22 Jan 2026 | Europe and Central Asia, Features, Russia, Volume 54.04 Winter 2025
This article first appeared in the Winter 2025 issue of Index on Censorship, Gen Z is revolting: Why the world’s youth will not be silenced, published on 18 December 2025.
It’s something of a surprise to learn that the rap music genre in Russia dates as far back as the Soviet era – and that then, it came about thanks to a woman, Olga Opryatnaya. Second director of the Moscow Rock Club, sometime in the mid-1980s she heard a performance by the group Chas Pik. Struck by their innovative funk-rock fusion overlaid with an MC’s flow, Opryatnaya invited them to record an album. And thus, Russian rap was born.
Today, Russian rap music made by women coalesces around Zhenski rap, a sub-genre that emerged in the mid-1990s. Starting with Lika Rap, the 1994 album by Lika Pavlova (aka Lika Star), women have “represented” in what remains in Russia – as elsewhere – a male-dominated genre.
But this has not been a smooth ride. And as the curious case of Instasamka, the first female rapper to be subjected to state censorship shows, double standards abound – with women being targeted, unlike their male counterparts, with ambiguous charges of “moral inappropriateness”.
The censorship of women musicians in Russia is not, it should be said, a recent phenomenon. Pussy Riot, the feminist political collective, have been persecuted for more than ten years, with five of their exiled members sentenced in absentia in September 2025 to long jail sentences for speaking out against the war in Ukraine. But their cause went largely unnoticed within Russia’s rap community.
Now the war between Instasamka and the authorities, beginning in late 2021, has added cultural censorship to the well-established category of suppressing political speech.
A vlogger and social media personality before becoming a musician, Instasamka’s older Instagram posts give a good sense of her defining aesthetic – accentuated physical features interspersed with tattoos, tropes often featured by her counterparts in the USA. Rubbing against the conservative – anti-foreign – values that have been in ascendency in Russia in recent years, it was no surprise that she would, in due course, attract the wrong sort of attention.
The offensive against Instasamka (real name Darya Zoteeva) was initially led by state organisations and civic organisations on 24 November 2021. The Rospotrebnadzor, the Federal Service for the Oversight of Consumer Protection and Welfare, cancelled her concert after complaints from members of the Surgut city Duma in Khanty-Mansia. The day after, the media watchdog Roskomnadzor cancelled her concert in Sverdlovsk due to similar complaints from local officials. The censorship campaign against her picked up, though, after being taken up by conservative parental groups like Fathers of Russia. A concerted campaign accusing her of promoting debauchery and prostitution among children starting in December 2022 led, ultimately, to the cancellation of her February 2023 tour.
Wilting under the pressure, Instasamka temporarily relocated to the United Arab Emirates, albeit in a precarious financial position – her bank account had been frozen by the Ministry of Internal Affairs due to an investigation on charges of tax evasion and money laundering.
The fraught situation that Instasamka found herself in only began to unwind in the late spring of 2023, following a meeting between her and Katerina Mizulina, head of the Safe Internet League. At the meeting, Instasamka and Hoffmannita (a fellow female rapper similarly targeted by conservative pressure groups) publicly apologised to concerned parents, and undertook to reform their public personas.
Her travails were far from over, however. Instasamka’s unapologetic pop (read: commercial) sensibilities had always set her out on a limb. In a music form that has traditionally (if not always consistently) prided itself on social awareness and political literacy, Instasamka’s peers themselves labelled her with one damning word: inauthenticity. By late 2023, the perception of Instasamka in Russia’s rap community was one of vocal disgust rather than silent tolerance, “I forbade my children from listening to Instasamka,” Levan Gorozia from rap group L’One told Index. “They need to understand what’s good and what’s bad.”
Similarly award-winning, rapper Ira PSP noted: “I haven’t heard of such names. They’re probably pop projects; all the rappers know each other.” Kima, another well-known rapper in the community, explicitly questioned the artistic credentials of her “peer”. Instasamka, she said, “is a successful commercial project. She’s great at copying Western artists. I don’t think of her as a rapper. […] A girl who raps can call herself whatever she wants, but she’s not a rapper if someone writes lyrics for her. I haven’t heard decent female rap lately that has both substance and a decent flow.”
