Putin’s Paranoia is Becoming Truly Absurd

追加: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]When countries start conducting information control, it's always because they fear two things. First, they fear the truth. And second, they fear their own people. And to combine those things, they are deathly afraid that their people might somehow learn the truth.

[00:00:19]And when a nuclear power is frightened of a phone app, that tells you something very important. And to be more precise, in the case of Russia, when a country who was already at war with limited resources, with an economy in the shambles, starts focusing those limited resources more and more on controlling their own people. That tells you something very important. There's been a shift in Russian information control efforts lately that I don't think a lot of people have actually noticed yet. And I'm not just talking about the shift where Russia is banning more apps or more websites or getting a tighter control over their internet, but rather I'm talking about the categorical shift behind all of those actions. Early on in the war, Russia, of course, started punishing those who spread information that was inconvenient for the government. people like journalists, independent media, bloggers, social media personalities, or even just a guy who could gather a small group of protesters around him. That's nothing new. But what's different about what's happening today is that Russia is no longer just punishing those who spread information. Russia is now punishing those who consume information that the government finds to be inconvenient.

[00:01:37]Russia is no longer just punishing speech. It is now punishing thoughts.

[00:01:42]And this is a massive shift. To put it another way, Russia only used to punish those who used their tongues against the government, but people could privately believe whatever they wanted to. But now Russia is seeking to punish those whose eyes or ears just happen to come across information that the government doesn't like. And while it might just seem like more of the same, it's all information control, this is not the same thing at all. This is a categorical shift. This is a decisive shift. This is a society changing shift that shows an increased level of paranoia in the Kremlin.

[00:02:22]Perhaps the most paranoia that we have ever seen across Russia right now. We are of course seeing many new and different things. It's no longer news at this point that popular communication apps, including YouTube and Telegram, have been effectively banned. The connection speeds have been so throttled that they are basically useless unless you're using a VPN. There's a certain irony to that because you can still find content coming out of Russia on these platforms. Content that invariably is making Russia look like this wonderful place with YouTubers walking around Moscow and St. Petersburg and saying the war isn't as bad as everybody in the West says. But the irony is that to even post those videos, these people had to break Russian law by accessing a banned service via a VPN. So you can see clearly what the source of this information is. But within Russia, they don't want people to consume even that.

[00:03:16]And they are effectively attacking now the VPNs themselves that allow people to access these services. Russia will still claim up and down that it is not illegal to use a VPN, but there's a caveat to this. If you use a VPN in the process of committing another crime, it's considered an aggravated circumstance and you get a worse sentence. And remember, Russia considers it a crime to share disinformation about the war in Ukraine. So, you can see where that is going. Russia is effectively targeting consumers of information who use VPNs to access that information. Even more than that though, we are seeing mobile internet crackdowns. Russia is flexing its muscles when it comes to their ability to control the channels themselves, not just the platforms that run on the channels. And everywhere we look, it's very clear that Russia is afraid of something. They are afraid of the Russian people figuring certain things out. The question is, why are they so afraid and what does it show about what's actually going on within the Kremlin? Today, we'll explore an important truth. The truth that regimes only criminalize listening when they know they're no longer capable of winning the argument. And we'll explore what that means within Russia. What arguments are they now incapable of winning? And what is the government going to do now that the society has reached that point? Can the war in Ukraine continue much longer? Or is Russian internal instability actually reaching a breaking point? A lot to cover in this video, so let's get right into it. As we talk about all the problems Russians are currently facing when it comes to government information control and a lack of privacy, we should zoom out for a second because this is not just a Russia problem. All of us live in a world where more and more of our data is constantly being captured, stored, and analyzed, often without us even realizing it. The culprit could be your government, a big tech company, or literally anybody else with access to your data. This raises bigger questions, not just about you and me, but about the next generation. Our digital identity doesn't start the moment we become adults. For most, this starts the moment we get our first email address, often at a young age. Over time, the way you use that email address builds a profile, something you're not thinking about when you're a carefree kid. This can be kind of a scary thought, and that's where Proton Mail comes in, the sponsor of today's video. Proton is built around a simple idea. Privacy should be the default, not something you have to fight to get back. They're based in Switzerland, protected by strict privacy laws, and they use end to-end encryption, meaning even Proton itself can't read your emails. That means an inbox free of ads, tracking, and profiling. Proton is now offering something I find really compelling.

