Society with no memory

Roman Badanin’s column on the fading of Russia’s recent history

10 ноября 2025

The history of states is the history of people. Every story in a newspaper or on the internet is an event in the life of one or several people. How accurately we describe our history depends on how much we know about those involved.

For more than two years, we have been engaged in a challenging task: studying the biographies of approximately 1,500 people who hold at least some kind of notable government position in today’s Russia. The vast majority of them had relatives who have also prospered while being either within or close to the government. If we take the average number of such relatives to be four, it would mean that we have studied the biographies of approximately 10,000 people. In terms of the entire Russian population, this figure is negligible. But in terms of a single study, it is enormous. At the same time, my colleague Mikhail Rubin and I were working on a book centered on Vladimir Putin’s political, personal, and commercial history. That was also quite a task. And it was not so much about the scale of these topics.

The fact is that right now, literally as you read this, history is being erased in Russia. It is becoming increasingly difficult to remember, learn, and find out what happened in our country even recently. Sometimes it is already impossible.

The first, biggest, and most obvious reason is the extinction of journalism, certain editorial teams, genres, topics, and professionals in Russia. In the West, there is a term “news deserts” — these are the areas where the local press has died out. Russia is one large “news desert” with some small, already polluted puddles. Here’s an unexpected example: between August 1999 and 2002, Moskovsky Komsomolets (MK), Moscow’s largest newspaper back then, published at least three interesting articles about episodes in Vladimir Putin’s biography. The first appeared a few days after his appointment as Boris Yeltsin’s replacement, and was titled “Seven Moments from the Life of the ‘Successor.’” It contained all sorts of things, good and bad, but importantly, the article was littered with evidence and topics that vanished from the media almost immediately afterwards. The fact that Putin was an undercover KGB agent assigned to spy on democrats? It was written there. The fact that he was involved in a fraud scheme involving the export of raw materials from Leningrad? It was written there too. The fact that he married the sister of his friend Viktor Khmaryn? They covered it as well, albeit with some inaccuracies. Putin ran away from Lyudmila Khmaryna just before the wedding. Later, the president would completely forget this fact, as real men should never be involved in such things Or perhaps he forgot about it so as not to expose his friend’s name unnecessarily, since the entire Khmaryn family later became Putin’s “nominees.”

The last of these articles appeared in MK in December 2002, with the headline “At the President’s Roots.” There was nothing scandalous there, just admiration, but the catch was hidden elsewhere. Reporters traveled to the birthplace of Putin’s parents, which is basic, normal and proper journalistic work. The stories they recorded from fellow villagers were supposed to be a fun read in the Sunday edition. However, one of the locals told a story that was a bit too memorable: Putin’s dad was a bit of a rowdy in his youth, so much so that in a fit of rage, he poked out the president’s mom’s eye (probably her right one) with a pitchfork. The injury could mean a lifetime of loneliness for her and criminal charges for him, but both problems were solved by marriage and the birth of three sons, of whom only the youngest survived. Of course, neither Putin nor his court chroniclers ever mentioned this again, and those who wanted to talk about it were probably promptly silenced. According to the president, his parents never uttered a single swear word and were paragons of love and modesty. No wonder that we do not even know for sure which eye Maria Putina lost. How could we learn this, if Putin never talks about it and Russian journalists are no longer interested in this story?

But that’s not the most telling thing in the history of the Russian media. The co-author of the first article was Alexander Khinshtein. He was, of course, a scoundrel even back then, but an article with his name and the words “Putin [… owns] real estate on the French Riviera” (it later turned out that he definitely does) does not really fit with what we know about Khinshtein, you must agree. Twenty-six years have passed since that article. Moskovsky Komsomolets has not disappeared, but on February 24, 2022, for example, the newspaper published an article titled “The Ukrainian army’s centralized combat control system no longer exists” (which is a lie). Over the years, Khinstein has become a state scoundrel and governor of the Kursk Oblast. In this position, he has said, for example, that “Ukrainian Nazis” tortured at least 20 Kursk residents, some of whom were raped (this is not a fact at all; there has been no independent confirmation of executions or rape). In short, under Putin, both the newspaper and its former journalist have come a long and shameful way from partial truth to complete lies. The crackdown on Lenta.ru, Vedomosti, and RBC is a great tragedy that has severely weakened our memory of events in Russian history. This degradation is most evident in how even the bad things have become completely disgusting. You will no longer find the first article in the MK archive; the last one is still there, but it is not likely to survive for long.

