Translated material
Society without memory
Society without memory
Column by Roman Badanin about how the modern history of Russia is disappearing
November 10, 2025
The history of states is the history of people. Any news in the newspaper and on the Internet is an event from the life of a person, several, many. How much we know about the hero determines how accurately we describe our story.
For a year and a half we were engaged in a difficult task - we studied the biographies of approximately 1,300 people who have at least some noticeable government positions in today's Russia. The vast majority of them had relatives who also succeeded in or near power. If we take the average number of such relatives at 8 units, it turns out that we have studied the biographies of approximately 10 thousand people. In terms of the Russian population, this is an insignificant number. And the scale of the research is colossal. At the same time, my colleague Mikhail Rubin and I were sitting on a book centered on the history of Vladimir Putin - political, personal, commercial. This was also a lot of work. And it’s not so much the scale of the topics.
The fact is that in Russia right now, literally as you read this, history is being erased. It is becoming more and more difficult to remember, find out, and find what happened in our country even quite recently. Sometimes it's no longer possible.
The first, biggest and most obvious reason: in Russia the extinction of journalism, individual editorial offices, genres, topics, professionals. In the West, there is a term “news deserts” - these are certain areas where the local press has died. In Russia there is one big “news desert” with separate, already polluted puddles. An unexpected example: between August 1999 and 2002, the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets (MK, then the leader in audience in the capital) published no less than three interesting articles about episodes in the biography of Vladimir Putin. The first appeared days after his appointment as Boris Yeltsin’s successor; it was called “Seven moments from the life of the “successor.” Everything was written there, good and bad, but it is important that the article contained a lot of evidence and topics that almost immediately and completely disappeared from the media. Was Putin an undercover KGB agent assigned to spy on the Democrats? It was written there. Was Putin involved in a scam involving the export of raw materials from Leningrad? And it's written there. Did Putin marry the sister of his friend Viktor Khmarin? They wrote this too, although they made a slight mistake. Putin ran away from Lyudmila Khmarina just before the wedding. Then the president will completely forget this fact - this does not make a man look good. Or maybe - so as not to expose the name of his friend once again - after all, the entire Khmarin family has become state managers and Putin’s “nominalities.”
The last of these articles was published in MK in December 2002, its title was “Rooted by the President.” There is no sedition here about Putin, rather admiration, but the catch lies elsewhere. The reporters went to the homeland of Putin’s parents, ordinary and correct journalistic work, the basics. The stories of fellow villagers they recorded were to become entertaining reading in the Sunday issue. True, one of the locals told an overly memorable story: Putin’s father was rowdy in his youth, so much so that in the heat of the moment he knocked out the president’s mother’s eye (probably the right one) with a pitchfork. The injury threatened her with lifelong loneliness, and he with a criminal case; both problems were resolved by marriage and the birth of three sons, of whom only the last survived. Of course, neither Putin nor his court writers ever talked about this again, and those who wanted to were probably slapped on the wrist. According to the president, his parents never uttered a single swear word and were an example of love and modesty. It’s not for nothing that we don’t even know exactly which eye Maria Putina lost. How would we know this if Putin never talks about it, and Russian journalists are no longer interested.
But this is not the most revealing thing in the history of Russian media. The co-author of the first material was ~~Alexander Khinshtein~~ . He, of course, was a scoundrel even then, but a note with his last name and the words “Putin [... has] real estate on the French Cote d'Azur” (later it turned out that he definitely does), this, you see, does not really fit into what we know about Khinshtein. 26 years have passed since that article. “Moskovsky Komsomolets” did not disappear, but, for example, on February 24, 2022, this newspaper published the following article: “The system of centralized combat control of the Ukrainian army no longer exists” (this is a lie). Over the years, Khinshtein became a state scoundrel, the governor of the Kursk region, and in this capacity he said, for example, the following: “Ukrainian Nazis” tortured at least 20 Kursk men and women, raped some (this is not a fact at all, there was no independent confirmation of executions and violence). In a word, both the newspaper and the journalist under Putin have come a long and shameful way from partial truth to complete lies. The dispersal of Lenta.ru, Vedomosti, and RBC are big dramas that have bled our memory of the events in Russia. But degradation is better seen in how even bad things become completely disgusting. You will no longer find the first note in the MK archive, the last one is still there, but it is not a fact that it will be preserved for a long time.
