access to social media, crackdowns on protest, and measures to render the LGBT community invisible and feminism illegitimate. Russia\u2019s \u201cforeign agent\u201d law, established in 2012 to identify individuals and organizations that received international funding, has become a tool to criminally prosecute and ban from public life anyone who disagrees with the state. In early 2022, 300 people and organizations were on the notorious list of foreign agents; now, the number is over 1,100. But even as the screws have tightened, Russians haven\u2019t stopped reading. One bookstore chain reported that 1984<\/em> was its most stolen book in 2023. In the first half of 2025, according to the same bookstore, it was surpassed only by theft of copies of the Russian constitution, which forbids censorship and guarantees freedom of thought, the right to speak, and access to information. \u201cWe read Orwell for his reflection of reality, and the constitution as a beautiful utopia,\u201d Russians grimly joke.<\/p>\n

To visit Russia over the past four years has been to observe the consolidation of a dictatorship in real time\u2014to answer the question readers confront in 1984<\/em>, wondering how Big Brother\u2019s gaze became so penetrating and relentless. At the start of the invasion, the state lacked the means to quell all possible opposition, and so it suppressed selectively. People self-censored, even as many found ways to express their distaste for Russia\u2019s path. But in the time since, Moscow has built a larger repressive apparatus. It has cultivated a climate of fear and uncertainty that encouraged many Russians to silence not just themselves but also one another. The accumulation of subtle changes on the part of both the state and society has led Russia deeper and deeper into tyranny\u2014a cycle that seems unlikely to break as long as Putin\u2019s regime pursues the kind of total control that until recently seemed to exist only in Russia\u2019s communist past or in Orwell\u2019s fiction.<\/p>\n

DUAL REALITY<\/h3>\n

Before February 2022, Russian society was fairly open. Official media was under state control, but independent outlets flourished, the Internet had no restrictions, and people could read or watch what they wanted. When the war broke out, mass protests ensued; people were dumbfounded that Russia would launch an invasion of a neighboring country.<\/p>\n

Dissent was immediately met with retaliation. In the first few months, more than 15,000 antiwar protesters, including more than 400 minors, were detained. Russian citizens found themselves under de facto martial law. Access to Meta, Instagram, and Twitter (now X) was criminalized. Foreign news sites offering opposing views, such as the BBC and Radio Free Europe, were blocked. Russia\u2019s own independent media outlets, including the radio station Echo Moskvy, Dozhd TV, and the newspaper Novaya Gazeta<\/em>, were banned within weeks. Sharing anything about the war other than the official Ministry of Defense\u2019s narratives was immediately made punishable by up to 15 years in prison.<\/p>\n

In the spring of 2022, there were many incidents in which the state responded with full force to mild displays of disobedience. One Muscovite, Konstantin Goldman, was detained for holding a copy of Leo Tolstoy\u2019s War and Peace<\/em> at a stone memorializing fallen soldiers from Ukraine during World War II in the Alexander Gardens, near the Kremlin. He was accused of potentially planning to overthrow the Russian government, detained, and fined. In St. Petersburg, a young artist, Aleksandra Skochilenko, was sentenced to seven years in prison for crimes against the armed forces because she replaced store price tags with hand-drawn antiwar messages. (She was released in 2024 and flown to Germany as part of an international prisoner exchange.)<\/p>\n

War became an ever-expanding presence in Russians\u2019 reality.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

These protests failed to move Putin. The president continued his fight on behalf of what he calls Russia\u2019s \u201cdistinct civilization\u201d\u2014the idea that Russia, although partially located in Europe, must keep its distance from the West. Many writers, journalists, scholars, artists, IT specialists, and other white-collar workers who disagreed with the Kremlin\u2019s interpretation saw no point in protesting and fled the country. Most everybody else pretended to fall in line. In December 2021, according to the independent pollster Levada, less than 50 percent of Russians believed the country was going in the right direction. In March 2022, 70 percent tamely reported their support.<\/p>\n

