This week, Russia announced the creation of a new censorship council to control historical content on the internet, in books, and in film. Fletcher and Octavio explore what this means for digital freedom and collective memory.
Esta semana, Rusia anunció la creación de un nuevo consejo de censura para controlar el contenido histórico en internet, libros y cine. Fletcher y Octavio exploran qué significa esto para la libertad digital y la memoria colectiva.
5 essential A2-level terms from this episode, with translations and example sentences in Spanish.
| Spanish | English | Example |
|---|---|---|
| historia | history / story | La historia de España es muy interesante. |
| controlar | to control | El gobierno quiere controlar la información en internet. |
| verdad | truth | La gente busca la verdad en internet. |
| miedo | fear | El miedo cambia lo que la gente dice. |
| diferente | different | La historia oficial es muy diferente de la verdad. |
When a government stops pretending and just names the thing what it actually is, that's when I pay attention.
Russia this week announced the creation of a censorship council.
Not a content review board, not a media standards authority.
A censorship council.
They used the word.
Sí, es muy directo.
Yes, it's very direct.
Rusia dice la verdad aquí.
Russia is telling the truth here.
Which is its own kind of unsettling, right?
Usually authoritarian governments dress these things up.
Octavio, what's your read when you first saw this story?
Para mí, no es una sorpresa.
For me, it's not a surprise.
Rusia controla mucha información.
Russia controls a lot of information.
Right, but here's the specific thing that caught my eye.
This council isn't targeting news, it's targeting history.
Historical content, they say, on the internet, in books, in film.
They want to control how the past is told.
La historia es muy importante en Rusia.
History is very important in Russia.
Es muy política.
It's very political.
That's the exact right word.
Political.
I spent time in Moscow in the late nineties, and even then you could feel how much the state needed to own the narrative about World War Two, about the Soviet collapse, about basically everything before 1991.
En Rusia, la historia oficial es muy diferente.
In Russia, the official history is very different.
No es mi historia.
It's not my history.
What do you mean, not your history?
You mean not what you'd find in a Spanish or a European classroom?
Claro.
Of course.
La guerra, Stalin, las víctimas.
The war, Stalin, the victims.
Rusia habla diferente.
Russia talks about it differently.
And now they want to formalize that difference.
Make it enforceable.
Let's back up for a second and explain what we actually know about this council, because the details matter.
Es un consejo oficial.
It's an official council.
Controla libros, cine e internet.
It controls books, film, and the internet.
Three channels.
Print, screen, and the web.
Which is basically every way a story about the past reaches a person in 2026.
What's interesting is that Russia already had tools for this.
The foreign agents law, Roskomnadzor as the internet regulator.
So why a new council specifically for history?
Porque la guerra en Ucrania cambia todo.
Because the war in Ukraine changes everything.
La gente busca la verdad.
People search for the truth.
That's a really important point.
When the war started in February 2022, Russians suddenly had a desperate need to understand what was happening, and they turned to history to find context.
Who were Ukrainians?
What is Kyiv?
What actually happened in 1932?
And the state did not like the answers people were finding.
1932 es el Holodomor.
1932 is the Holodomor.
Es una historia muy difícil.
It's a very difficult history.
The engineered famine in Ukraine under Stalin.
Millions of people dead.
Russia still officially disputes whether it was genocide.
And if you're trying to explain why Ukrainians have a particular relationship with Russian power, that history is pretty central.
Of course the Kremlin wants to regulate who gets to say what about it online.
En España también tenemos problemas con nuestra historia.
In Spain we also have problems with our history.
Es normal en muchos países.
It's normal in many countries.
Fair point.
Spain's reckoning with the Civil War and Franco is still genuinely complicated, and I've heard you talk about that before with some heat.
But there's a distinction I want to draw.
Democratic governments can have messy, contested histories and still allow the debate.
What's different here is the formalization of enforcement.
Sí, en España la gente puede criticar la historia.
Yes, in Spain people can criticize history.
No hay problema.
There's no problem.
Right.
You can write a book in Madrid saying Franco was a monster and nobody's going to knock on your door.
That's the line.
Now, let's talk about the technology side of this, because that's actually what makes this new council different from old-fashioned censorship.
Internet hace todo más difícil.
The internet makes everything harder.
La información viaja rápido.
Information travels fast.
Incredibly fast.
And Russia has known this problem for years.
There's a project called RuNet, which is basically Russia's attempt to create a sovereign internet.
A version of the web that can be isolated from the global internet at the flick of a switch.
They tested it in 2019.
It was messy but it worked.
Rusia quiere un internet propio.
Russia wants its own internet.
Como China con su sistema.
Like China with its system.
The China comparison is unavoidable.
The Great Firewall is the most sophisticated state-controlled internet infrastructure in the world.
Russia has been studying it for fifteen years.
But here's the thing about China that often gets overlooked.
The firewall didn't just block content.
It created a parallel ecosystem.
Baidu instead of Google.
