I am not going to say anything more on the topic of pride parades and what not....
However I agree with you on RT. They are going from strength to strength for sure. I am honestly grateful to Russia for providing this excellent channel. It's got great British news anchors and some really cool American characters hosting some of the shows.

Can you believe, the BBC practically IGNORED the NSA revelations, and the GCHQ spying for America story.
And pretty much everything around Snowden. And I can't stomach the beeb's coverage of the conflicts in the Middle East.

RT behaves like any modern state TV channel in my view -- obviously they are not going to go blatantly against a pronounced state decision but they certainly report critically from Russia, including on government affairs, and I'm sure they'd have debate programs where everybody can say what they have to say. I think that took place for the last 5 years of the Soviet Union as well, so I don't know what you are comparing with.

I never really watched Soviet TV in those days, apart from a few limited occasions a. However I watched a fair bit of East German TV. Honestly I can't remember thinking it was propaganda. All it was, was that they essentially choose to see the world through "Red glasses" as we used to say. So if there are two alternative ways of looking at some world event, they picked the one that fitted with their ideological outlook, and they sometimes ignored news that were negative.

Most countries had only state TV back in those days, so everyone was in the same boat. Actually, the USSR, as far as I remember, had more channels than for example Sweden. Not to mention lots of satellite channels! (strange really, did people in the USSR really have satellites, or how did that work..) And most Eastern European programming was not political, just good quality culture, special interest and kids stuff.

But a while ago, I was staying in a hotel and was pretty shocked that there were ADS on RT?! How did that happen? It was almost impossible to watch, there was an ad every 10 minutes or so.
Does Russia have a TV License system to pay for the state channels, or how are they financed?