Inside Another Reality

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]This is what children's writer Masha Rubinshtein saw when she began studying Russian women's chats.

[00:00:06]At first, she was collecting school and kindergarten propaganda. She wanted to understand what Russian children were being told about the war.

[00:00:17]Then, in the summer of 2022, she found herself inside chats of women whose husbands were fighting in Ukraine.

[00:00:26]And she couldn't believe what she was reading.

[00:00:30]These were not some propaganda bots.

[00:00:33]These were real women with children, dogs, cats, or flowers on their profile pictures.

[00:00:38]Women with ordinary faces, homes, and lives. And inside those lives, something had shifted so deeply that arguments like war is bad no longer worked.

[00:00:51]These women live inside another reality.