Initially, the Kremlin made efforts to pacify the public without resorting to near-total suppression. Putin expected a small, quick, and successful war to keep Kyiv in Moscow\u2019s orbit, so he used the term \u201cspecial military operation\u201d to avoid the word \u201cwar.\u201d Any fighting, Russians were assured, would happen elsewhere. The government\u2019s system of control was not yet prepared to handle widespread discontent, so it settled on a social contract of sorts: citizens who submitted to the state, even just by tacitly accepting its war, could go on about their daily lives. Soon, everything should return to normal. This created a dual reality: Stalinesque oppression awaits those who step out of line, but those who do not protest can read Orwell and carry on with their lives.<\/p>\n

Yet war became an ever-expanding presence in Russians\u2019 reality. Shelling has increased, Ukrainian drones fly all the way across the country, oil refineries are attacked, airports are closed, trains are blown up and delayed. In stores, prices are up and choices are down because of sanctions and other international restrictions. Many people have been hiding in bookstores to dissociate, or escaping to museums, where visitors can stay for the whole day and pretend that normality persists. Moscow\u2019s GES-2 art center, redesigned in 2021 by Italian architects, makes Russians believe they are still part of the West. This year, GES-2 was able to circumvent the Kremlin\u2019s call for patriotic art, installing Pop Art founder Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen\u2019s famed sculpture Plantoir<\/em>\u2014a giant red garden trowel\u2014which the exhibition announcement proudly notes was first displayed at New York\u2019s Metropolitan Museum of Art.<\/p>\n

Such duality is not unusual in Russia, a country that sprawls all the way from Germany to Japan. Even on its coat of arms, the double-headed eagle looks both east and west. People have lived before with Orwell\u2019s doublethink, holding two contradictory beliefs simultaneously and accepting both as true. The Soviet Union was deemed a \u201cparadise\u201d while people were dying in the gulags. In 1935, amid mass arrests of the perceived enemies of communism, Stalin declared, \u201cLife has become better, comrades, life became more joyous.\u201d In such an environment, people also become well versed in doublespeak\u2014saying one thing and thinking another.<\/p>\n

A HALF WAR<\/h3>\n

The same contradictions pervade Putin\u2019s Russia, yet Russia is not the Soviet Union. It has no ideology to bring the public together. The government continued to placate its citizens with capitalism and Western lifestyles only because the fighting was supposed to be brief. When the conflict turned into a multiyear war, Moscow began demanding that the population make sacrifices. A new 22 percent value-added tax hurts small businesses to fill state coffers. There are tariffs on everything. Even a study by the state media conglomerate RT admits that at least 70 percent of Russians are cutting back on groceries, travel, or dining out.<\/p>\n

But few want to make sacrifices without a reason, and so there are attempts at developing an ideology that can provide one. In 2022, Putin signed a decree to \u201cpreserve the traditional spiritual-moral values,\u201d essentially rejecting everything related to Western civilization. Russia promotes those \u201ctraditional values\u201d\u2014nuclear families, Orthodox religion, gender inequality, opposition to abortion, and so on\u2014and smears social progress as a Western plot against it. In the Soviet Union, too, the lack of personal freedom and dismal quality of life were explained as part of the struggle against the injustices of capitalism and for communist equality. But the Soviets\u2019 oppressive ideology had a recognizable origin; it grew out of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, when workers and peasants fought aristocrats and the bourgeoisie for a more equal world. Putin\u2019s quest for a traditional, religious civilization, in which girls are encouraged to procreate as early as high school and priests advise women to give up careers to become men\u2019s \u201chelpers,\u201d harks back to the preindustrial era. Such outdated mandates make little sense for contemporary Russians who have lived with technological progress, traveled the world, and in recent years excelled in the service economy. The widening gap between the message and reality is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain.<\/p>\n