Here is the second problem with our historical memory. Simply delete it by pressing delete. Some editors and individuals “publish” their texts on their own initiative, just in case. Others are afraid of imaginary and real lawsuits. Oleg Deripaska, Alisher Usmanov, others - it is more comfortable and cheaper for them to spend money on litigious lawyers than to go to the press and answer pressing questions. Did Usmanov go to prison for rape, as the former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan wrote in his online diary? Or is it true that Usmanov was being persecuted on a trumped-up case of the theft of socialist property, as the press service once conveyed it and, threatening everyone with lawsuits, cleared from the Internet the primary source of information about the rape; the blog of ex-ambassador Craig Murray in 2007 was temporarily blocked by the provider at the request of the law firm representing Usmanov’s interests. Subsequently, access to the resource was restored ×
? It is likely that the story about violence is a slander. Usmanov could give dozens of interviews to the independent press, dissuading everyone once and for all. But he didn’t, because questions would follow about many other things: about the Uzbek criminal world, about the Solntsevskys, about the dispossession of Gazprom, about the South Tambeyskoye field, literally stolen by Putin with the participation of Usmanov.
But high-profile lawsuits and the associated memory wipes are only a small, visible part of the problem. While you are reading our site, one of the influential Russians is quietly deleting some of the early notes of the “Project”. Over the 7 years of our editorial office, Google received 1,351 complaints demanding the removal of our articles. The complaints extended to 253 jurisdictions, the sheer number of which is surprising (in the world, even in the loosest calculations, there are no more than 200 states). As a result of these complaints, Google removed at least ten pieces of content published by the Project (the exact number removed cannot be determined because decisions could be made in any of the national jurisdictions). Among the texts that have already been deleted and those that are in danger of being erased are the most important investigations of our team, for example, an article about how ~~Ramzan Kadyrov~~ takes away enterprises by force and writes them down to his nominee Pavel Krotov, or the first article in the Russian media about the secret business of ~~Ilya Medvedev~~ , the son of the former President of Russia. The same list of deleted content includes parts of a unique interactive project about residents of Rublevskoye Highway, an investigation about the gangster Umar Kremlev close to the Kremlin, about the black cash register of the Liberal Democratic Party, and others.
The scale of this problem is enormous, and our editorial office is just one of the victims of the purges. The “project” examined how influential Russians clean up their digital memory on Yandex and Google. This is a real industry. To remove text from Russian search engines, a simple scheme is used: an inconvenient article is copied to a one-day website with the addition of incredible, absurd details, written specifically so that any court, seeing this, will immediately consider it defamation (“hero eats children”). In this case, the original article is presented to the court as an analogue of defamatory one and it is automatically subject to removal from the search engine. A simple reader is no longer able to notice all the emerging and emerging gaps in digital, and therefore in his own memory.
Global search engines turned out to be no less pliable: the American Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA) is used to clean them up. It is simple and obvious if we are talking about a rule of law state, and insidious if it is in the hands of scoundrels. The heroes of inconvenient articles again create a one-day website, copy the text there and deliberately “twist” the publication time in the opposite direction so that Google decides that investigative journalists stole content from honest copyright holders. The search engine removes the “stolen” text from the search results, and then the cunning people simply close the one-day site. That's it, there is no event left anywhere. Sometimes scoundrels resort to fantastic tricks. Here , for example, is a complaint sent to Google on behalf of the author of this column (of course, I never wrote it): attackers, hiding behind my name, inform an American company that the Russian publication “Secret of the Firm” allegedly violated the copyright of an article about Ramzan Kadyrov published in “Project”. Phenomenal impudence: first, people working for Kadyrov challenged the “Project” article, and now they are trying to erase all reprints of our investigation, hiding behind our own name.
The worst thing about this scheme is that you may never find out about the memory wipe; everything is done far from the public eye. Sometimes Google may report in the search results that some links have been removed due to rights violations, but for this you need to formulate your search query very precisely. And there is very little chance of finding out who exactly complained about the violation and what arguments they gave. Until now, information about such complaints was collected by the American non-profit project Lumen; now it is fighting for its own survival due to lack of funding. Money is the key word, because Google and other platforms are keen on advertising profits with a lot of zeros, they often will not notice the problem that Viktor Zolotov, a notorious corrupt official, erased almost all notes about his offenses from the search, spending mere pennies on it. Don't think that I'm making a big deal out of some little thing. The list of people, organizations and events that Project journalists compiled based on the Lumen database was gigantic: about a thousand names, people and organizations purged their memories, from bandits Ilya Traber and Semyon Mogilevich to Tatyana Dyachenko and the Russian Orthodox Church.