Here lies the second problem with our historical memory. It simply gets deleted, with the press of a button. Some media and individuals “de-publish” their texts on their own initiative, just in case. Others are afraid of supposed and real lawsuits. Oleg Deripaska, Alisher Usmanov, and others find it more comfortable and cheaper to spend money on litigious lawyers than to face the press and answer tough questions. Did Usmanov serve time for rape, as the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan wrote in his blog? Or was Usmanov persecuted on trumped-up charges of theft of socialist property, as his press service once reported, threatening everyone with lawsuits and purging the original source of information about the rape from the internet? . The blog of former ambassador Craig Murray was temporarily blocked by the web provider in 2007 at the request of a law firm representing Usmanov’s interests. Access to the page was subsequently restored ×

. It is quite possible that the rape story is slander. Usmanov could have given dozens of interviews to the independent press, convincing everyone once and for all. But he didn’t, because questions would follow about many other things: the Uzbek criminal world, the Solntsevskaya gang, the plundering of Gazprom, the Yuzhno-Tambeyskoye gas field, which was literally stolen by Putin with Usmanov’s participation.

But high-profile lawsuits and the associated memory cleansing are only a small, visible part of the problem. While you are reading our website, some powerful Russian figure is quietly deleting one of the Proekt’s early articles.

Over the seven years of our team’s work, Google has received 1,351 complaints demanding that our articles be deleted. The complaints covered 253 jurisdictions, a number that is surprising in itself (even by the most generous estimate, there are no more than 200 states in the world). As a result of these complaints, Google has removed at least ten pieces of content published by Proekt (the exact number of deleted items cannot be determined because decisions could have been made in any of the national jurisdictions). Among the texts that have already been deleted and those that are under threat of deletion are some of our most important investigations, such as an article about how Ramzan Kadyrov forcibly seizes businesses and registers them in the name of his nominee Pavel Krotov, or the first article in the Russian media about the secret business dealings of Ilya Medvedev, the son of the former Russian president. Also deleted were parts of a unique interactive project about the residents of Rublyovka, investigations into Kremlin-linked gangster Umar Kremlev, the Liberal Democratic Party’s slush fund, and others.

The scale of this problem is enormous, and our team is just one of the victims of these purges. Proekt investigated how influential Russians clean up digital memories of themselves on Yandex and Google. It’s a real industry. A simple scheme is used to remove text from Russian search engines: an inconvenient article is copied to a one-off website with the addition of incredible, absurd details (“our hero eats babies”) written specifically so that any court, upon seeing this, would immediately consider it defamation. At the same time, the original article is also presented to the court as an analog of the defamatory one and is automatically subject to removal from the search engine. The average reader is no longer able to notice all the gaps that continue to appear in the digital, and therefore their own, memory.

Global search engines have proven to be no less malleable: the 1998 US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is used to clean them up. It is simple and obvious when applied in a state governed by the rule of law, but insidious in the hands of scoundrels. Once again. the heroes of “inconvenient” articles create a one-off website, copy the text there, and deliberately alter the publication date so that Google decides that investigative journalists have stolen content from honest copyright holders. The search engine removes the “stolen” text from its results, and then the scoundrels simply shut down the one-off website. That’s it, the events are now nowhere to be found. Sometimes scoundrels resort to extraordinary tricks. Here, for example, is a complaint sent to Google on behalf of the author of this column (of course, I never filed such a complaint): pretending to be me, the attackers inform the American company that the Russian media “Sekret Firmy” allegedly violated the copyright of an article about Ramzan Kadyrov published in “Proekt.” That’s phenomenal audacity: first, people working for Kadyrov challenged the Proekt article, and now they are trying to erase all reprints of our investigation, hiding behind our own name.

The most frightening thing about this scheme is that the memory wipe may never be discovered, as everything is done far from the public eye. Sometimes Google may indicate in its search results that some links have been removed due to copyright infringement, but this requires a very precise search query. And there is very little chance of finding out who exactly complained about the infringement and what arguments they used. Until recently, information about such complaints was collected by the American non-profit project Lumen, but now it is fighting for its own survival due to a lack of funding. Money is the key word here, because Google and other platforms are preoccupied with advertising profits with lots of zeros, and they often don’t even notice the problem that Viktor Zolotov, a notorious corrupt official, has deleted almost all references to his offenses from search results, spending mere pennies to do so. Don’t think that I’m making a big deal out of something minor. The list of people, organizations, and events that Proekt journalists compiled using the Lumen database was enormous: about a thousand entries, with people and organizations ranging from gangsters Ilya Traber and Semyon Mogilevich to Tatyana Dyachenko and the Russian Orthodox Church erasing memories of themselves.

