Russian opposition forces will discuss with European officials the possibility of expanding opportunities for immigration from Russia to the EU countries. One of the measures they propose is a “relocatee card”: the bearer of this document would be able to freely obtain a residence permit in one of the EU countries, open a bank account, rent real estate, and get a job. The authors of the idea argue that the outflow of educated and well-off Russians can weaken Russia’s economic health while also “creating serious challenges to the Putin regime.” They argue this in a study on Russian relocatees in the EU, published on Tuesday, 11 June 2024.
The report was prepared by a new think tank, the Center for Analysis and Strategies in Europe (CASE), whose advisory board members from Russia are Dmitry Gudkov, Sergei Aleksashenko, Vladislav Inozemtsev, Andrei Movchan, and Dmitry Nekrasov. The study will be presented in Paris at the French Institute of International Relations (IFRI), which commissioned it. In the coming days, the report will also be presented at the PACE, the German Foreign Ministry, and the Bundestag, Gudkov said.
Portrait of Russian immigrants: good education, high income, anti-war views
As part of the study, researchers surveyed three and a half thousand Russian nationals residing in France, Germany, Poland, and Cyprus. The results showed that most of those who left Russia after the start of the war in Ukraine — eighty-two percent — have a higher education or an academic degree. Sixty-two percent of those surveyed reported monthly earnings of three thousand euros or more. This category of people, Gudkov said, not only does not require benefits [sic], but also makes a significant contribution to the EU economy.
Among Russians who have relocated to the EU in the past two years, the vast majority oppose the policies of Russian President Vladimir Putin (79%) and support Ukraine (64%). Gudkov emphasizes that most relocatees are well-off, educated people with anti-war views.
“It is important that this is the work of European researchers confirming our long-standing argument that new immigrants from Russia hold European [sic] views. They oppose the war, and can rightly be called ‘Russian Europeans’. They are not a threat and represent an economic and social resource for European societies,” Gudkov told DW.
Report’s authors propose “relocatee card” for Russians
The study’s authors suggest that the authorities in the EU countries develop legal norms for the large-scale migration of Russian nationals to the EU, Gudkov said. According to him, Russian nationals now face restrictions in some European countries, including, for example, problems with obtaining residence permits and opening accounts in European banks.
The study proposes a new mechanism for attracting “economic migrants” from Russia to the EU: a “relocatee card,” whose holder could easily open a bank account, rent real estate, and get a job in one of the EU countries. The document, as stated in the report, could be valid for a year with the possibility of renewal. During this “trial period,” the cardholder would have to confirm that they are employed or opened their own business, lived three quarters of the time in the country which issued the residence permit, have a higher education, know one of the European languages, and also own a home or rent one in the EU. Moreover, the study proposes providing evidence of the relocatee’s liquid assets in Russia as proof that they have the means to pay for their stay.
“Today, the strategy for undermining Putin’s regime must include a staged ‘bloodletting’: stimulating the outflow from Russia of both skilled professionals and money from Russian businesses not involved in the war,” the report says. The emerging new diaspora from Russia has political potential: it can play an important role in the transformation of Russia in the event of the fall of Putin’s dictatorship, and thus this community would see “a close and understanding ally, not an enemy” in Europe and the west as a whole, the study emphasizes.
The oppositionists believe that the approximately 300,000 Russians who left their homeland after the start of the war in Ukraine but who want to live in the EU would be willing to apply for the program.
The authors paint a portrait of these Russians: “They are not activists or oppositionists, but are driven by a search for options for a professional career, a risk-free place to live and a country in which their children could be raised outside the culture of hatred that is being created in Russia today.”
The authors of the report also suggest issuing “relocatee cards” inside Russia through European embassies, thus shifting the focus away from tourist visas.
“Relocatee card” not the same as “good Russian passport”
“That idea, which has been perverted, has already lost its relevance,” the politician explained.
The opposition politician also stressed that, in parallel, the study’s authors also propose that European authorities expand the program of issuing humanitarian visas, for which there is now a waiting list.
“But ninety-five percent of those who have left Russia do not need humanitarian visas. They are ready to work, earn money, and pay taxes. They don’t need welfare checks. We are highlighting them and suggesting various options for resettling them in the EU, which may not necessarily involve a relocatee card,” Gudkov concluded.
Otherwise, he argues, some of the relocatees will continue to return to Russia and restore the country’s economy, while another segment could become disillusioned with the west, “which makes no distinction between the Putin regime and people of modern liberal views who have become its hostages.”
The “relocatees” are indeed the very models of modern major generals:
The Russians who have left also differ in their value system from those who decided to stay. They are much less religious, aligning more with the general sentiments of Europeans; they find it much easier to engage in collective, volunteer and non-profit projects; they display significant empathy — including towards Ukrainians who have become victims of Russian aggression — and are more often inclined to respect other ethnic groups and cultures, as well as showing a willingness to learn the languages of their new countries of residence, regardless of how long they intend to stay there.
UK General Election 2024: help Ukraine win (Ukraine Solidarity Campaign, 31 May)
Upcoming solidarity events:
Tuesday 11 June, 7.0pm: Discussion meeting: “From Ukraine to Palestine, occupation is a crime” – Tuesday 11 June, 7.00 pm. Marchmont Community Centre, 62 Marchmont Street, London WC1N 1AB, and on line. Register to attend on eventbrite here or register to participate on line here. Organised by the Ukraine Information Group.
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After the Russian invasion of Ukraine last year, hundreds of thousands — perhaps more than a million — people left Russia. Although there is no data on how many of those people were foreigners, certainly many foreign citizens left Russia either at the insistence of their employers or on their own initiative. Many Western embassies advised their citizens to leave immediately, warning of the risks of staying.
The Moscow Times spoke to five foreigners who stayed. They are all living in various parts of Russia, have been living in Russia for a long time — and have no plans to leave in the near future.
True to his roots
Anselme Fayolle came to Moscow from France in 2008 to study Russian. He had no plans to stay at first, but he has been living here and working as a teacher of French at an international language school ever since.
Before coming to Russia, he knew more about the U.S.S.R. and only that Russia was the largest country in the world. He was surprised that Russians say what they think. “It can be unpleasant. But I liked this directness,” Anselme said.
Anselme loves to travel around Russia — even by hitchhiking. His favorite places are Lake Baikal and the cities of Vladivostok, Murmansk, Krasnoyarsk, and St. Petersburg. He also likes the Caucasus and Dagestan. “Most Russians like the French, and I’ve never had problems with my nationality,” Anselme told The Moscow Times.
A lot of his friends left Russia in 2022. Anselme is not going to return to France, but he does not exclude the possibility of relocation to other country, including his homeland. But for now he is staying in Russia. He lost some of his French students in 2022, but he has a lot of work again.
“I like France and Russia for different reasons. Russia has certainly influenced me, but I am still French,” Anselme said.
An aspiring Swiss Cossack
Benjamin Forster is from Switzerland. Since 2015 he has been living in Pereslavl-Zalessky, a small town a few hours’ drive from Moscow. He learned about the town from his Russian friends and the book “Taras Bulba” by Nikolai Gogol; now he likes to say he has a Cossack soul.
For 12 years Benjamin has been practicing organic beekeeping, and he continued his business in Pereslavl-Zalessky. “There is a stereotype in Switzerland that Russia is a third-world country, but it is not so,” he said. “My father said that he could sense how much I liked living in Russia, and he was glad. He was not surprised when I decided to stay here.”
Benjamin said that almost nothing changed in his life in 2022, except that visiting home has become more complicated. He used to visit Switzerland once a year, but now without a direct flight it is a long and complicated trip. He has to take a bus from St. Petersburg to Tallinn, and from there fly to Zurich. Another problem has been accessing money. But besides his beekeeping business, he also conducts Russian-language guided tours of his apiary. Since 2022, many Russians have begun to travel around Russia more often, and as a result, there is more demand for his guided tours.
“Russia is my home. I like the culture, mentality, and freedom. Here I have a house and a family. I am not against Switzerland, but I prefer to live here. I always joke that I was just born in the wrong country; the stork got confused and took me to the wrong place,” Benjamin said.
An Englishman with a Russian soul
Craig Ashton is from Great Britain. He studied Russian at the University of Exeter and came to Russia for the first time in 2002 with a group of students. He fell in love with St. Petersburg and wanted to live there.
At first, his relatives and friends were surprised by his decision, but he explained he had to live in Russia to understand the Russians. His mother and grandmother were especially worried. “In 2022, my mother wanted me to come home, but I decided to stay,” Craig said.
Today he works as a writer, blogger, and a teacher of English. “After Feb.24, I had fewer students, and I was wondering if there would be money for food. I bought a huge amount of bottled water and buckwheat, sat in the apartment and read the news. But now everything is back to the way it was before,” Craig told The Moscow Times.
He adds that he still likes Russians as much as he ever did. In the summer of 2022, he went to Great Britain with his wife to visit his family. After a month they came back. “Russia is the country that adopted me and gave me a job, a family, friends, and adventures. It is my life. I feel I must be here. If I leave when there are hard times, what kind of relationship is that?”
Pro-Kremlin information warrior
Sven Svenson left Germany many years ago. While he was living in Egypt he met a Russian woman, and they came to Russia together. Before that, he had never been to the country, but his grandmother used to say that Russia should be respected because they liberated the Germans from fascism.
In Moscow, he joined the pro-Russian Night Wolves motorcycle club and started to teach German and English at an international language school. After the start of the war, he never considered leaving Russia.
“The Germans are distant from me in spirit. I always say that I am for Russia, and I feel more Russian in spirit,” Sven told The Moscow Times.
He is sure that the Europeans do not know what happened before Feb. 24, 2022 in Ukraine, and said that he is fighting an information war on social networks.
“I make posts to show that the stores are not empty. It is often said that prices have risen in Russia, but I lived in Germany, where everything was expensive. In Russia, almost everyone has an apartment and a dacha, but in Germany, the majority rent housing. In Germany medical care is not free, taxes are high, and as a result, there is very little money left over. I do not talk about Ukraine with my brother, because we have different points of view, but many of my subscribers are beginning to understand the truth. After World War II, Russia promised that it would always defend the world from fascism, and this is what we are doing now,” Sven said.
Life’s work in Russia
David Henderson-Stewart is from the United Kingdom, but he decided to get his first work experience abroad. In 1996 he came to Moscow to work for a French company.
Today he is the managing director of the Raketa Watch Factory. When he visited the factory for the first time, he was captivated by the manufactory and its 300-year history. “In 2022, I didn’t even consider leaving, because the factory is my life’s work,” he told The Moscow Times.
In 2022, sales dropped off in Europe and the U.S., but they have evened out and new markets in the Middle East have opened up. David also hopes to enter the Asian market by next year. “The uniqueness of the factory is that we are limited in production capacity,” he said — meaning there will always be more demand than supply.
He admits that nowadays logistics have become more complicated and expensive, but nothing has changed in his personal life.
“I understand that I have privileges,” David said. “Yes, it’s more difficult and expensive to travel, and my family doesn’t come to see me anymore, but nothing has changed in my life in Moscow. We often go to theater and opera. My family is here, my work is here.”
Western academics have started attending conferences again on the down-low. Some are even conducting bits of research — and indeed, it is still possible to visit the archives. Most academic institutions forbid their employees from traveling to Russia, but you can still visit as a private citizen.
One Cambridge academic who has traveled here twice since 2022 told me, “Having Russian contacts is vital, especially now. Russians still have a voice, and we need to hear it.” The academic also encourages PhD students to try and visit because understanding the nuances of Russia and its culture is impossible without spending a certain amount of time here.
