Thread by @khodorkovsky_en

We were taught that truth is the best weapon.

That if people have access to facts, they'll figure it out.

This turned out to be completely, dangerously wrong

(🧵Read on)

Information is no longer scarce: everyone has access to it. The Kremlin understood this sooner than most. Unlike Pravda in Soviet times, they don't see hiding facts as the biggest priority — instead, they flood you with versions of events until you start drowning in them.

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This is not to say censorship in Russia isn't brutal — it absolutely is, and people spend years in prison for speaking out. It's just not the regime's most important tool. They do silence dissent, but what makes the real difference is what they amplify and how they frame it.

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In doing so, they fill the gaps with fabrications, effectively constructing an alternative reality where "objective truth" itself stops meaning anything.

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The result is straight out of Orwell. "We didn't start the war" — despite Russian missiles hitting Kyiv on February 24, 2022.

Occupation of someone else's land is called "liberation."

Convicted criminals recruited from prisons are called "heroes" and sent to speak to children at schools.

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They've built a system where everything is fabricated: election results — 87% for Putin is a fiction, it's not a real number — the same is true for poverty statistics, mortality rates.

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Zuckerberg once said: to defeat lies online, just give people access to truthful information, and they'll sort it out themselves.

Life—especially the last decade—proved him spectacularly wrong.

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For me, the clearest example here remains MH17.

When the Boeing was shot down in 2014, the Kremlin immediately flooded the space with competing stories. "Ukraine did it." "The Boeing brought itself down." "It was an unidentified aircraft."

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And what did Western media do? The BBC stuck to its old guidelines: "We don't know yet, it may have been a Russian Buk, but other viewpoints exist."

The Kremlin grabbed onto this immediately and used it to its advantage: "Look, even the BBC admits other versions are possible!"

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This was repeated for 3 months by different people on different channels in Russia — and it worked: just 3% of Russians believed that it was their military that shot down the passenger plane.

The facts were all out there, even state news agencies reported on the investigation. The factual findings got buried under the narratives.

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There is another element of this machine that I find particularly repulsive — the manufacturing of fake public opinion.

They take people and present them as ordinary citizens who're voicing their views — when in reality they're hired actors working off the same script.

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These characters distribute positions they were handed from the top — on TV, in newspapers, on radio.

The same method scales online: thousands of "independent" voices on X all saying the same thing, creating a false sense of overwhelming consensus. The lie starts feeling like the majority view.

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This is why I am convinced: if you offer only dry facts today, you lose.

Classical journalism — the kind taught in universities — does not hold up under these conditions. It was not built for this.

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In an information war, whoever offers the more effective and comprehensible narrative wins. The Kremlin understands this perfectly and uses every opening. When none exist, it creates them.

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My conclusion after the last five to seven years is unambiguous: we either learn to build and advance our own narratives, or we accept defeat.

The space of meaning is never empty. If we don't fill it, the Kremlin will.

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I write about what the Kremlin does, not what it says.

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