Tougher legislation could be an instrument to prevent the spread of disinformation. This active de-platforming of Russian disinformation might have positive outcomes. The operations of RT were shut down in most European countries and in the USA in February and March 2022. Once in a while, they post and share messages related to the Russia–Ukraine war that should spread perspectives that are favourable to Moscow narratives 15. They post in local languages, tap into local political agendas, and spread anti-US or anti-UK memes, which are shared by many in the BRICS countries. These bots do anything to avoid association with the Kremlin. Russian troll farms evidently use bots to target populations of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) countries, who could be more amenable to Kremlin messaging regarding the war in Ukraine. Scholars have observed similar approaches during the Ukrainian war. In the 2016 US presidential elections (and in addition to hacker attacks), Russian troll farms used divisive topics such as gun control and racial conflict to polarize voters and plant disinformation 14. But the myth persists, and so does its product-the visuals that have been destroyed can rarely be restored.Yet, what has helped Russian disinformation to spread is social polarization, which became even bigger problem after 2008, when the Kremlin relaunched its global disinformation conquest. We have since learned that the role of such denunciations during the terror was relatively minor: people were arrested to fill specific quotas the arrests were essentially random and not, as many have long assumed, the result of reports.
Much of the absence of documentary evidence of the Soviet regime-the destruction of personal archives and printed books alike-was a result of citizens’ fear that their neighbors or acquaintances might report them to the authorities. And there are the enduring myths that underlie the images.
There are the movie stills of the 1905 Russian uprising and the pictures of the storming of the Winter Palace, in 1917-in fact, the images depict historical reënactments that were used as though they were documentary photographs. There is the iconic photograph of Stalin and the masses, in which the image of Stalin is blatantly pasted in, and the masses, less noticeably, are composed of several repeating fragments of crowd. Many of the photographs in King’s collection showcase falsification by commission rather than omission. Earlier this month, news came that the F.S.B., the successor agency to the K.G.B., is destroying secret-police records from the terror era that means that we are unlikely ever to form a significantly more complete picture than the one we have now. There is so much more that we don’t know about Stalinist terror-we are no closer today to knowing how many people were killed than we were one, two, or five decades ago. The October Revolution agitational-propaganda train arrives in Sorotskinskoe Station, in 1919. By the time the photograph was published, in 1967, Trotsky had disappeared: he had been airbrushed out, along with several other commissars. In the picture, Vladimir Lenin stands at the top of a set of stairs, surrounded by many unidentified men and children and a few recognizable men, including Leon Trotsky, stationed just in front of Lenin. Its specific reference is to a photograph, from 1919, of a second-anniversary celebration of the October Revolution. The book is called “ The Commissar Vanishes.” The title is, incongruously, literal. Writing on the relationship between truth and politics in this magazine, fifty-one years ago, Hannah Arendt noted just how vulnerable factual truth is, using the example of “the role during the Russian Revolution of a man by the name of Trotsky, who appears in none of the Soviet Russian history books.” Thirty years after Arendt published her article, a British collector and historian of Russia, David King, published a study in the form of a photo album-a study of the disappearance of the physical record of Trotsky and a number of other Russians who fell out of favor, and out of history, during the Stalin era.
How unreal can things get? As the sense of shared reality is eroded, more with each passing day, one wonders.