NEWSLINK New York Times: Russia’s Ideology: There Is No Truth

April 3, 2015 JRL Russia List Europe, EU, Foreign Policy, Security, Visas, Media, Internet, Social Media, Television, Newslinks, United States, U.S.-Russian Relations

File Photo of Kremlin Tower, St. Basil's, Red Square at Night

IMAGINE if you grew up lying. Not a little bit, for convenience, but during every public moment of your life: at school, at work, at social events. You had to lie to survive, because the punishment for telling the truth was the loss of your academic or professional career, or even prison. For Russians who came of age before 1991, this is the only way they know. The mature generation grew up with this behavior during the later years of the Soviet Union: reading Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and listening to clandestine BBC reports in private while pretending to be good Communist Youth League or party members.

New York Times: Peter Pomerantsev, Russia’s Ideology: There Is No Truth.