Roskomnadzor is blocking us. We talk about the prime era of Demagogue

material: Fedya Otroshchenko
illustrations: Sofia Khananashvili

Since the beginning of this year, Demagogue has been receiving letters from Roskomnadzor, screenshots from well-wishers about how they write denunciations, Roskomnadzor’s responses to these well-wishers (thanks, but the magazine is already being checked), etc. After two days of blocking, we were able to restore our site and are preparing for new repressions.

Editor-in-Chief Fedya Otroshchenko talks about what is happening with the Demagogue.

I recently watched Eldar Ryazanov’s “Cruel Romance” and wanted to write a long, detailed text about it: what this film means today, how to watch it and why. This is such an unexpected movie of the sixties for the eighties - warning, alarming, and at the same time impossibly beautiful and reassuring with its beauty. It seemed to me that this message to the gradually boiling perestroika (the film was shot in 1984) is very consonant with today, when you get tired of “everything will be fine” and want something like this.

But this text will not be published today. Today I have to talk about something else.

Roskomnadzor is starting to block us. As he himself calls it, Demagogue is included “in a unified register of network addresses that makes it possible to identify a site on the Internet containing information, the distribution of which is prohibited in the Russian Federation.”

We were told by human rights lawyers that we had covered all the sore subjects of the Russian authorities: LGBT, small nations, etc. And in general it seems to them that culture has been nationalized, and the authorities consider it their bond, and here we are releasing a podcast about the history of sex, texts about the dissident movement, an interview with Kira Yarmysh, reviews of Tamizdat books, etc.

In general, this does not mean anything: we have published texts and podcasts, so we will, and we hope you will continue to do so, just as you read us. Because it is still safe - blocking does not, God forgive me, make us foreign agents, extremists, terrorists or anyone else. We distribute content that, according to Roskomnadzor, is prohibited, but there is no risk for reading it.

This is not the only warning from Roskomnadzor that we have received, but, without going into details, it is the first where we are not ready to make concessions. At first, they started sending Demagogue screenshots of how denunciations were being written against us, and Roskomnadzor responded, thanking us for our active civic position, that it was already checking the magazine, so denunciations here are redundant.

As a result, we were asked to delete the text on which we worked together with the author (it is noteworthy that RKN sent a letter on the birthday of the author of the text), for which readers thanked us. The editors of Demagogue refuse to accept such an outright act of self-censorship.

We are not going to trade VPNs or do anything else like that. The site will already be restored after blocking; it may not be available in Russia. In this case, our wonderful developer is creating a mirror site, which will launch soon: there you can read Demagogue, bypassing the blocking. However, it seems that in 2026 you already know perfectly well how to deal with such a situation.

In June our magazine will celebrate its sixth anniversary. Initially, we refused to talk about politics at all, but then it became impossible: whatever you say about is already politics, so you need to either remain silent or wait for the coveted letter from Roskomnadzor.

But over all these years, our main support has always been you, our readers. Hard times are coming, when telegrams are increasingly blocked, we no longer have money, and now there is also a blocking. But we hope that you will not lose us in the abyss of time: subscribe to us on all social networks, help us and other independent projects with donations, send them to friends, but most importantly, do not be discouraged!

The main tragedy in Ostrovsky's play "Dowry", on which "Cruel Romance" was based, is that everyone considers the main character Larisa Ogudalova to be a thing: the mother is trying to sell her daughter more profitably, and the suitors are trying to buy her more profitably. No one looks at her as a person, two even play toss. For the modern Russian government, we are all things, but the Demagogue will resist this as much as he can.