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Yevgeny Simkin is the co-founder and CEO of Samizdat Online, a free-speech platform designed to get journalism past government censors. Samizdat Online publishes in English, Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Farsi.
When Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in February of 2022 I, like many of you, immediately wondered: “What can I do to help?”
It’s incredibly frustrating to watch tsunami-sized events wash over whole populations, feeling unable to do anything—and worse, unable to even imagine what “anything” would look like.
I was born in Soviet Russia and have a very personal—almost visceral—revulsion at the oppression that tyrannies visit on their people. The suppression of speech is the worst of those abuses because all of the other horrors are built upon enforced silence.
On February 24, 2022 the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg weren’t overrun with outraged protestors. I understood right away that Putin’s grip on Russia’s information space was so tight that even Russians with family in Ukraine remained blind to what was happening. In one case, a Kyiv man called his father in the Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod to report that Putin’s forces were bombing the Ukrainian capital. His father refused to believe it.
Then, the idea struck me.
