A DAY INSIDE PUTIN´S SURREAL TELEVISION EMPIRE / FOREIGN POLICY

A Day Inside Putin’s Surreal Television Empire

How the nonstop blare of Russian state media fuels the war effort—and blurs reality.

By Anastasia Edel, a writer and social historian.

An illustration shows Russian President Vladimir Putin on a television set with spinning lines behind him for a story about Russia's TV propaganda. / MARK HARRIS ILLUSTRATIONS FOR FOREIGN POLICY

If there’s one part of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s autocratic toolkit that has lived up to its prewar hype, it is the Kremlin’s propaganda machine. 

Propaganda is the proverbial carrot in the ocean of sticks that is modern Russia, responsible for co-opting the public into the state’s war agenda. 

Every day, 82 million Russians tune into a vast web of state-controlled network and cable television channels that feeds them a uniform vision of the world: a hostile, scary place, in which Russia wages a righteous battle against the forces of evil.

Putin didn’t invent propaganda. 

As a citizen of the now-defunct Soviet Union, I was born into a land of make-believe created for me and millions of other Soviets by the propaganda bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. 

According to our television sets, my fellow citizens and I lived in the most advanced, peace-loving, and just country in the world, constantly fending off attacks at the hands of imperialist forces. 

Listening to songs that cried out against the impending nuclear war, or watching broadcasts of U.S. police forces dispersing peace demonstrations with tear gas, I wondered why Americans were so bent on destroying our way of life.

The collapse of the totalitarian state removed these propaganda blinders and revealed the world it had conjured for what it was: a fantasy. 

But the Soviet-era mechanisms of manipulation—and the Russians’ propensity to fall for it—are even stronger today. 

In survey after survey, public support for Putin and his war on Ukraine remains high, thanks in part to the consensus manufactured by pro-Kremlin television programming.

Last month, I put on these blinders again and tuned in to experience what an average Russian might consume in just one day. 

The results were disturbing.

A couple watch a TV screen from the kitchen of their home in Luzhki, Russia, on May 9, 2020, as Russian President Vladimir Putin addresses the nation to mark the 75th anniversary of victory over Nazi Germany in World War II. Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP via Getty Images

Television, not the internet, remains the dominant news medium in Russia. 

The average Russian consumes around four hours daily. 

In absolute terms, these numbers are not unique: Americans watch more. 

What is unique, even from Soviet times, is that every channel and every program, from news broadcasts to music competitions, transmit the Kremlin’s narrative, 24 hours per day, seven days a week.

The day’s agenda is set by the 5 a.m. newscast. 

On a Friday morning in April, the main story on Channel One, the Russian Federation’s oldest and most influential channel, is “battling Ukrainian Nazis” near Bakhmut. 

This is followed by reports on French President Emmanuel Macron’s visit to China; Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s visit to Turkey; and the Orthodox holiday of Annunciation. 

This lineup is repeated, with minor variations, every 30 minutes during the three-hour morning show, with news from the front interspersed with folksy advice on how to extract birch juice or make a mouse trap from household supplies. 

Even the weather forecast contributes what it can by listing occupied Ukrainian cities as part of Russian territory.

On Channel One, news—and programs discussing the news—amount to roughly eight hours of daytime broadcasting. 

It should come as no surprise that the lion’s share of this time is dedicated to coverage of Russia’s “special military operation,” the Kremlin’s euphemism for its grisly war on Ukraine.

As the day unfolds, news programs grow longer, adding stories in a crescendo until they reach their 9 p.m. catharsis: Vremya, or “Time.” 

A relic of my Soviet youth, the show is tasked with presenting domestic and international happenings through an ideologically correct lens.

Any pretenses of objectivity have been abandoned. 

Each segment tops the previous in its cynicism and bigotry.

Times, however, have changed. 

Though it remains one of Russia’s most popular news programs, Vremya’s smirking host is a far cry from the solemn-faced Soviet anchors of yesteryear. 

Any pretenses of objectivity have been abandoned. 

A segment on U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s remarks on the Ukrainian counteroffensive is accompanied by a cartoon image of Uncle Sam pulling the Ukrainian president by puppet strings under the headline “Tamed murderers.” 

Each segment tops the previous in its cynicism and bigotry. 

One of the stories is an investigation of crimes against humanity in Mariupol—that is, the host alleges, crimes committed by Ukraine.

Outside of news broadcasts, war is mulled over for the public in a steady flow of political and social talk shows. 