Putin wants an unreserved devotion to the war, and patriotic slogans glorifying Russian and Soviet heroism have filled TV screens, giant billboards, online ads, and the Kremlin\u2019s own statements. Digital displays all over Russian towns feature camouflaged soldiers defending the motherland, with captions demanding potential fighters to \u201cjoin ours\u201d\u2014pitting ours, the patriots, against those who are not ours, the unpatriotic. Putin has declared that \u201cunity, support for the army from the people, makes Russia victorious.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet his propaganda has not entirely caught on. Fewer and fewer Russians want the conflict to continue, because the longer it goes, the less it remains in the background and the more it consumes their lives. People are worried about experiencing another shock like the \u201cpartial mobilization\u201d in the fall of 2022, which required 300,000 men to join the army. After the announcement, many prospective soldiers fled abroad. That October, 66 percent of Russians told Levada that they feared a total mobilization, and 57 percent wanted to start peace talks (today this number stands at 66 percent). The government, wary of overplaying its hand, instituted a nominally volunteer-based recruitment system instead.<\/p>\n

All over Russia, young men have been recruited to go to the front. Their families receive the equivalent of $2,000 to $20,000, or more, depending on the region. In three years, the government spent almost $38 billion, or 1.5 percent of Russia\u2019s GDP, on these payments. The defense ministry said the army received almost 500,000 new recruits in 2024, and 450,000 in 2025. Some are coerced; some are criminals who would rather go to war than to prison. In addition to getting paid, they are absolved of their crimes. Thousands die, but thousands more come back. As the years pass, more and more maimed and wounded men are seen on the streets of Russian towns. Passersby treat them with apprehension, as mercenary soldiers of fortune.<\/p>\n

Putin has tried to fashion the campaign in Ukraine as a defensive war, putting it on par with World War II, in Russia known as the \u201cGreat Patriotic War.\u201d But that effort has failed. Bellicose rhetoric from Kremlin apparatchiks and pundits has not created a national fervor. Rather, the more militarism is pushed on the public, the more actively people resent the message. Last year, I heard two teenagers mocking a recruitment poster in Moscow\u2019s subway. It featured soldiers asking the viewer, \u201cWho if not you?\u201d \u201cWho if not you? Putin, of course,\u201d the boys laughed.<\/p>\n

GRAY AREAS<\/h3>\n

No one in Russia quite knows what is forbidden and what is still allowed; the Orwellian reality is full of holes. The West is canceled, yet this Christmas season most shopping malls greet visitors with the English word \u201cJOY\u201d in giant letters. The weekend culture guides regularly review episodes in the latest season of White Lotus<\/em>, explain why the film Conclave<\/em> is worth the hype and Avatar: Fire and Ash<\/em> is not, highlight an Italian brunch at the Four Seasons hotel near the Red Square, and promote English-language education in Moscow\u2019s British School\u2014while mixing in patriotic poetry or an advertisement to download a video game called Ask Stalin<\/em>. Some religious organizations and members of the Duma, meanwhile, have demanded a ban on the Harry Potter stories on the grounds that they promote black magic; those calls grew louder this summer, when Russia\u2019s Supreme Court declared Satanism a forbidden \u201cinternational movement\u201d (no such movement exists). Yet on the travel page on Yandex, Russia\u2019s answer to Google, Russians are offered trips to Harry Potter theme parks and museums around the world. This December, a favorite event is \u201cHarry Potter, or the Hogwarts New Year\u201d in Moscow\u2019s Art Club. In Kazan, the capital of the remote region of Tatarstan, a cute Harry Potter\u2013themed caf\u00e9 sells gingerbread with the faces of popular characters.<\/p>\n

Other targets of the traditionalists, however, have not been able to escape such attacks. Last year, the LGBT community was deemed an \u201cinternational extremist movement\u201d\u2014as with Satanism, it doesn\u2019t exist\u2014and acknowledgment of these identities was purged from public discourse. Same-sex couples are barred from marrying or having children. Roberto Carnero\u2019s biography of the beloved Italian poet and director Pier Paolo Pasolini, who was openly gay, ran afoul of the new LGBT policy. Its brave Russian publisher circumvented censorship and released it in 2024. Instead of simply cutting the forbidden parts, the publisher made the book look like a Cold War\u2013era CIA dossier, with hundreds of pages blacked out, showing the reader the ridiculousness of the regime.<\/p>\n

