On the morning of February 29, a 38-year-old woman – an Uzbekistan native who had worked as a nanny to a handicapped four-year-old Muscovite girl – had an encounter with the police in front of Oktyabrskoye Pole metro station, in north-west Moscow. Screaming “Allahu akbar!” she brandished the severed head of that child, and threatened to blow herself up.

At first, it seemed that the primary talking point – besides the unimaginable pain of the child’s family, of course – was the fact that a full hour passed before police resolved to arrest the woman.

Comments on social media pulled no punches: “Officer runs away from woman with child’s head. Doesn’t stop her, doesn’t pull his gun on her. Just runs;” “Moscow police had a terrorist threat on their hands for an hour, but in the end she was arrested by ordinary cops. What about the OMON? What about the Special Forces? It took an hour to arrest her! And the cops who were nearby just scattered when they saw her.”

Senior police officials, much more quickly, began claiming that their subordinates hadn’t fled from a potential terrorist but were actually rushing to evacuate people from the metro.

Meanwhile, oppositionist politician Alexei Navalny quipped on Twitter about “the standards of Russia’s law enforcement officers: stand by the metro with anti-Putin banner – arrest time 5 mins; stand by the metro with child’s head screaming Allahu Akbar – arrest time 1 hour.”

But on Tuesday night, these horrendous events took on another dimension, when RBC published an article about the federal TV channels’ coverage of the tragedy – or, to be precise, virtual lack thereof. The article also made clear that TV bosses were being puppeteered from without: “Sources from two federal channels told RBC that the largest broadcasters had been recommended not to air stories about the child’s murder. Both sources’ accounts would suggest that government representatives were afraid to draw attention to what is a national [migrants] issue.”

Social media again erupted, with some approving of the broadcasters’ actions (you can’t show that kind of stuff), and others expressing their outrage (what they’d really love is to censor everything). Gauging the intensity of the debate, Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov decided to offer a justification: “The federal channels receive no decrees from the Kremlin. As far as we understand, the channels took the decision not to broadcast this terrible tragedy. We can only express solidarity with this decision – this is too horrific to be shown on TV. Media outlets all over the world refrain from showing pictures of various tragedies.”

Journalist and well-known blogger Arkady Babchenko believes that the regime, in its censorship of reality due to the fear of possible adverse reaction, is now a hostage to its propaganda. “For ten years now they’ve been painting themselves into a corner – and that process is finally complete. For ten years they’ve been instilling such hatred for everyone else into the minds of the population that even the Kremlin has twigged that it’d be better to keep silent about this now. Because yes, this thing can really explode.”

For the past sixteen years, Moscow’s federal channels have quite deliberately refrained from exposing their viewers to certain things. Such is their daily routine in the propaganda war. They’ve effectively even stopped bothering with Russia itself – they just can’t get their fill of Syria and Ukraine. The volume of information they’ve held back from viewers is comparable only to the volume of information they’ve willfully distorted.

For example, the famous TV presenter Vladimir Pozner – whose eponymous interview show is broadcast on Channel One – fully agrees with Peskov’s position: “I was somewhat surprised to see how much has been written about the fact that the main channels have neglected to broadcast this story. I immediately thought back to the planes smashing into the World Trade Center towers – the main American channels didn’t show footage of people throwing themselves out of windows. This is along similar lines. What would be the point of showing it?”

Posner’s argument is hardly flawless. While the American TV channels had, after all, been motivated by ethical considerations, the actions of their Russian counterparts were prompted exclusively by top-down directives. Yes, the consequences are comparable – in both cases, the American and Russian networks decided not to show what could have been shown – but their respective motives diverge to such an extent that it is really motivation, and nothing but, that should be the focus of analysis here.

Furthermore, were it not for the Kremlin’s directives, the terrible images almost certainly would have been broadcast by the federal channels; and if the Kremlin had decided that airing the video could actually be somehow expedient (just imagine if the nanny had turned out to be Turkish!), the channels would promptly do so from morning till night.

Sergey Medvedev, a professor at the Higher School of Economics, believes that the state-owned networks are constructing a reality in which domestic problems simply do not exist: “If a migrant woman were brandishing a girl’s head by Berlin-Schöneberg station rather than in front of Oktyabrskoye Pole, they’d have an absolute field day – special news bulletins, NTV investigations, statements in the Duma, demonstrations against migrations by Russian Germans.”

So the issue here is really not about what, ethically speaking, can and cannot be broadcast in a moment of human tragedy. It’s the hypocrisy – the people currently making noises about “sensitivity” are the very same people who used Crimea, Ukraine and Syria as springboards for propaganda orgies, and conjured nightmarish crimes out of thin air (for example, Channel One’s famous story about the boy crucified by Ukrainian nationalists, which turned out to be pure lies).

We can see that the regime has used this tragedy to illustrate – brazenly so – a general principle: only the regime knows what ought to be reported, to whom, and when. It is precisely the flagrant laying bare of this cynicism that has so incensed the more thoughtful segments of the internet, and Echo Moscow journalist Alexander Plyushchev in particular: “No one is saying that the video of an insane woman brandishing a severed head should be doing the rounds 24/7. That’s what professionals are there for – to tell us about the most horrendous things without slipping into the gutter or going overboard with gore. People should have the right to know what’s happening and to reflect on it. Even if they knowingly disclaim or dissociate themselves from this right.”

The Putinist system in all its manifestations is geared primarily towards self-defence. So whenever police need to disperse an opposition rally or subsequently to misrepresent the circumstances surrounding it in court, they succeed perfectly in their law-enforcement duties. But when the situation demands a rapid and professional police response to ensure the safety of the public, that, as Moscow witnessed on February 29, is when the mishaps and meltdowns come thick and fast.

Propaganda is the bulwark of the regime, which is precisely why the public isn’t allowed access to objective and socially significant information. But that creates its own dangers, for a blinded manipulated public presents a considerable danger, both to itself, and when, like a pack of wild dogs, it turns on its manipulators.