![]() ![]() “They beat me, tied up my hands, starved me,” a woman from Volgograd cries. On NTV, another staple of Russian television appears: the dysfunctional-family showcase. No evidence is cited for any of this it’s merely people talking or, as some like to say, “asking questions.” (“Is it plus or minus?” another panelist asks.) Afterward, an “economic expert” tells the audience that transgender bodies have begun to fall apart. A panelist mispronounces the term LGBTQ+ to general laughter. On tonight’s Kto Protiv, Sweden and Finland are presented as having been coerced into joining NATO. But Russian state television is several degrees to the right of Fox, or even of its more lunatic competitor, Newsmax, although Tucker Carlson, the onetime king of televised white supremacy, is frequently shown on Russian TV as well-or, at least, he was back in April. The subject matter is often akin to what one sees on far-right television in the U.S., the exemplar of which is Fox News. Kto Protiv (“Who Is Against”), on Rossiya 1, is one such program. By my third or fourth swastika of the day, I start to believe that when the symbol is shown this often, it is not done so entirely with disparagement, but with a subconscious appeal to authoritarian power and to the state’s own fascism.Ī lot of time on all three networks is given over to flashy “newsroom” sets populated by older men in blazers who scream about the West. Sometimes it is on the news, sometimes in a documentary, sometimes in a TV drama. Sometimes it is taken from footage of the Nazi era, sometimes from purported videos of the Ukrainian far right. The first thing you notice when you switch on Russian TV is its totemic fascination with the swastika, which regularly appears on one of my screens. I settle into my large, comfortable bed order a pisco sour to be sent to my room (the hotel’s restaurant is Peruvian) and rub my eyes in anticipation. I flick on each monitor in turn: Channel 1, Rossiya 1 (broadcast outside Russia as RTR-Planeta), and NTV. But I am not here to look out on the World Trade Center tower or the New Museum right below the hotel. My room has nice views of most of the downtown-Manhattan skyline, which lights up in flashes of pink and purple as the sun begins to set over New Jersey. I arrive at the Public Hotel on the Lower East Side on a cold day this past April. Back then, I did not want to believe they could lead to the massacres of Bucha and Irpin. The images of Ukrainians as a bunch of Nazis hoodwinked by the West were readily presented on Russian television. But in some way, Russians were preparing for the bloodshed of innocent Ukrainians as far back as 2014, if not earlier. On the one hand, the length of my sentence has been commuted to five days from seven on the other hand, since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the state’s propaganda has become even more loud, brash, and genocidal, making any length of exposure to it psychologically problematic. Now, slightly more than eight years later, I have decided to replicate this experiment. ![]() By the end of my stay, I had turned from a happy-go-lucky novelist into a squeaking gerbil of a man, psychologically compromised and barely sure of what constituted reality. Three monitors were arrayed in front of my bed constantly blasting the state-owned Channel 1 and Rossiya 1 networks, as well as the Gazprom-owned NTV. ![]() On assignment for The New York Times, I’d agreed to stay in a hotel room for seven days (leaving only for a brief daily swim) while watching Russian state television. On New Year’s Eve of 2014, I became the subject of a terrifying experiment. This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. ![]()
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