Six years of the most dangerous prank of our lives

material: Fedya Otroshchenko
illustrations: Sofia Khananashvili

Today the Demagogue turns six years old. On this occasion, editor-in-chief Fedya Otroshchenko wrote a text about how a small student magazine, created during the pandemic, became a support during the war, a place for uniting people with similar views and interests, and most importantly, a source of joy.

Thank you for staying with us! Without you there would be no magazine.
We humbly remind you that you can support us on booster and patreon - today we will be especially pleased!

With the usual movement of my hand, I open a clean GoogleDock, almost without noticing, almost without thinking. Soon my working day will begin at my main job, which pays for the apartment, food and other things necessary to continue living, and I will almost not be able to engage in Demagogue, but now I have time to sit, try to formulate what has been spinning for a long time, but has not found a way out.

You can even feel this something in your mouth with your tongue - it is rough and wet, it is small and soft. At night I clench my jaw so hard that I wear down my teeth. It seems that one night I damaged the backbone of this something with my teeth that were grinding into dust. If you open your mouth and look in the mirror, you can even see the vein in his neck pulsating and swelling. It is alive, although it is hard to believe that it will be able to survive and even recover someday.

At night, I even hear a groan or wheeze, which ends in the morning, when early in the morning in the darkness I peer into the light of the phone screen: “Russia dealt a massive blow to Ukraine. The Kiev Pechersk Lavra and the Dovzhenko film studio are burning. In Dnieper, the House of Organ and Chamber Music was damaged. Five rescuers died in Kharkov.”

Today marks six years since we officially launched Demagogue, when we began publishing the first texts. From the very beginning, Demagogue was formulated as a joke: here, they say, we are young students who dreamed that they could create a platform for something fun. After all, culture is, first of all, something funny, which is what opposes the boring adult world of fathers and grandfathers. Where poetry evenings have become a petri dish for the proliferation of mold and mildew, and reflections on cinema are possible only through admiration for the author of the review itself. To be honest, not much has changed in this regard since then. The only additions were regular bans, bombings, and emigration.

But over these six years, we gathered a bunch of talented people around us, launched donations, became disillusioned with grants, turned to donations again, participated in the organization of an underground Moscow theater festival, held our own festival against censorship in Tbilisi, released several hundred of the coolest texts, several wonderful podcasts, Roskomnadzor in Russia began to block us, we released the first merch, and now we are preparing a new one, but most importantly, all this time we did not stop having fun. Demagogue is still a joke. Yes, it’s a joke that the state is fighting against; yes, it was a joke, because of which it was necessary to leave the country; yes, a joke, because of which Yandex deleted all our podcasts; Yes, it’s a joke, because of which they write denunciations against us. But still funny!

All these six years it’s been scary to look at the news: now you’re waiting for new shellings and deaths, now you’re checking to see if you or your loved ones have been registered as foreign agents, or what other author of ours has a criminal case opened against them. Today, on the Demagogue’s birthday, another terrifying news. But we continue and will not stop. We still have a lot ahead, but the authorities, on the contrary, have less and less every day. Therefore, we will win, and with us independent culture, journalism, and people.