Twitter ‘Blue’: Sex workers, censorship and the fight for online visibility

19 Jun 2023 | News and features, United States

“In the past couple years, I’ve gotten kicked off of PayPal and Venmo,” sex worker Maya Morena told me. “I’ve gotten kicked off Twitter. I had 80,000 followers on Twitter; I had 30,000 followers on Instagram, I had 30,000 on Tumblr. I lost all those platforms.”

Morena’s experience isn’t unusual, though it also isn’t well known. When the right talks about censorship, it focuses obsessively on liberals protesting conservative speakers. When the left focuses on censorship, it points to the efforts by red states to criminalise the teaching of LGBT and Black studies. The longstanding, and worsening, policing and censorship of sex workers online is seen by all as either justifiable or unimportant. It is neither though; the censorship of sex workers affects their livelihood, their ability to advocate for themselves, and puts their safety and their very lives at risk.

That’s why when Twitter started promising that Twitter Blue would boost visibility and engagement on the platform, many sex workers signed up. The service hasn’t really solved sex worker’s problems. But the hopes around it, and the backlash to it, demonstrate just how isolated sex workers are, and how much they need solidarity from those who care about free speech.

A Sustained Assault on Sex Worker Speech

Government, gatekeepers and the public have long been very uncomfortable with sexual speech, going all the way back to laws that criminalised the shipping of sexual material through the mail in the late 1800s.

The early internet gave sex workers the ability to advertise directly to clients and to be visible online in ways that had been previously unimaginable. Sites like Backpage and Craigslist allowed people to promote erotic services and, importantly, allowed them to vet clients. Homicides of sex workers cratered in cities where Craigslist opened erotic services websites as sex workers were able to get off the streets and out of danger.

Despite clear evidence that free speech made sex workers safer, policy makers and anti-sex advocates insisted, with little to back them up, that adult services on the internet contributed to trafficking.

The “watershed moment” for sexual censorship, according to Olivia Snow, a dominatrix and a research fellow at the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, came in 2018, with the bipartisan passage of FOSTA/SESTA. These laws made platforms legally responsible for user-generated sexual content. That gave many platforms an incentive, or an excuse, to purge sex workers.

Backpage was shut down by the government in 2018; Tumblr purged most NSFW content the same year. So did Patreon. Payment processors and banks have been escalating a longstanding war on sex workers, preventing them from accessing funds or doing business. Even OnlyFans, which has built its business almost entirely on sex workers, decided to get rid of sexual content, though it reversed its decision after a backlash from creators.

As sex workers have been shut out of most sites, Twitter has become more and more important to the community. “Twitter is the only major social media platform that tolerates us,” Snow said. “It is by default the least shitty of the platforms.”

Twitter Is Welcoming—But Not That Welcoming

A recent study found that 97% of sex workers rely on Twitter as their top site for finding followers. Writer and sex worker Jessie Sage explained that while she has accounts on sex worker sites like Eros and Tryst, “the people who book me tend to do so because they find me and then they go look at my socials.” Clients use Twitter to verify that sex workers are who they say they are, and to see if they have shared interests. And, Sage says, Twitter allows sex workers to share information. “Being able to connect with other sex workers allows us to create pathways and resources and screening resources for each other that keep us safe.”

Sage also says Twitter is vital because it lets sex workers show that they’re not just sex workers. “Most of my Twitter’s just talking about books I like to read and things that I’m thinking about,” she told me. “But there’s something very political about that, because I’m saying that I am a sex worker, and I’m also all of these other things. And when we get shoved off of social media, we lose that and we become dehumanised. And when we become dehumanised, our existence becomes much more ripe for abuse.”

While Twitter is somewhat welcoming to sex workers though, it’s not that welcoming. Sex worker accounts are often deprioritized by the algorithm (a process sometimes referred to as shadowbanning). Deprioritisation can mean that accounts don’t show up in search results or that they don’t show up in follower’s feeds. That makes it hard to build an audience. It can also make it easy for bad actors to impersonate sex workers and catfish clients. “Fake accounts on Twitter are able to get more followers than me, because I’m already censored,” Morena told me. “It’s a big problem for all sex workers.”

Twitter Blue to the Rescue, Sort Of

In December, new Twitter owner Elon Musk claimed that for $8/month, Twitter Blue users would begin to be prioritised in search and in conversations on Twitter. Many sex workers hoped Twitter Blue would give them more visibility.

