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In 2017, Liza Ositinskaya started a YouTube channel. It's called "Russkiye Norm" - "Russians are OK". She shot the opening of her first video in California, on a hill overlooking Silicon Valley. Liza is wearing a black t-shirt looking directly into the camera.
And you can see the tech capital of the world shimmering in the heat haze behind her. "I think that Russians are OK," she says. Russia produces not only oil, gas and hackers, but also talented people who are able to produce something really valuable. Lisa has built Ruskiye Norm into one of the most popular Russian language business channels on YouTube.
She spoke to enterprising Russians who launched successful businesses such as Revolut and others who made a mark in giants such as Visa and YouTube. It felt like she was helping to build a different, global Russia. Five days into Russia's war in Ukraine, Lisa sent me a text message. It said, There are no OK Russians anymore. Because when it's bombing, you can't talk about success and prosperity.
Lisa herself is the epitome of Russia's integration with the West. In 1999, she became a reporter for Vedomosti,
a leading business newspaper that was set up that year in a joint venture with the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal. Vedomesti was a newspaper for a new century, promising a clean break from the era of oligarchs, insider deals and shady privatizations.
It was more than just a quality business newspaper. It was a symbol of those massive IPOs that happened in 2000s. It was a symbol of growing chains of supermarkets, telecom companies. So I was formed by this idea of Russia that is OK. Because Vietnames was the first OK paper in a way. The very first OK media.
The rock star Sergei Shnurov, who was Vedomosti's Arts and Culture Man of the Year in 2001, provided the soundtrack to those years. The Russian economy was growing by as much as 10% a year, and incomes were growing even faster as oil and gas money poured in. But as I tracked the boom times in Vedomosti, I was also struck by the way the paper covered two other big stories.
In August 1999, Russia started its second brutal war in Chechnya, a Muslim separatist republic. In September, a series of explosions destroyed four apartment blocks in three Russian cities, including Moscow. More than 300 people died in the attacks and over a thousand were injured.
Vladimir Putin, who was Russia's little-known prime minister and former head of the state security service, the FSB, blamed Chechen terrorists for the apartment bombings. Some suspected that they might have been carried out by the FSB, or at least with its knowledge. In any case, Putin's response to them massively boosted his popularity and public support for the war. And less than a year later, he rode that wave into the presidency.
The apartment bombings, the brutality of Russian troops in Chechnya. For me, those were the defining stories in Russia at the time. But at Vedomosti, I was shocked to see they'd never made the front page. You were in the newsroom at Vedomosti. Just talk me through that decision. I think it was a combination of this blind optimism, our desire not to see these things as things that defined our country.
We honestly believed that our country at that point was defined by this positive move rather than by those terrorist attacks. We couldn't look at them as a fundamental threat to our future. The war didn't fit the picture of the OK Russia, right? Yes, and also we had so much desire to leave this behind.
to leave the past behind. We wanted to believe that this past actually ended. I'm Arkady Ostrovsky from The Economist. This is Next Year in Moscow. Episode 2. A Beautiful Life. So we're in Tbilisi with Ilya Krasilchik.
And Sonia Krasilchik. No, no, no, no, no. I haven't changed my name. Still Archinova. Always Archinova. Sonia and Ilya were married the day before our interview in a small ceremony at a registry office in the capital of Georgia. I just want to say that this is not the main event. I was going to say, when is the wedding? We haven't discussed it. I mean, when there will be peace, I think we'll discuss it. Step by step. Yeah, step by step.
Before they fled Moscow, Ilya was an executive at Yandex, Russia's biggest tech company. And Sonia was a program director at a famous design institute. When they moved to Tbilisi, Sonia started volunteering, helping Ukrainians escape from the Russian-occupied territories. Ilya launched a project called Helpdesk Media.
It collects stories of people affected by the war, be they refugees from Ukraine or dissidents in Russia. And it offers assistance, too. So people can write to our chat 24-7 and they can ask for help. We call it Journalism on Demand. I first met Ilya in Moscow just over a decade ago, during a very different chapter in his life and in Russia's. Back then, he was a young and successful journalist and publisher, the face of Russia's new hipster generation.
