‘Ten million people read us — I’ll talk to them’ Meduza’s co-founder Galina Timchenko on reaching readers in times of brutal censorship
On June 11, at Berlin’s Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien gallery, Meduza publisher Galina Timchenko sat down with sociologist Polina Aronson for a conversation about the emotional toll of today’s news cycle — on both readers and journalists. The talk was part of the event series accompanying Meduza’s 10th anniversary exhibition, “No.” One of the questions raised during the Q&A was how censorship is reshaping the ways newsrooms connect with their audiences. Meduza shares a summary of that conversation.
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When asked whether Meduza’s readership today is primarily inside or outside of Russia, Galina Timchenko, the outlet’s co-founder and publisher, said the picture is “changing in real time.” In the early days, she explained, Meduza was able to stay one step ahead of Kremlin censors:
We were pretty good at playing cat and mouse — ‘catch me if you can.’ But ten years ago, the people working for the Kremlin weren’t that sharp. Now there’s a whole new generation of digital-savvy operatives. […] They’re smart. Skilled. They know what they’re doing. I hate them — but still, credit where it’s due.
Despite increasingly aggressive Internet censorship, Meduza’s mobile app can still bypass blocks. But the Kremlin is learning fast. “A year ago, our ‘mirrors’ — alternative servers with identical copies of our site — were blocked maybe twice a week,” said Timchenko. “Now? Every ten minutes. We’re constantly changing mirrors.”
Pinning down the actual size of Meduza’s audience in Russia is difficult. When the site was first blocked, the team noticed huge spikes in traffic from countries like the Netherlands, France, and New Zealand — a sign that Russian users were relying on VPNs.
“We’ve since figured out how to count our Russian readers again,” Timchenko said. Meduza now estimates it has between eight to 10 million readers in Russia, down from 20 million before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. “The door is closing,” Timchenko warned. “We’re going to keep losing our Russian audience.” She recounted a conversation with a human rights activist in Russia: “She said, ‘It doesn’t feel like you’re working from abroad.’ But we know that won’t last forever.”
Fear is another factor. “No matter how secure our systems are, people say: ‘We’re scared to work with you,’ ‘We’re scared to even read you,’” Timchenko said. “Some uninstall the app, even though you can change the icon so it doesn’t say Meduza. And I get it. No story is worth your health or your nerves.”
For now, Meduza continues to focus on its Russian audience, but Timchenko said she’s realistic about the future. “At every conference I say, ‘Guys, let’s not kid ourselves — we’re going to lose more and more readers.’”
She added that the decline in readership is about more than just fear. “You can’t go around heartbroken for three years straight. You can’t grieve forever. At some point, you say: ‘I’m done. I can’t anymore. I’ve got loved ones, kids, birthdays, New Year’s. Please stop with the horrors.’”
Timchenko said that people in Ukraine do still read Meduza, though fewer than before the full-scale war. “That said, there’s still a big hunger for information — like in any country at war,” she said. She recalled how a well-known Ukrainian expressed concern about a story on low morale in the army: “He said, ‘People will read this and think it. But we need to keep morale up.’”
Before February 2022, about 18 percent of Meduza’s readers were in Ukraine. “Now it’s down to around 8–10 percent,” Timchenko said. “But that’s still a lot. They read us, they sometimes get angry — and they have every right to feel whatever they feel.” Meduza also works with Ukrainian journalists, she added — “anonymously, of course.”
Asked whether there’s a contradiction in saying the media can’t exist without readers while also saying you can’t reach people who don’t want to hear you, Timchenko didn’t see one. “We built a media outlet that we ourselves wanted to read — knowing we weren’t alone,” she explained. “We knew we had like-minded people out there.”
She does everything she can to reach readers, she said, “but I don’t knock on every door.” “People under the spell of propaganda are basically in a totalitarian cult,” she continued. “It takes years of therapy with really smart people to break out of that.”
“I don’t have that kind of time,” Timchenko said. “Ten million people read us — I’ll talk to them.”
The Collaborative Research Centre “Affective Societies” at Freie University Berlin, where Polina Aronson works as public outreach manager, has translated the full conversation into English. You can read it here.
