This Wall Street Journal article made me think of my blog post earlier this month about North Korea’s first beer ad. (I didn’t have a video of that ad when I wrote the post, but I’ve since found it online here.)

It’s easy to make fun of North Korea’s state television station, but reading about advertising regulations in Russia makes the North Korean ad seem like a paragon of free expression. At least the North Korean ad had people in it — people you can see. The people even pick up glasses of beer during the course of the commercial and move them around. None of that would be permitted on Russian television.

A Russian regulator explains why people speaking or clinking beer glasses off screen is also unacceptable:

“It creates the impression that someone is present,” says Andrei Kashevarov, deputy head of the FAS. “We don’t want this trend to continue.”

You wouldn’t want viewers to get the impression that live people drink the beer being advertised!

In the United States, we enjoy a freedom to communicate and share ideas that people in other countries can only dream of. Clink clink.