Sometimes they not only delete, sometimes they litter the memory. Generating a hundred meaningless laudatory articles about a historical figure is not a problem now, AI will do everything. If at the same time you cleanse the Internet of unpleasant publications and close independent editorial offices, the result can be stunning. Here is ~~Nikolai Patrushev~~ , a security officer about whom Russian propaganda has published hundreds of sycophantic articles. Is it possible for history to understand exactly what he and his family are really like? It's no longer a fact. You can easily find a servile story about how the Patrushevs, having chipped in, built a wooden hut, and the only decoration they keep in the house is an icon. His public image is poor and unobtrusive, like the wall of a Soviet dormitory. His family are unmercenaries in the shadow of a patriot. Because you won’t find in the press the fact that the 70-year-old wife of the chief security officer, a “modest retired doctor,” regularly buys hundreds of thousands of rubles worth of exclusive American cosmetics 3Lab in the Central Department Store, and her daughter-in-law, a modest woman from Elektrostal, left 65 million rubles in the same store for elite clothes. There are no longer any journalists left in Russia who can fearlessly go to Serebryany Bor and film the three estates of the Patrushev family in this green oasis inside the city limits of the capital. No one will have the opportunity to enter the blocked Rosreestr database to make sure that all these hectares of land became one huge bribe that a large oligarch gave to the Patrushevs. Is all this important for future generations to judge the people who now rule Russia? In my opinion, it is very important.
It would be dishonest to say that the littering of memory is the work of only the authorities. Journalists and ordinary people, deprived of access to high-quality, verified information, inevitably find refuge in lies and lies. Anonymous telegram channels and compromising sites, where for money or for some secret purpose you can publish and “publish” anything you want, are primarily a Russian phenomenon. ~~Sergei Shoigu~~ is a big hero for journalists; thousands of publications have been published about him in various media. For 12 years now, information has been wandering from one publication to another, which seems logical to all readers: Shoigu made his son-in-law (a certain Alexei Zakharov) a top official in the Prosecutor General’s Office. The rumor was launched in 2013 by the Izvestia newspaper, which is completely subordinate to the Kremlin. Even to them this “fact” seemed so natural that the usual censorship there did not apply to it. As a result, the rumor was repeated by the official “ Rossiyskaya Gazeta ”, and the tabloid “ Moskovsky Komsomolets ”, and the respectable Forbes , and even the Interfax news agency, which provided one of its news with comments from experts who all repeated as one “yes, Zakharov is Shoigu’s son-in-law, but he made his career himself.”
None of this is true. ~~Alexei Zakharov~~ , Deputy Prosecutor General of Russia, was never married to the eldest daughter of Security Council Secretary Yulia Shoigu, as the newspapers wrote. She has been married to notary Alexey Kuzovkov for 26 years. But there is something in this story that justifies the authors of the rumor. They were right that Shoigu simply could not help but assign his relatives to positions of profit (you will understand this by studying our information about this large family). And he added: the husband of his younger sister, coincidentally, is also Zakharov, but Victor, and Shoigu really gave him a post, but not in the Prosecutor General’s Office, but in the administrative department of the Moscow region government.
There are hundreds of examples of such “facts”, and it is difficult to blame only journalists and those who circulate rumors. Shoigu and Zakharov had many chances to go to the press and explain: they are not related. This would be enough, but they will never do this for the same reason: if you start communicating honestly with the press, you will have to answer questions that are not based at all on rumors.
Another reason for the rapid impoverishment of our memory of events is the crisis of humanitarian knowledge in Russia. For the same reasons as journalism. Work in archives is as limited as possible; publication of research that diverges from the general line is almost impossible. At the beginning of the 2000s, the scientific group of sociologist Olga Kryshtanovskaya did work somewhat similar to what we are producing today - they studied the biographies of thousands of officials of Putin’s conscription (the difference was in the technology of work and approach to data - OSINT methods were not used then, and there were significantly fewer digital traces of people and organizations). That study caused a lot of noise: Kryshtanovskaya, among other things, found out that, following Putin, a lot of security officials and former intelligence officers migrated to civil power. Kryshtanovskaya's scientific group continued to exist, but was no longer able to produce a single study on the same topic. Times have changed along with officials.
