No dictatorship ever relies solely on pure force. To achieve their goals, they often deceive, manipulate facts, discredit dissenters and bribe doubters. All this is necessary so that society does not notice how the space of freedom is gradually shrinking. Over the past 24 years, the political regime in Russia has undergone a radical transformation and developed its own repertoire of lies and manipulations. TV Dozhd journalist and co-founder of the Russian Independent Media Archive Anna Nemzer explores the evolution of Putin’s playbook in her YouTube show. At this public talk we will discuss how the archive of Russian independent media helps her in this work and what discoveries she has made.
Anna Nemzer is a journalist, writer and documentary filmmaker studying the historical memory of wars in the post-Soviet space. She is a presenter on Dozhd (TV-Rain), the Russian independent TV channel, now working in exile; a scholar at Bard College; and a co-founder of the Russian Independent Media Archive (RIMA) dedicated to the preservation of all Russian independent media as important evidence of the era.
Ilia Veniavkin is a historian, civic engineer, and a journalist. For 15 years he has been studying Stalinist culture and subjectivity. He wrote an ebook, Master’s Inkwell. A Soviet Writer Inside the Great Purge and co-founded Prozhito.org, a collaborative online archive of Soviet diaries and ego-documents. He is a co-founder of the Russian Independent Media Archive and a scholar at Bard College. He is now writing a book on the ideology of Putinism.