[00:06:15]They're allowing you to reserve your child's email address early so that as your children enter their digital life, they're protected on Proton and starting clean from the very beginning. The email address stays protected for up to 15 years, so you can allow them to start using it when they're ready. Plus, they can often get an email in their own actual name, which is pretty rare these days. This is a decision you can make once that benefits your children for a lifetime. So, if you want to take back control of your own inbox or set up a clean start for your kids, you can check Proton Mail out using my link at proton.me/pallarberg.

[00:06:52]Again, that's proton.me me/paularberg.

[00:06:57]Thanks again to Proton for sponsoring today's video. So, when it comes to understanding what's going on with information control in modern Russia today, it helps to understand some examples from Russian history. Because this is exactly what Vladimir Putin himself is doing. When Vladimir Putin implements information control, he is not being innovative, but rather he is moving up an escalation ladder, pulling from a playbook that was written over centuries of Russian history with Putin trying to implement a version of that playbook that learns from past mistakes.

[00:07:32]And when we can understand these past mistakes, we can understand the body of history that Putin himself thinks through and we can begin to understand what he himself is probably thinking. So information control in Russia is as old as Russian society itself. In the Russian Empire, information control took on a very specific form with some very specific strengths and weaknesses. And that specific form was the Russian Orthodox Church. a church that had priests all across Russian society.

[00:08:06]Priests who would typically be some of the only, if not the only educated members in all of society. These priests were not just spreading a religion, but they were actually intricately tied to the Russian monarchy. And so they were a mouthpiece, not as much about God, but a mouthpiece of the Russian emperor. And they had several doctrines that were very convenient for the Russian emperor.

[00:08:31]There was of course the idea that the Russian emperor had a divine right to rule. He was essentially God's representative on earth. And the Russian Orthodox Church was the only true church on earth. And so in order to spread the truth and to spread the influence of God's representative, the Russian Empire needed to embark in holy wars, embark on holy wars, wars of conquest where they would spread their religion and the truth by spreading the empire. Not unique to Russia. Other empires certainly did it, but it worked in this way. You controlled the thoughts of the people by having the only powerful speakers within their communities, the only educated speakers being representative representatives of the church. And if you could control people's thoughts, you could control their actions. Now, this system ultimately did end up breaking down because the people realized that they were getting kind of a bad rap. And eventually, of course, you have the Russian Revolution. In the Russian Revolution, the Soviet Union realized that they needed to go a step beyond just controlling people's thoughts, but they actually needed to control people's speech. They needed to control people's speech for a couple different reasons.