Sex worker Andres Stones says that in his experience post-Musk Twitter has strangled his engagement and has “had a very large and negative impact” on his business.” It’s not clear whether this is because Musk is more aggressive in restricting adult content, or whether the new Twitter simply throttles engagement for everyone who isn’t on Twitter Blue. Either way, Stones says, “I started subscribing [to Twitter Blue] out of necessity.” It hasn’t gotten him back to where he was before, but it’s at least slowed the slide. “It’s been helpful only insofar as not having it was a death knell for engagement.”

Other sex workers report similar experiences. Morena says it hasn’t been that helpful, though it’s given her content an “extra push.” Sage struggled because Twitter Blue didn’t allow her to change her screen name easily, which made it difficult for her to advertise her travel dates.

Block the Blue

Sex workers saw Twitter Blue as a possible way to navigate censorship and deprioritisation on the one important social media platform that warily tolerates their existence. But in the broader cultural conversation, Twitter Blue was portrayed as a service solely for Elon Musk superfans and fascist trolls.

Mashable reported on a Block the Blue campaign, which encouraged Twitter users to adopt a Blocklist targeting all Twitter Blue accounts. It was embraced by NBC News reporter Ben Collins, Alejandra Caballo of the Harvard Law Cyberlaw Clinic and other large progressive accounts. Twitter comedian and celebrity @dril told Binder, “99% of twitter blue guys are dead-eyed cretins who are usually trying to sell you something stupid and expensive.” Blocking them, @dril suggested, was funny and a way to undermine Musk’s right wing political agenda.

But a small study by TechCrunch found that the vast majority of Twitter Blue accounts were not right wing harassment accounts. Instead, people used the service because they wanted features like the ability to post longer videos, or two-factor authentication—or because they were, like sex workers, businesspeople trying to boost engagement.

Ashley, a sex worker and researcher of online platform behavior who did her own study of Twitter Blue users, told me that the Block the Blue list is frustratingly counterproductive. The best way to block hateful trolls, she argued, is to block the followers of large right-wing troll accounts.

“I’m all in favour of users being empowered to block people,” she says, “but combined with the fact that so many sex workers are using this, [Block the Blue] is really just sharing a sex worker block list. Because there’s way more sex workers than hateful people on there.”

No Voice

Ashley adds that the majority of Twitter Blue users are probably just random people experimenting with the service. The point though is that sex workers are using the service at high rates, but have had little success in getting their interests, or existence, recognised by progressives who are supposedly fighting for marginalised people. Matt Binder, who wrote the Mashable article about Block the Blue, told me he doesn’t believe that sex worker concerns did much to interrupt or slow the Block the Blue campaign which has “become somewhat of a meme on the platform,” he said. (He added that he thinks more people block individual users than use the block list, and doesn’t think there’s been much “friendly fire.”)

Musk and the right are no friends to sex workers; as Snow told me, the right-wing “neo-fash, neo-Satanic Panic” targeting LGBT people is built on terror and hatred of anything associated with sexuality, which includes sex workers (many of whom are LGBT themselves.) But progressive leaders often don’t feel accountable to sex workers either, and mostly ignore sex workers when they say (for example) that blocking everyone using Twitter Blue will further isolate them.

Twitter Blue isn’t a solution. But it’s a reminder that sex workers face extreme and debilitating censorship. More people need to listen to them.

Iranian society has been taken hostage, says exiled documentary film-maker

12 Aug 2022 | Iran, Iraq, News and features

At four in the afternoon on 16 April 2022, Iranian documentary filmmaker Gelareh Kakavand was at home when there was an insistent hammering at the door.

“There were five security police officers accompanied by a woman. They threatened to break it if it didn’t open immediately,” Kakavand told Index.

“They locked me in a room, put a camera in front of me, and started searching the house. When I protested that this was illegal to search my house and confine me in the room, they threatened to arrest and beat me.”

After the search of her home, which doubled up as her film studio, they confiscated Kakavand’s camera, camcorder and mobile phone.

Across the city at around the same time, Kakavand’s fellow filmmaker Vahid Zarezade returned home to find his door broken down.

“Agents had stormed my residence in my absence,” said Zarezade in an interview with Index. “The intelligence and security officers had told my landlord that the occupant of the house was engaged in ‘fraud and embezzlement’.”

