First modification:
The journalist Marina Ovsiannikova, famous for denouncing the Russian offensive in Ukraine during a news program on Russian state television, has published an autobiographical book in which she describes the Moscow media “propaganda factory”, from which she ended up fleeing.
Nearly a year after speaking out against the war in Ukraine during a state television news report, journalist Marina Ovsiannikova has published an autobiographical book describing, among other things, Moscow’s media “propaganda factory” of the one who ended up running away.
The book was published on Friday, February 10 in Germany. That same day, she gave a press conference in Paris, at the Reporters Without Borders headquarters, to recount her escape from Russia with her daughter, thanks to RSF, four months ago, when she was under house arrest.
Entitled “Zwischen Gut und Böse” (“Between good and evil, how I finally opposed the Kremlin’s propaganda”, Langen Müller publishing house), the 200-page book will also be published later in English and French, according to Ovsiannikova’s German publisher.
At the beginning of the book, the journalist, born to a Russian mother and a Ukrainian father, recalls how a few days after the start of the Russian invasion, she burst onto the country’s most-watched newscast with a poster proclaiming “No to war.”
His intervention – which he says he decided on his own because he could no longer bear the lies of the regime – turned his professional and family life upside down.
A book describing the tricks of the Russian “propaganda factory”
It is essentially this period of a few months that he describes in his book, with flashbacks to his childhood in Grozny, the capital of the Russian Caucasian republic of Chechnya, and to his early career.
She does not deny having been part of the system: her husband, from whom she has since separated and with whom she has a son and a daughter, is a member of the board of the ‘Russia Today’ television channel.
He also describes some of the tricks of the “propaganda factory” of his employer, Pervy Kanal: the spread of information about Vladimir Putin should never be followed by bad news. He is presented to her as the savior of Russia.
On the other hand, there is a latent ban on spreading good news from the United States and Western Europe. The image must be conveyed in Russian minds that all Americans support the LGBT movement, kill blacks, mistreat adopted Russian children, he writes.
Her book ends with her clandestine escape from Russia, when she crosses the Russian border on foot with her daughter, without specifying which country she is arriving in.
In the end, she describes herself in a car in Paris, on her way to the RSF office, “whose contribution to our escape was truly borderless in every way.”
*With AFP; adapted from its original in French