But there is, perhaps, another dimension to Instasamka’s support – or lack of therein – within Russia’s female rap community.
As one member of rap group Osnova Pashasse – one of the oldest all-female rap groups in Russia – pointed out (anonymously but speaking for the group), the issue goes far deeper. “In our country, many still don’t take rap with a female voice seriously,” she said. “Perhaps this is the fault of the female MCs themselves who don’t focus their work on something interesting, with intellectual or spiritual themes, or even some captivating abstraction in their lyrics, but instead constantly emphasise their gender in their lyrics and sometimes try to compete with men.”
Credibility for female rappers, it seems, does not sit easily with commercial kudos. But then again, even commercial success is predicated on staying with the boundaries of social and cultural norms – which, in effect, sometimes operate as a form of artistic censorship.
***
The success of female rappers in Russia is, by and large, contingent upon the approval of a male-dominated culture and male-dominated ideas of quality. The historical antecedents of female rappers working in the genre notwithstanding, fair evaluation of their capabilities is not a given. As branding expert Nikolas Koro noted, a small fan base has a marked limiting impact on the visibility and commercial viability of female rappers. “In financial terms, the number of female rap fans is mere pennies. So, the fate of almost all women rappers in Russia is either to leave the stage … or change the musical format.”
Ira PSP expressed the challenges trenchantly. The issue, she said, is that “we are neither heard nor seen. The girls and I have dedicated our lives to culture, but there is no [financial] return.”
So, where is Zhenski rap heading? The balance that its practitioners must try to strike can be found somewhere between the desire to be seen as “authentic” (legitimate in the eyes of the rap community) and being themselves. They must appeal to both the dominant cultural norms within rap and assert their individuality, as women and as rappers. In the 2000s, this meant balancing skill, sex-appeal, and objectification, which only become more pronounced from the 2010s on. And they, of course, must take into account the very real prospect of censorship – creative or cultural, by peers or by the state.
The Instasamka saga did not end with her apology of 2023. After another scheduled tour was cancelled in 2024, on the grounds of her “provocative appearance”, Instasamka finally threw in the towel, declaring that she would rebrand herself and embrace a more socially acceptable demeanour. This she has played out by re-inventing herself as a champion of child safety – and by showing rather less cleavage on Instagram. In July 2025, she participated in a roundtable discussion on a proposed legislative initiative to limit the access of minors to blogging platforms. Instasamka has shifted her entire public persona behind vocally supporting a “pro-child” agenda – completely distancing herself from her past in the process.
She has also, it seems, changed her views about artistic censorship. In July this year, she openly criticised fellow rappers Dora and Maybe Baby for allegedly “anti-Russian” behaviour. Their transgression, in Instasamka’s opinion? Performing covers of songs from firebrands like the rapper FACE. Real name Ivan Dryomin, FACE was a vocal critic of the Putin regime. Forced out of the country, he was labelled a “foreign agent” by the Russian government in 2022.
14 Jan 2026 | Features, Iran, Middle East and North Africa, Volume 54.04 Winter 2025
This piece first appeared in the Winter 2025 issue of Index on Censorship, Gen Z is revolting: Why the world’s youth will not be silenced, published on 18 December 2025.
She leaves before dawn, when Tehran is at its quietest. Sara, mother of three and grandmother of two, fingers the metal nozzles in her tote bag to keep the spray cans from rattling. She maps the alleyways in her head, the blind corners and burned-out bulbs, the CCTV arcs and the places where a single shouted word can turn a street into an alarm. Hair uncovered since 2022, she moves quickly toward a wall that has already forgotten yesterday’s words.
“Writing on walls is the only thing in my power,” she told me. Sara is not her real name – it would be impossible for her to safely reveal her identity.
