Two months have passed since the beginning of war today.
On the one hand, these two months felt like three days to us.
On the other, they’ve divided our lives so much and changed us so much that it seems like we have never had any other life.
Could versions of us that lived before February 24 imagine
that we will be reading the news of shelling of Odessa, in which, at the time of recording this video, at least eight people died,
one of which is a three months old baby.
A direct missile hit on a residential building, and the attack was confirmed by the Russian Ministry of Defense.
The ministry of defense said that they had hit a military facility, but it was a residential building.
And no, it was not a missile that was shot down by air defense and fell, as propagandists now claim.
Missile did not fall from above but hit directly on the third floor. This woman was there, along with her daughter and her mother.
They were all killed by a Russian missile.
And this news is so terrible that it is impossible to comprehend.
But it doesn’t seem exceptional anymore — almost every day something like that happens.
Almost every day the Russian army is killing Ukrainians with its strategic bombers or cruise missiles.
But now it is all perceived as just another piece of news, which against the background of tragedies of Bucha, Irpen, Kramatorsk, and Mariupol doesn’t stand out that much.
The world has changed, we have changed, everything has changed.
Today we will talk about another thing that has become different - about propaganda and the place of people in it.
To start, let us see a short excerpt from Field of Dreams, a TV show that we all have known since childhood.
Excuse me, where do you live now that you’ve left Donetsk?
In Saint Petersburg.
Did they give you an apartment?
Yes, Prigozhin Evgeniy Victorovich granted us a pretty small house.
Really?!
Really! And i am very grateful to him.
Know what? Now that you have a house, I believe that you’ll need it there.
I think you have children, too. Bring the present!
This is from the Wheel of Fortune.
Thing is that as soon as people in Russia knew that you are coming here…
The number of good, kind hearts that immediately expressed the desire to be with you in this difficult moment is enormous.
Bring in presents from United Russia! Turn around!
It seems that nothing special is going on here: well, yes, on Channel One they praise Prigozhin and distribute gifts from United Russia.
But the difference here is about who does that and how.
The staff members of federal TV channels and the many contractors that produce content for them
are thousands of people, most of whom have never been involved in any kind of propaganda.
Most of them had been doing the same thing that their colleagues in democratic countries with free media do:
entertained the viewer, trying to get high ratings and sell ads for a better price.
That is a normal commercial job in a fairly competitive market.
On the one hand, being on the inside, all these people couldn't see the process that was obvious to anyone on the outside.
How the federal broadcast fell completely under control of the government and entities close to it.
How over the years, first the open opponents were purged from it, and then everyone who was not enthusiastic enough about the regime.
How since 2012-2013 the rhetoric moved from being loyalist to open trade in hatred, hatred for external and internal enemies.
On the other hand, they could be telling themselves: I have nothing to do with any of it.
I am merely writing jokes for Ivan Urgant, in the same way as my American colleague writes jokes for John Oliver,
hell at times i may even troll the regime and the state propaganda a little.
Or maybe I am the producer of the TV show “Vocal”, which was actually born in the Netherlands and is being broadcast all over the globe with very little change.
Or maybe, I work at Field of Dreams,
a TV show created by Vladislav Listiev back when there was still the USSR, in 1990,
when that mr. Putin of yours was still a modest KGB.
That show is older than Russia itself: it survived the SCSE coup, the dissolution of the USSR, the shooting of the parliament,
wars, teracts, epidemics, man-made disasters, entire eras began and ended but on Field of Dreams,
the decor had only been changed three times, and Leonid Arkadyevich didn’t age a day.
Children who had read poems to him at the dawn of the show will soon have grandchildren,
but you can view its 1992 version as if it was filmed yesterday: both then and now it's three people guessing words.
A letter? What country is that?
Letter A.
Letter A?
Yes.
Why so sad? Smile! One more time, which letter?
Letter A!
Correct! The letter is there indeed!
Spin the wheel, you guessed it absolutely right.
Screw politics, i am not working for a “Federal TV”, i work at a TV show that was broadcast each friday evening in times of Gorbachev, and it will still be broadcast after Putin.
That is how it used to work, but it no longer works like that after the war began. We will talk about why after the commercial.
Let’s get back to our subject.
For quite a long time, this form of work of people in the media was supported by the very structure of federal channels:
let them do their job without being directly involved in serving the regime.
At the very least, it is known for sure about NTV that their "directorate of legal broadcasting"
responsible for open propaganda and filmish rubbish about the opposition, was simply physically isolated from the rest of the channel.