The couple were then taken to one of Iran’s intelligence ministry buildings and interrogated, accompanied by threats, obscenities and insults.

Their work in documentaries – which they like to refer to as artivism – had always attracted unwanted attention from the authorities.

“During our career, we have made films about political prisoners such as Abbas Amir-Entezam, Mohammad Ali Amouei and Jila Bani Yaghoub, and the problems and sufferings of life and education among Baha’is in Iran. We also covered Keyvan Emamverdi’s case, documenting cases of sexual harassment and rape, and the emergence of the Iranian #metoo movement,” said Zarezade.

“As a result, we faced security, professional, and even financial and livelihood issues. Because of a film we made about the removal of paintings in the Museum of Contemporary Art of Iran we were handed a two-year suspended sentence and fined. We were also threatened many times for our film about Entezam. I was also imprisoned for one of the documentaries I worked on,” he said.

They were threatened verbally and had contracts cancelled for refusing to bow down to the authorities.

It soon became clear that the violent April raids related to a documentary they had started making two years earlier called White Torture, based on the book of the same name by human rights defender Narges Mohammadi.

White Torture features hard-hitting accounts of torture and sexual and physical humiliation faced by prisoners in Iran, particularly those who follow the Baha’i faith, the country’s second-most followed religion after Islam. The name refers to psychological torture relating to the extreme sensory deprivation and isolation of solitary confinement.

After they were released from interrogation but still fearing for their lives, Kakavand and Zarezade made the difficult decision to flee the country, prompted by the re-arrest and imprisonment of Mohammadi.

“We were worried the security forces might have gotten hold of the hard drives that contained videos and human rights documents, so we decided to leave Iran to make the pressure less on the members of the group as well as our families,” said Zarezade.

“We left Iran in order to finish the film and to ensure the narrators would remain secure and the accounts of prisoners would be preserved.”

Index spoke to Zarezade at an undisclosed location as the pair decided on their next moves.

—

Vahid Zarezade has been fascinated by the world of cinema since childhood.

“Despite my family’s disagreement, my first and only choice was to study cinema at university. Gradually, I started getting more interested in documentaries,” he said. “Society and my surroundings, with their cruelty and injustice, made the poetic and dreamlike aspect of cinema seem unreachable and impractical. Through documentaries I could intertwine concrete reality with the world of cinema.”

Zarezade soon began collaborating with Gelareh Kakavand on documentary work.

“Gelareh is a reflection of an egalitarian and demanding artist. More than being a filmmaker, she tries to create inner reflections and experiments. For example, in a film project about Iran’s mandatory hijab, she was one of those who used to walk the streets without a hijab many years ago. For many people, this was very inspiring.”

He believes that making films in Iran is not difficult but that the problems come later.

“What is difficult is the supervision and censorship that is applied to every cultural product and not only films, and this exhausts the artists,” he said. “The security system very noticeably monitors the artistic community of Iran and threatens them in different ways.”

Zarezade says filming White Torture was inevitable. “It was not me who chose to film this documentary, it was White Torture that chose me.”

“I was imprisoned years ago because of making a documentary which was never completed.

“Prison had a great impact on my life and my choices. During those years, I became acquainted with different people and thoughts. Throughout all those years, I endeavoured to highlight this both directly and indirectly in my projects. After getting to know Narges Mohammadi and becoming aware of the book she was writing, White Torture, I suggested making a documentary simultaneously.”

White Torture includes an interview with fellow Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, who was sentenced to six years in prison in July. In the footage, Panahi and his lawyer go to court to complain against solitary confinement.

Zarezade believes the White Torture, which was released in spring 2022 White Torture and won an award at the Geneva Human Rights Film Festival, shines a strong light on what is truly happening in Iran.

“For years, the Iranian regime claims not to have any political prisoners and that the judicial system of the country perfectly performs according to law and justice. Totalitarian regimes are always trying to create an appropriate image of how they govern the society to the world. Taking a look at prisons and the diaries of prisoners and civil right activists will make the reality clear,” he said.

“In a country where endeavouring to create a civil society is considered a crime, in a country where a women’s right activist is charged by the crime of being a feminist, there probably would be no space left for civil demands and seeking justice. They have taken a large part of the Iranian society as hostage and their propaganda machine is spreading lies day and night.”

