Criticism is allowed unless you have ambitions to work in government. Critique of the government has become actually quite common in the Russian stand up comedy scene. There are some exceptions, like you cannot show any public disrespect to the Head of the Chechen Republic Ramzan Kadyrov (you can google how people apologise to him).

Edit (forgot to mention): also, participating in anti-government protests often results in people losing their jobs or being expelled from the universities

Edit 2: also, there is an ongoing crisis with the independent media: the Russian government is trying to suffocate the independent news outlets by classifying them as foreign agents (which has pretty bad practical outcomes for the news outlet)

The question was if people (I assumed a regular folk, not journalists and opposition) are allowed to make jokes about the government, and I answered to that. Of course I know that Russia has no traces of democracy left and I am aware how Russia targets high-profile people, including journalists. You should be more reserved before telling people they don't know anything.

Allowed? People would do it anyway. Most Eastern European communist era jokes involved the beloved leader. Russian jokes about politicians and policies are even better.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_political_jokes

No, the question was:

> Do you see it headed towards China, where no internal criticism is allowed?

But if you’re a russian opposed to Putin you cant’t really answer that on a western-run online platform.. (unless you’re considered insignificant enough by the Russian government, so you can safely be ignored of course)

I answered to this question:

> are people allowed to make jokes about their own government in Russia?

> participating in anti-government protests often results in people losing their jobs or being expelled from the universities

This is quickly becoming the situation in the US if you criticize popular political movements.

Not exactly... In the US, organizations use this form of self-censorship to prevent a potential backlash from the public, whereas in Russia, the bans are direct orders from the government and the employers simply don't have any choice.

Often, there is less practical difference than I’d hope for. Look at the credit card networks’ sanctions of things like allofmp3.com, for example.

If you enjoy audio fiction, or short stories you might enjoy “The Revolution, brought to you by Nike”. It was written by an ad industry insider, and touches on a lot of issues regarding corporate self-censorship. (It’s a few years old, and predates Nike’s recent political activism):

https://escapepod.org/2018/09/06/escape-pod-644-the-revoluti...

For example, there have been many documented cases in the past few years of people getting fired over supporting the BDS movement - or in a few cases, not actively supporting anti-BDS movements.

... oh, that's not what you meant?

How will you know if the answer to this is honest or censored, though?

For the Chinese you can tell when they cannot even refer to, say or admit certain things: e.g. massacres. But they would say "we are not being censored"

For China and Russia, etc, it feels as if by mocking the hypocrisy of the West they are naively assuming that there's no such criticism from within the West.

I think this is revealing but I might be wrong.

> For the Chinese you can tell when they cannot even refer to, say or admit certain things: e.g. massacres. But they would say "we are not being censored"

It is exactly the same in Russia, you may not mention certain historical facts at all, e.g. Germany-USSR cooperation during 1939-1941

As a native Russian I do remember learning about the said cooperation in school in the 2000s

That's why there is a Russian language Wikipedia article about said cooperation: https://ru.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Договор_о_ненападении_между_... and that article cites a number of print books.

To be fair, that's likely neither hosted in Russia nor exclusively edited by Russian residents.

The Chinese Wikipedia has an article on the 1989 Tienanmen Square massacre, for example. I would assume it's not available in China. https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%85%AD%E5%9B%9B%E4%BA%8B%E4...

Well, this is fine example of so-called "lie", plain and simple. You may mention it, and often it is being mentioned by all kinds of media. Things that really are frowned upon are highly controversial topics like alleged mass raping by the Red Army in Germany during WW2 . Other than that, no holds are barred, and things are discussed freely; I'd say hot topics are more frequent in Russian media than in the US one ; but clearly hotness and level of controversy is different in two blocs

It seems you're quibbling on which topics can't be talked about, not that there are some.

Many countries have forbidden topics. Try to question whether holocaust was real in EU.

if you're still in Russia, try posting some photos of 1939 Brest-Litovsk parade on your VK page, we'll watch from afar how it goes for you

Like this? https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Парад_вермахта_перед_частями_Р...

no, like post it to your VK and write "USSR cooperated with Nazis to divide and occupy Poland"

Alleged?

You can google my username, and get my social network accounts for the last 20 years, and a lot of details me and even my family, wikipedia article about my grandfather and his history in USSR, and so on. And then ask yourself if state propaganda would go to such trouble for a couple of comments. It's not doxing, I wouldn't use it if I wasn't completely okay with that.

It is a crime to make caricatures of Vladimir Putin.

Someone is downvoting this comment to death, so I'm sharing the story for the brave and curious.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/04/05...

It's also apparently not advisable to beat him in ice hockey.

https://deadspin.com/vladimir-putin-scores-eight-goals-in-ru...

Pikabu is one of the most popular Russian websites (something like Reddit). Here's search results of Putin caricatures: https://pikabu.ru/tag/%D0%92%D0%BB%D0%B0%D0%B4%D0%B8%D0%BC%D...