On the giant studio screens that serve as a backdrop for hosts and their expert guests, war is presented as an endless horror show unleashed by bestial Ukrainians. 

Blood pours in rivers, women wail, and shell-shocked grandmas thank Russian soldiers in shaky voices, while the anchors and their guests exude righteous anger. 

Yet, in their words, war is also a “blessed deed.” 

It’s the “legacy of our grandfathers”—one of many incessant hijackings of Russian memory of World War II for the current war’s ends. 

For those less attuned to their “sacred duty,” war is portrayed as a job, where tasks of murdering Ukrainians are described as being “finalized,” “advanced,” or “completed.” 

They frame the violence as inevitable and mundane, absolving the viewers’ minds of any friction or guilt toward the crimes committed in their name.

Elsewhere in the day’s digest, war is sold and humanized through an assortment of recurring characters that fall into one of two camps: “us” or “them.” 

The “us” (nashi) is led by the “heroes”— Putin’s soldiers. 

These “heirs to the Red Army warriors” are always tall, often blue-eyed, or at least with beards of light hues. 

When they aren’t fighting Nazis, they relax in clean, warm barracks and read support letters from Russian schoolchildren. 

Their health is attended to by beautiful field nurses with curled bangs and meticulously applied makeup, even on the front lines. 

That might not look believable to anyone who has seen real war, but Russians “have their own way” of doing business, the people on the screen assure. 

Elsewhere in the day’s lineup, talking heads coo, “We are different.”

An illusration shows a Russian tank atop spinning lines and television iconography for a story about Russia's TV Putin-Russia-TV-propaganda-Mark-Harris-illustration

Then there are the villains. 

The word “Ukrainian” is never used on its own, only with appendages like “Nazis,” “satanists,” “terrorists,” “murderers,” “godless,” “fascists,” “radicals.” 

In this reality, Ukrainians are not even real people—they’re “Russians with broken brains,” worthless creatures with no agency whose puppet strings are pulled by the United States. 

The Americans merit their own dose of vitriol. 

No longer the worthy opponents of the Cold War era, Americans—or rather, “Anglo-Saxes”—are “slow-witted,” “hegemonic,” and “chaotic.” 

In their quest to destroy Russia, they exploit emasculated European leaders, whose main interests are pandering to the gay agenda and enslaving their respective states to the European Union.

The share of foreign coverage in domestic broadcasts is astounding: Romanian farmers protesting Ukrainian grain imports, Parisians burning their president’s favorite restaurant, British parents decrying body positivity lessons taught by naked people. 

And, if that weren’t enough, U.S. intelligence is allegedly plotting Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s overthrow, according to the anchors on the screen. 

The turmoil is constant and visceral. 

By painting a terrifying vision of the Western world, these stories lead to the inevitable conclusion that what little good is left must therefore come from the East. 

Led by its “wise,” “brilliant,” and “mighty” president, Xi Jinping, China is lauded in this coverage for extending Russia a helping hand, as are other “friendly” countries such as Iran, Syria, Burkina Faso, or Belarus. 

Russia isn’t isolated, the anchors who used to spend their holidays in the hellish France or Switzerland insist. 

It’s anything but. 

They also deliver a standing and attractive invitation for other countries to join a new coalition founded on illiberalism, traditionalism, and anti-Americanism, whose twin capitals, Moscow and Beijing, are shaping the now-multipolar world.

Against this foreign focus, domestic stories feel like an afterthought, merely a way to showcase the Russian president’s omniscience. 

There’s Putin meeting with the minister of health to discuss advances in Russian health care; Putin ordering his government to help returning “special military operation participants” with employment and housing; Putin visiting a Tula railroad plant to discuss successfully replacing Western machinery with superior domestic masterpieces.

The few glimpses of regular Russian life that have not been airbrushed for Putin are depressing. 

On this day’s installment of Male/Female, advertised as a talk show about “citizens in complicated situations,” the host and his team investigate a village murder—reenacted and debated by the parents of the victim and the accused—in an episode filled with references to beatings, interrogations, and arrest warrants. 

Segments in Man and Law, a “sociopolitical program,” follow the extralegal exploits of a number of real Russians—a marriage scam artist, a deaf retiree money launderer, tenants running a furniture factory in a residential building, a woman violently harassing her neighbor’s family, and another one running a chicken coop inside her house. 

The lineup leaves viewers with a feeling of dread and wariness toward the insane world they inhabit.

