The squeeze What a museum and a Telegram news outlet reveal about how Russia really silences dissent

Last month, the journalist collective Bereg published a report on the Yeltsin Center — the Yekaterinburg museum and cultural complex dedicated to Russia’s first president. A decade after it opened, the center still hosts regional officials at public events and fashion industry figures from Moscow, and corporate sponsors appear on the acknowledgments wall. More than four years into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Yeltsin Center bustles with activity — just not the kind it was built for.

Hard to kill by design

The Yeltsin Center was built to withstand political pressure: a federal law prohibits its liquidation or reorganization. Its most important shield, though, has always been personal: Boris Yeltsin’s daughter, Tatyana Yumasheva, and her husband, Valentin Yumashev, Yeltsin’s former chief of staff, oversaw the center’s creation and both retain direct access to Putin. Operating costs and programming have also drawn on state money and donations from well-connected businessmen — among them Roman Abramovich, long one of Putin’s closest oligarch allies; Oleg Deripaska, the aluminum and construction magnate; and Mikhail Prokhorov, the mining and media mogul who ran a token presidential campaign against Putin in 2012.

When conservative critics went after the center in its early years — for example, when filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov called it a “liberal den under the aegis of the USA,” or when a Communist Party deputy asked Russia’s Audit Chamber to investigate its finances — nothing stuck. The federal law protecting the center from closure, combined with the Yumashev family’s direct line to Putin, made the attacks mostly theatrical.

Russia’s wartime footing hasn’t revoked the center’s legal status or its connections to the Yeltsin family, but what those protections guarantee has become clear: survival, not independence.

Hard to kill, but not to hollow out

The day after Russia launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Yeltsin Center published an anti-war statement. Within weeks, its leadership concluded that speaking out further risked not just a scandal but an actual criminal case — one that could be used to justify ousting the center’s entire management. Under pressure from prosecutors, police, and the Federal Security Service, the center removed the anti-war statement from its website by April 2022.

As the war dragged on, the Yeltsin Center’s programming quietly shifted toward natural science lectures. Herb garden tours replaced talks featuring political scientists. The media screen on the building’s facade, which before the war had displayed video installations, has remained dark — ostensibly due to mechanical problems, though insiders told Bereg that the center fears it would be urged to display pro-war propaganda.

Since February 2022, the pressure on the Yeltsin Center has settled into a routine: pro-war Telegram channels flag a scheduled speaker, local prosecutors issue a warning, and the center cancels its plans, usually citing “technical reasons.” Regional officials now request advance speaker lists, review lecturers’ social media, scrutinize artists’ portfolios, and occasionally ask management to cancel events — in the interest, as they put it, of “maintaining calm in the neighborhood.” A concert by the Ural rock band Sansara was pulled in August 2023 after its frontman’s anti-war views drew a denunciation from a pro-war channel. In November 2024, pro-Kremlin activists filed a complaint with prosecutors to block an appearance by scholar Nina Khrushcheva — author of a book on Soviet leadership and great-granddaughter of Nikita Khrushchev — and the center canceled the event.

The center has also faced a financial squeeze: annual donations, once around 1.4 billion rubles (more than $17.2 million by today’s exchange rate), have fallen nearly 14-fold during the war, as sponsors quietly redirected money toward what one former director called “other state needs.” By 2024, the Yeltsin Center was drawing 77 percent of its budget from the state, effectively making it a government institution.

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A parallel case in Russia’s news space

Last month, Bereg also published an interview with Sergei Titov, editor-in-chief of Ostorozhno, Novosti — the Telegram news outlet owned by Ksenia Sobchak, whose late father was Putin’s political mentor in St. Petersburg. Sobchak’s personal ties to Putin have almost certainly kept the outlet from being shut down outright. Titov is candid about what that protection is worth. Ostorozhno, Novosti, he says, is “more or less the last of what’s still possible” — one of perhaps two outlets remaining in Russia that can cover stories such as people laying flowers at Navalny’s grave on the anniversary of his death. Occasionally it still matters: after the outlet reported that a Russian soldier had been tortured in a military unit, a criminal case was opened. “That’s already a great achievement, in my opinion,” he told Bereg.

Still, none of that has stopped Russian authorities from squeezing the outlet on two fronts: a federal antitrust ruling declaring Telegram advertising illegal, which has sent the platform’s ad market into freefall, and a campaign to block the app entirely. Together, they have forced Titov to run a deliberately stripped-down version of the channel on the state-controlled Max messenger — one that excludes anything touching on the Defense Ministry, mobilization, early reports of Ukrainian strikes on Russian territory, or other content likely to draw prosecutorial attention.

Titov isn’t optimistic about the migration to Max. Ostorozhno, Novosti’s core readers — people looking for news the state media won’t cover — are unlikely to seek out this reporting on a Kremlin-approved app. “We’ve become quieter,” he says, “because there’s even less freedom in Russia now.”

What survives

Neither Ostorozhno, Novosti, nor the Yeltsin Center is at risk of being shut down by the authorities, at least not imminently. The center’s patrons are too well-connected, and the institution serves too many people as a venue — for government forums, corporate events, and the kind of anodyne cultural programming that still draws funding and donations. Titov’s outlet has its own protections and sources of income.

But both cases are a reminder that survival and preservation are different things. Patronage in wartime Russia sets the ceiling on how hard an institution can be squeezed — not whether it will be squeezed. Below that ceiling, both Ostorozhno, Novosti, and the Yeltsin Center have done much of the work themselves — disinviting speakers, avoiding topics, suppressing statements, and closing off spaces. For institutions with the right connections and the instinct to self-censor, the state rarely needs its heaviest tools. Regulatory pressure, advertising restrictions, and the occasional prosecutor’s letter tend to be enough.

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