WeChat instead of WhatsApp.
Russian versions of these exist but they're far less dominant.
Rusia tiene VK, como Facebook.
Russia has VK, like Facebook.
Pero mucha gente también usa Instagram.
But many people also use Instagram.
Or they use VPNs to get around the blocks.
After Meta was restricted in 2022, VPN downloads in Russia went through the roof overnight.
Millions of Russians installed them in a matter of days.
So the state has this fundamental problem.
They can block things, but determined people can get around the blocks.
A censorship council doesn't solve that problem.
No, pero da miedo a la gente.
No, but it frightens people.
El miedo funciona también.
Fear also works.
That stopped me cold when you said that.
Because you're absolutely right and I was thinking about this too technically.
The point of a censorship council isn't just to block content.
It's to make people think twice before they create it or share it.
The chilling effect.
That's the real mechanism.
Un periodista piensa: ¿escribo esto o no?
A journalist thinks: do I write this or not?
Es el problema.
That's the problem.
And that calculation changes everything about what gets published.
I've interviewed journalists in countries where the consequences are serious.
And the honest ones will tell you that self-censorship is the most effective form of censorship there is, because the state doesn't even have to do the work.
Los rusos ya tienen mucho miedo.
Russians are already very afraid.
Desde 2022, es peor.
Since 2022, it's worse.
Dramatically worse.
After the full-scale invasion, Russia passed laws making it a criminal offense to call the war a war rather than a special military operation.
People got arrested for holding up blank signs.
A blank piece of paper became a political act.
This new council fits into that escalating pattern.
La historia y la guerra están juntas.
History and the war are together.
No puedes separar las dos.
You cannot separate the two.
That's exactly the architecture of it.
Putin's justification for the invasion was always historical.
He published an essay in 2021 arguing that Ukrainians and Russians are essentially one people.
That Russia and Ukraine are not separate nations in any meaningful sense.
If you accept that framing, the war isn't an invasion, it's a reunification.
And the council exists to protect that framing from challenge.
Pero los ucranianos dicen: no, somos diferentes.
But Ukrainians say: no, we are different.
Tenemos nuestra propia historia.
We have our own history.
And historians, the serious ones outside Russia, largely agree with that.
Ukrainian identity, Ukrainian language, Ukrainian cultural memory, these are distinct.
The argument that they're not is not a historical argument, it's a political one dressed in historical clothes.
Which is precisely why controlling how history gets told online matters so much to the Kremlin.
¿Y en el mundo, qué pasa?
And in the world, what happens?
¿Otros países hacen lo mismo?
Do other countries do the same?
More than we like to admit.
China, obviously.
Iran.
North Korea at the extreme end.
But you also see softer versions in places that would call themselves democracies.
Hungary has moved in this direction with its university system and its public media.
Turkey went through a period of aggressive internet blocking.
Even Western platforms face pressure from their own governments on content moderation.
The line isn't always as clear as we'd like.
Pero hay una diferencia grande.
But there is a big difference.
En democracias, los jueces pueden decir no.
In democracies, judges can say no.
The courts.
The independent courts.
That's the load-bearing wall of the whole structure.
When you have courts that can push back against executive power, censorship has limits.
When you don't, there are no limits.
Russia's judiciary is not meaningfully independent.
So when the council decides something is prohibited historical content, that decision is essentially final.
Es muy triste.
It's very sad.
Los rusos normales solo quieren vivir bien.
Normal Russians just want to live well.
That's the thing I always come back to.
When I was in Moscow, covering the economy after the ruble crisis, the people I talked to in markets, on the metro, in kitchens, they were not cartoons.
They were trying to pay rent and feed their kids and figure out the future.
The system is not the people.
The system uses the people.
Oye, una cosa de español que quiero hablar.
Hey, one Spanish thing I want to talk about.
Usaste la palabra 'historia' muchas veces.
You used the word 'historia' many times.
I did, yeah.
History.
Historia in Spanish.
What about it?
'Historia' en español significa dos cosas.
'Historia' in Spanish means two things.
La historia del mundo y también un cuento.
The history of the world and also a story or tale.
Wait, so if I say 'me cuentes una historia,' I'm asking for a story, not a history lesson?
The same word does both jobs?
Exacto.
Exactly.
'Una historia de amor' es un cuento.
'Una historia de amor' is a love story.
'La historia de España' es el pasado.
'La historia de España' is the past.
You know what, that's actually perfect for this episode.
Russia's censorship council exists precisely because the line between history and story, between what happened and how you tell it, is so easy to blur.
And in Spanish, the language already knows they're the same thing.
Fletcher, por una vez tienes razón.
Fletcher, for once you are right.
La lengua es muy inteligente.
Language is very intelligent.
Mark it in the calendar.
Octavio said I was right about something.
Look, the takeaway from today is this: what Russia built this week isn't just a new bureaucracy.
It's a technological claim over memory itself.
And that, whatever language you say it in, is worth paying close attention to.