Moscow (AsiaNews) – Although Instagram is formally banned in Russia, a new generation of propagandists has emerged in recent years: the ‘Z-bloggers’, who target a young, educated audience in major cities. Perhaps the most prominent representative of this generation is Maria Čadina, the wife of a soldier from the Kaluga region, whose account has nearly 400,000 followers.
A well-groomed woman with flawless make-up and a velvety voice – a far cry from the aggressive tone of television presenters such as Vladimir Solov’ev or Olga Skabeeva – Čadina alternates between posts on love and family life and stories in which she asserts that there is no repression in Russia, that Ukraine does not enjoy state sovereignty, and that there will be no new wave of mobilisation. Her blog demonstrates how ‘Z’ patriotism can be fashionable, secular and ‘Europeanised’.
By the end of May, the entire Moscow elite had gathered at the Irina Viner Gymnastics Palace: the crowd ranged from actress Viktoria Isakova, Fyodor Bondarchuk and Nikita Kologrivy to the deputy head of the presidential administration, Sergei Kirienko. That evening, everyone took to the stage of the huge auditorium to announce the winners of the 5th National Award for Internet Content, established by the Institute for Internet Development, a key organisation responsible for distributing budget funds for the creation of ‘patriotic content’. Also on stage that evening was the 25-year-old blogger Maria Chadina, the wife of a soldier fighting in the war in Ukraine, who received an award for “the fastest-growing political blog of 2025” on Instagram, despite the platform already being banned.
Dressed in an elegant black dress, Čadina received the statuette from another blogger, Artemij Lebedev, and dedicated her acceptance speech to her husband Vladimir: “My husband is watching this broadcast right now, right there in the Svo area, and this is our victory together with him… Vova, we’ve won! We will all win; victory will be ours,” she said in a trembling voice, as tears welled up in her large blue eyes.
Just a year earlier, she was an unknown journalist from Obninsk, a scientific town 100 kilometres from Moscow. Čadina, then known by her maiden name Bakina, worked for the small publication NG Region, where she covered local news and the war in Ukraine: she was the first local correspondent to go ‘beyond the line’ with the volunteers. She only began talking about politics on Instagram in April 2025, but six months later she appeared on Direct Line with Vladimir Putin, and soon amassed several hundred thousand followers.
Maria posts new reels and posts within a matter of days, sometimes on more lyrical topics such as love, family and make-up, but more often than not she talks about politics. Of her last 20 Instagram posts, most are devoted to current affairs: rumours of an imminent mobilisation, strikes against Wildberries, the resignation of the Ukrainian defence minister, the fuel crisis, prisoner exchanges and more. She has announced that neither she, nor her husband, nor her family, nor her friends, nor her team would ever issue statements to liberal media outlets. Commentators admire her beauty and call her ‘the female face of Russia’, and her manner of expression stands in stark contrast to the usual propaganda rhetoric: there are no shouts or curses directed at the enemy; instead, Maria speaks in a velvety voice about the events surrounding the war in Ukraine and international politics.
In her blog, Čadina ridicules the ‘enemies of the Russian Federation’ – primarily Volodymyr Zelenskyj and the ‘liberals’ – with sarcasm, but without overt aggression. At the same time, she consistently emphasises that she is a lively and empathetic person who understands her followers’ complex feelings and their outrage at what is happening in the country. She criticises officials, for example, for failing to explain to the public the need to block Telegram and the culling of livestock in Siberia; at the same time, Čadina urges her audience not to ‘destabilise’ society and to believe everything reported on federal television. Her aim is to ‘help, build and reassure’. She tempers the patriotic rhetoric with positive news – such as the availability of a cancer vaccine under Russia’s compulsory health insurance scheme – seeking to give a “human face”, albeit a very glamorous one, to the grim propaganda that has been stifling the Russian people for years now.