Many more of those returning have Russian spouses and families. (This was true of most people I spoke to in the line at the airport in late 2023.) Craig, a Californian, has a young son. His work visa expired after the start of the 2022 invasion, and so he had to leave temporarily. In his own words, the war had a “zero-percent” impact on his decision to return.
“I missed my family. And things are just fine [here],” he said. “[The war] made certain things harder. There are more rules and visa requirements now, but to be honest my life has hardly changed. If anything, I make more money now than before.”
Raymond, back after a year’s hiatus, agreed. He is more in demand as an English-language teacher now because so many others left soon after Russia invaded Ukraine. But that’s not all he and Craig have in common. “A lot of the new arrivals from the U.K. and America are trying to escape Western problems,” Raymond explained. “The wokeness, the [political correctness], the entitlement.”
Both he and Craig said they see Russia as a country fighting the “woke epidemic.” They do not see Russia as a savior of “traditional values,” as some claim, but rather as a bulwark against what they perceive as liberal values run amok. Russia, in their view, is not going down the rabbit hole over issues of gender identity, race, and policing language — and is much better for it.
Of course, gender and sexuality are actually huge talking points. Russia banned the so-called “international LGBT movement” late last year, effectively outlawing all LGBTQ+ rights activism and visibility. Discrimination is rife, and rights have been curtailed, particularly for trans people. Police have raided LGBTQ+ nightclubs and bars and charged their employees with “extremism.”
Aydyn Zhamidulov. Photo: Russian Defense Ministry via Kommersant
Kommersant has learned that a military court has begun hearing the criminal case against Senior Lieutenant Aydyn Zhamidulov, a platoon commander in the Airborne Troops, and his subordinate, Private Alexei Dorozhkin. The Russian Investigative Committee alleges that the men kidnapped a young woman who had threatened the officer that she would tell his wife about their relationship and took her to their unit’s temporary deployment point as a Ukrainian spy. There, they stabbed the victim to death and blew up her body in an attempt to conceal their crime. Zhamidulov gained renown for writing patriotic poems during his combat training and was shown reciting them on Telegram channels.
The criminal case against Senior Lieutenant Zhamidulov and Private Dorozhkin was submitted to the Southern District Military Court, sitting in Rostov-on-Don. The men are accused of the kidnapping and brutal murder of a resident of the Luhansk People’s Republic per articles 126.1, 105.2, 30.3, 33.4, and 244.2 of the Russian Criminal Code.
In the file of the case, as investigated by military investigation units at the Russian Investigative Committee, it is reported that Zhamidulov is twenty-eight years old, a native of Kazakhstan, and lived in the Pskov Region. He has a higher education, is married, and was raising two daughters.
In January 2022, Zhamidulov signed a contract with the Defense Ministry and, in the rank of senior lieutenant, served as commander of a parachute platoon in an airborne assault regiment of the famous 76th Airborne Division.
In late 2022, a video was widely circulated in social networks and the media in which Lieutenant Zhamidulov recited a poem of his own about the those involved in the special military operation. At the end of the recital, the officer stated that his family was proud of him and was waiting for him to come home.
Dorozhkin was mobilized on 1 January 2023. Ranked as a private, he served as a senior scout in the Airborne Troops.
According to investigators, at about eight p.m. on 13 January 2023, Zhamidulov and other military men, including Dorozhkin, were drinking hard alcoholic beverages at the Rainbow Cafe in Luhansk. About half an hour later, local resident Valentina Davronova, with whom Zhamidulov had previously been in an intimate relationship, entered the cafe.
A row broke out between the senior lieutenant and the twenty-three-year-old woman. Fearing that Ms. Davronova would report their relationship to his wife, Zhamidulov decided to deal with the young woman, the case file says. He told his subordinates that he would take Ms. Davronova to her current boyfriend.
The young woman was put in the back of a KamAZ truck, and when the truck arrived at the unit, Zhamidulov tied her hands with duct tape. Dorozhkin, who went with them, was ordered by the senior lieutenant to tape Valentina’s eyes, which he did.
To avoid questions from his subordinates and make his actions look legitimate, the investigators note, Zhamidulov told them that Ms. Davronova had served in the Ukrainian army from 2018 to 2021 and had tattoos featuring Ukrainian symbols on her body. He also alleged that she was engaged in intelligence on behalf of the Ukrainian armed forces.
The young woman was taken to a soldier’s bathhouse, where Zhamidulov stabbed her about two dozen times in different parts of her body. At that time, the commander of a reconnaissance platoon combat vehicle, Sergeant Roman Pleshcheyev, entered the bathhouse (his case will be tried separately). Zhamidulov ordered him to finish off the victim. Not wanting to kill her, but fearing negative consequences on the part of the senior lieutenant, Plescheyev stabbed Ms. Davronova with his knife in the area of her left shoulder and right leg.
At 12:20 a.m., Dorozhkin entered the bathhouse, and Zhamidulov instructed him to finish what he had started. Pleshcheyev left the room and Dorozhkin killed the victim by stabbing her in the area of her heart.
Having made sure that the young woman was dead, Zhamidulov ordered his subordinates to take the body outside the temporary deployment point and detonate it with three F-1 grenades so that the deceased could not be identified and the cause of her death could not be determined.
Nevertheless, the crime was solved literally while the trail was still hot. All three defendants were detained and then remanded in custday by a military court.
The case is now in preliminary hearings, and is expected to be considered on the merits this summer. Zhamidulov’s lawyer Natalia Kokhan refused to comment on the case without vetting her answers with her client.
Aydyn Zhamidulov was mobilized from the Orenburg Region. As a civilian he worked as a welder, but now he serves in an Airborne Troops reconnaissance unit. He has a wife, two daughters, and his parents waiting for him at home.
“I was retrained in my specialty. In the short period of mobilization combat training, everything — camouflage, identifying the enemy, working with topographic maps, artillery fire — is very easy to learn,” Zhamidulov said.
All of the things he saw and his interactions with his fellow soldiers inspired Aydyn to write poems. They are plain but honest and poignant, straight from the heart.
Always our ancestors fought evil. They wrote history with blood, with the pen. They weren’t afraid to go all the way. They removed shackles, they united hearts. Now, our brothers, it’s our turn To defend our country, our home, and our people. To do justice, to open their eyes. The enemy is in deep, like a needle under the skin. Let us strike down the puppeteers, the servants of evil, Who pull the strings Of bewildered people, Of gray-haired mothers shedding tears For them, the lives of people are just a game. We must put a stop to this once and for all!
Memorial for actor Joachim Gottschalk. When his Jewish wife Meta and son Michael were to be deported, the whole family decided to commit suicide on November 6, 1941. The bronze figure, which was created by Theo Balden in 1967, resembles the actor. It was initially located in a park but had to be moved due to the building of the local Sparkasse in the 1990s. Its new place is a memorial wall in the Joachim-Gottschalk-Straße 35.
The Impact of the Gold Rush on Native Americans of California
This inquiry lesson provides primary sources, maps, images, and background history to offer teachers and students insight into a little-known but vitally important aspect of one of the most iconic events in American history—the California gold rush. Students will analyze sources to answer the question: Do American actions against California Native Americans during the gold rush meet the United Nations definition of genocide?
The attitude of César Chávez and the UFW towards the undocumented changed over time and can be divided into three periods: 1962 to 1975; 1975 to 1993; and 1993 to the present. A look at these changes reveals much about Chávez, the union, and the times. Frank Bardacke is the author of Trampling Out the Vintage: César Chávez and the Two Souls of the UFW.
Whenever an infant heads to nursery, it can feel like an enormous step. Things are changing for everyone. There are all sorts of feelings flying around – relief, sadness, doubt, fear. But what’s going on behind the doors of nurseries and childcare settings in England? India speaks to Joeli Brearley from Pregnant Then Screwed about the current childcare crisis, child development psychotherapist Graham Music about how childcare impacts children, as well as economist Emily Oster on our choices around childcare. India then meets artists Conway and Young who have found a way to make the invisible labour of childcare pay.
Presented by: India Rakusen. Producer: Georgia Arundell. Series producer: Ellie Sans. Executive producer: Suzy Grant. Commissioning Editor: Rhian Roberts. Original music composed and performed by The Big Moon. Mix and Mastering by Charlie Brandon-King.
Childbirth is deadlier in the United States than in any other high-income nation, according to a study released Tuesday by the Commonwealth Fund that underscores the persistence of maternal mortality.
More than 80 percent of pregnancy-related deaths in the United States are preventable, but factors including a shortage of maternity care providers, limited access to after-birth home visits and lack of guaranteed paid parental leave have increased the risk of maternal mortality, especially for Black people, researchers have found.
In 2022, about 22 maternal deaths happened for every 100,000 live births in the United States. For Black people, that number rose sharply to 49.5 deaths per 100,000, according to the report from the Commonwealth Fund, which conducts independent research on health-care issues. Two out of three maternal deaths occur up to 42 days after birth, highlighting the importance of postpartum care, which only some state Medicaid programs and private health insurers cover.
The study compared 14 high-income countries. It used data from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development — known as the OECD — which tracks health system metrics across 38 high-income countries, and from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Maternal Mortality Review Committees in 36 states.
Although OECD data is widely regarded as the gold standard for international comparisons, the authors note that discrepancies in how countries gather health data may affect the findings.
“We can’t just think of reproductive health at the time of pregnancy because a lot happens after the baby is born. If we’re not supporting women during this crucial time period, we’re never going to solve this problem,” said Munira Z. Gunja, the study’s lead author and a senior researcher at the Commonwealth Fund.
Ten of the countries listed in the report had a death rate of fewer than 10 per 100,000 live births; in 2022, Norway’s maternal death rate was zero.
Laurie C. Zephyrin, senior vice president for advancing health equity at the Commonwealth Fund, said these numbers paint a stark picture of health care in the United States. She called for more focus on community-led investments, including birth centers and health-care teams working with patients in the weeks before and after delivery. She also said health systems should have incentives and accountability involving equitable quality of care, particularly for communities of color.
With 65 percent of maternal deaths occurring after birth, many health experts emphasize the need for not only more prenatal care but an increase in comprehensive postpartum care.
“We want this to be the cultural norm. We want this to be federal policy. We want there to be a big change because we know that we can completely minimize the rate of maternal deaths in this country,” Gunja said.
Health disparities are not unique to the United States. In Australia, Aboriginal people are twice as likely to die of maternal complications compared with other people giving birth, according to the report. Still, experts are hopeful that policy changes and awareness will help bridge the divide and decrease the overall maternal mortality rate in the United States.
The report highlighted the importance of access to midwives, whose work has been described as an important factor in countries with the lowest maternal mortality rates, the report found. Teams involving midwivescould deliver 80 percent of essential maternal care and potentially prevent 41 percent of maternal deaths, 39 percent of neonatal deaths and 26 percent of stillbirths, the report said.
Some studies have found that teams led by midwives offer care comparable, or superior, to care provided by obstetrician-gynecologists. In the United States, Canada and South Korea, OB-GYNs outnumber midwives, but in most other high-income nations, midwives are more prevalent.
The United States and Canada face a shortage of midwives and OB/GYNs. Almost 7 million people in the United States live in areas without hospitals or birth centers offering obstetric care or any obstetric providers. The shortage is expected to worsen.