Sometimes they don’t just delete things, but also contaminate memory. Generating hundreds of meaningless articles praising historical figures is no longer a problem; AI can do it all. If, at the same time, you purge the internet of unpleasant pieces and shut down independent media, the result can be astonishing. Russian propaganda has published hundreds of sycophantic articles about Nikolai Patrushev, a KGB agent. Is it now possible to understand exactly what he and his family are really like for the sake of history? Not so much. You can easily find a servile story about how the Patrushevs chipped in to build a wooden hut fo themselves and how the only decoration in their home is an icon. His public image is as poor and unassuming as the walls of a Soviet dormitory. His family are penniless people living in the shadow of a patriot. What you won’t find in the press is the fact that the 70-year-old wife of the chief security officer, a “modest retired doctor,” regularly shops at TSUM for exclusive American cosmetics from 3Lab worth hundreds of thousands of rubles, and her daughter-in-law, a modest woman from Elektrostal, spent 65 million rubles on luxury clothes in the same store. There are no longer any journalists in Russia who can fearlessly go to Serebryany Bor and film the three estates of the Patrushev family in this green oasis in the center of the capital. No one has the opportunity to access the blocked Rosreestr database to verify that all these hectares of land became one huge bribe that a major oligarch gave to the Patrushev family. Is all this important for future generations to judge the people who currently rule Russia? In my opinion, it very much is.

It would be unfair to say that the authorities are the only ones responsible for polluting our memory. Journalists and ordinary people who are denied access to high-quality, verified information inevitably find refuge in falsehoods and fabrications. Anonymous Telegram channels and dirt-slinging websites, where anything can be published and “de-published” for money or for some secret purpose, are primarily a Russian phenomenon. Sergei Shoigu is a big hero for journalists, with thousands of articles about him appearing in various media outlets. For 12 years, information that is presented as logical to the readers has been circulating in media: Shoigu made his son-in-law (a certain Alexei Zakharov) a top official in the Prosecutor General’s Office. The rumor was started in 2013 by Izvestia, which is completely subordinate to the Kremlin. Even to them, this “fact” seemed so natural that it was not subject to the usual censorship there. As a result, the rumor was repeated by the government-published Rossiyskaya Gazeta, the tabloid Moskovsky Komsomolets, the respectable Forbes, and even the Interfax news agency, which supplemented one of its pieces with comments from experts who all unanimously repeated, “Yes, Zakharov is Shoigu’s son-in-law, but he made his own career.”

None of this is true. Alexei Zakharov, Deputy Prosecutor General of Russia, never married Yulia Shoigu, the eldest daughter of the Security Council secretary, as the newspapers wrote. She has been married to notary Alexei Kuzovkov for 26 years. But there is something in this story that justifies the authors of the rumor. They were right in that Shoigu simply could not help but place his relatives in lucrative positions (you will understand this after reading our summary about this large family). His younger sister’s husband also bears the surname Zakharov, but his name is Viktor, and Shoigu did indeed give him a position, but not in the Prosecutor General’s Office, but in the administrative department of the Moscow Oblast government.

There are hundreds of examples of such “facts,” and it is difficult to blame only journalists and those who spread rumors for this. Shoigu and Zakharov had many opportunities to go to the press and explain that they are not related. That would have been enough, but they will never do so for the same reason as Usmanov: if they start communicating honestly with the press, they will have to answer questions that are not based on rumors at all.

Another reason for the rapid deterioration of our memory of events is the crisis in humanities education in Russia. The reasons are the same as those affecting journalism. Archive work is severely restricted, and it is almost impossible to publish research that deviates from the mainstream. In the early 2000s, sociologist Olga Kryshtanovskaya’s research team did something similar to what we are doing today: they studied the biographies of thousands of Putin-era officials (the difference was in the technology and approach to data — OSINT methods were not used at the time, and there were significantly fewer digital traces of people and organizations). That study caused quite a stir: among other things, Kryshtanovskaya discovered that a large number of former members of security forces (“siloviki”) had migrated to civilian government positions following Putin. Kryshtanovskaya’s research group continued to exist, but was unable to publish a single study on the same topic. Times had changed, along with the officials.

