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On New Year’s Eve of 2014, I became the subject of a terrifying experiment. On assignment for The New York Times, I’d agreed to stay in a hotel room for seven days (leaving only for a brief daily swim) while watching Russian state television. Three monitors were arrayed in front of my bed constantly blasting the state-owned Channel 1 and Rossiya 1 networks, as well as the Gazprom-owned NTV. By the end of my stay, I had turned from a happy-go-lucky novelist into a squeaking gerbil of a man, psychologically compromised and barely sure of what constituted reality.
Now, slightly more than eight years later, I have decided to replicate this experiment. On the one hand, the length of my sentence has been commuted to five days from seven; on the other hand, since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the state’s propaganda has become even more loud, brash, and genocidal, making any length of exposure to it psychologically problematic. But in some way, Russians were preparing for the bloodshed of innocent Ukrainians as far back as 2014, if not earlier. The images of Ukrainians as a bunch of Nazis hoodwinked by the West were readily presented on Russian television. Back then, I did not want to believe they could lead to the massacres of Bucha and Irpin. Today, I know better.
Day 1
I arrive at the Public Hotel on the Lower East Side on a cold day this past April. My room has nice views of most of the downtown-Manhattan skyline, which lights up in flashes of pink and purple as the sun begins to set over New Jersey. But I am not here to look out on the World Trade Center tower or the New Museum right below the hotel. I am here to suffer and learn. I flick on each monitor in turn: Channel 1, Rossiya 1 (broadcast outside Russia as RTR-Planeta), and NTV. I settle into my large, comfortable bed; order a pisco sour to be sent to my room (the hotel’s restaurant is Peruvian); and rub my eyes in anticipation. It begins.
The first thing you notice when you switch on Russian TV is its totemic fascination with the swastika, which regularly appears on one of my screens. Sometimes it is taken from footage of the Nazi era, sometimes from purported videos of the Ukrainian far right. Sometimes it is on the news, sometimes in a documentary, sometimes in a TV drama. By my third or fourth swastika of the day, I start to believe that when the symbol is shown this often, it is not done so entirely with disparagement, but with a subconscious appeal to authoritarian power and to the state’s own fascism.
[Read: Putin is caught in his own trap]
A lot of time on all three networks is given over to flashy “newsroom” sets populated by older men in blazers who scream about the West. Kto Protiv (“Who Is Against”), on Rossiya 1, is one such program. The subject matter is often akin to what one sees on far-right television in the U.S., the exemplar of which is Fox News. But Russian state television is several degrees to the right of Fox, or even of its more lunatic competitor, Newsmax, although Tucker Carlson, the onetime king of televised white supremacy, is frequently shown on Russian TV as well—or, at least, he was back in April. On tonight’s Kto Protiv, Sweden and Finland are presented as having been coerced into joining NATO. A panelist mispronounces the term LGBTQ+ to general laughter. (“Is it plus or minus?” another panelist asks.) Afterward, an “economic expert” tells the audience that transgender bodies have begun to fall apart. No evidence is cited for any of this; it’s merely people talking or, as some like to say, “asking questions.”
On NTV, another staple of Russian television appears: the dysfunctional-family showcase. “They beat me, tied up my hands, starved me,” a woman from Volgograd cries. “My grandmother beat my face with a metal stick.” The beaten woman, now in late-middle age, is the daughter of a mother of five, who rejected all or most of her children after giving birth to them. The elderly mother who abandoned her children is presented. A woman with a piece of jewelry around her neck resembling a thick chain screams from the audience: “Why did you give birth to so many children if you didn’t have a husband or money? So that they would be orphans?”
Meanwhile, on Channel 1, a black-and-white documentary shows Khrushchev greeting a group of cosmonauts. The glories of the Soviet past on one screen are contrasted with the realities of the present on another. You may ask why a government obsessed with propaganda would be showing programs about broken families. One reason is that audiences of all nations enjoy watching their fellow citizens in pain. Another is to remind the people that life in the lower depths is a time-honored tradition. The show is presented by two dapper male hosts who are part of a well-trod Russian-TV theme: Provincials in distress are interviewed by stylish urban hosts, as if they are Chekhovian peasants being judged before the district court in czarist times. Subconsciously, shows like these teach poorer and older Russians (the kind of people who regularly watch state television) that they should be ashamed before their betters and that they cannot expect much from life or their immediate families.