“We are setting ourselves up for an absolute reproductive health provider shortage, and contributing to that is this interference into the patient-provider relationship and the restrictions that are being placed on us,” said Tamika C. Auguste, a D.C. OB/GYN and chair of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists Foundation Board who was not involved with the study.
The United States is the only high-income nation without a federally mandated paid parental leave policy and universal health care. Only 13 states and D.C. have paid family and medical leave laws; these policies have been shown to improve health outcomes for pregnant people.
“We are in a dire time in our country, where we’re seeing firsthand the impact of these policy changes at the state level and how they are impacting people’s lives,” Zephyrin said.
In recent years, abortion restrictions have sparked debates and legal battles. State legislatures have been enacting increasingly stringent laws aimed at limiting access to abortion services, such as mandatory waiting periods, ultrasound requirements and bans on certain procedures.
The current wave of abortion restrictions has significantly affected broader health-care services, particularly obstetric care. States that have imposed abortion restrictions often face closure of clinics offering a variety of health-care services, such as cancer screenings, contraceptive services and general reproductive health care. As a result, people in these states encounter greater challenges that exacerbate existing health disparities.
“Women’s health-care providers are being driven out of areas due to the restrictions on practicing full-scope reproductive health care,” Auguste said. “This creates areas where there are no health women’s providers for women.”
The factors that led into the creation of their newest album aligns perfectly with the discussions this podcast is about. Just blocks away from the 3rd Police Precinct that burned down during the protests, Twin Cities country-folk band The Gated Community saw many of their recordings lost due a power outage. But being in the center of burning buildings, gunshots, and neighborly concern, Sumanth Gopinath was compelled to write about it. The result: songs about that tumultuous era that culminated in a new album filled with important issues and topics, which fit perfectly with their existing songs and socially conscious perspective as a band. Sitting around one table, I got to hear about the evolution of a band without egos, which is part of what makes The Gated Community so special.
In his new book, Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry (Island Press, 2024), Austin Frerick identifies contemporary “barons” in seven different corporations—such as Cargill, Inc., the Driscoll’s and the conglomerate JAB Holding Company—who have taken over food systems and re-shaped communities. Frerick writes in the introduction, “I refer to these people as ‘barons’ to hearken back to Gilded Age robber barons such as John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan because I believe that we are living in a parallel moment when a few titans have the power to shape industries.”
A fellow at theThurman Arnold Project at Yale University and former Treasury Department official, Frerick has been among the leading experts and researchers in competition policy and antitrust examining food industry consolidation. As co-chair of the Biden campaign’s Agriculture Antitrust Policy Committee, he helped advise several of the leading Democratic presidential candidates on agricultural policy leading up to the 2020 election.
Frerick’s interest in the barons of today’s food-industry is also personal. As a seventh-generation Iowan, Frerick’s interest in antitrust policy began as an undergraduate at Grinnell College where he researched corporate power in Iowa’s slaughterhouse communities.
Barn Raiser spoke with Frerick about how agricultural consolidation has changed the landscape of rural America, and how to bring rural people out from their local Walmart and back onto “Main Street.”
What is it like writing about your home?
It started off as angry and it changed into profound sadness. I think that’s because the origin of the book is in Iowa. “The Hog Barons” chapter is what started this whole thing. This book came about because I published that article in Vox on the hog barons at Iowa Select Farms in Iowa, and I got a book deal from that. I noticed that I changed the tone from when I wrote it as a magazine article and made it into a book chapter. It now reads to me as profoundly sad, like it all kind of fell apart in Iowa. It’s grappling with the Iowa I grew up in and what it’s become, from the anger that’s everywhere to just how industrial the landscape has become.
You wrote that “as farms consolidate, more and more of the wealth leaves rural communities and flows to the Cargills of the world.” You also describe how your hog barons live in a gated community in Des Moines — far from the pollution and working conditions they are creating. A few weeks after your book came out, Jeff and Deb Hansen of Iowa Select Farms, the hog barons you highlight in chapter one, published an op-ed in the Des Moines Register, where they called themselves “stewards of [their] land and communities.” What was your reaction to that op-ed?
They employ their own spokesperson, like someone’s job is to do this for a living, and I just thought it was so poorly written. It reinforced in my head that no one’s ever the villain in their own story. And they’re just delusional. They’re living in a delusional world. They’re just not living in the same world we’re living, and I think the op-ed reflected that. To call themselves stewards of the land with a straight face, it’s just like, no one in Iowa thinks that. That’s an accepted reality at this point.
You hosted a book event in Iowa Falls, where the hog barons are from. What was the reception to your book like there?
Honestly that one shocked me the most. I was actually nervous for that event. I really haven’t been nervous at all during this whole book process. That was the one time I was a little worried for my safety. I turned that tracking thing on my phone so my husband could follow me. It’s a little scary, it’s like you’re going into the heart of the beast. At every book event someone asked me am I worried about my safety, which was, you know, an unnerving question to get all the time. But I had a completely different reaction when I got there. I was shocked. Not only at the turnout—I mean, like 45-50 people—but that there was not one dissenting voice. It was among the most incredible after-talk experiences I’ve had because it felt like a third or half of the room came up and talked to me afterwards, because they all know Jeff and Deb, the hog barons.
They all told me a different story of how Iowa Select Farms bamboozled the community from promises they made and didn’t keep for Des Moines and the intimidation tactics they used to build their empire. Iowa Falls is a beautiful town. It was the epitome of the American Dream for a lot of people and then Jeff and Deb just come in and kind of destroy things to their own personal benefit, and then they hightail it out of there. That’s one thing I kept hearing from people, how they did all this stuff, and then they just left.
In the conclusion of your book, you discuss how “a sense of a distinct regional and local identity” disappears when local businesses disappear. “Unlike the barons, the owners of local businesses live in the communities they serve and are stakeholders in their success. Losing them means losing the glue that binds communities together.” What would need to change for the “Main Street” in rural communities to be revitalized?
This culture of efficiency we live in has stripped us of our community. It views everything as an Excel sheet. There are no coffee beans native to Iowa, you can get coffee anywhere. So much of what you’re buying into is interaction with another human, a sense of being. People bought coffee from my mom because of the human connection and Excel can’t capture that. I was really determined to make that point. Because I saw my mom, who used to work for her own coffee store, and later worked at a corporate Starbucks in Target.
These communities thrive when middle class family farms are around. The biggest way to do that is by putting animals back on the land. These confinements have just destroyed rural communities in every way possible. We also need old fashioned trust busting and antitrust enforcement.
Could you explain how CAFOs are connected to Main Street? How are confinements impacting Main Street?
Denise O’Brien in southwest Iowa really drove home this point to me. She’s a longtime activist, and she talked about how much her street has changed in her lifetime. First of all, one human being can only watch so many cows on pasture—you can’t do robotics for that. Family farms pay local taxes, send their kids to local schools and spend their money locally in town. When that consolidates to one person who owns a big metal shed stuffed full of animals, and the owner of the asset lives in an urban rich community, and then has a low wage worker pop by and take care of things, that’s a very different occupation. It’s the difference between watching a cow on pasture to hauling out dead pig bodies, which is what a lot of that work entails. There’s a whole undercurrent of trauma a lot of these low wage workers experience from basically being surrounded by this incredibly cruel production model that is full of death and destruction.
You write that to change the current system and to “build a more balanced food system” we need to “challenge power directly.” How are you hoping your book will mobilize others to build a more just food system?
That’s my nice Iowa way of rejecting the whole change the food system with your fork mentality that’s been the theory of change the last few decades. To me, it just bifurcated the food system between those that go to the New Pioneer Co-op in Iowa City and those go to Walmart. No one’s ever going to get you a seat at the table. So you have to fight for it.
Mariameno Kapa-Kingi, Te Pāti Māori Member of Parliament for Te Tai Tokerau, raised eyebrows recently when she claimed in parliament that the government of had a “mission to exterminate Māori.”
Kapa-Kingi was speaking on a proposed change to the processes under which children forcibly removed from their parents by the child welfare agency Oranga Tamariki are placed in foster care.
“The theory of the Minister is that Oranga Tamariki’s governing principles should be colour-blind, which is just another word for white supremacy, because to say we are all one people is really to say we should all be white people,” she explained.
Mariameno Kapa-Kingi, Te Pāti Māori Member of Parliament for Te Tai Tokerau. Photo: Tania Whyte
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon described the speech as ‘completely out of line’ and ‘unhelpful.’ Opposition leader Chris Hipkins agreed that it was unhelpful, adding “It’s certainly not language that I agree with.”
Te Pāti Māori co-leaders backed up their MP, however. Rawiri Waititi called it a brilliant speech. “This is how we feel and we will not be told how to feel,” Waititi said. “Many of the policy changes that this Government absolutely makes us feel like there [are] huge extermination processes and policies [aimed at] the very existence of tangata whenua in this country, so it was absolutely the right wording.”
When the facts don’t stack up, you can always appeal to feelings.
Co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer concurred. She could hardly do otherwise, since she herself had used similar language in respect of another of the government’s reforms. Her own response last November to the incoming government’s move to roll back some recent restrictions on sales of cigarettes was equally immoderate: “There is absolute deliberate intention of this government, as I said, to create systemic genocide,” she said on that occasion.
Te Pāti Māori Co-leaders Rawiri Waititi and Debbie Ngarewa-Packer
The question, however, is not how Rawiri Waititi or anyone else feels about anything, but whether the claim is true. And as everyone who has not completely lost their head knows, such claims are preposterous. Genocide is not just cultural assimilation, but the physical extermination of a people. It is inconceivable without mass violence and ethnic killings.
The closest thing to ethnic violence against Māori on such a scale in New Zealand history was during the land wars of the 19th century. And even that was not a war of genocide, but a war of dispossession. As soon as the colonial authorities had their hands securely on the land, the fate of the dispossessed Māori became a matter of relative indifference to them.
A repeal of anti-smoking legislation, or of child welfare legislation – irrespective of one’s attitude to that repeal – does not constitute mass violence. To use such terms to describe what is happening in New Zealand today only debases the language and renders the terms themselves meaningless. And in doing so, it disorients anyone who takes the term for good coin, concealing the true nature of the problem, and disarming anyone who seeks to address it.
What drives Te Pāti Māori to resort to such histrionics and attention-seeking language?
The answer to that question lies in what Te Pāti Māori is. It is an electoral formation and nothing more. It has no existence outside of Parliament and its associated vote-gathering machinery. It is a parliamentary voice without a movement, like a head without a body, and is therefore powerless, despite its presence in parliament, to affect the course of politics in any significant way.
This powerlessness was exposed in the immediate aftermath of last year’s election, when, buoyed by its electoral gains and alarmed by the new government’s right-leaning course, it called for a National Day of Action to coincide with the opening of the new Parliament in early December. The declared kaupapa was to demonstrate the “beginning of a unified Aotearoa approach to the government’s assault on Tangata Whenua and Te Tiriti o Waitangi”. Their hype included the prediction that “The movement that we’re seeing from Māori will make the foreshore and seabed hīkoi look like something extremely small.” This was a reference to the protest of twenty years ago, in which 15,000 Māori and others converged on Parliament, and which triggered the Labour Party’s Māori MPs to quit to form Te Pāti Māori.
Nothing remotely comparable to this occurred in the December 2023 Day of Action, despite generous support of the action by the liberal news media, which publicised the assembly points in advance. A few hundred marched in Wellington, and groups of a few dozen rallied in various other towns and cities. In the largest working class concentration, Auckland, a handful of car drivers attempted to disrupt traffic on the motorways, with little effect. It was a rather stark revelation of the narrowness of support for Te Pāti Māori, especially among workers.