Read more The Coming Crisis of NATO Deterrence<\/a><\/p>\n

The gray area leaves people in a state of perpetual uncertainty and becomes a form of oppression itself, encouraging individuals to police their own behavior. In the theater, there is an informal guideline\u2014the result of a suggestion from the top\u2014against presenting foreign authors\u2019 works on stage, so few dare to put them on. Some theaters delete names of actors and authors deemed \u201cunpatriotic\u201d from playbills. Renowned director Dmitry Krymov left the country in protest of the war, so the production of his drama Seryozha<\/em>\u2014a take on Tolstoy\u2019s Anna Karenina<\/em>\u2014at the Moscow Art Theater excluded his name from publicity materials. The credit in the program read: \u201cDirector: Director.\u201d Last year, one young director staged Hans Christian Andersen\u2019s Thumbelina<\/em> at the Moscow Satire Theater. In the story, the young heroine wants to fly to warm southern countries, seeking freedom. But the director was told not to mention \u201csouthern countries\u201d\u2014Ukraine is to the south of Russia. The word \u201cfreedom\u201d was to be avoided, too, so as not to give people the wrong idea. The director proposed to end the performance with a Latin choral. \u201cIs Latin from a friendly country?\u201d the theater administrator inquired.<\/p>\n

Some examples are even more farcical. The ancient Roman marble statues of naked human figures in Russia\u2019s museums now violate Russia\u2019s \u201cdeep moral traditions,\u201d according to the Kremlin. Even under Stalin\u2019s brutal regime, antiquity was not a threat to the state. Meanwhile, the popular plush toy Labubu, created by a Hong Kong\u2013born artist who was raised in the Netherlands, has been painted as an enemy of the homegrown Soviet-era cartoon character Cheburashka. One Russian lawmaker suggested in all seriousness that \u201cthose following traditional values at the Ukraine front would choose Cheburashka.\u201d His audience nodded as if this was a reasonable statement.<\/p>\n

People are not in control of their own lives anymore. That much became clear in December 2023, when the telecommunications company MTS held an \u201calmost naked\u201d Christmas party in Moscow. Celebrities on the guest list showed up in skimpy outfits, as they had done in previous years, still thinking their private lives were private. But Putin\u2019s patriotism took that protection away. The attendees were accused of lacking national pride, \u201cdisgustingly\u201d mimicking the West while the country fights for its \u201ctraditional soul.\u201d Since then, parties and performances have been raided all over Russia in search of LGBT \u201ccriminals,\u201d \u201cSatanists,\u201d or music and plays written by \u201cforeign agents.\u201d<\/p>\n

THE MAKING OF A DICTATORSHIP<\/h3>\n

In his 1993 article \u201cWorking Towards the F\u00fchrer,\u201d the British historian Ian Kershaw explained how authoritarianism takes over: through the use of ideology to justify individual and collective actions, through voluntary societal complicity, and through state repression. The leader outlines repressive requirements, then everyone else\u2014starting with his entourage but extending to businesses, governmental and political organizations, schools and universities, and volunteer groups and individuals\u2014make up the rules of behavior. The uber-patriotism of Putinism follows the same script. Ordinary citizens are not just passively complicit but co-authors of repression as they attempt to please their leader and police members of their communities. Officials eager to outdo each other become ever more aggressive in their crackdowns. The result is absurd spectacles as apparatchiks hone the craft of making the abnormal seem normal, and vice versa.<\/p>\n

It is not that the authorities stopped recognizing absurdity. They see it when it suits them. Ella Panfilova, the head of Russia\u2019s Central Election Commission, was incensed when a concerned lawmaker reported that the official symbol associated with the 2024 elections was similar to the logo of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, once headed by the late Alexei Navalny, the Kremlin\u2019s main nemesis. Panfilova reprimanded the lawmaker for his \u201cparanoid imagination.\u201d He was later declared a foreign agent for his comments.<\/p>\n

