By Olha Chepil | 2025-06-26

In moments of openness, truth has reshaped nations. In the final years of the Soviet Union, a wave of uncensored reporting gave the public a new view of its country and helped bring down a regime.

Today, that same power of truth challenges Vladimir Putin's Russia, where the state is working hard to control what the public sees and hears.

Systemic disinformation

Even after the Soviet collapse, disinformation tactics endured. Soviet methods continued into the 1990s, both inside and outside Russia, said Tatiana Yankelevich, former director of the Sakharov Program on Human Rights at Harvard University.

Her stepfather, Andrei Sakharov, a physicist, dissident and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, condemned Soviet oppression, the war in Afghanistan and the totalitarian system itself.

The campaign against Sakharov stands as a defining example of Soviet disinformation. In the 1980s, intelligence services worked with loyal journalists to produce fake videos and documents aimed at discrediting him abroad.

"Correspondence, videos and letters were falsified. Everything was edited, gathered from different contexts and sold to the Western press, not for money but in order to demobilize efforts in Sakharov's defense," Yankelevich told Kontur.

In Gorky, now Nizhny Novgorod, where Sakharov was exiled, doctors secretly filmed him and passed the footage to the KGB.

"This wasn't merely propaganda -- it was a systemic substitution of reality,” Yankelevich said.

The effort aimed to isolate Sakharov and silence the broader human rights movement. The tactics later became part of the post-Soviet propaganda playbook.

"Disinformation was very extensive. It's hard to imagine a clearer demonstration of the power of the Soviet propaganda machine," Yankelevich said.

Truth as catalyst

Until the late 1980s, Soviet media offered only the official line. Newspapers, TV and radio echoed the state's voice, with no room for dissent.

"Before perestroika [restructuring], there were two TV channels in the Soviet Union. They broadcast programs that could put you to sleep -- things like 'The Rural Hour' and 'I Serve the Soviet Union,'" Igor Eidman, a Russian sociologist and journalist who was labeled a "foreign agent" and now lives in Berlin, told Kontur.

That stifling situation began to change with glasnost, or openness, the policy introduced under Mikhail Gorbachev that eased censorship and encouraged transparency. The TV program Vzglyad ("Viewpoint") broke from Soviet-style broadcasting with a fast-paced format. The magazine Ogoniok, once a staid illustrated weekly, began publishing bold political commentary and investigative features.

"When perestroika started, censorship loosened and then totally disappeared. That opened the doors and gave carte blanche to incisive, lively programs," Eidman said.

For the first time, Soviet citizens were exposed to alternate views -- and a different version of their country's history.

Western news outlets, including CNN, played a key role in covering the August 1991 coup attempt in Moscow. Images of Boris Yeltsin standing on a tank outside the Russian White House flashed around the world, marking a turning point: for the first time in decades, the Kremlin no longer controlled the narrative.

"An independent -- or relatively independent -- Russian journalism started to take shape, and that included TV journalism," Eidman recalled.

But the truth came with a price. The collapse of the old system brought economic chaos, a vacuum of ideology and growing inequality. The Communist elite was replaced by a class of oligarchs.

"The appearance of the oligarchs stemmed from what amounted to shock therapy. This 'predatory capitalism' spawned social Darwinism and poverty," Gregor Razumovsky, an Austrian political analyst who has been studying Russia-Ukraine relations for over three decades, told Kontur.

It dismantled the population's Soviet-era economic bearings and created a stark new reality. Widespread poverty and joblessness stood in contrast to the sudden wealth of a new elite, Razumovsky noted.

"The collapse of the voucher system enabled a narrow elite to monopolize state property," he said, referring to the much-criticized privatization of Soviet economic assets.

Citizens who either were ill informed or needed the money sold their shares in Soviet enterprises for a pittance to budding oligarchs.

Privatization "created millionaires and billionaires who often had neither the experience nor the intention of growing the businesses they received," said Razumovsky.

From freedom to monopoly

After 1991, TV became a battleground. Free speech emerged but only briefly. Oligarchs bought up channels to gain influence. NTV, under media magnate Vladimir Gusinsky, maintained an independent editorial line. ORT, tied to businessman and political insider Boris Berezovsky, walked a line between journalism and government interests.

"There was more freedom in the 1990s, but the media weren't entirely free -- they served their masters," Eidman said.

A turning point came during the first Chechen war (1994–96), when Russians saw images of destroyed cities, dead soldiers and protesting mothers. Even state channels aired sharp criticism of the government.

"The state didn't control TV then. NTV and independent journalists harshly criticized the war," Eidman said.

But the window closed quickly. By the second Chechen war in 1999, journalists were largely barred from the front.

"There was a clampdown on the media, and it was especially active after Putin quickly decimated NTV when he came to power," Eidman said.

When Putin came to power in 2000, the rollback of press freedom began.

"After the 2000s, the state monopolized TV in Russia. It demolished NTV and pushed Gusinsky and Berezovsky out. Only one master remained: the Kremlin," Eidman said.

Since then, he said, freedom of expression has nearly vanished. Laws targeting "foreign agents," criminal prosecutions and censorship have revived Soviet-style repression.

"The only people left are those who serve Putin. Everyone else has either left the country, or they're keeping their mouths shut," Eidman said.

This time, the Kremlin has more tools: digital surveillance, internet censorship, bans on independent media and control of social platforms.

Yankelevich called the government's actions, especially in Ukraine, a crime.

"The people involved in this have lost their human face, but I don't want to demonize anyone. When we demonize people, it's as if we are justifying their actions. But I don't want to justify their actions -- these are criminals," she said.