How does Putin's propaganda work? Irina Rastorgueva talks to Martin Meyer about manipulation techniques that have long since found their way to the West.
Monday, 03. November 2025, 19:00 – 20:00 h
At Literaturhaus Zurich, Limmatquai 62, 8001 Zürich
While within Russia the ban on critical media and the synchronisation of nationalised broadcasters are producing an almost cartoonish narrative about traditional values and the necessity of “special military operations”, carefully planned propaganda campaigns in the rest of the world are working to destabilise democratic societies. A planned madness is sweeping the country. It manifests itself in the inflationary use of euphemisms and hate speech, as denunciation and in a punitive regime that has been thought through to the most subtle level. And it is a madness with a history. For the violence that has a relentless grip on Russian society is a continuation of the paranoid search for enemies, the nightly arrests, searches and torture as well as the gulags from the Soviet regime – in a garish, new guise and fused with the gangsterism of the 1990s.
In her unique tone, which is as precise as it is ironic, Irina Rastorgueva shows the effects of Russian self-poisoning in a montage of newspaper clippings and independent reports, from her own experience as well as from the analyses of authors critical of the Kremlin and loyal to Russia.
Irina Rastorgueva, born in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk in 1983, studied philology at Sakhalin State University and worked as a cultural journalist for several Russian magazines and radio stations. From 2006 to 2015, she was a lecturer in journalism at Sakhalin State University. She is the author of numerous academic articles on the theory and history of literature and journalism in the 20th century. In 2011 she founded the cultural magazine “ProSakhalin”. From 2011 to 2017 she was dramaturge at the Chekhov Theatre Sakhalin and artistic production manager of the “Far Eastern Theatre Forum” / “Theatre go round Festival” in Sapporo (2015).
She has been working as an author and graphic designer in Berlin since 2017. She writes for the FAZ, NZZ and the “OSTEUROPA” magazine, among others. Together with Thomas Martin, she translates and publishes the works of Georgi Demidov at Galiani. Her most recent publications are “Das Russlandsimulakrum” (2022) and “Pop-up-Propaganda. Epikrise der russischen Selbstvergiftung” (2024), which was awarded the Leipzig Book Fair Prize in the non-fiction/essay category.
Photo: © Irina Rastorgueva.