In his more than 25 years in power, Putin has instilled in the Russian collective the idea of Russia as a \u201cbesieged fortress\u201d\u2014pundits on television have pushed this message for years. People in villages and small towns, living paycheck to paycheck, can draw inspiration from belonging to the great nation that stands up to Western pressure. Wielding the Great Patriotic War slogan \u201cVictory will be ours,\u201d Putin justifies to this public the losses and cruelties they suffer along the way.<\/p>\n

The more militarism is pushed on the public, the more people resent the message.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In return, Duma members and regular people alike invent suppressive rules as if consumed by collective madness. When the communist system collapsed, the practice of denouncing one\u2019s friends, family members, or coworkers for subversive thinking died down, but it reappeared in 2022. In fact, it became normalized, even encouraged, within the broader society. By 2024, proud patriots produced well over 3,000 reports accusing others of discrediting the armed forces, supporting LGBT rights, or criticizing the Kremlin.<\/p>\n

Some inform out of conviction, some want to get recognition for assisting the state, and some squeal on others out of fear of becoming victims themselves. Ivan Abaturov, an undistinguished Ph.D. student from Yekaterinburg, became known for making up fantastic accusations against journalists who, for instance, used the word \u201cwar\u201d instead of \u201cspecial military operation.\u201d Within six months in 2023, he wrote 1,357 denunciations under the pseudonym Anna Korobkova.<\/p>\n

Others, such as the Russian Commune, an ultra-right pro-war group, fight domestic enemies outright. Originally a vigilante movement, since 2022 it has been aiding official security forces, participating in raids that target ethnic communities or \u201cundesirables\u201d at university lectures or music concerts. Volunteers interrupt talks at Moskva, a bookstore minutes from the Kremlin; they promise trouble for speakers they disapprove of and threaten to burn books and break windows. When the store calls the police asking for protection, officers often refuse, citing limited resources.<\/p>\n

TIGHTENING THE SCREWS<\/h3>\n

It came as a surprise in July when the Ministry of Internal Affairs sought to put a stop to amateur vigilantism. In an indirect reference to the Russian Commune, the ministry issued a warning to Russian citizens about nationalist groups that \u201cuse patriotic slogans as a coverup, searching for false enemies, and inflaming ethnic conflicts.\u201d Since then, even the most nationalistic apparatchiks, such as Kirill Kabanov, a member of the Presidential Council for the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights (a name that is now an oxymoron), insist that such organizations must be fully incorporated into \u201cgovernment structures.\u201d<\/p>\n

These moves are part of a new phase of repression and control that targets not only the opposition but also the superloyal. Levada pollsters found in December that only 26 percent of the population somewhat agrees that Ukraine\u2019s \u201cmilitary operations should continue,\u201d the lowest level of support since the war began. The proportion of those who insist that Russia should fight until complete victory has fallen from 29 percent in 2022 to 15 percent at the end of 2025. The current mood is a threat to the Kremlin. It has responded by leaving less of its authoritarian project to citizens, shifting the burden of suppression to the state. It aims to eliminate all independent political activity\u2014anything that could slip from its control.<\/p>\n

The government has even turned against regime insiders. Since the summer, there have been daily detentions of once-trusted government officials, politicians, and high-ranking army officers, who now stand accused of corruption. June and July also witnessed the brutal arrests of journalists from the online news outlet Ura.ru and the Telegram channel Baza, both hyperpatriotic, pro-war publications that had been obediently hateful toward \u201cthe enemy\u201d\u2014Ukraine, foreign agents, Kremlin critics. In the fall, a few of the most faithful were labeled foreign agents, including Sergei Markov, a pro-Kremlin political propagandist, and Roman Alekhin, a prominent pro-war blogger. The reasons are subject to speculation: Markov dared to offer Putin advice, or perhaps he was too cozy with Azerbaijan. Alekhin could be critical of the Russian battlefield situation. The highly militant Crimean-born blogger Tatiana Montyan skipped foreign agent status altogether and was labeled a \u201cterrorist and extremist,\u201d apparently because she criticized certain Kremlin-connected patriots. Now, no independent evaluation of Russia\u2019s actions is tolerated, even when it comes from the most loyal of followers.<\/p>\n

