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Hacking Through Putin’s Media Cult

Putin
Photo by Sasha Mordovets/Getty
Julia Ioffe
March 22, 2022

Jean-Michel Scherbak is a young actor and model from Moscow. I’ve never actually met him in person because my friend started dating him after my last visit to the Russian capital, and then the pandemic and now the war have kept me away. I started following him on Instagram, where he posts photos from his modeling shoots and videos from his travels. He was always funny and upbeat. He danced, he gave people witty tours of the cities he found himself in, including Kyiv. And then, as for so many Russians and Ukrainians, everything turned dark. 

War tore everything apart–—including, it seemed, Jean-Michel’s family. His light-hearted posts about overheated games of Monopoly were now replaced by screenshots of his Russian mother’s angry messages to him, calling him a traitor and disowning him. Soon enough, to enlighten his mother and people like her, Jean-Michel turned his Instagram into a stream of debunking and deprogramming. He started posting messages from other Russians who believed Kremlin propaganda, juxtaposed alongside information from his Ukrainian friends—presenting the nationalistic myth versus the gruesome reality. When Russia banned Instagram, he started up a Telegram channel to keep the truth flowing.