If you’re going to lie about Russia, at least make it believable

Daria Serenko isn’t Putin’s worst nightmare. She says so herself. But that didn’t stop the Daily Beast from crowning her Queen of the Kremlin Resistance.

There is a moment in every farce when the mask slips, the props wobble, and the stagehands start looking at one another in mute despair. We may have reached that moment in the Western media’s ongoing production of “Russia: The Pantomime Villain State,” with the revelation that Vladimir Putin’s greatest fear is, apparently, a poet.

Not a general. Not an oligarch turned rebel. Not a cyberwarfare genius or paramilitary warlord. No, according to the Daily Beast, the woman that scares the bejaysus out of the Kremlin is Daria Serenko: a softly spoken 32-year-old feminist with “asymmetric hair and a rose tattoo.” As headlines go, it’s not just wrong. It’s parody.

It would be comic if it weren’t so persistent. The article, breathlessly titled “Meet the Woman Who Vladimir Putin Fears the Most,” makes Serenko out to be some amalgam of Joan of Arc and Alexey Navalny. Her books are banned. Her name is whispered in Kremlin corridors. Her very existence, we are told, keeps the Russian President up at night.

There’s just one problem. Daria Serenko herself doesn’t believe it. She responded to the report with incredulous amusement, saying she nearly fell off her chair when she read the headline. Her feminist group, she noted dryly, can’t even muster 100 Patreon subscribers. “That’s not my story,” she said.

And that’s the thing. It really isn’t. Serenko insists she gave a polite, measured interview in Russian. She expressed no delusions of grandeur. She did not anoint herself as Putin’s greatest nemesis. That particular crown was manufactured in an English-language newsroom and pinned to her head by strangers with a quota to fill.

What we are dealing with here is not journalism but fan fiction, written in the style of moral instruction. A righteous tale for a Western audience, in which every Russian anti-Kremlin actor is a lionhearted freedom-fighter, and every Russian institution is a Bond villain’s lair.

The media ecosystem that produced this story doesn’t deal in nuance. It cannot accommodate the possibility that a Russian feminist might oppose the Ukraine conflict, be targeted by the authorities, and yet not be the singular, spine-chilling nightmare of the President. That kind of complexity breaks the fairy tale.

But it also raises a more serious question: if Western reporting can invent that Putin fears Serenko more than anyone, what else is being invented? How many other stories are contorted into Hollywood shapes, with villainy maximised and nuance scrubbed clean?

This is not to disparage Serenko. She appears to be a thoughtful person doing work she believes in, and facing risks as a result. But making her into Russia’s Most Wanted does her no favours. It warps the narrative. It encourages fantasy over fact. It invites mockery where support might be warranted.

And it feeds a larger pattern: the relentless infantilisation of Western audiences when it comes to Russia. Readers are not shown the country as it is — a sprawling, contradictory, multi-ethnic state with a long history and complex politics. Instead, they are handed comic books.

In this week’s issue, the villain fears a feminist. In last week’s, he feared a frog. Next week, who knows? Perhaps Putin will be terrified by a viral TikTok or an anonymous balloon.

What this also suggests is something deeper: the decay of editorial standards when Russia is the subject. Almost anything can be said, so long as it paints the country in a certain hue. Whether it’s toilets, GDP, or poets, the bar for truth is lowered to the floor. And those who question it are accused of being apologists.

Meanwhile, the disservice to the genuine Russian opposition is profound. If everyone becomes the “next Navalny,” the the real story becomes invisible. And when Daria Serenko herself says, in effect, “this is nonsense,” and nobody listens, it becomes clear that the narrative matters more than the person.

Serenko is not the problem. The problem is the fantasy industrial complex around her. It will chew through any figure who offers a vaguely oppositional stance and inflate them to mythic proportions, not for their sake, but for the moral gratification of the reader.

We are long past the point of parody. And yet the stories keep coming. Putin is everywhere. Putin is afraid. Putin is defeated. Putin is lurking. He is the West’s bogeyman of choice, a figure on whom we project both our dread and our moral superiority.

But the real world is messier. And more boring. The truth, as ever, is not as headline-worthy as the fiction. And Daria Serenko knows it better than most. That’s not her story. But it is, increasingly, ours.