This chapter investigates the televisual sources of the nationalist authoritarianism that has defined Russia after 2000. Khazanov argues that the popular perestroika-era television show Vzgliad, along with its successor, ViD, helped shape early post-Soviet Russian audiences into a new narod. The teams crafting this updated, mediatized narod represented its future as emancipatory, but not necessarily liberal: though they worked to defeat the August 1991 GKChP-led coup, they remained distant from the liberal-democratic ambitions of late-Soviet intellectual elites. Instead, they shaped the narod as the stateless, apolitical subject of an essentially anarcho-libertarian system. Though the blurriness of this collective identity was arguably necessary to unite divergent interests against the GKChP, this same quality became problematic in the later 1990s, when the new narod proved incapable of coalescing around a common vision of post-Soviet statehood. This void at the heart of Russian liberalism, in turn, set the scene for Russia’s return to authoritarianism under Putin.