When its fighting talk in parliament produces zero effect, the party therefore has few options except to open their mouth wider, shout louder, and use more extreme language in order to win the ear of the ruling class. Not just ‘racism’, but ‘white supremacy’ becomes the order of the day. Not just ‘discrimination’ but ‘extermination’. Not just ‘extermination’, but ‘systemic genocide.’
Don’t be fooled by the truculent posturing and coarseness of tone: these appeals are directed to the rulers, asking “please, listen to us!” They hope to frighten the ruling layers into adjusting their course.
(On his side, Winston Peters of New Zealand First, the counterpart of Te Pāti Māori on the right wing of capitalist politics, uses equally hyperbolic language in his denunciations of Te Pāti Māori, accusing them of “cultural Marxism” and of wanting “anarchy – headed by their Māori elitist cronies turning this country into something akin to apartheid.” Believe me, Winston, nothing could be more alien to Marxism than the politics of feelings!)
But neither the government nor the broader ruling class will listen to Te Pāti Māori. They defend above all else the dictatorship of profit, and the rate of profit has now fallen to the point where it is incompatible with some of the most basic social rights and needs, such as affordable housing, equitable access to health care, basic infrastructure like water and roads, and more. Their ability to grant even small concessions is strictly limited: on the contrary, their present focus is to restore their profits by making even deeper inroads against our wages and social rights.
And among the things capitalist society today is incapable of delivering is the protection of children from violence. The child welfare ministry Oranga Tamariki has been in a permanent state of turmoil for many years, over the question of uplifting children from their parents. It is no closer to resolving this than it was five years ago, when a shockingNewsroom documentary by reporter Melanie Reid exposed the brutality of child ‘uplifts’.
On the one hand, Oranga Tamariki is rightly excoriated for the tearing apart of Māori families in circumstances where it is not justified, such as the case documented in the 2019 documentary, causing long-term trauma. On the other hand, it gets criticised – again with full justification, at least in some cases – for failing to protect the lives of children, who suffer violent deaths at the hands of their family members at a high rate in New Zealand.
Coming under fire from both these opposite directions, the institution lurches from one policy to the opposite, according to the nature of the most recent scandal. At the time of the 2019 documentary, Oranga Tamariki was uplifting hundreds of babies each year, in response to criticism for failing to prevent the violent deaths of babies at the hands of family members. About 70% of these uplifted infants were Māori. (Māori make up about 20% of the population). Oranga Tamariki was under pressure to act pre-emptively in many of these cases, before there was any clear evidence of danger to the child – and therefore these decisions were inevitably based on rumour, prejudice, and racial profiling of Māori as ‘bad parents’. In many cases, the decision to uplift was taken in secret, without any prior discussion with the family concerned.
An intense public outcry followed the documentary. Protests outside Parliament demanded an end to the unjustified snatching of babies, especially Māori babies, from their parents’ arms. The protests denounced the lasting trauma inflicted on the affected Māori families, and the damage to the social fabric caused by the high rate of children being taken into state care. A petition called Hands off Our Tamariki (children) gained 17,377 signatures.
Protest at Parliament demands “Hands off Tamariki forever” Photo: Lynn Grieveson
These protests prompted a switch to the opposite policy. Following multiple inquiries into the functioning of Oranga Tamariki, an amendment to the governing principles of Oranga Tamariki was introduced in 2019, called Section 7AA, which bound the institution to uphold the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi in matters concerning Māori children. In practice this meant placing uplifted babies with members of their own whānau, or with their wider iwi, wherever possible. Labour Party Minister for Children Kelvin Davis proclaimed “This report will end uplifts as we have known them. While there will always be a need for some children to be taken into care, this should only happen after all avenues with community and whanau have been exhausted.” The rate of uplifts fell steadily, from 963 uplifts in 2018 to 251 in 2022.
This was a small but significant gain for the whole working class. It pushed back state interference in Māori families and strengthened the bonds of solidarity within our class.
The death of another young child at the hands of his family has halted that momentum, and now the pendulum is poised to swing all the way back again. Wellington toddler Ruthless-Empire Wall was beaten to death by family members unknown, just shy of his second birthday, in October 2023 – after the boy’s uncle had alerted Oranga Tamariki to the dangerous environment he was living in, and requested them to place the boy in his care.
Now the government, at the behest of its Act Party component, seeks to restore the policy of wholesale uplifts. Act campaigned on the issue in last year’s election, and repeal of Section 7AA was part of the coalition agreement between the three parties that formed the new government in November 2023. The campaign is headed by Act’s Karen Chhour, the incoming Minister for Children and for the Prevention of Family and Sexual Violence. Chhour, who is Māori herself and was raised in state care, presented her own petition to repeal Section 7AA, which received more than 13,400 signatures.
Chhour claims that Section 7AA has led to Māori children being removed from safe and loving homes because their caregivers weren’t of Māori descent. “I consider that section 7AA allows the treatment of children and young people as an identity group first, and a person second, it creates a divisive system that has had a negative impact on caregivers. This repeal will make sure that Oranga Tamariki is entirely child-centric and is making decisions that ensure a child’s wellbeing and best interest. Over successive years, Oranga Tamariki has failed our most vulnerable children, and in part that has been because of Section7AA,” she said.
Karen Chhour Photo: Doug Mountain
Chhour presents no evidence to back these assertions, a point noted by the Waitangi Tribunal which entered the debate. If children are actually being torn from existing foster homes where they have already bonded with their caregivers, simply because their caregivers were not of Māori descent, that could be a matter of legitimate concern. But it is incumbent on Chhour to prove that this is in fact happening. Since she does not do so – beyond claiming to have seen it herself – this appears to be a spurious claim.
Nor does she make any attempt to explain why or how adherence to the Treaty of Waitangi should lead to Oranga Tamariki making decisions that are not in the child’s best interest. Her unsupported assertion hints at an unspoken racist explanation: that Māori parents and foster parents are less than competent caregivers. This is a debate with high stakes.
Thus, the issue Mariameno Kapa-Kingi was attempting to address is a real one, and the repeal of Section 7AA should be opposed. It is the ability to recognise a real problem, combined with the inability to do anything about it, that generates the flailing of arms in Parliament, and the politics of middle class hysteria in general.
Even if the repeal of 7AA is defeated, the social scourge of violence against children can only be expected to worsen in the short term. It is a consequence of, among other things, the divided, weakened state of the working class, which is increasingly being torn apart by the ordinary workings of the capitalist economy, exacerbated by the actions of its government and state.
Such violence against children is connected with massively increased economic and other pressures on families: the inflation eroding our wages, the growing insecurity of employment, the cuts to social services like health care, including mental health care, the breakdown of attendance at school, and above all, the housing shortage, which hurls ever-wider layers of workers down into the horrors of drug-riddled and gang-infested ‘emergency housing.’
Violence against children is closely connected with the scourge of violence against women, in which New Zealand ranks so shamefully high in the world. It is worth noting that Te Pāti Māori, along with the Labour, National and Green parties, supported legislation that undermined women’s single-sex spaces, including women’s refuges from domestic violence, by requiring them to open their doors to males. They took an active part in the attack which shut down a women’s rally in Auckland in March 2023 by force and violence. This fact alone should nullify their claim to speak in defence of children.
As long as these social conditions continue, there will continue to be situations in which children have to be removed from their parents’ care in the interests of their own safety. But such removals can also provide an opening for hostile class interests to drive in a wedge that tears apart working class families. This has been done disproportionately, though not exclusively, against Māori, who make up a substantial component of the working class. It is the built-in tendency of intervention by the capitalist state and its agencies like Oranga Tamariki.
It falls to a revived movement of the whole working class to oversee such situations and to ensure that the ties between children and their whānau are maintained as far as possible during their removal, and that they are returned to their parents’ custody as quickly as possible. Strengthening solidarity within the working class, along with raising the social status of women, is the road to ending the violence against children in a more permanent way.
This is not a new problem for the working class worldwide. Farrell Dobbs, a leader of the historic Teamsters Union strikes which organised truck drivers in the US Midwest in the 1930s, once described how these strikes took on the character of the mass social movement. The Teamsters Union Local 574 ‘flying squads’, which had been organised to shut down strike-breaking trucking operations across the city, expanded their operations to intervene when the union got news of unemployed workers being evicted from their homes for non-payment of rent. The arrival of the union flying squad quickly ended the attempts by landlords and their deputy sheriffs to evict the worker.
Farrell Dobbs, (with images from the 1934 strikes behind him)
“In a few instances, the union even adopted children,” Dobbs said.
He explained that at the time it was common for bourgeois charities to identify working-class families that in their view were unable to adequately provide for their children, and the charities would then arrange to have the children adopted out, against the wishes of their parents. The union organisation stepped in to prevent this happening, finding foster parents from among the union ranks to care for the children temporarily, so that they could be returned to their parents at the earliest opportunity. (The talks where Dobbs tells the story of the Minneapolis strikes are available on YouTube, and are very inspiring to listen to in full. Dobbs describes the adoption of children in the third talk, beginning about the 24th minute.)
Children demonstrate in support of their unionist parents
At this point there is little outward sign of such a revived fighting labour movement in New Zealand, so this political course is far from obvious to see.
What is abundantly clear, however, is that Te Pāti Māori, and all those like them who pursue the opposite course – of appealing to the capitalist rulers and relying on their parliamentary apparatus and state institutions – quickly find themselves in a blind alley.
Errollyn Wallen’s memoir Becoming a Composer is a look into the mind of the composer as well as the life of one. Born in Belize but now based in the far-flung north of Scotland, where she sometimes inhabits a lighthouse, she works at a brisk pace, composing prolifically for orchestra, chamber ensemble, choir, and over twenty operas. Her major public commissions have included music for The Last Night of the Proms, the Paralympic Opening Ceremony, and the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, and she joins us from her home in the Orkney Islands to talk about Becoming a Composer, and becoming a composer.
Music heard in the show:
Title: Horseplay i. Dark and mysterious Artist: The Continuum Ensemble/Philip Headlam Composer: Errollyn Wallen Album: The Girl In My Alphabet Label: Avie AV0006
Title: Dervish Artist: Matthew Sharp (cello), Dominic Harlan (piano) Composer: Errollyn Wallen Album: The Girl In My Alphabet Label: Avie AV0006
Muscovite Ivan Astashin knows firsthand what human rights activism, Russian prisons, and terrorism and arson charges look like. As a young man, he was close to Eduard Limonov’s National Bolsheviks and was arrested as part of the high-profile Autonomous Combat Terrorist Organization (ABTO) case, in which a group of young men were charged with a series of arson and terrorist attacks.
At the turn of the 2000s and 2010s, this story was widely discussed in the media, sparking debates over whether the arson attacks were justified. Astashin was convicted of torching an FSB district office in 2012 and spent over nine years behind bars.
Upon his release, Astashin worked for Andrei Babushkin’s Committee for Civil Rights and was involved in defending the rights of prison inmates. In February 2022, Astashin joined the protests against the invasion of Ukraine and was soon forced to leave Russia.
Astashin is now involved in the campaign Solidarity Zone, which aids Russians who have been arrested for radical anti-war protests.
How did the “Solidarity Zone” come into being?
When full-scale war broke out, large protests took place in many Russian cities, and criminal charges were filed against protesters, both charges of “violence against police officers,” which have been routine at protest rallies (police officers themselves use violence, but they don’t pay for it), and charges that were newish for Russia.
