Masha and the Experts

the death of expertise and common sense is something authoritarian states and "democratic" ones have in common

Original post here: https://postsocialism.org/2026/07/08/masha-and-the-experts/

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As the row over banning Masha and the Bear continues to escalate, British Russia experts have themselves come under attack, accused of spreading pro-Russian propaganda. Both the calls for a ban (Guardian, 2026) and the social media attacks on Mark Galeotti rely on claims made by Ukraine’s Centre for Countering Disinformation and Estonia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. They argue that the cartoon “embeds pro-Kremlin and militaristic messaging in children’s entertainment” (Guardian, 2026), citing a 2010 episode in which Masha guards the Bear’s carrot patch from a thieving Hare while wearing a battered Soviet border guard’s cap dating from the 1930s.

Anyone who actually takes the trouble to watch the episode to the end, however, will see something very different from a glorification of Stalin-era militarism. The Bear cannot guard his carrots himself because he desperately wants to sleep. To stay awake, he resorts to the familiar tricks used by generations of soldiers everywhere who have struggled to remain alert while on sentry duty. Having exhausted every possible way of fighting off sleep, he asks Masha to keep the Hare away, handing her the now-infamous border guard’s cap.

Masha promptly interprets guarding the Bear’s vegetable patch as if she were defending the state’s frontiers. Mangling the words, she sings the only line she knows from an old Soviet song about border guards. Yes, it is a song from the 1930s—but Masha knows only the opening line, and even that she gets wrong. She does indeed stop the Hare from stealing the carrots and drives him away from the garden. At the same time, however—perhaps in the heat of her militaristic zeal—she destroys every carrot bed, wrecks every structure on the property, and leaves the Bear’s house in complete chaos. The Bear is then left to rebuild his home, reinforce the boundaries of his little domain himself, and plant the carrots all over again.

Ironically, Russian advocates of banning the cartoon object not to this particular episode but to the programme’s entire premise. Hyperactive Masha lives alone at a tiny rural halt where trains no longer stop. Four-year-old Masha constantly creates havoc for the adult Bear, a retired circus acrobat surrounded by trophies from his glory days. Her nearest neighbours are a pig of indeterminate sex, a mongrel of dubious pedigree, and a goat—kozyol, a word that also happens to be one of Russia’s favourite insults. Even the Wolves are frightened of her, despite her determined attempts to reform them and administer medical treatment with an enormous syringe and an enema.

It is therefore hardly surprising that calls were made in Russia more than a decade ago to ban Masha and the Bear for failing to uphold “traditional values” (MK, 2016). More surprising is that those Russian loyalists eager to tap into the ever-expanding propaganda budgets have not yet spotted another supposedly subversive symbol: the dilapidated, wheel-less carriage from a Moscow–Peking train which stands beside Masha’s house. ’Moscow-Peking’ is itself a slogan popular in the late 1940s and early 1950s. One might have expected them to interpret it as an allegory for the lamentable state of the railway infrastructure linking Russia and China.

When sound expertise is displaced by media noise, public pressure, and the intimidation of influential but poorly informed decision-makers, failure in both domestic and foreign policy becomes almost inevitable. The governments of the UK, the EU and Russia are becoming increasingly alike in their preference for dramatic but ill-conceived gestures over the harder task of addressing the structural causes of their internal and external problems.

Anyone with even a rudimentary grasp of the Russian cultural context—and the patience to watch a single seven-minute episode through to the end—should at the very least question the claim that the series advances either a “pro-Kremlin” or, for that matter, a “pro-Western” narrative. The references to Soviet-era slogans, catchphrases and music from beloved Soviet films are there to amuse the grandparents watching alongside their grandchildren. Every one of them knows the difference between Soviet border guards—an armed service within the NKVD and its successor organisations, the KGB and today’s FSB, responsible for protecting the state frontier—whose caps had green tops, and officers of the Soviet secret police, whose blue-topped caps became symbols of political repression. None of the Soviet songs appears in the cartoon with its original lyrics intact. Above all, Masha and the Bear is simply a fairy tale about an independent little girl. It belongs in much the same tradition as Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking. Lindgren fortunately did not live to see the day when children’s stories would be prosecuted in the court of public opinion as propaganda for one geopolitical camp or another.

Context, however, is of little interest to those seeking to increase their influence by ostentatiously demonstrating loyalty to whichever set of political values currently enjoys official favour. That is why such a torrent of hostility has been directed at those prepared to call out this performative display of loyalty applied to material far removed from real concerns; at those those prepared to watch the episode to the end; and at those prepared to question whether banning a children’s cartoon is remotely relevant to supporting Ukraine, curbing Russian influence, or solving their societies’ actual problems.

The responses of the British Parliament and Netflix will reveal whose expertise ultimately carries more weight. The Russian authorities have long relied on the advice of security-service hardliners who explain away their own failures by attributing them to malign foreign influence spread through the media. Yet banning Roblox, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube has done nothing to curb the power of monopolies that inflate prices, create shortages and sustain wars. British parliamentarians now appear to be following much the same logic, paying little attention to genuine expert opinion questioning whether such measures achieve anything at all.

guest post by Charlie Nail

Sources:

Masha and the Bear (2010). The Border is Secure https://yandex.ru/video/preview/11995598889559404205

Guardian (2026). https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2026/jul/02/mps-uk-broadcast-russian-cartoon-masha-and-the-bear

Spectator (2026). https://echofm.online/statya-dnya/the-spectator-mark-galeotti-v-zashhitu-mashi-i-medvedya

Известия (2016). «Маша и медведь» признан самым вредным мультфильмом для детей. К такому выводу пришли российские психологи https://iz.ru/news/641913

KP (2013). Психолог: «Маша и медведь» — очень вредный мультфильм»

«Комсомолка» встретилась с гостьей Первого Международного форума библиотек, посвященному 100-летию Сергея Михалкова, психологом, публицистом, общественным деятелем Ириной Медведевой. https://www.kaliningrad.kp.ru/daily/26103.4/2999318/

Мел (2016). «Мультфильм садистский, но смешно».Учителя и психологи — о том, почему «Маша и Медведь» стал самым популярным мультфильмом в мире https://mel.fm/vospitaniye/psikhologiya/6347512-Masha_and_bear

360.ru (2016) «Они просто не смотрели»: режиссер не согласился с психологами в оценке «Маши и медведя» https://360.ru/tekst/obschestvo/oni-prosto-ne-smotreli-rezhisser-ne-soglasilsya-s-psihologami-v-ocenke-mashi-i-medvedya-77889/

MK (2025). Машу и Медведя хотят запретить из-за недостаточно традиционных ценностей https://karel.mk.ru/social/2025/10/28/mashu-i-medvedya-khotyat-zapretit-izza-nedostatochno-tradicionnykh-cennostey.html