ABSTRACT
Nina Khrushcheva’s “Vladimir Putin’s Russia: Living in George Orwell” discusses the development of the propaganda formulas deployed by Putin’s Kremlin over the last two decades. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2024, the propaganda narratives have gotten more direct and militaristic; however, many Russians have found creative ways to confront those narratives. Given severe restrictions on free speech, protesting in public and en masse is not possible. Instead, some people have expressed their opposition to the Ukrainian war and to Putin’s rule by employing images and quotes from George Orwell; his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four has been the most sold-out book in Russia in recent years. Russian literature, too, has provided a source of optimism and hope. Lessons from previous periods of oppression in Russian history described by such Soviet classics as Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Eugenia Ginsburg suggest that dictatorships invariably fail and that the Putin rule will be no exception.