In that hostile universe, the extraterrestrial plays a special part. 

According to The Big Game, a political talk show, the reason Xi would never talk to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is because the latter is cursed: Every leader who crosses his path walks into political or physical misfortune. 

For proof, look no further than the fates of former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson or Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin—both ousted from office—or, worse, the sultan of Oman, Qaboos bin Said, who died just days after the Ukrainian president visited his country. 

Fearmongering has always been a goal of propaganda, but in Putin’s KGB days, the Soviet Union’s anti-religious, pro-scientific stance imposed certain constraints on peddling obscurantism. 

Those constraints have now been lifted, and superstitions of all stripes have been conscripted to serve the ideological agenda. 

We live in end times, the television is saying: Prepare for the final showdown between good and evil.

Nowhere is this eschatological angle played up with more zeal than during the political talk show Evening With Vladimir Solovyov on Russia-1. 

Dressed in the red-trimmed black garb of a medieval executioner, Solovyov, an owner of multiple Italian villas sanctioned by the EU for his role in the invasion, is notorious, even in the crowded space of Russia’s war propagandists. 

In his two-hour-plus program that airs almost every day, Solovyov paints the current conflict in doomsday colors—a raging holy war in which Russian saints fight Ukrainian demons. 

Direct incitement to murder is not a crime on Russian television. 

Decrying Ukrainian authorities’ search of the Monastery of the Caves, a historical stronghold of the Russian Orthodox Church in Kyiv, Solovyov asks: “For how long would we leave the blood of our heroes unavenged? … When will we destroy the government block in Kyiv and the chief Nazi Zelensky?”

If the guests of his show are to be believed, then the answer is: soon. 

According to Margarita Simonyan, editor in chief of Russia Today, a propaganda network directed at audiences outside of Russia, and a frequent guest on the show, the 10 biblical plagues have already been unleashed on “Pharaoh Zelensky.” 

“Thunder and hail,” she muses about the destruction in Ukraine that has plunged so many into darkness. 

“This might have been written about our missile launchers!” 

It’s hard to see her smile in this moment as anything but sadistic.

Behind the manic smiles and modern graphics of this machine, however, is a petty man who uses fear to distract from the cruelty and deep failings of his war with the world.

The rest of the program’s guests, mostly parliamentarians and academics representing the Russian “elite,” are entirely supportive of Solovyov’s carnival of pathologies. 

The United States is the source of all evil, they agree. 

The International Criminal Court problem, says a professor from Moscow State University, can be taken care of in no time with a nuclear strike, to which the show’s “experts” giggle knowingly. 

“Destroy Ukraine,” Solovyov thunders in the closing remarks of his 170-minute-long Sunday show. 

“Burn it out with hot iron. 

We can’t negotiate with Satan.”

The Sunday after this, he demands the reintroduction of capital punishment to deal with “traitors.” 

He favors hanging. 

Once Russia wins, it might negotiate with the West—or, rather, with “what is left of the West,” Solovyov says, one of many thinly veiled threats of nuclear annihilation directed toward Russia’s enemies. 

“We have the means to shut down the Americans,” one of his guests, a former Ukrainian politician now wanted in Ukraine, echoes. 

“It is time that we use them.”

Though it’s hard to imagine anyone choosing to consume this propaganda outside of Russian territory, the Russian public is not the only target audience for these efforts. 

As Western leaders read reports of Putin’s mouthpieces threatening to reduce the United States and Europe into “radioactive ash,” or ponder a Russian Nobel laureate’s admonition about Russia preparing to win a nuclear war, they, too, are engaging with an externally focused, albeit less cinematic, arm of the Kremlin’s propaganda machine that seeks to undermine their unity and sow doubt about supporting Ukraine.

Behind the manic smiles and modern graphics of this machine, however, is a petty man who uses fear to distract from the cruelty and deep failings of his war with the world. 

Someday, like those who lived to see the other side of the Soviet era, Russians will recognize Putin’s lies for what they are: a tool to make them complicit in their state’s crimes. 

Just how many more Ukrainian lives will be taken between now and Russia’s next reawakening is anybody’s guess.

Anastasia Edel is a Russian-born American writer and social historian. She is the author of Russia: Putin’s Playground, a concise guide to Russian history, politics, and culture. Her writing has appeared in the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Project Syndicate, Quartz, and World Literature Today. She teaches history at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at University of California, Berkeley. Twitter: @AEdelWriter