Superficially, Russian Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky’s recent claim that Netflix was a CIA plot resembles another excitable pronouncement from a Kremlin hierarchy increasingly out of touch with reality. The same goes for the regularly inflammatory comments of Dmitry Rogozin, the possible successor to Vladimir Putin, who famously warned the West in 2015 that ‘tanks don’t need visas’, and that the West would crumble ‘under pressure from ISIS and gays’.
Russia’s accusations against the West are often bizarre, and not always the product of a Soviet-style misinformation monolith. But many are also carefully calculated. For one thing, a great many Russians earnestly …read more