WIKIPEDIA had faced trouble from the Kremlin before, with Russian censors threatening it almost from the start of the Ukrainian war in 2014. But it was only in late 2023, with the appearance of glitzy ads across Moscow, that a serious plan to replace it became clear. RuWiki, as the censors’ project is known, is mostly a straightforward copy of Wikipedia. But the most sensitive moments of history have been left out or rewritten. The Kremlin’s ideologues hope that millions of Russians will now embrace these new versions as the truth.

The RuWiki project might be called Orwellian, if only the British author were not himself occasionally censored. The entry on “Nineteen Eighty Four,” for example, omits the regular site’s description of Winston Smith’s Ministry of Truth, where historical records are “corrected” (though Smith’s job does get a mention elsewhere). Elsewhere, RuWiki’s rewriters hack their way through the sensitive zones of Putinist ideology: LGBT rights, oral sex, Soviet history and the war in Ukraine.

Russian atrocities in Bucha, near Kyiv, in 2022 are reimagined as a “Ukrainian and Western disinformation campaign”. Kherson, a Ukrainian city being destroyed by Russian bombs, is mentioned without a word about the war. The execution of nearly 22,000 Polish officers at Katyn in 1940 is rewritten to cast doubt on the archive documents proving it was done by Soviet secret services. There is no entry on Putin khuylo!, a derogatory chant mocking the Russian president first heard on Ukrainian football terraces in 2014. And all references to Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who was killed in prison in February 2024, are altered to describe him as a mere “blogger”.