One slight caveat though. There are loads of channels of propaganda on when you're in Russia and I may be mixing some of them into what I said about RT. But it's definitely got way worse over the last twenty years or so, my girlfriend (I'm gonna call her V instead of writing "my girlfriend" out again and again) is shocked by it herself.
In fact it's very sad, cos a year or two back V's dad was very ill and had an operation and so on and then when he came out hospital he was still very weak and, I suppose, unusually for him, he was housebound and he just sat there watching this stuff and it had a very noticeable and detrimental effect on him. Looking back, his illness and state of mind mad him vulnerable and it was just like someone you know getting red-pilled or becoming alt-right and he'd come out with all this crazy political stuff about how the EU was corrupt or how the UK was lying about those guys poisoning the homeless guy in the UK (I remember now it was just after those assassins came from Russia to England for one night just to look at Winchester Cathedral which is 137m high and an internationally renowned) and he and V would have big arguments cos he would repeat stuff that was total bullshit and she would be storming out the room in tears and stuff, whereas before he had never talked about politics. It was easy for me to ignore it though as the only Russian phrase I know is "please suck my dick".
In short there is a huge propaganda network in place in Russia and it really does have an effect, not just on the olds too. We went to see V's extended family and there is this guy who grew up with V and they were super close as kids* and I'd met him before but this particular time he started telling us about all these riots that were going on in Germany, and we'd actually come via Germany to Russia and it was just bullshit and he was insisting that Dusseldorf and Cologne were burning and we were saying "I don't think so, we were there three days ago and we spoke to our friends there this morning" and he just wouldn't have it. And there was other random crazy stuff, it comes back to me now, he said "You in the West are so weak cos you don't have any buckwheat" and we're like "What?" "You don't have buckwheat" and we'd be saying "I really think we do" - but it was a definite pattern of his believing stuff he'd seen on telly over our direct experience. And the thing is, it's not like people digging this nonsense up from the kinda weird websites that they to have go searching for, it's from the mainstream telly.
Quite common to swallow it. Maybe not the smarter people but a lot of people believe in some of this stuff to a greater or lesser degree. One thing I've heard said quite a few times, and each time , I still find it shocking, is when someone says with complete sincerity to me "You people in the west hate us" and I think it's something they've done quite cleverly in that, your average person in the West probably doesn't like Putin much, they think he's a dangerous dictator, and as a result, a lot of people are wary of Russia as a whole, but the propagandists have sort of tweaked that and have quite successfully made a large chunk of the Russian provincial population truly believe that the man on the street in the UK nurtures an actual dislike of the man on the street in Russia. Which to me is just a totally bizarre idea.
*Total digression but V told me about how as a kid she got up to all kinds of naughtiness with this guy. In the 80s when they were probably eight or nine years old I suppose, it was quite common for the water to be cut off for a day or two for one reason or another. Now V's dad worked in computing which was all but unheard of then and there, and he had access to a printer so V and Anton would get on her dad's computer and print out these (almost certainly not very professional) posters saying something like "We regret to inform that from 10am on Wednesday the 4th of August until 10pm on Friday the 6th, the water to this block of flats will not be available as we need to perform some important maintenance" and then they would stick these posters in the doorways and the stairs just to run people's days.