There was Anastasia Levashova, who threw a Molotov cocktail at police officers. There was the case against Anton Zhuchkov and Vladimir Sergeyev: they were detained near Pushkin Square in Moscow on 6 March 2022 on their way to an anti-war rally. A Molotov cocktail was found in Sergeyev’s backpack. The police did not know what they guys were planning, so they were able to accomplish part of what they’d planned. Zhuchkov and Sergeyev had planned to commit suicide publicly at an anti-war rally as a sign of protest—they were so desperate. As they were being detained, they took lethal doses of methadone. The police failed to notice this. They put them in a paddy wagon and beat them up there, but on the way to the station the police realized that their detainees were quite sick and took them to hospital. They were saved in the intensive care unit at the Sklifosovsky Institute.
Zhuchkov and Sergeyev were sent from the intensive care unit to a pretrial detention center after being charged with “attempted disorderly conduct.” According to police investigators, the men had been planning to set fire to empty paddy wagons. When detained, Sergeyev said that they “wanted to torch a couple of paddy wagons,” emphasizing that it was empty vehicles they had intended to target. At first, we wanted to find out the address where we could write to Zhuchkov and Sergeyev at the pretrial detention center, so we asked OVD Info, but we also learned that OVD Info would not defend them, as theirs was not a peaceful protest.
We realized that none of the existing human rights organizations was willing to take on such cases. We decided to take on Zhuchkov and Sergeyev’s case: we published the address to which people could send them letters and found them a lawyer. A little later, the authorities started charging people with arson attacks on military recruitment centers, and so we decided that we should also aid such people. By September 2022, we had launched Solidarity Zone’s social media accounts and expanded our work.
Do I understand correctly that the attitude of OVD Info, Memorial, and other human rights organizations to people engaging in “non-peaceful” anti-war protests has changed? Have their motives become clearer to these human rights organizations?
Yes, their attitude has changed. As I see it, it changed after the military mobilization, when people began setting fire to military recruitment offices en masse in protest. Now it is easier to get announcements of fundraisers for such detainees reposted. But the position of human rights organizations has remained the same.
We had a public discussion with Sergei Davidis, head of Memorial’s Support for Political Prisoners project. He said these people should certainly be supported, that in most cases they have been wrongfully charged with violating Article 205 of the Russian Criminal Code (“terrorism”), but that whereas the criminal code articles on “discrediting” the army and “disseminating fake news” about the army clearly contradict Russian law and international conventions, and people charged with violating these laws can be designated political prisoners without a detailed examination of their cases, then with regard to people who attempt to torch military recruitment centers, Memorial examines the cases in detail and is guided by international criteria. They have designated twenty such people political prisoners, but the number of these cases is many times greater.
All human rights organizations have their own focus. OVD Info deals with cases related to peaceful protest; First Department, with high treason cases; and the Net Freedoms Project, with freedom of expression cases. Our cases do not fit these criteria. Before we started, there was no organization which was willing to support such people.
Is your campaign volunteer-driven? How many people are you assisting now? How do you define the people you support?
We support people who have been arrested for anti-war protests, for radical anti-war actions, although nowadays virtually all anti-war protests are radical. We handle cases where people actually set fire to a military recruitment center or a railroad signal relay box, and cases where they were merely planning to do such things.
Or they weren’t even planning to do such things, but the security services have fabricated a case against them, alleging that they were planning to torch a military recruitment center, as happened to Ivan Kudryashov.
We are currently supporting nineteen political prisoners. In almost all cases we pay their defense lawyers and organize fundraisers to this end, and in many cases we are also involved in arranging for parcels and care packages to be sent to the prisoners and replenishing their personal commissary accounts at their detention facilities. We talk publicly about their cases and similar criminal cases. We did a count in September 2023, and at that time there were around three hundred people in Russia facing criminal charges over radical anti-war protests. There was no further info on half of these people: we could not find out whether they were under arrest or wanted by the police.
We try to cover such cases as much as we can because we are a volunteer organization: we don’t get paid or have permanent funding, although we would certainly like to have such things. We raise money for political prisoners through cryptocurrency and PayPal donations. We also do personal ruble-denominated fundraisers to pay lawyers through the platform Zaodno (“In Cahoots”).
In the first quarter of 2024, we spent 900 thousand rubles (approx. 9,100 euros) paying for care packages and one-off visits by defense lawyers. When lawyers defend our prisoners in court, we organize personal fundraisers. Sometimes we hold events in Europe to raise money, and sometimes other campaigns hold events to raise money for us.
Let’s imagine that a programmer in Tver has been arrested for attempting to set fire to a military recruitment center. His relatives are scared: they are unlikely to want to do business with a volunteer campaign based in Europe. How do you reach out to those accused of anti-war protest?
Actually, we are increasingly being approached by relatives of arrestees as we are becoming famous. We are recommended in various chat rooms dealing with support for political prisoners. Often people contact OVD Info, and they suggest contacting us.
Aftermath of an arson attack on a military recruitment center in Kemerovo
We also search for information on detainees ourselves. If you have at least a first name and a surname, you can find the rest of the information in the public domain. But sometimes you cannot find out which thirty-year-old native of Voronezh has been detained. There are such case, unfortunately. Information can be obtained when a person is added to the list of “terrorists and extremists” via court filing. When a person is in the database, the locale of the pretrial detention center where they are held is identified as well. In many cities there is only one pretrial detention center, so we can dispatch a lawyer there to offer assistance to the arrestee and get their take on the case.
Some argue that publicity is not always beneficial to defendants in political criminal cases given the current conditions. Does Solidarity Zone not take this approach?
Our opinion is that publicity is beneficial in most cases. Despite everything, the security services still don’t like their lawlessness to become public. This still entails inspections, which, although they are formal procedures, are still unpleasant for them.
Publicity is a defense against torture and coercion. Also, you cannot raise money to pay a lawyer if there is no publicity. Without publicity, a person will not receive letters from supporters and well-wishers, but letters are very important. Publicity has practically no effect on the sentence nowadays, neither positively nor negatively.
So the lawyer is the prisoner’s link with the outside world? If a person ends up in this situation, they will still get a brutal sentence of ten, fifteen or twenty years or more, won’t they?
The lawyer is the only person who can visit someone in pretrial detention centers and penal colonies without limits on the number and length of visits. During the investigation phase of a case, relatives usually do not have visitation rights, especially if the individual has not pleaded guilty. So the support of a lawyer is very important.
As time goes on, this is less and less the case, but what the lawyer does can still affect the sentence. If a person has a court-appointed defense lawyer, they often tell them to agree to every deal offered by the prosecution and to sign every paper they ask them to sign, so the sentence will be shorter. Ultimately, however, the investigators and prosecutors add new charges, and the sentence is huge. But if there is a lawyer who really defends their client, they at least make sure that no new charges are filed.
A lawyer can go after the gross violations on the part of the state. Take Ivan Kudryashov: there was no evidence in his case, and so he should have been acquitted. But there are no acquittals in Russia, so he was sentenced to six years for “planning a terrorist act.” This is a short sentence by today’s standards, but his lawyer got it reduced on appeal to four years and ten months.
Although Ilya Baburin was just sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for violating six articles of the Criminal Code. For one incident—planning to torch a military recruitment center—he was charged with violating four different articles, for one and the same thing! And the lawyer could do nothing.
Ilya Baburin in court
There are news stories of phone scammers conning people into torching military enlistment office, of people being offered money on Telegram to torch railway signal relay boxes. Do you handle these cases?
We have been approached about such cases. Those people shouldn’t be in jail, of course. It is doubly cynical that the pensioners who were conned have also been charged with terrorism, although in terrorism cases what matters most is the person’s intent. We have limited resources, however, so we only assist people who take an anti-war stance, which is an important criterion for us.
You also have the criterion that the defendant not testify against anyone else. Whether they pleaded guilty or not doesn’t matter.
What matters is that they didn’t willingly testify against others. Anything can happen under torture.
The number of people who go down the road of torching military recruitment centers and railway relay boxes has not been decreasing, has it? Not all those who oppose the war and Putin have left the country or gone to jail, have they?
On the contrary. Whereas previously we tried to write about all arrests on such charges, we now realize that our small team cannot cover all the arrests because they occur almost daily. Often little is known about the detainees, but the news reports say that the person was on a mission for the Free Russia Legion, meaning that the person has an anti-war stance.
When a person engages in such actions, they seemingly first of all undergo an existential crisis because they live in a quasi-fascist empire that has also attacked its neighbors. Does this person want to do something even though they realize that their life may be in danger?
Yeah, that’s right. In the cases that are well known, the defendants say they wanted to do something, to take radical action by way of protesting.
In 2022, Navalny supporters were often detained for such actions, such as Igor Paskar, who threw a Molotov cocktail at an FSB building, or Vladimir Zolotarev, who set fire to a Russian National Guard building in Komsomolsk-on-Amur. People used to go to protest rallies, but then there were no more protest rallies. Another motive we can observe among such people (Zolotarev and the anarchist Alexei Rozhkov, who set fire to a military recruitment center in March 2022, spoke of it) is that they couldn’t tear themselves away from the news about Ukraine. At some point it was impossible for them to just read all of it: they had to do something as well.
When the military mobilization began, people realized that all of this was not happening somewhere far away, but could affect them. Many people realized that they would go to jail, but they went to commit arson because they thought it was better to go to jail than to go fight a criminal war. Roman Nasryev and Alexei Nuriyev were sentenced to nineteen years each for attempting to set fire to a military registration office in the Chelyabinsk Region. This phrase in Nasryev’s correspondence jumps out: “It’s time to start—or we’ll die as slaves.”
There are now people who are primed for a long-term confrontation with the military machine, for guerrilla actions, and for greater degrees of security. And if you look at the reports of sabotage, not every one leads to the capture of the perpetrators.
It is clear what could have prompted radical action in February 2022. In the autumn of 2022, it was the mobilization. But how can it be that someone tolerated the war for a long time and decides to act only now? Or are these just “guerrillas” who have avoided capture for a long time?
That is a good question, to which I have no answer. We know generally about those detained for radical protests in 2022, but there is still little data even for 2023. We can assume that some people went abroad in 2022, but had to return to Russia because they could not settle down here. Some people may not have resisted in 2022 because they hoped that everything would end quickly, but now they see that nothing ends by itself.
The case of Sergei Okrushko can be cited as an example. He is Ukrainian but has a Russian passport. In 2022, he went to Moldova, whence he wanted to enter Ukraine and work on humanitarian projects. But he was not allowed to enter Ukraine because of his Russian passport. He was forced to return to Russia. He got a job at an oil refinery (as an electrician) and set off an explosion there.
Are you also a wanted man in Russia? What are the charges?
The authorities have not yet responded to inquiries about what the criminal charges are, although my lawyer submitted a request over a month ago.
After this interview was recorded, Moscow’s Cheremushkinsky District Court published information that it had been petitioned to arrest Ivan Astashin in absentia on charges of “condoning terrorism.” Other details of the case are still unknown.
The Russian Justice Ministry has once again designated Republic a “foreign agent.” This happened for the first time in 2021, but at that time a legal entity with which we soon severed ties was placed on the register of foreign agents. Now the publication itself has been put on the register. We are charged with “shaping a negative image of the Russian Federation,” as well as publishing “inaccurate information about the decisions taken by Russian federal officials and the policies they pursue.” I would like to remind you that Republic has always been financed solely by subscriptions, and Justice Ministry’s unjust ruling is a great reason to subscribe (if you are not subscribed already) or to renew your subscription.