Finally, we, independent journalists, ourselves bear part of the blame for the fact that we know less and less about the authorities. A very Russian phenomenon is that the current generation of journalists and researchers does not always trust those who worked in the 90s and 2000s. “Demshiza” is a stupid and offensive term, coined to describe not only politicians during the heyday of Russian pluralism from the late 80s to the early years of Putin’s rule. “Demshiza” was also often branded against journalists and, more generally, humanities workers who worked in that era. Few facts, a lot of emotions, this is how journalism of that time was often described in our circle. There is some truth in this: even purely technically, investigations of the past could not compete with the current ones; journalism was often replaced by journalism, and custom-made notes were found everywhere. But there is another side. As a researcher, I dealt with materials that deputy and social activist Gleb Yakunin collected in the KGB archives during the short period of their “half-openness.” As a priest, he searched the archives for examples of cooperation between the church and state security. And he found them. Just recently, one of the best journalists of the modern generation, Yuri Dud, asked me with skepticism whether we should trust the work of people like Yakunin. Answer: Not a single independent journalist in the last 25 years has had such direct access to unique documents that Yakunin and his colleagues had. None of the modern journalists I know can boast of working in the archives of the Russian special services. No political journalist today can match the level of access to senior 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. A very “out-of-date” read and a unique historical document, which many of my colleagues in the shop don’t even know now - the book was lost on a shelf with the inscription “demshiza”.
Let me summarize: every day when journalists and researchers are not allowed to work honestly, eyewitnesses and participants in very recent events grow old, forget a lot, and die. Our knowledge dies with them. Previous written sources, articles in the media, monographs and books are either quietly withdrawn from access and erased from the Internet, or are pushed into a marginal sphere, which the current generation of journalists does not particularly trust (and often justifiably). Khinshtein’s article about Putin from 1999 disappeared from MK, but was preserved on the Kompromat website. ru", the name of which fully reflects its essence. The current reporter will probably simply dismiss this publication, considering it an invention of “black PR people” - like hundreds of other Kompromat articles. This is exactly how memory cleaning works - what cannot be erased, rendered unusable, cast rot into the well. Recently, a major independent media outlet released a documentary about businessman Roman Abramovich, omitting the most important facts of his political biography, for example, not mentioning that Abramovich probably corrupted Putin with a valuable gift - the multimillion-dollar Olympia yacht. Responding to the reproaches, the authors of the film noted that the history of the yacht, once described by Novaya Gazeta journalists, disappeared from the website of this publication, which, according to them, indicates that this fact is false. This incident perfectly describes the situation in which we find ourselves. The article about Olympia did not disappear anywhere, it just changed its unique address on the Internet during the next redesign of Novaya Gazeta (this is inevitable not only in Russia, but throughout the world). But there really are few traces of this story left on the Russian Internet, except perhaps on the same website “Kompromat.ru”: after all, fearing the claims of the all-powerful oligarch, the system media did not dare to mention the bribe (although in the West many influential media outlets wrote about this, confirming the story with the words of direct participants). The memory is not just erased, it is desecrated.
What should we do?
First, I will address the journalists. History is also what happened just yesterday. The more energy we spend on recording what happened in Russia - yesterday, last year, 25 or 30 years ago, the more useful it will be for future us. The more future we will know about now. Even purely arithmetically: the more units of content that record reality, the more difficult it is to remove them all from memory. In the “Fathers and Grandfathers” project, which we are releasing these days, there are about four thousand “urls”, that is, from the point of view of search engines, unique pages dedicated to individual characters in the modern history of Russia. We don’t know how fast the Kremlin’s war on memory will go, but deleting 4 thousand “urls” will take a very long time in any case.
Secondly, I will appeal to donors, public organizations, politicians, even foreign ones. The better we know history, the easier it is to navigate our time. Someday, the history of Russia of the last 30 years will become the most popular discipline - so that the future we live better. Therefore, significant investments are needed in any projects that, at a minimum, preserve our knowledge, and, at a maximum, extract and popularize historical facts. Many years ago, the unique Russian philanthropist Dmitry Zimin was one of the first to realize the importance of historical research. Honor and praise to him, posthumously. But preserving history is not a task for one person, it is a huge one.
Thirdly, I will address the audience. We know that you love history and stories about history. A series of four historical investigations by The Project, released over the past two years on YouTube, have collected more than 30 million views and a lot of grateful reviews. And we are grateful to you for your attention to our work. There is confidence that historical topics will never lose relevance, and as we struggle with memory they will only become more in demand. Read 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 “The Tsar in Person” by Roman Badanin and Mikhail Rubin.