This is the story of how two very different visions of Russia vied for dominance. The OK, open Russia and Vladimir Putin's Russia. And how that struggle led to war. And in 2011, these two Russias collided for the first time. Ilya was then the youngest ever editor of a Fisher magazine. Youngest and the third. But still, I was 21 when I started writing.
this job, so I think yes, it's pretty young, yeah. 'Afficher', which means 'playbill', was a glossy weekly covering entertainment and lifestyle. It portrayed Moscow as a cool modern European capital like Paris or Berlin. The magazine's unapologetically arrogant slogan was 'We will say it, and it will be'. And its publishers wanted an editor who embodied the new reality.
Their choice was Ilya. He was handsome, talented and full of the energy of the moment. I think this was the wealthiest time in the Russian history when for the first time people had an option to
travel. I remember that I loved the section in the magazine called "Weekend in". So, weekend in Barcelona, weekend in Berlin, weekend in any other city. And it was possible. You just could come to some western best city for a weekend and come back to Moscow. You are the part of the global world and you're part of the western civilization.
But if a fissure created the appearance of a prosperous European life, the Kremlin matched it by supplying a fake president. Dmitry Medvedev. Medvedev took over from Putin, ostensibly at least, in 2008. And he looked the part of a modernizer. He was young and smartly dressed. He tweeted and used an iPad. And he even said that freedom is better than non-freedom.
Readers of "Officer" and "Vedomosti" were not complaining, but that spoke more of their optimism than of Medvedev's true qualities. And in September 2011, the curtain was pulled back and the trick revealed. Medvedev announced that he was stepping aside to allow the return of the real boss.
People felt duped and angry. So in December, when the Kremlin brazenly rigged parliamentary elections, that anger burst out and the middle class took to the streets. As the Economist Moscow bureau chief, I covered those protests. Two characters from two different generations took the stage. One was instantly recognisable.
Boris Nemtsov, a charismatic liberal reformer from the 90s, chanted along with protesters, Russia will be free. Boris Yeltsin, Russia's first post-Soviet president, once favoured Nemtsov as his successor. He had taken on the oligarchs as they amassed wealth and power and might have been president instead of Putin if Russia had chosen a different path.
Beside him was somebody new, someone not seen at rallies before. A blogger and an anti-corruption activist. He looked nervous, having stepped out from behind his online persona to address thousands of people in person. But his message was powerful. We have a voice, he shouted. Do we exist? We exist!
We exist, the crowd shouted back. Alexei Navalny told them they mattered. I remember Alexei Navalny there and Nemtsov. The rally was a five-minute walk from Sonia's house. Yeah, I think this was the first time when I felt that I am participating in something that is much bigger than I've ever participated before. Suddenly, people who had long ignored politics felt like citizens.
Having got used to choice and service as customers, they wanted the same from the state. The key word was dignity. Over the coming weeks, the rallies grew from 5,000 to 50,000 to 100,000. They moved to a little island in the Moscow River, to a place called Balotnaya Square. The Kremlin was just across the bridge.
It was very exciting. You felt freedom in a way, the freedom that you've never experienced before and you never thought of trying to experience, you know, this feeling of freedom. And these gatherings felt like a once-in-a-lifetime experience for you. What were you protesting? What were you trying to say?
I think when you're a teenager, when somebody lies to you, it feels very personal, especially when somebody is lying to you about the future that you might and can have. You take it really personal. And even though at that time I wasn't allowed to vote because I was underage, it almost felt like you're fighting for your future.
Over several months, on weekends, demonstrators sporting skiing jackets and goose-down parkas carried witty slogans and balloons. It felt more like a carnival than an uprising. Protests were now in vogue. There were police, of course, occasionally chasing protesters off the streets. But the atmosphere was not fearful or violent. I remember the moment when we had to run, you know, and...