[00:09:48]First of all, because that kept people from rising up and rebelling against them the way that they had just rebelled. But also, because people's thoughts were still intermingled with the old thoughts of the previous Russian Empire, and that was going to take a couple generations to go away. It takes time to influence people's thoughts. So the Soviet Union started by controlling speech and influencing thought. But as the Soviet Union went further and further along, they realized that people were becoming a lot more rebellious, people were looking at the West, for example, and realizing how much better life was over there. And this was a threat to the Soviet Union because if they realized things were terrible for them, they could do what they already did a generation before and overthrow the government. And so the Soviet Union moved from merely controlling speech, spreading information to controlling consumption. They started punishing people for merely possessing books, possessing information that shared about the West and the outside world. And they really worked hard to control the internal narrative. And the reason they worked hard to control the internal narrative was again to accomplish the same thing the early Russian Empire had accomplished. If you control the only narrative, you control the actions of the people and you can get the people to do what they want. The Soviet Union collapsed and we saw this iteration again. At first, society seemed a lot more open. People could think whatever they wanted to think, but speech was always controlled. First just de facto controlled and then it became legally controlled. It started out with Putin just de facto having control of all of the media. And it started out basically with gaslighting where people who had narratives that differed from what the government wanted to tell you. They were told that they were unpatriotic or disloyal. They may not have been punished for those things directly, but socially they would be punished for those things by their friends and their neighbors. And nobody wants that. And for a time that was enough for modern Russia. That was enough to get the majority of the people to tow the party line and to do what the government told them to do. But now the Russian government has reached a similar stage to the Soviet Union where things within Russia are genuinely terrible. terrible to the point that it's impossible to hide. And when people see these things in their own society and they are confronted with information from outside societies on the internet where they can see how clean other people's cities are, where they can see how prosperous other people are, where they can see how stable other societies are in comparison to theirs, all these things are a threat. And so you need to get to the point where you actually aren't just controlling speech so that you're not just controlling people gathering together and rising up against you, but you actually have to start controlling people's thoughts. Because even if the speech is controlled, you're no longer able to influence people to do the things that you want them to do. In this case, continue to support your war. With these examples in mind, we realize that since Russia is stepping beyond just influence and now reaching into direct control of people's thoughts, they know something critical. They know that their own propaganda is starting to lose its luster. And though they will continue to scream on staterun television all of these narratives, they know that people are starting to disbelieve the narratives because the narratives differ from what they see in reality. The average Russian now the war has been going on long enough that they have seen coffins come home from friends or loved ones or at least friends of friends and they know that this war is not merely a special military operation. They know that it has a massive societal cost. The average Russian now can also see that Russian cities are being hit by Ukraine on a nightly basis. They can see that their profit producing infrastructure is being systematically wiped out by Ukraine. They can see the economic effects in their own lives. They can see the inflation. They can see how hard it is to find jobs outside of government industries because the government has soaked up all the good employees. They can see their society degrading more and more. And while the heavy speech laws might prevent them from rising up and sharing that information at the current level of frustration, that frustration can boil to where they no longer care about those speech laws. But more importantly for the immediate term, even if people aren't saying things against the government, the Russian government clearly knows that the average Russian is now more likely to believe anti-government narratives. And so the average Russian is less likely to volunteer to go fight in Ukraine. No amount of money is enough when you know you're going to die, for example. Or even if you don't care about dying, maybe you are typically a patriotic type person. Even just the internal motivation to fight, maybe that is going away as people start to ask themselves, what am I actually fighting for? This is the psychological state that Russian society is almost certainly reaching now. And it's a very vulnerable state for Vladimir Putin because this is the first level of betrayal in the minds of an authoritarian government. not actually believing what we say. Once you have committed that first act of betrayal, it is much easier to get to the second act, which is to take action against the government. If you think of, for example, people that leave cults, the psychology is very similar. Somebody can be trapped in a cult for a long time where they will never question anything because they think it's all true. But then they might see something that makes them question. And the move from that first moment of true questioning to actually actively wanting to disassociate from the cult is a much faster move than the move from believing everything the cult leader says to the first line of questioning. And so Vladimir Putin knows that society is reaching a point where he can't control them anymore. He knows he can't win the argument anymore or at least not as effectively as he once could. And that's why they're introducing all these new controls.

[00:16:18]banning communication apps, having police officers stop people and check their phones to see if they have banned apps, working to suppress VPNs and to ban VPNs. Putin knows that he has a reputational and a communication crisis on his hands. Now, these controls that Putin is implementing will probably work for a period of time, just as they worked for a period of time in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. But the problem is they will only work until they don't. And the fact that Putin has to implement the controls in the first place indicates an underlying problem, at least for Putin, an underlying problem within Russian society that he now has to repress. And that problem, even if it's repressed, isn't going to go away. Repression actually makes the problem grow. But potentially it does buy you enough time so that maybe you personally can stay in power long enough so that the repression doesn't grow so quickly that you yourself are thrown out of power. But regardless, the fact that Putin is implementing these new repressive strategies, this is certainly going to have a negative effect on Russian society. If you think about it, Putin's earlier laws controlling speech, while frustrating, only affected a tiny percentage of the Russian population.

