You don’t know anything about Russia, but it is worse than that. Everything you think you know about Russia is wrong. That’s because you live in an echo chamber, with all incoming information bottlenecked to a select few platforms and legacy media outlets controlled by the United States government. If you want to know the Russian perspective on world event, that’s impossible from western news sources available to you.
If Russian municipal services euthanized an aggressive dog, your media would report it as “Putin personally strangles innocent puppy with his bare hands because he is evil.” That’s an exaggeration, but not by much. Western news sources don’t necessarily tell direct lies about Russia, but they do regularly engage in worst motive fallacy (I overslept today because the neighborhood kids played loud music last night. Ivan overslept because he is lazy). Western media uncritically repeats any claim levied against Russia as long as it’s negative, and these conspiracy theories often go into Alex Jones levels of crazy. Every random deputy mayor, judge or policeman from some small town who dies or gets arrested for corruption was a personal enemy of Putin he wanted eliminated. Because of course Putin spends all of his time in personal feuds with random low-ranking officials.
A good trick with news about Russia is to swap out all references to “Russia” with “USA” or another western “civilized” country. If the story sounds ridiculous when about the USA, it is probably also ridiculous to say about Russia. Not always, but 99% of the time. But still, even the most “media literate” person can’t look at a slanted news story and magically unslant it with his brain, that’s not how disinformation works.
But what you can do is look at Russian media for yourself, and then you’ll at the very least be able to understand what their position is on a subject, and you can contrast it with how that position is being presented in western legacy outlets.
That’s why I’ve created a Russian media summary channel on Substack, where I list the major Russian news topics of the day with links to the original sources. You can believe or not believe them, but you will at the very least know what the Russians are actually saying, which is more than what you know now.
Ian Kummer
I now have a new YouTube channel that I will use to upload videos from my travels around Russia. Expect new content there soon. Please give me a follow here.
Also feel free to connect with me on Quora (I sometimes share unique articles there).
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