Actually, it felt exciting. It felt fun, you know, when you have to run. I don't know, is there a word in English for it? Salichke? It felt like a tag game. And just the energy and the sensation of a big, big group, the group that is bigger than all of this police. It felt like we could win this game, you know?
Sonia remembers running until she arrived at a cafe called Jean-Jacques, a popular après-protest hangout for intellectuals and activists. She and her friends were too young to go in, so they huddled on the boulevard outside. She would later learn that Ilya, her future husband, was inside Jean-Jacques at that exact moment. And to the teenage Sonia, peering in through the cafe's steamed-up windows, he and his friends seemed like heroes.
All of these independent journalists that were kind of idols for us. They were there and they were discussing the future of the country, of the state. And we just, we wanted to be somewhere close, yet not very close, just to, yeah, just to experience this energy because I think we were driven by this energy that these people were producing. I felt like I was in power.
Like I have a lot of strength. And actually, it was a feeling that we're actually more powerful than these bastards. What made you think you were more powerful? First of all, I think when you're 20, this is a feeling which you have. Second is that all the main Russian newspapers, all the main Russian magazines, all the main Russian popular websites, they were liberal and they were strongly oppositional.
So actually we control the narrative. And in Russia, narrative is everything. This is a country that in the last 40 years alone has moved from communism to democracy to imperialism. The one thing that has been consistent is that people who control the narrative have the power. And if Ilya thought the Kremlin would leave that up to him and his liberal friends, he was mistaken. They were smart. They were smarter. And they just waited.
Hello, I'm Dan Rosenheck, the editor of the Economist data team, and I'd like to tell you about some of the work we've done on the war in Ukraine. This is the most documented war in history, but social media videos and military blogs paint only a partial picture. After a year of fighting, we wanted to come to some conclusions about the conflict as a whole based on comprehensive data.
Using two satellite-based systems, we identified the locations of fighting and damage to buildings in every corner of Ukraine on every day of the war. We found that rather than being limited to a few big offensives and grinding battles, the war has devastated vast swathes of the country, reaching 14% of municipalities and damaging nearly half of the hardest-hit cities. Our conclusions are laid out in detail in an interactive map.
If you already subscribed to The Economist, thank you. You make all this possible. Otherwise, for access to all our journalism and to join exclusive events with Arkady and others on our team, visit economist.com slash Moscow Offer. That's economist.com slash Moscow Offer. The link is in the notes for this podcast.
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In March 2012, Putin returned to the Kremlin as president. His control over television, his promise to maintain economic stability and the lack of any other serious opponent on the ballot made the election result a foregone conclusion. He celebrated with an elaborately staged victory rally in front of the Kremlin. But not everyone was cheering. On the eve of Putin's inauguration, people came out to demonstrate against his return.
This time, there was violence, almost certainly provoked by security services. Police detained 400 people and cleared the streets. The next day, Putin's motorcade rode through an eerily empty Moscow. The morning of the inauguration, riot police raided the Zhanjak cafe. It felt like we failed, like something we were protesting against happened and you feel like a loser. When did it stop feeling like a game? When the Balotnaya cases started to happen.
After Putin returned to power, prosecutors went after the Bolotnaya protesters. When people were being put to jail because of participating in it. So it felt dangerous. That's the moment when it stopped being fun. I felt very angry. There was no hope. It's just pure anger. When you're trying to change Putin, I think you need to be more prepared. And I think you need to be braver than I was, for example.
Ilya realized that it would take a lot more than a peaceful demonstration to make Putin go. My goal and the goal of my friends was to avoid blood. And I'm not actually sure that the real politician should go this way. The real politician should go in the conflict because there is no possibility to win without fight. This is not the government who will say, okay, we'll surrender.
But while repressions could crush the protests, Putin also needed something to boost his popularity. He needed a new story to tell to the Russian public. And that story was now unfolding in Ukraine. In 2014, demonstrations in Kyiv's Independence Square overthrew Ukraine's corrupt, Kremlin-backed government. I was there reporting on the Maidana uprising for The Economist.
