From Pussy Riot’s punk prayer to Western hip-hop glorifying "undesirable lifestyles," and from Ukrainian wartime anthems to explicit LGBTQ+ imagery, hundreds of music videos have been scrubbed from VK, YouTube Russia, and local streaming services. But the cat-and-mouse game is far from over. Every time Russia’s media watchdog, Roskomnadzor, blocks a video, a patch appears. Every time a patch is deployed, the government bans the patch.
The desire for banned uncensored uncut music videos in Russia has created a hyper-specialized arms race. For the average user, the golden age of easy patching is over. For the dedicated archivist, a new patch is always being written in a St. Petersburg basement or a Tbilisi café. Check Dvach on Wednesday evenings (MSK) – that’s when the latest build usually leaks. banned uncensored uncut music videos russia patched
In the decade since the Russian government began aggressively expanding its "information sovereignty" laws, a strange new category of digital artifact has entered the lexicon of the post-Soviet user: the banned uncensored uncut music video. From Pussy Riot’s punk prayer to Western hip-hop
The only surviving communities are private invite-only trackers on RuTracker (which itself was blocked, unblocked via patch, and then re-blocked) and the burgeoning method where users upload uncut videos as password-protected .zip files within VK documents. Every time a patch is deployed, the government