Apparently other channels did the same: some people call for nuclear war, and others give gardening advice in the morning, they don’t really interact with each other.
In general, people just do the usual commercial entertainment, it’s just that two evening hours are allocated for the poisonous saliva of Soloviev and his experts.
In reality of course, none of the federal media employees were ever “out of politics”.
Mass culture being “out of politics” is nonsense in general, it’s always in politics, it reflects and shapes it.
Information autocracies couldn’t care less for the commercial performances of their media outlets, which are all unprofitable.
For them the function of entertaining TV shows is different: to attract the audience for propaganda.
And everyone who was writing horoscopes for the morning broadcast, worked indirectly for this purpose.
Still it worked as an argument for complacency, for internal emigration, and this reasoning worked fine:
I merely do my job, I write good scripts and funny jokes, just making a show about art or history,
I don’t call to imprison anyone, to bomb anyone’s countries, none of it is my problem.
And you can even remain a decent person working for the propaganda — it seemed back then.
It has changed with the beginning of the war.
Firstly, everything but the open propaganda of war has disappeared from the broadcast of the biggest state TV channels.
The main sellers of hatred, from Skabeeva to Soloviev, seem to sleep in sleeping bags, never leaving their studios,
because they fill the broadcast completely.
Television doesn't have any commercial purpose anymore, it does not entertain but inflames.
Secondly, propaganda has metastasized far outside its usual territory.
The last thing you could think about when you were hired as a cameraman for some Match TV
was that you would have to shoot a “political talk show” indistinguishable from the one on the VGTRK.
But this is how it is today.
Even in sports, the traditional mecca for talented journalists who strive for free and uncensored discussion in an unfree country, you cannot hide from it.
Thirdly, everyone went to frontlines.
Even those purely entertainment formats that have survived in the broadcasting grid, including the very Field of Dreams,
which survived everything and everyone unchanged – even they can no longer remain themselves.
It is no longer a nice retro-show for the older generation, where, no matter the political system or whatever crisis is going on,
a pensioner from Kargopol would gift Leonid Yakubovich with a jar of mushrooms that she herself salted,
and even if the whole world had shattered outside the studio, neither the pensioner, nor the mushrooms, nor Yakubovich would change even a little bit.
And now they have to sing praises for an outright thug Prigozhin,
now they hand out gifts from United Russia, the ruling party, the very party that only today killed 8 people in Odessa, including a 3 months old child.
During the last 22 years you could have worked on television, in a major newspaper, at a radio station, even the state one, and not be directly involved in bloody propaganda.
It doesn’t work like that anymore.
A big war makes the world simple and very much black and white, and in such a world, one has to eventually pick a side.
The Rwanda tribunal, the Nurneberg process, the trial on propagandist Wiliam Joyce —
these are all stores that show that, after destructive regimes fall, neither the international, nor the national justice cares to distinguish those
who were giving orders to kill people from those who were making calls for it among their readers, listeners, and viewers.
Freedom of speech doesn’t apply to warmongers and advocates for genocide.
There is no chance to be partially pregnant today.
If you work for the state media, then you are a part of the system that is committing horrible war crimes every day.
It is not just a job.
A job as a presenter, a cameraman, a screenwriter, or a producer. No.
Now, it means complicity.
One could say like, wait, I have kids, parents, a mortgage, I don't have a choice.
Well no, my friends. It doesn’t work like that, there is always a choice and now is the last chance to make it.
Remember that there is no option to both remain human and keep working for federal media, no matter the job.
The people in power took it away.
Even under Soviet rule in its post-Stalin period, creative people, those who wrote, filmed, or painted,
had the opportunity to remain in the profession in service of the state and still not be involved in its malices.
Leonid Parfenov, who has a solid experience of working in the Soviet press, calls this period “writing about cute animals”.
The most talented people who were sick of the thought of the topics and the language that the party was trying to force upon them,
those who did not want to write about the "muddy waters of the Rhine" and about the "unhappy faces of ordinary Londoners",
did not want to write about milk production and the Israeli military, they went to animation, to children's literature, to scientific pop.
They had no chance to hide from the government, but they had a chance to survive professionally in areas that the government didn’t care for.
The most harmless TV show like “telling children about the world”
can at any moment turn into having to explain to children about why the world must be burnt to ashes for the sake of saving Baba Yaga from a hut in Washington.
The state has radicalized everything.
