| The European Correspondent
Dmitriy Beliaev

A Russian series released in October used AI to replace actor Maxim Vitorgan’s face – and removed his name from the credits. Vitorgan reported it himself on social media, while the streaming platform Kion offered no explanation.

It was the second time the actor had been digitally erased and replaced with AI – a punishment for his vocal opposition to the war in Ukraine. On the first day of the invasion in 2022, he posted a black square on Instagram with the caption “Shame” to his 700,000 followers. That led to his removal from another show in 2023.

Erasing “undesirable” actors, writers, and musicians has become routine in Russia, where censorship has tightened its grip on cultural life since the country’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

TV channels and streaming platforms now not only blur or replace actors with AI, but also cut entire scenes – scrubbing away unwanted dialogue, characters, or references that the state considers unwelcome.

In April 2025, a TV channel removed a map of Odesa and cut a reference to the 2006 deportation of Georgian citizens from Russia in a 2010 film (which also featured Vitorgan). In June, Russian streaming services removed a line mentioning Putin’s death from a 2024 Spanish thriller Rich Flu.

Censorship now extends far beyond politics, reshaping even harmless scenes: in early November, following a law banning so-called “LGBT propaganda”, a Russian online cinema cut a Fight Club (1999) scene showing men kissing.

It goes beyond films. Several broadcasters have been fined for airing music videos deemed “LGBT propaganda”. In January 2023, a court fined the TNT Music channel one million rubles (roughly €10,600) over a music video Hallucination by Regard and Years & Years.

A year later, another broadcaster, Tochka TV, was fined for airing a music video by pro-regime singer Nikolai Baskov for containing “LGBT propaganda” because of “the lyrical subject’s relationship with a male”. The video had aired on television without issue before. After the new laws came in, some Russian artists began deleting their old videos from YouTube and social media.

Publishers are also blacking out entire paragraphs in books. Even a biography of Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini was censored, with about a fifth of the text removed because it described an openly gay filmmaker's personal life.

The invasion of Ukraine has triggered a kind of patriotic cultural revolution. Actors, directors, and musicians who publicly opposed the war have been effectively blacklisted – removed from the big screens, stripped of work, and, in many cases, pushed into exile. Some have been declared “foreign agents”, a status that severely restricts civil rights and professional opportunities.

Some songs by these “agents” are being removed from Russian streaming platforms, and performing them publicly can lead to fines or even arrest. For the most recent case – in October, several young street musicians in St Petersburg were arrested for singing songs by anti-war artists.