Each night she searches for a patch that isn’t in view of a camera and hasn’t been freshly scrubbed clean. She bends close and writes the phrases she has come to know by muscle memory: “Death to Khamenei. Death to the dictator. Woman, Life, Freedom.” By sunrise, municipal crews will pass with rollers and solvent to strip away the words. By night, she will return.
The Shi’a faith dictates that Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, enacts God’s will on Earth. This mix of religious zeal and power makes Khamenei one of the most brutal modern dictators, and today, protesters in Iran often chant the phrase: “Death to Khamenei” at risk of imprisonment, or worse.
Nazi Abad, in south Tehran, was one of the 2022 uprising’s epicentres: narrow streets, modest courtyards and the then regular scene of teenagers in sneakers facing men in body armour. At some point between a funeral and a scuffle, Sara met a mother whose 16-year-old son, Siavash, had been shot during a protest.
“I am a mother,” Sara said, remembering the scene. “I put myself in her place. My heart burned. How could I stay silent while mothers buried their children?” She bought markers and paint that afternoon.
She feared arrest, but knew this was nothing compared to what happened to some of the young people who took part in anti-establishment protests that started in September 2022. Many people like Sara now sneak out to graffiti across the city.
“I think of Nika, Sarina, Siavash, Abolfazl – children who died at sixteen. At worst, I will go to prison. They gave their lives.”
Sara’s life had been drawn inside firm lines: illiterate parents who raised her to piety; marriage at sixteen; decades caring for a man shaped by trauma; three children, two of them daughters who now have daughters of their own. For years, she enforced those same lines on her family. Then the years turned, the city shifted, a young Kurdish woman named Mahsa (Jina) Amini died in the custody of the morality police in September 2022 following her arrest for not complying with strict hijab rules. It wasn’t long before the words “Woman, Life, Freedom” found their way from banners onto people’s lips.
Iranian women protest the death in custody of Mahsa (Jina) Amini outside the Iranian consulate in Istanbul. Photo: AP Photo/Emrah Gurel/Alamy
Sara kept her secret night-life from almost everyone. But Sepideh (not her real name), her eldest daughter, found Sara’s sprays. It was October 2022, and Sepideh was on a visit to see her parents. She wore a denim skirt and white blouse, her wavy, black hair falling to her shoulders, with no hijab. She was in her late thirties and travelled on the metro without a headscarf. Dozens of women were doing the same. When she arrived, her religious mother smiled. Her father said nothing.
In the parking area in her parents’ apartment block, Sepideh noticed spray cans lined up like tools on a workbench. She turned to her teenage cousin: “Mohammad, be careful when you go to write slogans.”
He shook his head. “They’re your mother’s.”
Sepideh quizzed Sara about the accusation.
“It’s none of your business,” Sara said. And then, after a beat, admitted: “Yes. Every night, our neighbour and I write. Whatever they erase in the morning, we rewrite. With thick markers – on buses, on the metro, everywhere. With spray cans – on the walls. I even wrote on the door of the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] man on our street.”
“What do you write?” Sepideh asked.
“Whatever you post on your Instagram Stories,” Sara said. “I copy them onto paper, then onto the walls and anywhere I can. Mostly: ‘Death to Khamenei. Death to the dictator. Woman, Life, Freedom.’”
Sara told her daughter that she wanted to make up for the past. “Back then I was afraid. Now I cannot be.”
Days later, Sara visited her daughter in central Tehran. Sepideh told her she had been at the protests, and described how a riot officer had called her a prostitute on Keshavarz Boulevard.
She stopped and told him: “My uncle was martyred in the war, my father wounded, so their daughter could be safe without being insulted.”
The officer stepped forward with a thin apology.
“Don’t apologise,” she said flatly. “You are ordered to verbally and sexually harass us.”
Another day, near Valiasr Square, tear gas burned through the crowd. Sepideh told a solider that he must be able to feel it too. When he denied that they had launched the gas, Sepideh pointed out that the soldiers were armed with batons, shields and guns, and were there to beat the protesters. He moved toward her, and she backed up to the lip of the metro stairs. She stood eye to eye with him. Strangers around her applauded, and swept her to safety via a motorbike.
