One Man's Refusal to Eat Shit

In the previous installments of Russian Propaganda, we looked at a Soviet fairy tale about Lenin and Stalin killing God, some stories and art from satirical journals of the First Russian Revolution (1, 2, 3), and a very strange newspaper with QAnon/PKD vibes called The Voice of the Universe, from the 1990s.

Today, I’m sharing something from the present.

Russia is overflowing with pro-war propaganda, standing up to which can be dangerous: by the new laws, even calling this war “a war” (as opposed to “a special operation”) in public can, in the worst circumstances, lead to a jail sentence.

Recently, a Krasnodar man reposted a picture of a salad bar in a St. Petersburg grocery store, with one of the salads having the letter Z written in mayonnaise on it, and added a comment: “They started selling salads with shit.“

When he was brought to a police station for questioning, he tried to walk a tight-rope by, on the one hand, pretending that he didn’t even notice the Z salad and was talking ab…