“My husband drank,” the elderly negligent mother explains on NTV. She was a tram driver. Her husband worked in a factory. “He went to prison for three years for stealing a coat. Then he divorced me.” Whereas the manned space flight on Channel 1 was a great accomplishment, NTV is presenting the eternal Russia, which will remain when the glories of the past are left to the history books.
The old woman crawls on the floor. “Forgive me! Forgive me!” she cries to her children. Now we have left the pages of Chekhov and arrived in Dostoyevsky Land. Some of the audience is in tears. “My fate has been so difficult!” the old mother cries out to them, and to her many abandoned children.
On Rossiya 1, the topics of Finland and American transgender people are not yet exhausted. On one screen, men are screaming about geopolitics, while on another women are screaming about their destroyed personal lives.
The show about the dysfunctional family cuts to a commercial for a fast-food chain that has replaced McDonald’s after the sanctions for the Russian invasion of Ukraine were imposed. The copycat McDonald’s is offering an unconvincing-looking “beeeeg speshal roast beef,” as an announcer describes it.
On Rossiya 1, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov is giving one of his usual bombastic speeches: “They want to cancel our country, as they like to say. They’re trying to cancel our country for pursuing its own politics. The West has long groomed Ukraine … Just like Germany invaded Russia.” The television shows another Nazi parade, a long sea of swastikas and chanting in German.
Later on the channel, we see images of Russian President Vladimir Putin striding through gilded Kremlin halls, while U.S. President Joe Biden is shown tripping on the stairs of Air Force One. It’s an advertisement for a show titled Moscow. Kremlin. Putin.
It’s only 9 p.m., but I am exhausted. I have drained two glasses of pisco sour and eaten my ceviche from the hotel’s restaurant, and am blindly watching a movie called Razplata (“Payback”), which seems to be about a drunken man who beats his wife. My vision is getting hazy and my eyes can barely see what’s happening on the three monitors, but I can sense that it is a triptych of a nation that has no idea what it is supposed to be.
Day 2
“Not my King!” The day’s news begins with anti-monarchist demonstrations in the U.K. “At least no one is throwing eggs at him like last time,” the NTV announcer intones as King Charles III is booed. In addition to the constant footage of anti-war and pro-Russian demonstrations in Germany, Russian TV is obsessed with the perfidy of the “Anglo-Saxons.” Here the Royal Family is criticized for a variety of sins, such as colonialism in Africa and the 3 million pounds King Charles supposedly received from a Qatari sheikh. Although Russian propaganda normally skews far right, its producers are able to pivot quickly from feigning horror at transgendered people to promoting a kind of Soviet-flavored anti-colonialism. Surely something will appeal to Misha from Murmansk or Vanya from Vladivostok, or any of the more than 100 million viewers who spend an average of almost four hours a day digesting this spicy gruel.
After the booing of King Charles, the national weather forecast features temperatures in Donetsk and Melitopol in addition to Yalta, all cities stolen from Ukraine. I note that the city of Kherson, liberated by the Ukrainian army, does not make an appearance.
It’s the weekend, and Channel 1 is showing an endless run of old Soviet movies and army choirs singing about glory. But NTV is skewing younger with a show about women being stalked by ex-lovers. “He’s a professional boxer and he punched me several times,” a woman says of her former boyfriend. “He has a very aggressive nature.” A model is being blackmailed over sex videos by her ex. “Smartphones have made stalking easy,” the announcer intones. “He threatened to knock my teeth out,” another woman says, and we are treated to an array of horrifying bruises. The program notes that stalking of exes by spurned lovers is a problem in the U.S. and Germany as well.
This may be true, but after watching Russian television for less than 24 hours, I am starting to see a through line here, which is the consistent presence of violence in Russian shows, usually committed against women and children. The verb meaning “to hit” comes up constantly, which makes sense in a country where men encounter horrific hazing in the military as well as a cruel and violent penal system. In 2017 the Duma even passed a law decriminalizing domestic abuse that does not result in the victim being treated in a hospital.
There’s an ad break for a male anti-impotence drug called “the Emperor’s Secret,” supposedly made in China out of various fungi. “The Emperor’s Secret can be mixed with alcohol,” the announcer helpfully advises the Russian male.