And now, as usual on Saturdays, here are links to our latest articles and the best stories of the past week.
In “Power,” Ivan Davydov attempts to explain the psychology of Russians who have taken a position neither for nor against the war, but are “unopposed” to it. They probably make up the majority, but what explains their stance? A habitual mindset that regards political power as a force of nature, with which nothing can be done and which is better to ride out. “This stance is ethically vulnerable, but it is warranted by the know-how of several generations and supported by the self-preservation instinct,” argues Davydov.
[…]
Dmitry Kolezev, Editor-in-Chief, Republic
P.S. This is my last newsletter as editor-in-chief of Republic. I am leaving the post of my own free will. I announced my resignation a week ago: it has nothing to do with the Justice Ministry’s decision. I thank the authors, editors, and readers of Republic for the three years we have spent together. As they say in such cases, take care of Republic. And take care of yourselves, too.
Source: Republic Saturday newsletter, 1 June 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader, who has (mostly) happily subscribed to Republic for several years running. I will definitely be renewing my subscription later today to show them my support.
A “For Victory!” banner on the facade of the Contemporary, a long-shuttered movie house in Ivanovo, Russia. Photo: Ivan Davydov/Republic
Since the death of public opinion polling, people who are professionally obliged to speculate about Russian politics and make predictions about the future have been looking for signs literally everywhere, gradually turning from analysts into soothsayers.
For example, a respected opposition political scientist based in Europe recently wrote that “General Popov’s arrest may generate serious friction between society and the authorities.” By the way, this same political scientist has also been trying to gauge the mindset of Russians by counting the poop (excuse me!) and other unpleasant emojis that Russians (presumably) post as comments on the Telegram channels of Russian government officials and pro-regime propagandists.
He is an optimist, of course, confident that the regime is about to collapse. Poop emojis don’t lie!
Another political scientist, a pessimistic lady, on the contrary, gazes at Russia from her distant American vantage point, but does not even condescend to comment—she simply reposts a photo from a certain bookstore where Darya Dugina’s works are displayed on a separate shelf.
And really, what good are words? One glance at the photo is enough to get the whole point, to forget forever about terrible present-day Russia and wave it goodbye.
Nor am I an insider, alas. I’m not endowed with secret knowledge, and it has been a long time since I perused the “real polls” said to be commissioned by the presidential administration and other important agencies. Frankly speaking, I’m not even sure that such studies are still being conducted.
But there are still some advantages to being a participant observer, a person looking at Russia from the inside. In any case, I will risk sharing my own observations.
Has the Russian state been expanding into the cultural realm (since we mentioned bookstores)? Does it seek to reshape culture for propaganda needs? Yes, undoubtedly. It would be foolish to deny the obvious. And it has been invading more and more realms, where, until recently, it seemed one could sit back and wait out the storm. It has finally gone after “bad” books in a big way, it seems. Museums have also been toeing the line. Right now, for example, there are two exhibitions related to the special military operation underway in Moscow: Behind the Lines, a large-scale project at the Russian State Historical Museum, in whose launch [pro-war TV presenter] Vladimir Solovyov personally had a hand; and War Correspondents, at Zaryadye Park, in which the work of today’s TV correspondents is shown as a continuation of the work of journalists during the Second World War, in full compliance with the basic propaganda narratives. Regional museums have not been lagging behind the capital’s museums either.
Although television has indeed reduced the number of programs dealing with the ins and outs of the special military operation, even now they take up most of the airtime on the major channels.
The information warriors have been firing all guns. The only question is their firepower’s effectiveness.
In February and March 2022, the special military operation was undoubtedly the main topic of all conversations, from television studios to kitchens. Emotions were voiced in a variety of ways (and I wouldn’t say that enthusiastic support prevailed in the kitchens and subways), but rather quickly it all shifted to the outskirts of public opinion. There has been a “normalization” (that’s the accepted term, it seems) that has equally outraged both the vocal pacifists and the supporters of an immediate nuclear strike on Washington, the latter, perhaps, even more so. Complaints that no one on the home front cares about the war front are the leitmotif of many posts on the social media channels of the Zeds [Russian pro-war activists].
The zed (since we are on the subject of signs) is also an important sign. Nowadays you can find this letter in ordinary Russian cities, but it is no longer as prolific as it once was. There is, as a rule, one, big, main zed (Z) somewhere on a government building in the city center, but that’s all. And even that one is faded, mounted there long ago and thus overly familiar to the point of invisibility.
There are, of course, the Defense Ministry posters for recruiting contract soldiers. But they seem out of context as it were, speaking as they do about the chance to “join up with people just like you,” solve your financial and social problems, and, ultimately, rake in hefty paychecks. They are outside of time and devoid of specifics, of references to reality. We see a rugged-looking man in soldier’s kit, the Russian tricolor flag, tantalizing numbers….
If we speak, as is fashionable, of the current Russian regime as restorationist, we can argue that the country’s masters have succeeded in restoring only one thing—total depoliticization, the leadership’s fear of any doings that might be unwieldy and thus regarded as political. This was typical of the late-period Soviet Union (and ended overnight, we should note, when Gorbachev loosened the screws a bit). Cities that are like enclaves, people who are like atoms, the plight of the Russian opposition in the twenty-teens, and the isolated (yes, as yet isolated) crackdowns have vividly reminded the doubters what happens to eager beavers.
In this sense, nothing has changed in recent years. Perhaps the intensifying propaganda shows that the authorities have new ideas in this regard, that they have decided to make their words about the nation’s unprecedented unity mean something. It is unclear why, though: the regime will get nothing but problems by politicizing the populace. So far all these efforts have failed, however. The Master and Margarita and 1984, not the works of the Dugin family, are still atop the Russian bestseller lists. Brought to museums by their teachers, schoolchildren yawn and poke at their smartphones, while adults are almost absent. The escalating propaganda makes people neurotic rather than political, but since Soviet times the populace has had a remedy—an effective remedy—for countering this neuroticization.
It’s all the business of the folks in power. As long as it doesn’t directly concern you, don’t make a move, nothing good will come of your flailing. Political power is a force of nature, an element beyond human control, so try to have as little contact with it as possible. When asked whether you are for or against something, answer evasively, “I’m unopposed to it.” Better yet, hang up immediately if pollsters call you. The times are such that they can be even more dangerous than bank fraudsters.
Talking to crooks may make you poorer, but it certainly won’t get you sent to prison.
This stance is ethically vulnerable, but it is warranted by the know-how of several generations and supported by the self-preservation instinct. This stance poses obvious problems for the future—for any future, both the one cherished by fans of rights and freedoms and the one imagined by armchair slayers of Washington.
Open Space is a project that supports grassroots activists. It has two sites, in Moscow and St. Petersburg, with co-working spaces, a human rights center, and a psychological center. The Moscow site is at odds with the pro-government movement SERB, known for its provocations against the opposition. Republic correspondent Nikita Zolotarev is often at Open Space, sometimes as a volunteer. That was how he found himself at the Moscow co-working space last Saturday, where he was detained along with other visitors on the basis of a complaint filed by the “Serbs,” who were assisting the police, and then spent several hours at the Basmannoye police precinct. Here is how it went down.
“It’s showtime,” SERB leader Igor Beketov said on his movement’s video stream before knocking on Open Space’s door. He and another SERB activist, Pyotr Rybakov, were able to get inside after the police arrived.
SERB’s video recap of the SERB-assisted police raid on Open Space Moscow, as posted on their Telegram channel on 19 May 2024
“A circus is about to kick off,” a young woman sitting across from me named Thiya texted a friend at 6:09 p.m. A knock on the door distracted her from solving a strength of materials problem. Nine minutes later, she sent a new message, writing that “the Serbs and the police” had come in.
The [pro-regime] activists walked around filming anything they saw as “extremist propaganda” and drawing the attention of police officers to it. Thus, halting near a painted copy of “The Brotherly Kiss,” the famous photo of Brezhnev kissing [East German leader Erich] Honecker, Pyotr and Igor began explaining something to a policeman. “What does this mean?” Rybakov asked, pointing to the drawing. “Since Soviet leaders could do it, it turns out that…,” he answered his own question uncertainly. The police officer remained expressively silent and photographed the image just in case.
The photograph known as “The Brotherly Kiss” was taken in 1979 at a meeting between Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker in Berlin during the GDR’s thirtieth anniversary celebrations. Source: Regis Bossu/Sygma/Corbis
Then they went looking for members of Left Socialist Action (Levoe sotsialisticheskoe deistvie, or LevSD, for short), having prudently abbreviated the name of the organization to “LSD,” because, after perusing “the page of this movement, [they] saw that it does not smell of any left-wing movement.” What exactly they did not fancy about “LSD” on a day when the latter were holding “an evening of letters from some political prisoners” remains unclear.
“They came and almost broke down the door,” recalls Anastasia, who organized the event. The SERB activists asked her why her movement was holding an event in support of Ukraine, a conclusion at which they arrived after seeing a couple of posts with Ukrainian flags on Lev SD’s Telegram channel. Anastasia tried to persuade them that such “flags are posted after the massive shelling of Ukrainian cities to express condolences.” A brief discussion ensued, whose acme was the following question from Pyotr Rybakov: “Did you see Soviet people publishing posts in support of Germany during the bombing of Dresden?”
This discussion was witnessed by Anastasia’s friend Andrei, a expert on the history of Yugoslavia. He was surprised that Pyotr “probably didn’t know that there was no Telegram back then” and asked what, in Pyotr’s opinion, “equates the Great Patriotic War [World War Two] with current events.” The “Serb” responded by comparing Zelensky’s regime to Hitler’s, dubbing it “absolutely fascist.” After mentioning NATO, they smoothly segued to the bombing of Yugoslavia. This discussion did not last long: Pyotr soon ran out of arguments against the facts Andrei presented. The culmination of their conversation was when Andrei asked whether the SERB activist had read Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, to which Pyotr replied that he had “never read Bunin.” Andrei recalls this conversation with a little annoyance: he says that if they had more time, he would have tried to wheedle some “less cannibalistic” information out of this “ideologically charged man” and “make him think.”
SERB leader Igor Beketov (aka Gosha Tarasevich) and his associate Pyotr Rybakov, both wearing black-and-orange scarves. Source: theins.ru.
At 6:32 p.m., a police officer let some of the people who wanted to smoke out by going out with them. It was as if he knew what the visitors were going to experience a little later.
In addition to writing letters to political prisoners event, a session of board games under the auspices of the Libertarian Party of Russia was being held in the basement of the co-working space. As organizer Vladislav tells it, the libertarians were having a quiet time when Open Space volunteer Sasha suddenly appeared and said, “We’ve got a situation: the police have showed up, the ‘Serbs’ have showed, but so far everything is fine.”
“We took note. I won at Jenga: my buddy had happily wrecked the tower,” recalls Vladislav. After that, he went to make coffee on the first floor of Open Space—where he saw the “Serbs” writing a complaint to the police.
At that moment, Andrei, the expert on Yugoslavia, made a terrible blunder for which he repented long afterwards: he offered the provocateurs Roshen caramels, a Ukrainian brand. On the table with the tea bags there was a metal box, where volunteers put sweets that keep for a long time. The ill-fated caramels were in this box on the day in question.
“You can’t get these candies so easily in Moscow—you have to make an effort to find them,” the SERB leader noted.