Despite their relative safety, the future for Zarezade and Kakavand remains uncertain.

“I think we will always be concerned about being forced back to Iran. We get out of the house infrequently,” Zarezade explained. “On the streets and in crowded places, even when grocery shopping, we do not address each other in Farsi. This is because the security agents of the Islamic Republic are very active outside the country, taking hostages and even committing assassinations. What happened to Ruhollah Zam shows that it is not far-fetched for them to kidnap people in any country.” (Zam, the founder of Amadnews and a critic of the Iranian government, was executed in December 2020 after being lured from exile in France. He was tricked into attending a meeting in Iraq where he was seized by agents of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps in what they described as “a complicated operation”.

Zarezade says he has now become numb to censorship.

“I have spent 40 years of my life under supervision and censorship. Sometimes I feel like I have become my own censor. To my mind, the responsibility of the art and its artist is to turn a blind eye to censorship and move around it with new means of expression. This might seem unreachable in practice but what is important is to ignore censorship in art and do your work your own way regardless. Thus, your work, just like a signature that solely belongs to you, will go through a monitoring and censoring process and the new work that comes out of these censoring processes will find its own way of publication and survival.

Cancelling Russian culture is today’s moral imperative

23 Jun 2022 | News and features, Russia, Ukraine, Volume 51.02 Summer 2022, Volume 51.02 Summer 2022 Extras

Artistic director of the Mariinsky Theatre Valery Gergiev at the opening of the Zaryadye Concert Hall. Photo: www.kremlin.ru

Since the war started, Ukraine has become a magnet for the global media. As the war has progressed, its voice has become stronger in cultural matters, too. Ukraine has emerged from the shadows of its murderous “brother” and thrust itself into the western imagination, bleeding, yet stoic, full of raw emotion. It stopped being “the Ukraine”. “Kiev” became “Kyiv.”

Western intellectuals and the public suddenly started browsing Wikipedia pages on Ukraine’s history, trying to dissect reasons for its obstinance in the face of the enemy.

The Russia-Ukraine war has many layers. It’s a war of democracy versus authoritarianism. It is a war of blatant propaganda versus principled journalism. It is also a classical colonial war of a metropolis against one of its former subjects. A liberation struggle, extending into the realm of history and culture.

There’s a growing consensus among Ukraine’s cultural elites that this war should become a point of no-return for Russia trying to impose its imperial blueprint on the perception of history and culture of this region, both domestically and internationally.

In the early days of the war, as the first Russian rockets hit the Ukrainian capital, Ukrainian Institute, a young state institution with a mandate to promote Ukraine’s standing in the world through cultural diplomacy instruments, published a manifesto, calling on international partners to stop cooperation with Russia’s state cultural institutions. Similar to weaning itself off Russian energy, the West needs to stop thoughtlessly consuming Russian cultural products, without contextualising them, the Institute said.

As Russian artillery pound Ukrainian cities, London’s leading museums continue feeding the narrative about great Russian culture and history to their audiences. “Fabergé in London: Romance to Revolution”opened at the V&A shortly before the invasion. It profiles “craftsmanship and luxury” of Carl Fabergé, the jeweller of the Russian imperial family. The backdrop of the story is Russia’s imperial history and close ties between both monarchies.

There has since been a pivot. British museums are suddenly showing more willingness towards giving Ukraine agency. London’s National Gallery reviewed its stance on a Degas canvas in its permanent collection, depicting a swirl of dancers in a distinctly Ukrainian traditional attire. “Russian Dancers” became “Ukrainian Dancers”. Tate Modern is currently working on a new exhibition project with Ukraine as its focus, the first of its kind in its history.

Ukraine’s cultural elites and scholars worldwide are determined to seize this moment and to shift the paradigm where imperial hierarchies persist. As it has stood the histories of big countries, mostly former empires, and their cultural figures and phenomena matter more than those of their colonial subjects. This explains why there are so few centres for Ukrainian Studies in the UK (Cambridge being the notable exception), so few translations of Ukrainian literature. No exhibitions in major museums, up until now.

“We cannot cancel Russian culture.” “Pushkin cannot be held responsible for Putin.” “We cannot exclude Russian artists from being invited to residencies and collaborative projects.” “It’s illiberal.” “It smacks of censorship.” These are the arguments often deployed by many intellectuals and creatives in the West. Let us address these concerns one by one.