There were even darker moments, too. A security agent grabbed Sepideh’s hair to drag her into a van.
“When I felt the cold of his hand, I thought it was over,” she told me.
Instead, a pack of young men burst from an alley, ripped his hand away, and whisked her away down the block on another motorbike.
“This wouldn’t have happened before. Men would have stayed silent. Now they understand their freedom is tied to ours,” she said.
Even during the day, Sara looks at the city as a potential canvas, ready for defiant slogans to be painted across surfaces. As the mother and daughter stepped out of a stairwell onto Villa Street together, an area in the heart of Tehran and packed with CCTV cameras, Sara gestured with her chin at a row of freshly whitewashed walls.
“What are you doing?” she asked her daughter, half-teasing. “Why didn’t you write on these? Why are these walls all white?”
Three years after protests erupted in Iran, Sara has not stopped playing her part in this quietly relentless revolution. Inspired by the young, this grandmother is still going out at night with her tote bag of spray cans, consistently continuing to daub the words of the Woman, Life, Freedom protests across Tehran. While the words may be gone by morning, their meaning endures, and women like Sara and Sepideh will not be silenced.
This piece is published in collaboration with Egab, an organisation working with journalists across the Middle East and Africa.
8 Jan 2026 | Belgium, Europe and Central Asia, Hungary, News
It should now be clear to everyone that the year 2026 will be marked by the march of the far right further into the mainstream of European politics. Each of the major European powers now has an ultra-nationalist party capable of taking at least a share of power in a democratic election. In Italy it has already formed the government.
What’s more, these Far Right revivalists claim they are defending the key enlightenment value of free speech – although they can be highly selective in its application.
The movement is driven by its hostility towards a well-defined common enemy, not Russia or China, but the European project itself. “The real threat does not come from Moscow or Beijing or from troll farms in St Petersburg. It comes from Brussels.” This, in a nutshell, was the message of the Battle for the Soul of Europe, a conference organised in the Belgian capital in December by MCC Brussels, a thinktank devoted to the downfall of the European Union.
MCC stands for Mathias Corvinus Collegium, a Hungarian institution with close links to Viktor Orbán (Corvinus himself was a 15th century expansionist king of Hungary). Politico has described the organisation as, “The EU’s most prominent hard-right pressure group.” The speaker was Norman Lewis, a visiting fellow at MCC Brussels and a former director of management consultants PwC, who perfectly embodies the ease with which the corporate world can embrace so-called National Conservatism.
The repeated message at Battle for the Soul of Europe was clear and coherent, if somewhat monotonous: European civilisation is under threat from the combined forces of mass immigration and wokery. Patriots of sovereign nations need to wake up and fight for the Christian values of the West and make peace with Russia. Just a week after the conference, US President Donald Trump made it clear that his national security strategy is based on precisely the same principles.
Many participants felt their voices were being silenced by the liberal European establishment.
Virginie Joron, MEP for the French far-right party Rassemblement National (National Rally) expressed her horror that, in her view, the Macron government was planning to label disinformation and “malicious advertising” with the help of the NGO Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and she said felt this was an attempt to target French TV channels sympathetic to the far right. Joron’s views reflect a feud going back several years. In 2024, RSF claimed there were concerted attempts to discredit them – for defending French law on fact-based broadcasting – led by the right-wing media group Vivendi with the support of far-right politicians.
Joron went on to attack Google, George Soros and the EU’s planned Centre for Democratic Resilience as part of a wider threat to free speech disguised as initiatives to tackle fake news. She claimed there now exists a cartel of authorised speech run by Brussels and militant NGOs. “No to the Macron-Brussels globalist Ministry of Truth,” she said, in a final rhetorical flourish.
If this weren’t hyperbolic enough, the French MEP was followed on stage by Adam Starzynski, the editor of Visegrad 24, an online pro-Orbán, pro-Trump news outlet. Starzynski claimed the censorship of stories about Hunter Biden, the son of the former US President Joe Biden, represented “the suppression of news on a whole new scale.” But he did not stop there, for Starzynski, UK far-right anti-immigration activist and convicted criminal Tommy Robinson was a dissident figure in the fight for free-speech rights.