Forgetting about their complaint to the police, the “Serbs” paced the room talking about Roshen candies. Everyone else in the room was silent, listening attentively to their arguments. But since the entire candy argument consisted of no more than five sentences per two people—Beketov and Rybakov kept repeating the same thing—their listeners could barely contain themselves from laughing. “Sometimes candy is just candy,” Open Space volunteer Sasha finally told them and suggested they taste the caramels, adding that they were delicious. The activists resisted. “Roshen is good quality, no one is arguing about that. But they are Ukrainian candies!” they said. The conversation about candy was interrupted only by the advent of a paddy wagon.
Rybakov and Beketov writing their complaints to the police during the raid on Open Space, 18 May 2024: Source: social media
The people at the board game event hastily made to leave, but a police officer soon came down to them, and, according to Vladislav, “it was clear [we] would spend the next few hours in a less comfortable place.” The moment the policeman stepped away, Vladislav “snuck through a window.” The policeman shouted after him, summoning his partner, but Vladislav managed to escape to a subway station. Not knowing what to do, he wrote on the Libertarian Party’s Telegram channel that the police had begun detaining attendees at their event.
First, the attendees of the two events and several visitors to the space who were just minding their own business were dispatched to the police bus. One of the detainees calmly recalled how she went to the police bus: “Going to the police station isn’t the same as digging a ditch, and I was so tired anyway I wasn’t about to resist. It was a comfortable ride, but it’s a pity they didn’t bring me back.”
Anastasia, who for some reason was transported to the station separately from the others, recalls how she “snapped at the policemen while dying inside.” When asked if she had any sharp objects for stabbing or cutting, she “blurted out that only her tongue was sharp.” The policeman was amused, and a small exchange of pleasantries ensued, but he stopped laughing at her jokes as they neared the Basmannoye precinct.
Ten Open Space visitors went on the first trip to the station. I was among the second batch of six detainees. There were five seats on the Ford Transit bus, not counting the seats reserved for officers, and between the seats was a table, which Thiya occupied by placing the worksheets with the strength of material problems on it.
“More comfortable than in a economy class sleeping car,” said one of the detainees.
The “Serbs” stood by the police vehicle, taking turns proclaiming “Open Space is closed!” They seemed to enjoy the play on words. They too headed to the police station to file their complaint.
The Open Space detainees in the educational classroom at Basmannoye police precinct. Source: social media
We were taken to an educational classroom, where some of the people detained earlier were already located, as well as a couple of people who had been brought to the precinct independently of us—a young man detained for brawling and a woman who had attempted to strangle her sister. Some of the Open Space people were in another office. As transpired later, the officers wanted to take their fingerprints, and several people consented.
As one of the detainees recalls, when the officer “was taking our prints he referred to some order issued by [Interior Minister Vladimir] Kolokoltsev, dated such-and-such a day in July 2023, that all those brought to police precinctd must be fingerprinted.” There is no such order. Moreover, according to Article 13, Paragraph 19 of the Federal Law “On the Police,” an officer has the right to fingerprint a detainee only if their identity cannot be ascertained in any other way. Since almost all the detainees had [their internal] passports with them, they were used to establish their identities. And those detainees who refused to be fingerprinted and later signed statements that they refused to undergo the procedure, left the precinct even earlier than those who had been fingerprinted.
The key question we were all asked by the interrogators was whether we had anything to do with LGBT and whether we were involved in any activities related to this movement. Yevgeny, a lawyer who aid the LevSD detainees, recounted that all the police officers with whom he spoke were convinced that “this was some kind of LGBT gathering, a gay bar and so on.”
“When I told them about the event to aid political prisoners, they started telling me, ‘Come on, stop pitching us a yarn,'” the defense lawyer recalled. In response to the flyer for the event, which Yevgeny showed them, the officers told him, “That’s how they encrypt themselves.”
Around 8 p.m., we were given water and food, and journalists and a support group gathered under the windows of the classroom. At that time we were called out of the classroom to make our statements. It was my turn.
“You’ll tell me all about LGBT. I’ll tell you something too.”
With these words the interrogator started lazily looking for the copy of my passport and preparing a blank form for my statement. At that moment someone called him—probably some supervisor giving additional instructions. The interrogator mostly agreed with what the caller was saying, only at one point he uttered, “They’re mostly came to play board games, that’s all.”
Our conversation flowed smoothly, albeit with a few, brief lyrical digressions.
“What were you doing there?” the interrogator asked in a tired voice.
“I was helping Thiya do her homework, on strength of materials, as it turns out. She still has those strength of materials worksheets with there.”
“No, I forgot most of that stuff a long time ago.”
Another officer passed behind me, and my interrogator seemed to come to life.
“Listen, wait! There should be a broad in red pants out there. You cannot let her go!”
His colleague shared his worries.
“Everyone refuses to be fingerprinted.”
“The hell with them. What matters is the woman in red pants…. Don’t let anyone go at all!”
He was talking about Sasha, the Open Space volunteer.
“Nobody’s going anywhere.”
“That’s fucking great.” After a little silence, he added, drawling his words again, “The journalists haven’t arrived yet for some reason. But never mind.”
“Are you expecting them?” I asked with hope in my voice.
“They already filmed me.”
And then he complained me about how he wanted to get home, how he had already “one foot in [my] slipper, and then your gang arrived.” Suddenly, in an animated voice, he asked the key question of the evening:
“What’s up with LGBT?”
“I don’t know anything, I haven’t seen anything, I don’t belong to LGBT.”
“You getting married soon?”
“I am getting married soon,” I said, and showed him my engagement ring.
Trying to guess what material the ring was made of, he let me read the statement. When I asked him if I could get a copy of it just in case, he waved me off, saying, “Don’t even think about it.” I quotedThe Heart of a Dog, the passage about the “ultimate in certificates,” but it transpired that the interrogator had not “waded through” the novella. And he had not watched he movie version, either, because it was, from his point of view, a “cheesy farce.” He and I parted on these words.
Inside Basmannoye police precinct
While I was giving my statement, an officer came into the educational classroom and asked whether there was a “competent person” among those present, meaning someone legally literate, apparently, someone whou would write a refusal to be photographed and fingerprinted, so that everyone could write their own refusals using his as their model. Such a “competent person” was found, and the question itself provoked laughter among the detainees.
After my return to the “waiting area,” Thiya went to her interview, her strength of materials worksheets in tow. She returned twenty minutes later with a look of bewilderment on her face. The fact is that she is getting married soon—but not to me—and in the process of making her statement, the interrogator, after finding out that Thiya also had nothing to do with LGBT and was also getting married soon, assumed that she was getting married to me. Thiya wasn’t about to argue with him.
The interrogator reread her statement aloud: “I am getting married. I am not inviting the chief of police.”
“The above is an accurate record of my statement,” Thiya added in writing to the end.
One of the detainees who heard this conversation saw my surprised face—I was planning to marry someone else after all—and gave me a piece of advice.
“When questioned later, you answer that it was dark, and that’s why you mixed up [the fiancees].”
“Uh-huh. I was drunk, I don’t remember!” I joked back, and we laughed together.
“Seryoga, did you count the number of [detainees]?” one of the officers asked my interrogator in the meantime.
“I don’t fucking know. How many are there supposed to be? There’s a whole fucking busload of them, a whole fucking classroom of them. Count them as a pack,” Seryoga the interrogator replied. At some point he took the worksheets from detainee Thiya, scrutinized them, and pointed out a flaw in the diagram to her.
Meanwhile, Vladislav the libertarian was walking towards the police station—he wanted to support his comrades. His fellow party member Georgy Belov was signaling to him from the window: fearing that Vladislav would be detained by the police, he waved his hand at him, telling him to get away. One of the officers at the Basmannoye police department did head toward Vladislav, but he managed to escape again. He then went to the store to buy food to give to his fellow party members and, as he put it, “our buddies from LevSD.” Some time later, LevSD and LPR agreed to hold joint events, primarily debates.
At 8:30 p.m., the officers at the station detained Vladislav all the same. When he and the other libertarians at large brought the care package, the policemen noticed him standing under the windows and took him inside.
Vladislav the libertarian is detained outside Basmannoye police station. Source: Rus News
My attention was drawn to a female detainee who at some point started making postcards for political prisoners. She said that she would send them with the note “A postcard from Basmanny police station.” Someone wanted to work, but since there was no free Internet in the department, they were unable to. “I’m giving them a negative rating for not having wi-fi,” a young woman joked.
Anastasia was indignant.
“We are locked up here, a group of people who were not involved in anything criminal at all, while locked up here as well are a young man who was nicked for brawling and a woman who tried to strangled her sister. Instead of dealing with these people, the cops are dealing with political activists.”
This made her so angry that she stopped being afraid.
At some point, all the officers in the precinct left our part of the department. The metal door leading to the officers opens with a key card, so we had no communication with them. For a little over an hour we had “free time.” Everyone socialized, joked, and planned where they would go to drink beer after we were released, while some of the detainees chatted with the support group outside since the windows were open. And if it were not for the bars on those windows, it might have seemed that the detainees had not even left the co-working space.
From Open Space to Basmannoye police precinct. Source: social media
At around 10 p.m., the interrogator and another officer (the head of the department, probably) brought all the paperwork. They caloled the detainees by name, collecting their papers—the copies of their passports, fingerprinting refusals, and statements—and handing back their passports and escorting them to the queue for release.
At first, those who had not been fingerprinted were released, because “the staff had lost their fingers” [sic]. At 10:07 p.m., I found myself outside with a group of detainees. We waited for the others to be released. Journalists taped our commentary for their news dispatches. At that time, Sasha, the Open Space volunteer in the red pants, was driven away by the Basmannoye police officers for an inspection of the “crime scene,” during which they confiscated several stickers and posters. The last detainee, libertarian Georgy Belov, was released at 11:34 p.m.
Activist Alexandra (“Sasha”) Kalistratova on the seizure of stickers and posters in Open Space by law enforcers. Source: Rus News (Telegram)
“I feel like we had an interesting, productive time, but it was complete fucking rubbish per se,” said one of the female detainees. “Saturday night was unforgettable,” concluded Andrei.
After talking to relatives in Kharkiv, once again shelled by Russia, and hearing news of the missile strike on one of Ukraine’s largest printing plants, I touch the bindings of the books on my shelves. I think about how many of them were printed in that same city, now very much on the frontlines again. This time it was not only transport and urban infrastructure that were targeted but books as well.
Factor Druk is one of the largest full-cycle printing plants in Europe. It is part of the large Factor holding, which includes, among other companies, Vivat, one of the top Ukrainian publishing houses, which has its own network of bookstores. Factor’s customers include not only Ukrainian publishers but also such global publishers as Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan.
I look at the kaleidoscope of photos—the burnt-out shop floors, the waves of pages, the scattered covers (one—oh, the bitter irony!—bears the title “The Club of the Rescued”)—and wonder how much a Russian missile costs. The internet, for example, reports that an Iskander runs for around three million dollars. Instead of “liberating” us from twenty thousand books a week before Book Arsenal, Ukraine’s most important book fair, the aggressors could, say, print themselves a few more copies of books by their own classic authors. This is not the first such strike, by the way. On 20 March of this year, Russian forces hit another printing plant in Kharkiv where many Ukrainian publishers also had their books printed.
