This chapter looks back at thirty years of media history, showing that the repressions Putin’s government unleashed on independent outlets following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 were several decades in the making. Governmental decisions that appear contingent or spontaneous are, instead, the product of two parallel processes that unfurled after perestroika and the USSR’s collapse. The first is the economic transformation of the early 1990s, which produced an oligarchy that commodified and consolidated television and print media. This process culminated in Boris Yeltsin’s contentious re-election campaign of 1996, a highly mediatized affair that set the stage for political machinations later in the decade. The second process is Russia’s perennial drive to “remember” its difficult past, which is generally followed by a backlash that seeks to force memory back underground. Though they may at first appear unrelated, these two processes are tightly entwined. Their collective effect is a dangerous ideological presentism that forecloses the creation of truly independent media institutions—and the development of publics that would demand them.