Memes For Our Times

A sense of the absurdity of current events, combined with the need to relieve stress, not to mention censorship that compels an Aesopian approach to self-expression, make fertile ground for satire.

Here, we explain ten recent memes that best capture the current sociopolitical mood across a large subset of Russian society.

In Petrograd, in the autumn of 1922, the Bolsheviks herded a couple of hundred Russian intellectuals considered harmful to the socialist cause onto ships headed for Germany. Among them were several philosophers, including the Christian existentialist Nikolai Berdyayev, the Orthodox theologian Sergei Bulgakov, and the monarchist and political philosopher Ivan Ilyin.