Wikipedia has had problems with the Kremlin before, with Russian censors threatening it almost since the beginning of the Ukrainian war in 2014. However, it was not until late 2023, with the appearance of flashy advertisements all over Moscow, that it became clear that there was a serious plan to replace it. RuViki, as the censor project is known, is an almost direct copy of Wikipedia. However, the most sensitive moments in history have been omitted and altered. Kremlin ideologues now hope that millions of Russians will embrace these new versions of the truth.
The RuViki project could be called Orwellian, if only the British author was not occasionally censored himself. For example, the entry for his work "1984" omits the otherwise regular description of Winston Smith's Ministry of Truth, which "corrects" the historical record (although Smith's work is mentioned elsewhere). Elsewhere, RuWiki's editors are wading through sensitive areas of Putin's ideology: LGBT rights, oral sex, Soviet history and the war in Ukraine.
The Russian crimes in Bucha, near Kiev, in 2022 were described as a "Ukrainian and Western disinformation campaign." Kherson, a Ukrainian city destroyed by Russian bombs, is mentioned without a single word about the war. The execution of nearly 22000 Polish officers at Katyn in 1940 has been retold to cast doubt on archival documents proving it was carried out by Soviet services.
There is no section on Putin khuylo!, a derogatory chant mocking the Russian president that was first heard from Ukrainian football stands in 2014. All entries about Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who was killed in prison in 2024, have been changed to make him was described as an ordinary "blogger".
An analysis to be released soon by Mediazona, an independent Russian media organization, shows that most new changes to the site come during business hours during the work week. They believe this shows that teams of paid writers are making the changes, as opposed to Wikipedia's volunteer model.
All entries about Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who was killed in prison in 2024, have been changed to describe him as a simple "blogger"
Earlier versions of the RuViki site were open about how much was changed and when. At the end of 2023, it was possible to see that a total of 158 characters had been deleted from the original Wikipedia text on Russian human rights. Entry on “Russian freedom of speech! was smaller by 000 characters. The "censorship" article was also 205 characters shorter. However, recent versions of the site hide such statistics, probably due to negative media publicity.
Despite longstanding disagreements, Russian authorities have not yet blacklisted Wikipedia, as they have done with dozens of other media outlets. For now, the two sites coexist. However, the large investment in RuViki indicates that Wikipedia's days are numbered. Sergey Leschina, a member of the original Russian Wikipedia team who left in 2015 after early attempts at censorship, said the Kremlin views such resources as bricks in a kind of Chinese wall around the truth. The Russian Internet is slowly being purged of foreign sites, and local search engines and AI models will soon be forced to prioritize new fake history. "The Russian Internet has not yet been built like China's, but that is the direction in which we are going and very quickly," he said.
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