Russian Justice Ministry’s new online ‘sovereignty’ exhibition includes a Nazi propaganda film calling Hitler the ‘liberator of the Russian people’ — with no explanation

A new section devoted to an exhibition called “Protecting the Sovereignty of the Russian State: History and the Present Day” has appeared on the website of Russia’s Justice Ministry. The project has several parts: an attractively designed registry of “foreign agents” and sections containing the country’s history, photographs, and documentary films. Among the latter, unexpectedly, is a propaganda film about Hitler, presented with no context whatsoever. After the launch, many people noticed that the text on the site, full of errors and nonsensical phrases, reads as if AI had generated it. Meduza went through the site so you don’t have to. Here’s what else is on it.

The ministry has been holding similar exhibitions in regions across the country since last summer. The stated goal of these events is to “demonstrate the efforts of foreign powers to interfere in the internal matters” of Russia. Now the exhibition is available in digital form as well.

The main body of the exhibition is divided into eight sections. The first seven trace Russian history from the Time of Troubles — that is, from the late 16th century — to the present day. The eighth and last is devoted to the people and organizations the Justice Ministry has added to its “foreign agents” registry.

For each of them, the ministry made a separate card describing their “harmful” activities. Most cards carry a photograph or, for organizations, a logo. Meduza has a card of its own, though without a logo.

Some people the Justice Ministry calls “foreign agents” have remarked on how well the section is designed. Others are less pleased. The former defense lawyer Mark Feygin, for one, is outraged by the quotations the ministry placed alongside the description of his activities.

There were mistakes, too. For the card on Yekaterina Klepikovskaya, a former journalist at the news outlet Sever.Realii, the ministry used a photograph of a different woman who happens to share her surname — as Klepikovskaya pointed out herself on Facebook. The picture actually shows Anna Klepikovskaya, a winner of the Woman Mercury Awards, presented by the Russian edition of Forbes; she has not been designated a “foreign agent.” The source given for the photograph is wrong, too.

Other sections were full of errors as well — grammatical, stylistic, and factual. Some phrases made no sense at all, as though written by a neural network that kept hallucinating.

The very first section, for instance, opened with a quotation from Vladimir Putin whose meaning was impossible to make out; five errors rendered the text completely unreadable. The rest of the project description was hard to follow, too.

If a neural network really did generate the text, it hallucinated in the historical sections’ photo captions as well.

One caption claimed that a map of “the decolonization and reconstruction of Russia” came from a Telegram channel called the “Forum of the Free Russian State Postal Service” — a claim that, taken at face value, would mean the state postal company wants the country to fall apart. The channel’s actual name is the “Forum of Free States of Post-Russia.”

Nearly all the stylistic and grammatical errors have since been fixed, but many factual ones remain, the independent Russian outlet Agentstvo reports. The first historical section, on the Time of Troubles, says that King Sigismund III of Poland declared war on Russia in 1610. In fact, he did so in September 1609.

Other historical events are treated just as loosely. Take the account of how much influence the British diplomat Charles Hanbury Williams had over the future empress Catherine II. From the ministry’s text, a reader might conclude that Catherine — who allegedly received money from Britain — was practically a “foreign agent” herself.

The section devoted to documentary films — propaganda, in reality — is even more interesting. It includes a nearly four-minute Russian-language clip titled “Hitler the Liberator,” which calls Hitler “the true liberator of humanity” and in particular “the liberator of the Russian people.”

Nazi propagandists made the film for people living in the occupied Soviet territories. The Justice Ministry probably meant to present it as an example of the kind of influence that could be brought to bear on the country’s population. The trouble is that the clip comes with no explanation at all. Without context, the film is taken literally — as though the ministry really were praising Hitler.

The film “We’re Going to Germany,” which the Nazis shot at the Ukrainfilm studio during the German occupation, also looks rather strange on the site. It describes the expulsion of the Bolsheviks and the wonders of living and working in Germany. The whole thing comes across as a video from an alternate reality.

Strangest of all, these films sit alongside a present-day clip that the Russian state propaganda channel RT made for a historical subsection called “Sanctions Storm.” But the Justice Ministry sees no error in this, at least for now, and hasn’t bothered to add any description.