The Kremlin\u2019s repression is deepening. Internet access has been shrinking: first, YouTube was made too slow to use, and calls via the messaging apps Signal and Viber were blocked. Then, in September, drastic new regulations came into force: calls via WhatsApp and Telegram were restricted, and anyone searching for any banned website would be fined for participating in extremism. This digital censorship was so far-reaching that factions in the Duma that are normally oppositional in name only voted against it. Only Putin\u2019s party approved it without any dissent. It even sparked a rare protest: former presidential candidate Boris Nadezhdin led a group to a parliamentary building with a cardboard placard that read, \u201cOrwell wrote a dystopia, not a manual.\u201d Yet the restrictions keep coming. WhatsApp is all but unusable, and mobile Internet is now blocked daily all across Russia\u2014at least 11,300 shutdowns have been reported in different regions since May\u2014allegedly to prevent its use for Ukrainian drone strikes, but really to sever Russia\u2019s connection to the rest of the world and to control the population.<\/p>\n

No one in Russia quite knows what is forbidden and what is still allowed.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Disillusionment is swelling. Zealous war supporters are angry that Russian society ignores the military\u2019s sacrifices. They are dissatisfied with the slow advances in Ukraine: since February 2022, Russia has occupied less than 12 percent of Ukrainian territory. Others worry about inflation, now around seven percent, and complain about the rising prices of food, utility services, gas, and medicine. Economists are gloomy about the struggling economy. The 2025 budget deficit is more than $53 billion; military spending has risen 38 percent compared with last year, while most businesses\u2014in a variety of industries, including construction, automaking, and travel\u2014have seen significant decline. Russia\u2019s shift to more labor-intensive sectors, rather than the \u201cfocus on high-level technology\u201d that Putin promised back in 2020, is unlikely to help. And the country increasingly has to reckon with the loss of the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who have died fighting.<\/p>\n

If there is no peace, then full war is only a matter of time. Earlier in December, Putin\u2019s annual question-and-answer session for the public and the press was overwhelmingly focused on the country\u2019s necessary sacrifices for the \u201cspecial military operation.\u201d Staying committed to the war could potentially mean total mobilization and martial law. If, instead, the conflict ends next year, the regime will be bombarded with difficult questions. Both possibilities are laced with uncertainty, so the Kremlin\u2019s control needs to be absolute.<\/p>\n

Yet entering 2026, Russia\u2019s recreation of 1984<\/em> remains incomplete. The final rules are not fully set, and dissent slips through the cracks. Dmitry Muratov of Novaya Gazeta<\/em>\u2014himself labeled a foreign agent\u2014regularly raises his voice against repression. His reporters continue to work as they did before 2022. The newspaper is officially closed, but it is available online via VPN, and Russians can order a hard copy online under the alternate title Novaya Gazeta Journal<\/em>. Some anchors and analysts from the YouTube channel Zhivoi Gvozd (formerly Echo Moskvy) have also remained in Moscow; evicted from their prestigious headquarters, they now broadcast from a few modest rooms on the outskirts of the city.<\/p>\n

These people resist repression every day. So do countless others in acts of defiance that expose the ludicrousness and brutality of the regime. A few months ago, a brave man in St. Petersburg painted graffiti with the 1960s Soviet slogan \u201cPeace on Earth\u201d; he is now being investigated for extremism and terrorism. Walking the grounds of the St. Savior Transfiguration Monastery in Yaroslavl, an ancient town 160 miles north of Moscow, one encounters a large stone on which someone painted a bird in yellow and blue\u2014the colors of the Ukrainian flag. In the town of Murom, 200 miles east, a clothing store attracts visitors by displaying clusters of balloons in eye-catching colors\u2014black and purple, white and red, and yellow and blue. When I asked if the last pairing was deliberate, a saleswoman winked and said, \u201cWell, if an official comes in, I\u2019ll do a Marilyn Monroe smile and say, \u2018These colors look so pretty together.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more China\u2019s AI Heist<\/a><\/p>\n

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