"What I didn’t tell the guard... is that I’m tired of hiding from my country—and that I want to trade one form of hiding for another."

"I have conducted my adult life as if censorship and propaganda were my natural enemies, but now some broken part of me is homesick for that world. I want to be deceived, to forget that there is a war going on...."

Writes Vadim Shyslov, in "Give Me Propaganda or Give Me Death/When Russia went to war, I faced a choice: Flee to a world where the truth might kill me—or seek peace in censored oblivion" (Wired).

Masha Borzunova, a journalist who fled Russia... walked me through a typical day of Russian TV: “A person wakes up to a news broadcast that shows how the Russian military is making gains. Then Anti-Fake begins, where the presenters dismantle the fake news of Western propaganda and propagate their own fake news. Then there’s the talk show Time Will Tell that runs for four, sometimes five hours, where we’ll see Russian soldiers bravely advancing. Then comes Male and Female.... Then more news and a few more talk shows, in which a KGB combat psychic predicts Russia’s future and what will happen on the front. This is followed by the game show Field of Miracles.... And then, of course, the evening news.” 

I had gone from being infuriated by this kind of hypnosis to envying it. The free flow of information had become for me what a jug of water is to a severely dehydrated person: The right amount can save you, but too much can kill....