I saw protesters burn tires, price up cobblestones and build barricades. It became known as the Revolution of Dignity. Unlike the Moscow crowd, they didn't disperse and they were not afraid to use violence. The success of Ukraine's revolution was a threat to Putin, but also an opportunity. He responded by annexing Crimea, then stoking and fanning a war in Donbass.
My friend, he wrote a status on Facebook and it was during the Maidan. And he wrote like, it's strange to say, but right now in Ukraine, the future of Russia will be chosen. And he was absolutely right. And throughout all of it, Russian state television provided the pictures. The army supplied the war. These were the same plot lines that eight years later would be used to prime the country for a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
It had clear villains, invented Ukrainian Nazis. Victims, terrorized Russian speakers and heroes, Russian soldiers who would come to their rescue. Unlike the current war though, the annexation of Crimea produced real euphoria in Russia. There were fireworks, concerts and uplifting speeches by the president. His popularity rating soared. Crimea had been a prize jewel of the old Tsarist Empire and a hedonist resort in the USSR.
It was now a part of Putin's new fatherland. The war in Donbass was serialized into hour-long episodes on state television, filled with violence and suspense. And before long, the violence found its way back over the border into Russia. I think it's a crime, a real crime.
Boris Nemtsov, the liberal politician who joined Navalny at Bolotnaya Square, understood that Putin's war in Ukraine was also crushing freedom in Russia. After the annexation of Crimea, he led an anti-war movement. In 2015, Nemtsov and Navalny planned a demonstration for March 1st, the first day of spring in Russia. But spring never came. On February 27th,
Nemtsov and his girlfriend went for dinner at a restaurant in an upscale shopping mall on the Red Square. Afterwards, he walked home across a bridge outside the Kremlin walls. There, an assassin shot him four times in the back. Nemtsov was charismatic, determined, honest and full of life. He embodied hope for a free, open and optimistic Russia that never was. Now his body lay on the wet asphalt, covered in black rubbish bags. It was a postcard murder.
with the cupolas of St Basil's Cathedral in the background. Boris Nemtsov was a friend of yours, so this must be very shocking and distressing news. It is. It is, Cathy. The next day, I gave an interview to Britain's Channel 4 News at the spot where he had been murdered. Did he speak to you about his assassination fears?
Nimtsov has talked about it without displaying any fear. I mean, he talked about it almost in a matter-of-fact way. It just didn't seem until last night and still doesn't feel today a reality.
It felt devastating. I think this moment it felt dangerous.
This thought that somebody can be killed just in front of Kremlin is absolutely impossible to imagine. I think at that time I felt this authoritarian state working pretty well because you as a person
not allowed to participate in politics in any way. You can do your thing, you can work, you can produce your little projects and go to posh chic bars, but just don't bother to think or talk about the politics. Ilya kept fighting a little longer. He helped found Meduza, which became one of the most important independent media outlets in Russia. Because of the crackdown on free speech, it had to operate from outside the country.
Ilya was shuttling between Latvia's capital Riga and Moscow. Four years later he resigned and moved back to his life in Moscow, which by then had cycling lanes, public Wi-Fi and landscaped green spaces. For me it was like I was tired of doing something about the future of my country. I had a lot of other goals in my life. Like Sonia, Ilya resolved to turn away from politics. I was tired of journalism and I just had no ideas anymore.
I was empty and actually I had no money literally every month you have last days before you get your payslip when you have no money and you need to find 100 or 200 euros somewhere and I was really tired of this so I wanted to try to do something completely different and I wanted to
earn some money and Yandex was for me the interesting thing Yandex is a giant company it's Russia's answer to Google Amazon and Uber all in one Ilya became the head of its new grocery delivery service which was making life in Moscow ever more comfortable sun or snow the couriers at Yandex Lavka would deliver you a missing ingredient for a dinner in under 15 minutes we all
lived in this theater of being at the best city in the world, feeling like we live in the best city in the world, feeling that we live in the best district, feeling that we have a cool posh job, feeling that I have a cool, successful boyfriend, and that my life is actually better than I could imagine. Sonia became a program director at Strelka, Moscow's flagship design and architecture institute.