Next up, NTV introduces an American named John McIntyre who fought with the Ukrainians but then fled to Russia. He has been described as mentally unstable by fellow soldiers and commanders and was allegedly pushed out of the Ukrainian army for incompetence, but in Russia he is a prized asset, proudly wearing his Che Guevara baseball cap and T-shirt. The program intimates that it was a right-wing Ukrainian battalion that caused the well-known massacres in Bucha and Irpin, and not the Russian soldiers whose campaign of rape, execution, and terror was well documented.
“Are there people like you in the States?” the interviewer asks McIntyre. “There are many pro-Russian Americans,” the young man replies. “American intelligence, they own the media machines. Most people watch CNN, but Fox has the most objective positions.”
“Their voices are getting louder!” an announcer on a Rossiya 1 newscast booms as older Germans are shown marching in a pro-Russia demonstration. “NATO out of Ukraine!” they chant. “U.S. and CIA out of Ukraine!” Afterward, an attractive young female correspondent brings cakes to Russian soldiers at the front. The war may be brutal, but, for Misha from Murmansk, it can also be sexy and exciting.
Day 3
Channel 1 is stepping up its game in the propaganda Olympics with a “documentary” series called The Age of the USSR, which blends animation and old footage. The Russian language, the announcer tells us, has no word for “loser,” but instead has neudachnik, literally “unlucky person.” “The loser is guilty for what he hasn’t achieved,” the announcer explains. “The neudachnik is not guilty of a lack of achievement, just a lack of fortune, and he deserves sympathy.” Hence, Russia, a country of poor roads, decaying houses, and abysmal life expectancy, is not a nation of losers who lack achievement, but simply those upon whom fortune has not smiled. In other words: Don’t blame Putin for the mess we live in.
The program then pivots to Ukraine. “The history of Ukraine begins with the Slavs,” the announcer says. “The territory of Ukraine passed between Catholic and Orthodox hands. ‘Ukraina’ means ‘the edge of.’ The word first appears in the 12th century.” The program takes the view, per Putin’s own “academic work” on the subject, that Ukraine has no history of its own, only the common history of the Slavs. “Their national character is Russian, only in the south [meaning Ukraine] it comes with increased aggression … ability for betrayal, and infantilism.”
And then the genocidal rhetoric is amped up with an animation showing a half-naked drunk Ukrainian in a pigsty (the actual pig is snorting nearby). The Ukrainian is shown with a haircut featuring a long lock of hair. This hair symbolism refers to the khokhol, a slur that Russians use against Ukrainians. It is equivalent to the worst kind of anti-Semitic and racist slurs. The image of the drunken Ukrainian with his khokhol haircut is no less eliminationist than the “hook-nosed Jew controlling the world” imagery of the Third Reich.
Meanwhile on NTV, more German grannies are chanting “for peace” in a pro-Russia march, participating, whether they realize it or not, in what amounts to their own Nuremberg rally.
[Read: It’s not enough for Ukraine to win. Russia has to lose.]
As the day continues, NTV presents a documentary entitled I Was Zelensky’s Filth. A young imprisoned woman is accused of trying to bomb Mariupol’s city hall, after the battered city held a sham election in favor of joining Russia. “Mariupol is a place of glory for Russian forces and shame for the Kiev führer,” the announcer declares. That führer, of course, is none other than Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky himself, a Jew whose relatives perished in the Holocaust. The show visits the apartment of the supposed terrorist, which is hilariously staged with an American flag and Nazi memorabilia. Can Sasha from Samara possibly believe this nonsense?
The program breaks for a commercial for Prostricum 100, another erectile-dysfunction supplement. The bottle seems to feature the drawing of a prostate. Meanwhile, on Rossiya 1 news, we learn that German Chancellor Olaf Scholtz has “fully committed himself to America. Germany can’t deal with the rising price of energy. The Greens are to blame. Germany will be turned into Kenya soon.”
Geopolitics takes up an inordinate amount of airtime on Russian TV. Russian viewers are probably subjected to more images of U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and European Union Commission President Ursula von der Leyen than their American or European counterparts. The anger at the West is palpable and, as with everything in Russia, deeply misogynist. An NTV host calls Von der Leyen “Macron’s girlfriend” and notes that she has dry skin.