[00:17:39]Because only a tiny percentage of any population cares enough about anything to publicly share about that. Even in, for example, American society when it comes to politics, it's actually only a very small minority of our population that talks about politics, for example, on social media because they know a lot of people find that off-putting. And social constraints alone are enough to keep people from sharing that speech.

[00:18:07]And so, the only people who are really affected by the speech law are the really passionate political thinkers, the journalists, maybe people who would run movements. But the average Russian, it probably honestly didn't impact them all that much. But this new repression affects every single Russian. Even the Russian who was consuming information not necessarily out of dissent, but out of curiosity. And maybe they were even consuming the information to argue against it. I've noticed an interesting trend where since Russia has been more repressive, I've gotten less troll comments on my own videos. So, there are less Russians who disliked my information who are consuming my information. That's just an example. And so you're starting to control people's not just public life, not just what they speak out loud, but their private thinking life, what they do in their own time, just going on the internet, doing something that felt innocent, just accessing information, maybe even working for your government against that information. So this is going to have a massive shift. Unlike the speech laws, all of Russian society is going to feel the costs of these things and it will accelerate and accentuate the problem over time. Putin probably knows that too because again he has a welltrodden history of examples to pull from. And so this is sort of a desperate move. And the question we have to ask is why is Putin making this desperate move and why is he making it now? Is Vladimir Putin preparing for something big where he feels the need to control people's speech? Now, there has been a lot of speculation on that topic. Some people think that Russia is preparing for some big event, for example, an event like mass conscription, which would be terribly unpopular, and they think that Russia is trying to preemptively get control of communication systems so that when the announcement happens, people don't gather and rise up against the government. Now, that is a genuine possibility. It wouldn't be that surprising to see, but again, it's just speculation. We don't know. Others speculate that Russian banks might soon have to announce some sort of collapse because they're so heavily leveraged.

[00:20:20]I'll have another video on that. But that again is another genuine possibility, but we just don't know.

[00:20:27]It's speculation. Some say things have gotten so bad that maybe Russia is going to actually be forced to accept Ukrainian peace terms and they're preparing again for an unpopular announcement and preparing to completely control the framing around that announcement so that Putin can hold on to as much power as possible. That's again speculation but theoretically possible. Although I don't personally put much credence in that because when I look at Vladimir Putin, he just doesn't seem to be that kind of a person.

[00:20:56]historical examples of leaders with similar psychologies to Vladimir Putin.

[00:21:01]They're not the type to surrender.

[00:21:03]They're not the type to give up. They're the type to destroy their countries in the process to try to achieve their goals, even if it's getting more desperate. We look at Hitler as one example. Even though the scale of devastation that Hitler accomplished was much larger than Putin, the psychology is no doubt similar. So, we don't really know. It could be that Russia is preparing for some unpopular crisis. Or it could be kind of what I mentioned earlier in this video that there's no specific crisis, but rather just a growing paranoia within the Russian leadership as they realize that even though they have everybody's speech controlled, the Russian people's thoughts are moving ever more against them. I would be curious what you think.

[00:21:52]I think that the idea of a government controlling people's thoughts is one of the scariest but also one of the most interesting social phenomenons that we can examine. And it's super important again because while this is happening in Russia today, we know it's also happened in many other countries in the past. And no society is immune from this escalation trap if they put the right kind of leaders in place who are more concerned with their survival than the survival of their society. With that being said, I hope you enjoyed this video. I hope you learned a lot. Let me know your thoughts in the comments below. Don't forget to like and subscribe to the channel. It's free, but it helps out a ton. And if you want to support my work, as always, there is Patreon or consider becoming a YouTube channel member. Thanks so much for watching. I'll see you on the next