The latest censorship scandal in Russia involves historian and political scientist Konstantin Pakhlyuk’s book “In Search of Russian Antiquity”, which was removed from the website of the publishing house “Novoye Literaturnoye Obozreniye” following a complaint by the Orthodox activist group “Sorok Sorokov”. The group accused Pakhlyuk of criticizing the Soviet Army in his social media posts, alleging he had accused it of violence against civilians and liberated concentration camp prisoners. Shortly before this, T-invariant spoke with Pakhlyuk about the most significant shifts in the historical memory of World War II.

Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin explored carnival and laughter culture in the stagnant years of the late Soviet Union and called such topics “material-bodily bottom. Half a century later, anthropologists held a conference about excrement in St Petersburg entitled Anthropopology: Brown Studies and the Unclean Turn.

Since September 1, a number of Russian universities have begun training “information warfare specialists”. Such programs were “tested” even before the full-scale invasion, but this year there have been significantly more of them. T-invariant found out which universities have such programs and who will teach students propaganda.