Almost to a man and woman (and there were certainly no non-binary categories here), there was a disciplined “line to take”. The one dissenting voice at the conference, Vaclav Klaus, had been a genuine dissident during the Cold War and later became Prime Minister and President of the Czech Republic. Klaus has impeccable anti-European credentials and began by saying that Brussels was “everything a democrat should disagree with”. He added that it had been a tragic mistake to confuse Europe with the European Union. For him, Europe was just a conglomeration of nation states which sometimes had common interests.
But he took issue with the very concept of the conference: “There is not a common history of Europe,” he said. People should not artificially invent a European “soul”.
The new European Far Right baulk at being called “fascists”. But this is something of a distraction. Most are happy to be considered “hard right” or “patriotic right” or “National Conservative”.
They are for the most part, united and disciplined, where their liberal opponents are confused and disorganised. Their message is simple, clear and seductive. And now it has the backing of the White House it cannot be ignored.
24 Dec 2025 | Europe and Central Asia, News, Turkey
When I met Can Dündar in London, he was in a jovial mood. His book, I met my killer (Ich traf meinen Mörder) had been published in Germany to much acclaim.
When we met, Dündar had just flown in from Berlin to London to present the Index Arts Award to Mohamed Tadjadit, a slam poet imprisoned in Algeria for reciting his poets during the Hirak protests. Dündar is a friend of Index on Censorship and was one of the judges for the 2025 Freedom of Expression Awards.
Dündar, a dapper man in his early 60s, is a fearless journalist, once the editor of Turkey’s largest newspaper Cumhuriyet. But he’s now in exile. He was enjoying the anonymity of London when I saw him. Dündar has lived in Berlin since 2016, and he is sometimes attacked in the capital’s street verbally by Turks who want to prove their loyalty to the regime. They film themselves while doing it, so that they can post videos on social media. But as Dündar explains, he would rather be in Germany because he also enjoys huge support and it’s a place he’s given a serious hearing.
People in Germany care about Turkey precisely because of the large Turkish diaspora (the biggest in the world) who first came over in the 1950s as Gastarbeiter. Increasingly Turkish-Germans are in positions of influence in politics, business and the arts.
Dündar’s new book describes in vivid detail the kind of mafia state Turkey has become – it’s more Godfather than Le Carré. In it, Dündar tells the story of how he uncovered the full extent of Erdoğan’s ties with organised crime.
Dündar had to leave Turkey for good after being jailed for his journalism and then attacked in a botched assassination attempt on a square outside the Istanbul Palace of Justice while his case was being heard. He was only saved because of the quick-thinking of his wife Dilek who took hold of the collar of the killer’s shirt when she saw him point a gun at close range towards her husband.
He landed in trouble with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government because he published a story the Turkish authorities would far rather had never come to light – that the Turkish secret services were smuggling arms and rocket launchers, under the guise of humanitarian aid across the border to IS and other extremist groups in Syria during the war there in 2015.
It all began when lorries carrying arms were stopped by local police and prosecutors near the Syrian border. Excited that they had uncovered an illegal gun-running operation, they filmed the search and the arms they found (thousands of mortars and tens of thousands of machine gun rounds). An accompanying secret service man was hauled out of the lorry and handcuffed on the ground. There then ensued a huge battle between Turkey’s various police and secret services forces – and an intervention by the government’s justice minister who knew about the illegal arms delivery and ordered it to continue. The saga is all described in gripping detail in the book.
Dündar’s newspaper was passed the video footage and he ran the story despite knowing he would be prosecuted. Dündar spent three months in jail and later a court sentenced him to 27 years in absentia. But the government decided that a jail term was not enough. They needed to silence him forever and officials asked their links in the underworld to murder him.