Everyone who tried to take conciliatory or intermediate positions,
everyone who tried to pass between the streams — they have lost everything,
from their radio station to their name in the name of the bank they’ve created.
If today you keep serving the state in structures of state propaganda,
then you will have no chance to avoid participating in crimes.
The times of non-participation have passed, it is the time of total loyalty now.
The state expects you to agree to any kind of malice in its name.
But what differentiates you from your colleagues from the USSR, the state is not the only thing you have.
You don’t need to seek refuge in its depth, especially since there is no such refuge there.
You have options.
My channel is not the biggest one on YouTube.
Despite us reaching Varlamov and The Editorial in terms of audience size, we are still number 1285 in Russia.
But my channel has 1.3 million subscribers, that’s almost a million and a half of views each day.
This is not yet comparable to ratings of federal TV channels,
but it is already comparable to a big UHF channel or a nationwide newspaper, and such a number of copies
would be a dream for something like Commersant in its better years, when it had an edition of 100 000 copies.
I am not even a professional journalist, that was not why i've created this channel.
Russian YouTube now is the testament to our desire for independent journalism.
Any channel, no matter how amateurish, immediately skyrocket.
Navalny Team, Michael Naki, Alexander Plushev, Yulia Latynina, the whole teams of Ekho and Dozhd
old channels grow rapidly, and new channels immediately get audiences for which they would have had to work for years before.
Just yesterday you needed a sizable sum of money to buy equipment and hire specialists to create your own channel,
because the spoiled audience of YouTube expected your picture and sound to be not worse or even better than those on TV.
Today you may have compression artifacts and croaking audio, live stream interrupting in the middle,
everything underlit and under colored, nobody cares for all of it now, you'll still have tens of thousands viewers online.
Such is the demand for an adequate statement, as well as the deficit of one.
Today you cannot be tied to the state without becoming a criminal.
Such is our reality.
But the thing is that you don’t have to.
The choice between freedom of speech and providing for your family mattered in Soviet times,
partially in the 00th and the beginning of the 10th.
Today, the choice is different: complicity in a crime or working as a journalist.
Working as a journalist that the audience wants. The one that the audience is willing to pay to.м
Not only we’ve never had so many views, we’ve never had so much support from the audience.
One would expect that since there is a crisis and everyone’s perspectives are unclear at best,
everyone would try to save up and not spend, but nope, people donate like never before.
And the advertisers who should’ve fled too, keep coming in droves.
Don’t lie to yourself that there is no way out for you. There is one.
There are people who will hire you, there are those who will watch you and give you money.
Today, in these first months of war, you have your last chance to evacuate, to preserve your future.
To keep staying within the framework of Putin’s propaganda is not only unethical and criminal,
but it is also foolish from a rational point of view.
You’d be siding with a man who is already 70,
who is stuck in a bloodshed that will not end in him winning.
No matter how the situation turns out, long term, there will be no Putin.
And the closer his end is, the bigger crimes the regime will force you to commit.
To bet on an old man who unleashed a war and ruined his closest circle is to sign on for a deliberate defeat.
It will all end sooner or later, but those who managed to escape, especially loudly and defiantly,
like Ovsyannikova did, will be in relative safety, and those who stayed to the end,
who called for the extermination of people to the end, will answer for everything.
Some have no way out and no way to avoid responsibility anymore,
obviously Margarita Simonyan and Vladimir Soloviev will share fates with Julius Shtreiher,
but people below have the time to not only avoid responsibility,
but to continue their career at a qualitatively new level.
Not doing anything vile. Maybe even doing something good.
Think of it for a second: you all know how it ends.
Any leadership after Putin, be it his most faithful guard or his closest oligarch,
will put an end to everything that is going on now, and they will do it in a single day.
The new government will, more fiercely than any liberal opposition, be putting warmongers on trial,
looking for whom to blame for the fact that Russia fell into isolation, killed countless civilians in Ukraine
and lost thousands, if not tens of thousands of its own soldiers.
The blame will fall on the most public persons, and primarily propaganda workers.
And not just public ones, but all of them, simply by the list, by their editorial IDs.
And what is worse is that you will never know in advance when such an end will come.
When it will be too late. When you will no longer be able to get out.
When the day comes when Putin is gone and you are still with him
and your colleagues of yesterday have declared you the public enemy.
It’s like a financial pyramid: very profitable to enter on the first day and to get out on the last.
The problem is that nobody knows when that last day will come.
Do not stay there till the end. Get out now.
Till tomorrow.