It might be a crime, but it's not enforced enough, obviously.

The real reason for that law is probably to use it as a tool against dissidents.

I am very worried that the situation is headed towards China, or much worse.

And the main reason I am worried is that I can see no path towards a peaceful de-escalation. It is a foregone conclusion in the West that "Russia = bad" and any attempt to say anything counter to that narrative gets you labeled a pro-Kremlin troll. Let's see how deep in the grey this comments ends up for example.

Think Germany after WW1. Humiliated, defeated country. The people of such countries tend to follow leaders who promise to make them great again. When they do, they get further mockery and isolation. And I think it's been conclusively proven that this only breeds more radicalism.

But most will read this as "if you are not with us then you are against us" and turn up the intensity.

While criticism is legal, it does significantly increase your chances of falling out a window, if you're in a prominent position. Very careless, these Kremlin critics.

Interestingly, critics of repressive regimes exhibit _themed_ carelessness; those who were a bit too open in Apartheid South Africa fell down _stairs_, instead.

> I know that people can joke about the west in Russia but are people allowed to make jokes about their own government in Russia and in the associated eastern european states?

That's a tough question. For example, when I was active in TikTok (I grew tired of it pretty fast), I've made a lot of very critical videos that had a lot of views. In one of them, that got almost 100k views, I explicitly said that Putin and his gang are usurping power, and while the current Russian laws say that it's punishable up to 20 years in prison, I think that they deserve the death penalty. I did not get in any trouble for that. But many others from Russian Libertarian Party (which I'm a member of) have, even though they've said much less. May be they had a wider reach, or may be it's just random, I don't know. And I wouldn't be surprised if a couple of years later I'll get 5 years of prison for these TikToks.

thanks for your perspective! Is the chilling factor an issue there yet? It feels from your comments that it's not, that its a bit too random yet, or a bit too early?

> I know that people can joke about the west in Russia but are people allowed to make jokes about their own government in Russia and in the associated eastern european states? Is it like China yet?

Yes, plenty of people inside those countries do not like regime and openly discuss it on public internet websites. I don't know about China situation so I can't make a direct comparison. If you're very popular blogger and you'll make direct insults to Putin (or any other person with high position), you might be fined or even jailed, there are laws prohibiting insults against people, but those cases are very rare. And nobody hunts ordinary people.

> I'm guessing not as there's no visible list of banned words and phrases, but we don't see (in HN) much criticism of Russia, Belarus from there, just attacks on the hypocrisy of the West.

Huh? HN is pretty much against Russia, Belarus, etc. Those who try to defend usually are heavily downvoted and labeled as kremlin bots.

Anyway people usually are gathered with similar viewpoints. Any outsiders are expelled quickly. I know web forums, where most of people are holding pro-Russian viewpoint and I know web forums, where most of people are holding pro-West viewpoint. But I know no webforum with balanced opinion. I think that for US people Republicans vs Democrats might be a close analogy.

> If you're very popular blogger and you'll make direct insults to Putin (or any other person with high position), you might be fined or even jailed

> nobody hunts ordinary people

Unless they have something bad to say about the regime. These don’t add up, are bloggers not ordinary people? How can you be ok with this?

> Unless they have something bad to say about the regime.

That's not true.

> are bloggers not ordinary people?

No, they're influencers.

> How can you be ok with this?

Why wouldn't I be ok with this? Nobody should be allowed to insult anyone.

> are people allowed to make jokes about their own government in Russia and in the associated eastern european states?

What "associated astern european states" do you mean?

Belarus probably serves as a decent example.

Belarus aside, which ones? Because I can't think of any.

Seriously, it's been over thirty years since the end of Cold War and people still think there are some eastern European states associated with Russia... Almost all of them are in the EU now with the notable exception of Ukraine which is in a state of de facto war with Russia. Even Lukashenko has a bitter-sweet relationship with Putin.

There's still Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaidjan. Technically, the Caucasus region is still in Europe.

Of these, Georgians are as anti-Kremlin as one could be, they were at open war against Russia in 2008. Armenia is a pro-European democracy. Azerbaijan, probably the least democratic of these, doesn't long for Kremlin either. In general, all eastern-European countries were happy to become independent from Russia and there is no reason for them to choose Russia over the EU.

So one would never refer to them as "Russia and associated eastern european states" because, frankly speaking, Kremlin has no friends in Eastern Europe. (I specifically differentiate between Kremlin with its cold-blooded war crimes, and Russian people, who are normal nice folks and are a significant part of the total population of Eastern Europe.)

I've seen some consider Kazakhstan to be a part of Europe. I suspect the region stretches, depending on the speaker, far enough east to encompass the speaker's country, regardless of its location (but no further).

Kazahstan is in Central Asia probably because it's so big. Even their timezones are prefixed with Asia. The Caspian Sea and the Ural Mountains are the eastern limits of Europe, so everything on the Caspian's west bank is in Europe. Astrakhan is in Europe for instance.