The office was in a converted chocolate factory just around the corner from Balotnaya Square. And when Putin got re-elected in 2018, his fourth term as president, the square stayed quiet. And for a while, the Kremlin, confident in its grip on the country, dialed down anti-Ukrainian and anti-Western hysteria. It was possible to squint and think, maybe this is not so bad, but not for very long.
I was walking alone with my bike in a very cute white dress. It was summertime. There's like a big, big store called Detski Mir, a child's house. It's a beautiful place. It's the Lubyanka Square. It's right in the middle of the center of Moscow. And right there I saw a woman. The woman had joined a protest march related to the Moscow city council elections.
Sonia saw a group of Amon, Russian riot police, move in. They were wearing these hats where you couldn't see their faces. The helmets. The helmets, yeah. And she was just walking with her, I guess, boyfriend, and she was holding his hand. So the tactics of this Amon, they're taking one by one from the crowd, and so all of the crowd just starts running. The police came for the woman's boyfriend. The woman tried to help him by grabbing the officer's hand.
and he just smashed her over the ground. Other people, they were trying to, you know, rescue her because, I mean, it's an awful scene when somebody's pushing a lady to the ground and you see blood and it was not a feeling of being scared, it's just a feeling of you're in a shock, you can't move. I'm telling you this now and I feel kind of shaky, you know. What did you think afterwards? That it's not my city.
It felt like it's not my city. And especially when you're riding a bicycle, you feel like the city belongs to you. And you know, but at that moment, I felt so powerless and alone, you know, and I was alone. But I felt like alone alone. And I think a lot of the people who were walking around, they felt alone as well. The wall that separated Sonia's life from the state's repression was growing thinner and thinner. And on February 24, 2022,
It came tumbling down. I clearly remember the morning of 24th. It was like 8 a.m. I just opened my eyes. I opened my phone. I always, when I open my eyes, I open my phone. And there was a lot of push notification about the war. I opened some video. There was a bombing of Kyiv.
I clearly remember this feeling that this is not my world anymore. So I'm not secure anymore. I see my apartment and you feel your apartment like a safe place. I don't feel it as a safe place anymore. So everything changed just in one second. Russia was engaged in a full-scale war. Its creative class was no longer needed.
At the moment, my thought was, I guess all of these projects that I've made, all of these exhibitions, all of this work at Strelka and etc., etc. It was exciting, yet it was grabbing attention from something that was worthy of attention much more than all of these cultural projects. And I was thinking, am I a part of this machine that created this situation?
Like hundreds of thousands of others, Sonia and Ilya joined the Russian exodus. They left soon after the war began and settled in Tbilisi. Ilya has since been put under criminal charges in Russia for spreading news about the massacre of civilians in the Ukrainian city of Bucha. And they are both now left to wonder how their country got away. It happened, I don't know how to say it, during my watch. Yes? So it happened while I live a beautiful life.
What I didn't understood that we had no time for this, that when you don't have the legal court, when you don't have the justice, when you don't have the real parliament, it will be worse. And my feeling was that, no, it will be better. There will be progress and the progress, our culture will beat these people who are dinosaurs, who are from the past.
And right now they see that the past can destroy the future. The past is very dangerous. The past is very dangerous. About 40 miles west of where Sonia and Ilya are living in exile, that danger is alive and well. I think he's lost his child in March 1917. Stalin arrived in St. Petersburg.
In autumn 1917, the socialist revolution took place in Russia. After this revolution, the Soviet Union was formed, the first socialist state in the world. That's next time. Next Year in Moscow is produced by Sam Colbert, Pete Norton and Ksenia Barakovskaya with help from Lika Kremer and Libeliba Studios. Additional production and development is by Sandra Shmueli.
Our sound design is by Wei Dong Lin, with original music by Darren Ng. Our executive producer is John Shields. I'm Arkady Ostrovsky. This is The Economist.
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