Meanwhile, Russia’s new Best Friend Forever is Xi Jinping of China. He is presented as a virile and well-armed world leader. Many programs feature Chinese jets seemingly headed for Taiwan. Perhaps to make up for Russia’s increasing vassal status in relation to China, the Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko is presented as Russia’s own pet vassal and Putin’s funny sidekick. “Belarus comes to us so many times,” a presenter jokes, “they painted a red carpet on the airport tarmac instead of rolling one out.” (Since June, Lukashenko has gotten a spring back in his step after supposedly mediating the end to Yevgeny Prigozhin’s attempted putsch.)
Rossiya 1 is broadcasting Moscow. Kremlin. Putin. In today’s episode, Putin visits a train factory! The workers at the factory are shown losing their ability to speak in front of their leader, quaking before the “boss,” as the presenters call him. “Don’t hurry,” Putin says kindly to a worker who looks like he has soiled his pants. “We’re just talking.”
Day 4
There is a sadness to watching this much Russian television. I have started drinking earlier and have switched from pisco sours to vodka martinis. A part of me wants to die.
But not before I catch Maria Butina’s new show on Channel 1. Butina is famous for being arrested and jailed as an unregistered Russian foreign agent in the United States. Once she was deported from the U.S., she became a member of Russia’s parliament and, of course, the host of her own TV program. (“Today’s program is brought to you by Erecton Activ. Every woman wants to be near a strong man, strong in every way. Only 2,999 rubles.”)
Today, the redheaded Butina, wearing an equally red blouse and suit pants, decides to talk about Hillary Clinton. Wait, what? Who still cares about Hillary Clinton? Apparently, Butina and Tanya from Taganrog still do.
Tense music begins. According to the program, Clinton laughed “hysterically” when she was shown pictures of the death of Muammar Qaddafi. “What kind of monster responds to a person’s death like that?” Butina asks. A “psychiatrist” appears and says, “Yes, she’s a monster. But it’s because she has had to compete with men.”
Donald Trump, whom Russian television adores, is shown calling her “unstable.” “What an awful woman,” the former U.S. president says.
“Hillary Clinton,” the chyron reads. “A shark floating belly up?”
A so-called expert on America is produced to diagnose Hillary’s early years: “She wore big glasses, she had terrible teeth, and then she threw herself at Bill Clinton.” But Hillary is just the appetizer to the entrée of evil that really controls the strings of world government. That man is of course George Soros. “He helped the Gestapo arrest his own co-religionists and then take away their own possessions,” an announcer says to chilling background music. “George Soros. The spider.”
Of course, the image of Jew as vermin or as a spider holding the world in its web is typical and, frankly, not even very imaginative anti-Semitic propaganda. But as I watch Butina’s show, I remember that my own grandfather was a Jew born in Ukraine who died fighting Germany’s fascist armies during the siege of Leningrad. A decade after his death, another fascist named Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was born in the city my grandfather died defending. Watching Butina and her garden-variety anti-Semitism feels like a terrible desecration of his memory.
Meanwhile, on NTV’s news program, Elon Musk declares in a clip, “All news is propaganda. People have to decide for themselves.” Russian state television could not have said it better.
Day 5
I can almost taste my freedom. The weather is improving, spring is finally here, and all of New York seems to be beckoning me to escape my luxurious prison cell. But I also feel overwhelming disgust, as if there’s a thick layer of dirt behind my shirt collar.
I watch a show called For Men / For Women, in which a woman is attacked on the street by her ex-husband, who, with the aid of his relatives, also kidnaps her little son. “I fell on the asphalt, and he is holding me down and beating me,” the woman says. “I lost my breast milk. I went to the police. The police didn’t do anything.”
“Nikolai drank a lot and still drinks a lot,” the woman continues. “He gets aggressive and he takes it out on people. I was his victim and had to obey him.”
The poor woman’s lament reminds me of the show I watched a few days prior (it now seems like a lifetime ago) about women being stalked and beaten by their ex-lovers. “He has a very aggressive nature,” a woman said of her former lover, the professional boxer. As does Russia in 2023. So many of the shows I’ve watched during the past five days were obsessed with the West, with our Clintons and Soroses and Von der Leyens. Russia is the spurned lover with the “very aggressive nature” taking out his inhumanity on the innocent neighbor next door. Despite all the posturing and doublespeak, Russian television announces as much to the world. Whether on the airwaves or, perhaps someday, at the Hague, the evidence has been clearly presented.