Finally, we, as independent journalists, are also partly to blame for knowing less and less about the authorities. A very Russian phenomenon is that the current generation of journalists and researchers does not always and in all respects trust those who worked in the 1990s and 2000s. “Demschizos” or “demophrenics” is a silly and offensive term coined to describe not only politicians from the heyday of Russian pluralism from the late 1980s to the early years of Putin’s rule. Journalists and, more broadly, humanities scholars who worked during that era were also often branded as “demschizos.” Few facts, lots of emotions—that’s how journalism at that time was often described in our circle. There is some truth in this: even from a purely technical point of view, investigations in the past could not compete with those of today; journalism was often replaced by publicism, and commissioned articles were ubiquitous. However, there is another side to this. As a researcher, I have dealt with materials that were collected from the KGB archives during their brief period of “semi-openness” by Gleb Yakunin, an MP and social activist. As a priest, he searched the archives for examples of the church’s collaboration with the state security services. And he found them. Quite recently, one of the best journalists of the modern generation, Yuri Dud, asked me skeptically whether we should trust the work of people like Yakunin. The answer is that no independent journalist in the last 25 years has had such direct access to unique documents as Yakunin and his colleagues did. None of the contemporary journalists I know can boast of having worked in the archives of the Russian special services. No current political journalist can compare to the degree of access to top government officials that our colleagues had under Boris Yeltsin and even early Putin. An outstanding example is the book by presidential pool correspondent Elena Tregubova, Notes of a Kremlin Digger, published at the beginning of the Putin era. It is a very “unmodern” read and a unique historical document that many of my colleagues are now unaware of — the book has been lost on the shelf labeled “demschizos”.

To sum up: every day that journalists and researchers are forced to stop their work, eyewitnesses and participants in recent events grow older, forget many things, and die. Our knowledge dies with them. Old written sources, media articles, monographs, and books are either quietly removed from access and erased from the internet, or pushed into marginalized areas that the current generation of journalists does not particularly trust (and often with good reason). Hinshtein’s 1999 article about Putin has disappeared from MK, but it has been preserved on the website Kompromat.ru, whose name fully reflects its essence (“kompromat” means blackmail material in Russian). A current reporter would probably just dismiss this piece as fiction from “black PR specialists,” like hundreds of other articles on Kompromat. That’s how memory cleansing works—whatever can’t be erased is rendered unusable and thrown into the cesspit. Recently, a major independent media released a documentary about businessman Roman Abramovich, omitting the most important facts of his political biography, for example, concealing that Abramovich probably bribed Putin with a valuable gift — the multimillion-dollar yacht Olympia. Responding to criticism, the filmmakers noted that the story of the yacht, once described by Novaya Gazeta journalists, had disappeared from its website, which, according to them, proves that this fact is false. This case perfectly describes the situation in which we find ourselves. The article about Olympia has not disappeared: it has simply changed its address during the latest redesign of Novaya Gazeta (which is inevitable not only in Russia, but throughout the world). But there are indeed few traces of this story left on the Russian internet, except perhaps on the aforementioned Kompromat.ru: fearing lawsuits from the all-powerful oligarch, the mainstream media did not dare to mention the bribe (although in the West, many influential media outlets did write about it, confirming the story with the words of those directly involved). The memory has not just been erased, it has been desecrated.

What should we do?

First, I would like to address the journalists. History includes events that happened just yesterday. The more effort we put into recording what happened in Russia yesterday, last year, 25 or 30 years ago, the more useful it will be for our future selves. The more our future selves will know about the present. Even on a purely arithmetic level: the more pieces of content record reality, the more difficult it is to erase them from memory. In the “Fathers and Grandfathers” project, which we are currently releasing, there are about ten thousand URLs, that is, from the point of view of search engines, unique pages dedicated to individual figures in Russia’s recent history.

We don’t know how fast the Kremlin’s war on memory will go, but deleting 10,000 URLs will take a very long time in any case.

Second, I would like to address the donors, public organizations, politicians, even foreign ones. The better we know history, the easier it is to navigate the present. Someday, the history of Russia of the last 30 years will become the most sought-after discipline — to ensure that our future selves can live better. This means that significant investments are needed in any projects that, at the very least, preserve our knowledge and, at most, extract and popularize historical facts. Many years ago, the exceptional Russian philanthropist Dmitry Zimin was one of the first to recognize the importance of historical research. He should be honored and praised, posthumously. But preserving history is not a task for one person; it is a huge undertaking.

Thirdly, I would like to address the audience. We know that you love history and stories about history. A series of four historical investigations by Зкщуле, released over the past two years on YouTube, has garnered more than 30 million views and a lot of positive feedback. We are grateful to you for your attention to our work. We are confident that historical topics will never lose their relevance and, as the war on memory continues, will only become more sought-after. Keep reading quality journalism!

*All examples given in the text are real. You can find them in our special project “Fathers and Grandfathers,” as well as in the book “Tsar in Person” by Roman Badanin and Mikhail Rubin”