Placing Russia at the centre of any cultural conversation should not happen without clear articulation of the fact that Russia has used culture for the purposes of aggressive political propaganda internationally. Culture is a broad reflection of the society it represents, and currently Russian society stands largely united behind an ideology promoting violence and blatant untruths.

The new consensus should go beyond the outcome of the Ukraine-Russia conflict and should be about realisation that cultural discourse is unfairly skewed in favour of big and powerful countries, denying many voice and agency. And Ukraine is not alone here.

Our perception of one’s culture is often shaped by a sheer fact of its presence on the cultural scene: through books, theatre productions, films and exhibitions. We often forget that there’s a powerful state machinery propping up this presence and that rogue states – and Russia has become one – weaponise culture and history to political ends, and even use them as a pretext to start a war. To be remembered, the Russian intent behind the killings in Ukraine is to “de-Nazify” the country.

Artists and academics often lack a toolkit to study and bring to the fore cultures previously absent from the discourse. These cultures are absent or underrepresented not for the reasons of uninteresting or lacking value. They are absent because of entrenched cultural hierarchies, intellectual laziness, lack of courage to work with original sources, as well as a long history of suppression of their culture and language by the metropolis.

It is intellectually dishonest and arrogant to place Ukrainian and “good” Russian artists on the same footing by inviting them to speak at the same panel discussion or to apply for funding, for the sake of “reconciliation” and “dialogue”. There can be no reconciliation while the war is still on. It can only start happening after Russia has admitted its guilt and paid reparations for the damage done. Any other framework would mean perpetuation of the colonial discourse.

This article appears in the forthcoming summer 2022 edition of Index on Censorship. Get ahead of the game and take out a subscription with a 30% discount from Exact Editions using the promo code Battle4Ukraine.

For another view, read Maria Sorenson’s article as she calls for artists to unite in their opposition to authoritarian regimes and an end to the blanket boycott of Russian culture.

Cancel Putin, not culture

22 Jun 2022 | News and features, Russia, Ukraine, Volume 51.02 Summer 2022, Volume 51.02 Summer 2022 Extras

In the dark times
Will there be singing?
Yes, there will be singing
About the dark times.

Bertolt Brecht, motto to Svendborg Poems 1939

For someone who has by now lived most of my adult life in the West but grew up in Belarus – a country that borders both Ukraine and Russia – these have certainly been dark and turbulent times.

The horror of what people in Ukraine are going through is heart-breaking. It is also confusing if my own country of birth is viewed as an aggressor or a victim.

Should people who have bravely protested in hundreds of thousands in 2020 and paid a very high price for it be now equated to the regime that rules them? Does Belarus, the country and the people, mean Lukashenka? What about Russia? The support for Putin is undoubtedly bigger there. But does Russia and Russian culture mean Putin?

Having always been a passionate advocate of freedom of expression under the most trying of conditions, what to make now of the blanket censorship of Russian and Belarusian artists not in Russia and Belarus… but in the West?

When the horror of the invasion of 24 February sank in, the Western cultural scene was immediately rocked by a succession of cancellations and calls for boycotts. Some of them were easier to understand and justify than others.

Opera singer Anna Netrebko and conductor Valery Gergiev have been tied to Putin’s regime and identified as representatives of his soft power: association with them became too toxic for Western cultural institutions. Recently, the evidence of oligarchic wealth accumulated by Gergiev due to his political connections has also come to light. This made any defence of him even more difficult
Art in some ways has always been held hostage. The authoritarian Soviet regime used the prestige of the Bolshoi and the power of Russian culture as soft power.

One is reminded of a powerful 1968 performance by cellist Mstislav Rostropovich at the BBC Proms in London where he performed – intitally to the calls of protest and with tears streaming down his face – a tortured and impassionate piece of music by a Czech composer Antonin Dvorak on the day Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring.

His wife, the opera singer Galina Vishnevskaya, recalled the event in her autobiography:

“In the hall, six thousand people greeted the appearance of Soviet artists with long unceasing cries, stomping, whistling, preventing the concert from starting. Some shouted: ‘Soviet fascists, get out!’ Others: ‘Shut up, the artists are not to blame!’

“Slava (his nickname) stood there completely pale, absorbing the shame for his criminal government, and I, closing my eyes and not daring to raise my head, huddled in the far corner of the viewing box. But then, finally, the hall fell silent. Dvořák’s music poured over the people like a requiem, and Rostropovich, shedding tears, spoke through his cello.

