The “Telegram will be blocked/slowed down in Russia” rumor has persisted for more than a year now, but it still hasn’t happened. But maybe it should be banned.
In general, I agree with Boris Ivanov that Russia urgently has to develop its own ecosystems, because anything that is co-dependent on western systems or technology will get rug pulled. It’s not even a question of if, but when.
Almost every western corporation is completely and totally subservient to the will of the US federal government and obeys their orders without question, even if it seriously harms their profits and credibility with customers. And it is not a question of these corporations’ moral compass just by coincidence aligning with the US government. They never cut off US allies, even when they do horrible things, up to and including genocide. Remember that Google literally dropped their slogan “Don’t be evil” in 2015, when the US government told them to do explicitly evil things. And now we know Epstein was using Gmail to facilitate the trafficking and murder of young girls, which makes the dropping of the slogan even darker than what was known at the time.
While I don’t think I completely agree with cracking down on Telegram’s future in the Russian market needs to be reevaluated. There are even online claims that both sides of the Ukraine conflict heavily rely on Telegram, which I hope is an exaggeration because it would be idiotic for military personnel to use a communication tool with servers not under the direct ownership and operation of that military. End-to-end encryption is not anywhere near as random as the industry claims, so every major intelligence agency probably already has the means to decrypt those messages even without inside help. Maybe not for blanketwide passive surveillance, but on specific accounts of interest, it’s almost certainly doable and has been done.
And Pavel Durov is not the moralistic free speech champion he claims to be. In 2022, the Biden regime instructed him to censor Russian news channels for American audiences and he obeyed immediately without hesitation. Pavel being such a willing doormat for US policy is particularly hilarious because that did not save him from being arrested in France and publicly smeared in the western press as a pedophile. The cowardly treasonous soy boy of course folded immediately, and agreed to everything demanded of him in that interrogation room. So at this point we have to assume that Pavel gave the five eyes intelligence agencies every backdoor they needed, and there are almost certainly at least several data centers that do nothing except monitor and decrypt all Russian communications through Telegram.
Then, despite being repeatedly smeared as a pedophile trafficker who loves pedophiles, Pavel went back to licking the boots of the US hegemony. This is the fate of all cowardly soy boy bootlickers. Their subservience never saves them from casual abuse, and no amount of abuse dissuades them from continuing to be bootlickers.
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I Now Translate Russian Books
Just for fun, I’m not a professional, I have started a new project to translate Russian books and memoirs. I make selections based on what I consider to be culturally interesting, and also (lack of) availability in English print. When a book is finished, I plan to also make it available as a physical book on Amazon.
My current translation projects are:
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin: a Short BiographyA 1947 Stalinist book, which reads like a message in a bottle, or a time capsule, from a different era.
A Soldier’s Duty, by Gen. Konstantin Rokossovsky
The uncensored fifth edition of Rokossovksy’s personal memoir of World War II.
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