Thread by @jonworth

Back in 2018 I travelled across Russia on the Transsiberian railway

2 conversations from that trip have been on my mind a lot these past few days

The first was on one of the long stretches - Tayshet to Krasnoyarsk or Krasnoyarsk to Tayga

There were two others in my RZD Cupe 2nd class sleeping carriage. A forestry manager from the wilds north of Ulan Ude, and a technician from Tomsk University

The Tomsk guy spoke a little German, and Yandex translate handled the rest

Hours into the trip our conversation turned semi-political. “We all have VPNs” he said

Me and my travel companion could have been anyone. But to use a VPN was that normal it was just dropped into conversation

The second conversation was in Moscow on a summer evening in a roof top bar overlooking the Moskva, and a meeting with a friend of a friend, arranged beforehand

By this point in the trip, 3 weeks in, I’d become fascinated by the lack of obvious authoritarianism

I went to Uzbekistan under Karimov - there the control was obvious

In the cities at least, the person I was meeting told me, you can more or less consume what you want and behave as you wish - so long as you don’t organise dissent

Sure, just two little stories. But they make me wonder if the Putin-controls-the-narrative lines are perhaps slightly over done

/ends