“The hall froze, listening to the confession of the great artist, who at that moment, together with Dvořák merged with the very soul of the Czech people, suffering with him and with them asking his forgiveness and praying for them.

“As soon as the last note played, I rushed backstage to Slava. Pale, with trembling lips, having not yet recovered from his experience on stage, with eyes full of tears, he grabbed my arm and dragged me to the exit:

“‘Let’s go to the hotel, I can’t see anyone.’

“We went out into the street – the demonstrators were shouting there, waiting for the musicians of the orchestra to express their indignation to them.

“Seeing the two of us, they suddenly fell silent and parted in front of us. In the ensuing silence, not looking at anyone, feeling like criminals, we quickly walked to the car waiting for us and, returning to the hotel, we could finally give vent to our despair.

“But what could we do? We did the only thing that was in our power – got drunk.”

What then should the answer to this moral dilemma be? Should musicians and artists be allowed to perform only once they have stated their opposition to their government?

And is it then morally justifiable from the point of view of Western democracies to put someone living under completely different conditions in that position? To demand dissent from someone who might not be in the position to speak freely?

The German music critic Jan Brachmann gives the example of Dmitri Shostakovich, who, in 1949, appeared at a Soviet-backed peace conference in New York, having been pressured by Stalin into attending.

The émigré Russian composer Nicolas Nabokov publicly interrogated Shostakovich about Soviet denunciations of modernist music, even though he knew that his colleague could not speak his mind. Shostakovich muttered, barely audible: “I fully agree with the statements made in Pravda.”

It is unclear what exactly had been gained from that exercise. But Gurgiev aside and any moral clarity there notwithstanding, there have been other, much less clear-cut cases recently.

Sergei Loznitsa, one of Ukraine’s most prolific filmmakers, who has explored the Maidan uprising, the Donbass war, Stalin’s personality cult and the tragedy behind the Babyn Yar massacre, has recently been expelled from the Ukrainian Film Academy for speaking out against blanket boycott of Russian filmmakers.

His opposition is based on the fact that people should be judged by their actions not their passports. It is hard to disagree. People can still love their country and feel deeply ashamed of their government’s actions.
Kirill Serebrennikov, a Russian dissenting artist of great talent, is currently also in the line of fire.

Serebrennikov, who had his homoerotic production, Nureyev, taken off stage at Bolshoi in 2017, was placed under house arrest accused of embezzling theatre funds – a charge widely seen as being politically motivated. He was not allowed to attend a premiere of his production of Cosi Fan Tutte at Zurich Opera nor to the Cannes premiere of his hugely acclaimed ode to rock ‘n’ roll and dissent in 1980s Leningrad, Leto.

Recently Bolshoi has once again cancelled a scheduled production of Nureyev, this time as a retaliation for him speaking up against the war. Serebrennikov told France 24 in an interview last month that “it’s quite obvious that Russia started the war”, and that it was breaking his heart.

“It’s war, it’s killing people, it’s the worst thing (that) ever might happen with civilisation, with mankind… It’s a humanitarian catastrophe, it’s rivers of blood,” he said.

And yet the Ukrainian State Film Agency opposed Serebrennikov’s inclusion in Cannes Film Festival and the premiere of his new film on the grounds that he is a Russian filmmaker, and it was unacceptable in times of war. While this reaction is humanly understandable and can even be seen by some as a moral decision, we need to ask ourselves who ultimately benefits from silencing, cancelling, de-platforming and similar methods? It is never a viewer, a reader or any ordinary person.

The power of art is in our shared humanity and not in division. Art and its healing power is what gets us through the hard and dark times. We need to show solidarity with people in Ukraine and Ukrainian artists, shine a spotlight on their experiences and prioritise their voices, as well as support those who struggle under authoritarianism in their own countries. This is a task for any functioning democracy.

Having started by quoting Bertolt Brecht, another quotation, this time by the Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn comes to mind: “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart – and through all human hearts.”

This article appears in the forthcoming summer 2022 edition of Index on Censorship. Get ahead of the game and take out a subscription with a 30% discount from Exact Editions using the promo code Battle4Ukraine.

For another view, read Marina Pesenti’s article where she argues that promoting Russian culture risks furthering Putin’s agenda.

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