I'm Sarah Kensier, the author of the best-selling books, The View from Flyover Country, and Hiding in Plain Sight.

And this is Gaslit Nation, a podcast covering corruption in the United States and rising autocracy around the world.

And I'm Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker, and the writer and producer of the journalistic thriller, Mr. Jones, about Stalin's genocide famine in Ukraine, a film that the Kremlin doesn't want you to see. No, literally.

No, literally. Last Thursday night in Moscow, a human rights and history organization called Memorial, the oldest NGO in Russia, and certainly one of the bravest and most relentless, hosted a screening of Mr. Jones.

Around 30 young mass men crashed the screening, shouting things like shame, and demanding that people leave and calling the screening over.

Police arrived, but instead of holding the masked men accountable, the police locked the doors

and held the audience and the event organizers trapped inside the building for several hours,

questioning the people inside, demanding to know how they heard about the screening.

The police handcuffed the front door of the building.

Commentators in Russia pointed out that the photograph of the front door in handcuffs represented

Russia today. Lawyers for the organization had to enter the building through a window, and supporters

of their work and members of the community showed up to gather outside.

Eventually, the audience and organizers were allowed to go home at around 2 a.m.

The police confiscated several computers and cameras, some of which the organizers were able to get back.

It's important to note that this is part of a larger pattern of escalating repression in Putin's

Russia against facts, against history, against dissent. Putin is scared. He's a terrorist

holding Russians and their future hostage. As one Russian friend said to me,

at least in the Soviet Union, there was an ideology people could get behind. With Putin,

there's nothing, nothing but a mafia state. Putin stands for nothing but his own greed. Russia, as Putin very well knows,

is a powder keg, which is why the authorities continue to clamp down on something as simple as a

movie screening. The organizers of the screening of Mr. Jones in Moscow, the group called

Memorial, the group I mentioned,

...