Putin's Young Army in Crimea on May 9, 2022. Image by Soviet Ministrov Respubliki Crym via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 4.0.

This article was originally published in Russian on March 18, 2025, on Novaya Vkladka. Global Voices translated the article, edited it for clarity, and is republishing it with permission from Novaya Vkladka. 

VKontakte, or VK, is a Russian social media platform, created in 2006 by Pavel Durov. It was sold to the state-affiliated structures in 2015. Since that time, and especially after the start of the full-scale Invasion of Ukraine in 2022, VK has been heavily censored. Since the spring of 2022, posts with military–patriotic themes have flooded the social media pages of public institutions on VK, including the pages of schools, kindergartens, social centers, hospitals, theaters, museums, and libraries. Journalists from  poke with employees of state organizations in the regions to find out who initiates these propaganda posts, how public sector workers are involved, and how their personal choices shape the information landscape.

The names of the people in this text have been changed at their request.

In the summer of 2022, Natalia in Petrozavodsk was offered the position of a public relations specialist in a government institution that worked in the field of social welfare. Three years in, Natalia still hadn't figured out what it actually did: it did not work with any of the groups mentioned in its departmental title (such as pensioners or children). The institution had a camera and other professional filming equipment, even a chroma key screen on the wall of one of the offices. However, at that time, the institution's VKontakte page had only about two thousand followers.

For the first few months, Natalia sat in her office, still unsure of what exactly she was supposed to do. The pointlessness of the job led her into depression — eventually she couldn't take it anymore and quit. But, a few months later, she came back because she needed the money and was struggling to find another job due to her poor psychological state. That was when she discovered that the previously irrelevant social media page of the institution had started receiving “news from above.”

Natalia recalls:

As far as I know, the news was generated by the Regional Management Center (RMC) and manually distributed through all subordinate institutions. My director sent them to me for publication, and she received them from the RMC. The news was generic. If you scroll through any state-run page, you’ll see the same format: videos about the war, “our guys,” and so on. Among ourselves, we called them “crap-news.” 

Managing social media pages became mandatory for all government bodies, local authorities, and affiliated organizations in December 2022. The corresponding amendments were made to federal law in July of that year. The Russian government designated VKontakte and Odnoklassniki as priority social networks. Groups had to be registered on the Gosuslugi (State Services) platform, after which their community pages displayed a flag and the label “state organization.”

According to their curators, these government-run pages are meant to be a “convenient communication system between the authorities and citizens.”

“There is no other system of government transparency in the world where every agency has its own social media page. […] The law has been deemed successful and does not require amendments. Government-run pages constitute the largest editorial board in the world. We have 175,000 public pages, and according to the latest data, just over 70 percent of them are systematically and consistently maintained, meaning they publish at least three posts per week,” said Andrey Tsepelev, Deputy General Director of “Dialogue Regions,” in December 2024.

Tsepelev cited VTsIOM (Russian Public Opinion Research Center) data indicating that every third Russian follows these government pages and called them a “weapon in the information hybrid war being waged against our country”:

From the very beginning, the creation of military–patriotic content for these pages was handled by local RMCs — Regional Management Centers that were established in each republic or region of the Russian Federation in 2020 on the orders of Vladimir Putin.

Shortly after the legal amendments were passed, a new administrator appeared on one social institution's social media page: the press secretary of the regional Ministry of Social Protection. These “appointed from above” administrators (such as press secretaries of relevant agencies) log into their Gosuslugi accounts and distribute news to communities in their sector.

“At first, posts were sent for manual publication, but then, at some point, they started being posted automatically. And suddenly, my entire social media feed was flooded with this stream of crap-news,” Natalia recalls.

The same thing happened at a state theater in the Kirov region. Before 2022, the theater's social media pages were left alone, but later, control was tightened, and they also started receiving top-down news. Unlike the theater’s own posts, these patriotic ones, according to employee Evgenia, were ignored by the audience and got the fewest likes.

Inna, who has been managing several youth center pages in the Novosibirsk region for over ten years, recalls that two weeks after the law was amended in summer 2022, they received an email instructing them to register their page on Gosuslugi, and all administrators had to link their personal accounts to the government portal. Those who failed to do so within a week were removed as administrators.

For her, there was no question of not complying, since she needed to post information about events and projects. “We all have an insane workload, and these tasks are just things you do and move on. Those who didn't think it was important simply didn’t go through the registration process.”

There was this pressure element — mandatory posts were sent down. Our director didn't change anything; she just posted them as they came. But she is patriotic. I don’t remember exactly what those posts were because it was hard for me to deal with, and I just wanted to delete them all.

She says that posts were sent from the city hall and district administration, along with guidelines on “working with youth in a time of socio-political tension.” They were also given a list of mandatory war documentaries — “just the bloodiest ones possible” — to show to children and teenagers. Inna and her colleagues pretended to have watched them and even faked a photo report, but they never actually showed the films to visitors.

Evgenia from Kirov says her theater also had to join the government page system in 2022, but they try to “navigate around it”: posts are prepared outside the theater and uploaded via the Government Pages system. They try to push these posts down quickly by posting more of their own content afterward.

Ludmila, an employee at a Vologda kindergarten, said that the education department called and asked them to add an unknown account as an administrator of their VKontakte page. This same account was also managing other educational institution pages. The account had been created in December 2020 — shortly after the RMC was established in Vologda. According to Ludmila, this administrator now posts “pro-government content” on behalf of their institution.

Even training public sector employees in social media management was handled by RMCs, both online and in person. At first, the control wasn't too strict: “Like, one crap-news per week.” But from August 2022, when automated posting began, the Karelia RMC required at least three unique posts per week about the institution itself to “dilute” the military-patriotic content for better ranking in social media algorithms.

Inna from Novosibirsk admits that sometimes it is “sickening to open” their public page due to the abundance of military content. She recalls that when their youth center was asked to post advertisements for contract military service in 2022, some parents among the subscribers reacted negatively to this propaganda and even wrote about it in the comments. After that, the number of such posts was reduced. Inna remembers that she once deleted a long anti-war comment “just in case,” so that its author would not be fined.

Olga from Buryatia says that there were no posts about the war in the regional tourism public page where she worked. She recalls that when the director asked her to meet the military at the airport and write a post about it, she refused to go, and there were no consequences for her at work.