It was at the end of 2020 after four and a half years in Germany when Dündar received a letter from a man in jail in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The man wrote: “I was given the contract to kill you. Now I’m prepared to tell you everything I know.” The man’s name was Serkan Kurtulus.
In the end Kurtulus had refused to carry out the hit and it was another man who did it. But Kurtulus was able to tell him who had ordered the job, and the deep connections between the government and Turkish organised crime. Kurtulus had also been on the gun-running trips to Syria. He told Dündar he didn’t want to be deported back to Istanbul and thought that getting his story out would give him some sort of protection. As Dündar writes he was put in the uncomfortable position of being able to potentially save his would-be killer’s life.
I Met My Killer also includes three other interviews Dündar carried out with repentant whistleblowers. One man who ran a gun-running business described how, in the two and a half years up to August 2015 enough weapons were sent over the border to Syria by the Turkish government to arm 100,000 men. His business bought them in Serbia, Croatia and Bulgaria and transported them to IS and others with the support of government officials and the Turkish secret service.
I talk to Dündar later over email when I’ve read the book in German and ask what the reaction in Turkey has been to the revelations about the links between the government and organised crime and just the sheer numbers of weapons that went to jihadists in Syria.
“The aspect of the matter is even more frightening that the scandal itself: there is complete silence. It is as if these things never happened, even discussed. It is impossible for my book to be published in Turkey. Those who write about the subject are punished. Fear grows like a veil over the truth,” Dündar told me.
And in Europe and the EU?
“Nothing so far…. Apart from the astonished looks of readers in the German cities I visited for the readings. I have not seen any reactions yet.”
Dündar is convinced the Americans and Europeans knew what was happening and didn’t do anything about it, either because it wasn’t in their interests or they were powerless to do so.
We talk about journalism. There are far fewer journalists in jail now than there used to be, Dündar says, because the independent press has gone out of business. People like him are in exile and others have simply chosen different jobs. Those that remain are afraid. A colleague lives with a little bag packed by the door, awaiting the day that he will be picked up by the police. I say it reminds me of Julian Barnes novel The Noise of Time about Shostakovich waiting to be arrested by Stalin’s secret agents.
One imprisoned journalist who has fascinated Dündar is Fatih Altaylı. He is no friend though, because Altaylı was once a loyal supporter of the Erdoğan regime, even prepared to change polling number for Erdoğan when he was prime minister to make him look more popular. But Altaylı became disillusioned and compared Erdoğan and his cronies to Ottoman Sultans, reminding them of the fate of Sultans (murdered and plotted against). The regime was not impressed.
“It’s symbolic that someone, even someone who supported Erdoğan once upon a time, could be a target,” Dündar told Index
The police arrested Altaylı, but he continued to report from Istanbul’s Marmara prison where he was being held, because he had access to prominent people who were in the cells with him: judges, lawyers, opposition politicians. His colleagues broadcast his YouTube channel but with an empty chair, where he used to sit, and a narrator reading out his investigations. Unfortunately, now the authorities have silenced him completely and his reports from prison are no longer broadcast.
Dündar is currently working on another documentary with Germany’s international news service Deutsche Welle, about the academic and judicial system in the USA and why it has suddenly been put at risk.
“It’s like the re-release of a film we saw 20 years ago in Turkey… It sounds strange, but I am as a Turkish exile meeting with ‘American exiles’. The country which was a [safe] harbour for exiles until now has suddenly started sending its own exiles. The political epidemic is spreading round he world”.
Finally we talk more about the situation in Turkey itself: the opposition mayor of Istanbul who has been locked up since March and has now been sentenced to more than 2,000 years in prison. Dündar laughs at how ridiculous this. The mayor is in prison because he would be the likely successful challenger to Erdoğan in upcoming presidential elections.
And as for Turkey, has he learnt more about his home country after writing his book? “I knew about the intelligence services collaboration with the mafia, but I saw more clearly that the government had transformed power into a mafia state.”
Dündar is looking for an English publisher of Ich traf meinen Mörder. I hope he finds one. The story is a shocking one, and the English-speaking world should take note.