The Factor Druk printing plant, damaged by a Russian missile strike on Kharkiv. Photo: Nicolas Cleuet/Le Pictorium/MAXPPP/dpa/picture alliance
Solidarity in response to terror
But the further away they are from Ukraine, the less people in the rest of the world understand the symbolism of these events. As the well-known Ukrainian journalist Kristina Berdynskykhwrote on her Facebook page, “Three days ago, I bought the diary of Volodymyr Vakulenko, as published by Vivat. [Vakulenko’s] shot corpse was found in a grave in a forest outside Izium in autumn 2022. The diary was found by Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina, who unearthed it in a courtyard near the house where he lived during the occupation. Amelina died [from the wounds she suffered during] the missile strike on Kramatorsk in 2023. The plant where this book was printed was destroyed by a Russian missile strike today, in 2024. ‘Volodymyr Vakulenko kept a diary during the occupation, hoping that you, the world, might be able to hear him. If you are holding this book in your hands, the writer Vakulenko has won,’ Victoria writes in the foreword. Hold books printed in Ukraine in your hands. The world will never understand all the way anyway.”
Ukrainian social networks have been overflowing with solidarity and sympathy. Thousands of people have simply gone and ordered books by their favorite publisher, Vivat, and so for a while, due to the number of orders, the publisher’s website was down, and long queues formed in some bookstores. This is probably the least that can be done now. It is the constructive fact that gathers us every day, in the midst of worries and threats, when just being is a victory in itself.
Bookshops opening in Ukraine during the war against all odds
Against all the odds, new bookshops have been opening in Ukraine amidst the war. Literary events, festivals and book fairs have been taking place. In Kyiv, one major book fair ended a month ago, another is due to start in a week, and two more are planned for the next few months. There are many reports about the growing demand for books. The other day, a bookshop manager I know commented, “People are just jumping on books. This not only furthers the culture but also helps to maintain some level of normality.”
I take one of my favorite Vivat books from the shelf—Lazarus, a novel by Svitlana Taratorina, a Ukrainian author originally from Crimea. It’s a contemporary fantasy set in an alternative magical Kyiv in the early twentieth century. The city is inhabited by both ordinary people and various “impure” creatures such as water sprites, ghouls, and werewolves. Although the book presents an interesting, intriguing and self-contained world of magical adventure, it is not hard to see its political aspect. The human beings in Lazarus come to Kyiv from the Empire. They try to impose their centralized way of life on the city, seeking to neutralizing its peculiarities and nuances, to level anything outside the imperial framework, anything “impure,” that is. This clampdown eventually and inevitably leads to an explosion. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
Everything can be restored but people cannot be brought back to life
It is a day of mourning in Kharkiv. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has visited the site of the attack.
“The production facility was destroyed, and tens of thousands of books were burned by this strike. A lot of children’s literature, manuals, and textbooks…. Russian terror should never go unpunished,” he said.
Seven workers were killed at the printing plant: five women and two men who were printing children’s books that day. Twenty-one people were injured. As Elena Rybka, editor-in-chief of the publishing house, wrote, “Everything can be restored. It is impossible to bring people back to life. We sympathize with the families of the victims. We pray for the wounded. We support Ukrainian culture, because it will never be beyond politics.”
Julia Stakhivska is a Ukrainian writer who has published books of poetry and fantasy stories for children and co-edited anthologies of Ukrainian poetry.
Russia’s strike on the Factor Druk printing house killed seven workers and left 16 wounded, according to Suspilne. The company estimates that 20,000 books were destroyed, of which 40 percent were schoolbooks.
Factor Druk printed around half of Ukraine’s schoolbooks, CEO Serhii Polituchniy said in an interview with Radio Liberty.
“I don’t know how we will print tomorrow,” he added. The strike on the company’s printing facilities stands to reduce the volume of Ukraine’s publishing industry by 40 percent, according to Polituchniy’s estimates.
Three out of 10 leading publishing companies in Ukraine are located in Kharkiv which is constantly under Russian missile assault. Factor Druk did not evacuate its facilities from its location, around 40 kilometers from Russia’s border, due to the complexities and costs involved.
Polituchniy stated that most publishing professionals have chosen to stay in Kharkiv rather than move westward, where the right skills and knowledge are believed to be harder to find. “One should teach a professional for 4-5 years minimum,” Polituchniy said.
Industry leader
Factor Druk became a founder of Vivat Publishing House, one of the most prominent and popular book brands in the country, printing non-fiction and fiction books in the Ukrainian language. In 2023, Vivat became the seventh largest in Ukraine’s book publishing industry, with Hr. 191 million in revenue (almost $5 million), according to Pro-Consulting estimates provided to Kyiv Post.
Ukraine’s honey exports amounted to almost a third of the commodity’s imports to the EU in the last year, with China taking the leading position.
Vivat’s two bestsellers include Winston Churchill’s biography written by ex-UK prime minister Boris Johnson (50,000 books sold) and “Stus’s Case” – a novel about how the KGB arrested and tried Vasyl Stus, Ukraine’s poet, translator, literary critic, journalist, and an active member of the Ukrainian dissident movement. Around 120,000 copies of the book have been sold.
In addition to books, Factor Druk prints newspapers and magazines, booklets, catalogs, as well as stationery products such as calendars, notebooks and school diaries according to the company’s website.
The company also prints for other publishers, including:
Industry leaders KSD and Folio (both also Kharkiv-based)
Schoolbooks publishing company Ranok
Faith books publishing house Svichado
Children’s publishing house Zelenyy Pes
Vivat forms the majority of Factor Druk’s revenues. Overall, between 2017 and 2023, Factor Druk generated Hr. 230 million ($5.7 million) as an annual average, according to the company’s financial statements on Vkursi big data platform. The enterprise did not generate losses even during the first year of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Ukraine’s publishing industry includes 385 publishing enterprises of different sizes, 200 of them each generating more than Hr. 1 million (£25,000) in revenues in 2023, according to Pro-Consulting’s data provided to Kyiv Post.
Well I turned around in time to see the clouds fade Running back could only make them stay Forward now I run down a winding road Try to pay back everything that I have ever owed
And when your money runs, will you buy a friend? And when your guns don’t fire, will that be the end? With no land left to burn, and nowhere left to run Where then can we stand when it’s all said and done?
Well I hear the thunder roll, I feel the cold winds blowing But you won’t find me there, ’cause I won’t go back again While you’re on smoky roads, I’ll be out in the sun Where the trees still grow, where they count by one?
Well you take from our schools to build a bigger bomb You tell us fiery lies about the course we’re on And you’ll kill all the world, and you’ll reverse the sun And which would you sell first, your soul or your gun?
But I hear the thunder roll, I feel the cold wind blowing But you won’t find me there, ’cause I won’t go back again While you’re on smoky roads I’ll be out in the sun Where the trees still grow, where they count by one?
For several years now, almost every May 21st, we release a statement that speaks more clearly about memory, colonialism, defiance against repressive mechanisms, and resistance to assimilation.
For the Circassians, this day is a day of mourning, marking the end of the Russo-Caucasian War in 1864, the loss of independence, and the mass expulsion from their historical homeland.
Alongside the Adyghe, the Abkhazians also mourn on this day, having faced similar displacement. The Ubykhs, who lived in what is now Krasnodar Krai, are believed to have disappeared entirely, save for their descendants, who scarcely remember their language and cultural heritage. Most of them now identify as Circassians.
Open sources provide general information on these events, and the descriptions of past May releases cover our stance on the Circassian genocide.
The situation regarding how federal authorities in Russia and regional authorities in Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachay-Cherkessia, Adygea, and Krasnodar Krai address the history of the Circassians and the Caucasus, as well as their reactions to contemporary issues, remains unchanged. It is consistently disheartening, and one could reread our texts from previous years to find that everything stays on the same trajectory. We’ve even expressed this very thought a few years ago.
However, there is a positive stability — Circassian society continues to calmly and confidently speak about their problems and historical traumas while striving to build their future. Those engaged in linguistic activism, genetic and archaeological research, history, music, or contemporary Circassian art in recent years are unlikely to seriously hope for systemic changes, official acknowledgment of past mistakes, or a shift in the offensive or bland rhetoric of officials, such as “we brought you culture.” Yet, the realization that self-education and self-driven work are essential has dawned on many, if not all.
Xexes — The Diaspora
One visible result of the Russo-Caucasian War was the creation of a massive Circassian diaspora in Syria, Jordan, the United States, Europe, and especially Türkiye. Today, there are more Adyghe in these countries than in the Caucasus (various sources estimate between 3 and 5-6 million). These are the descendants of the muhajirs, forced migrants of the 19th century.
They have their own context, their own struggles, and even their own intonations in music and culture. In Türkiye, all North Caucasians — Balkars, Karachays, Ossetians, Dagestanis, Chechens, Ingush, Abazins, and Abkhazians — are collectively referred to as Circassians.
For a long time, the Turkish government prohibited muhajirs and their descendants from speaking their native languages, using native names and surnames, or naming villages in their native languages. Consequently, Caucasians in Türkiye carry two surnames: an official Turkish one and their “real” native one.
There was no systematic direct communication between the diaspora and the homeland for a long time. Since the early 20th century, muhajirs have returned home with exciting projects (e.g., Adyghe educator Nuri Tsagov/Tsağe Nuri). Or the North Caucasian political figures or abrek warriors who became heroes at home left for Türkiye and Europe (e.g., Kabardian abrek Murat Ozov/Wazi Murat or the founders of the Mountain Republic), but these were exceptions rather than the rule.
In the context of fragmentation and separation from each other, the Adyghe and Abkhazians have preserved and developed their music differently depending on the region. In the diaspora, songs and melodies that are no longer remembered in the Caucasus have been preserved, but those still remembered at home have been lost.
For example, neither Türkiye, Syria, nor Jordan have preserved the violins (shichepshins), but the accordion has developed unique features. Each diaspora has created its own style, which did not exist in the homeland. In this sense, diaspora life has gifted diversity to our people. However, the Circassians and Abkhazians in the diaspora retain a romantic and even sacred perception of the homeland (Hequ for the Circassians) as a pure, untouched, and genuine place.
This presents a danger — any information from the Caucasus is perceived as an unquestionable truth, and any style coming from Hequ is considered the most authentic. Consequently, young musicians sometimes ignore their local characteristics and strive to sound like Kabardian pop music. As a label, this disheartens us.
Nevertheless, the desire for unity and strong ties between the diasporas and the Caucasus is generally positive. Perhaps we should view fragmentation not as a problem but as a feature that makes us more global and mobile.
Düzce and Sakarya
This album includes recordings from a major expedition across Türkiye in 2017. Some of these materials have been released in previous years. This release features songs and tunes we collected in two neighboring provinces: Sakarya and Düzce.
In Sakarya, we visited the Abkhazian family ensemble Azar, which folklorist Madina Pashtova and our friend Erhan Turkav recommended to us before the expedition. Erhan, a Circassian from Türkiye, knew almost all the elderly and young musicians in Sakarya and Düzce.
The rare recordings we found on Facebook from compilations promised a meeting with an old style, free from academic or pop influences. Expeditions in Abkhazia showed that such music is almost gone there. The Soviet influence was very strong — choirs in Sukhumi, Pitsunda, and even villages often sounded like ensembles from radio committees or cultural centers. This, of course, is also interesting, but we wanted to find performers who had either not been influenced by this or had somehow overcome it.
Thus, we were looking forward to our trip to the villages of Sakarya, perhaps even more so than other meetings in Türkiye. It seemed our informants were just as eager to meet us. From the doorstep, we were greeted by elderly Abkhazians keen to show us their hospitality — the table was full of homemade food, and people were ready for well-wishes and toasts (though we only drank tea there).
During the long feast, we learned that the ensemble had faced difficult times — one of the main vocalists and experts in traditional Abkhazian songs, Nezhmettin Anashba, had recently passed away, making it harder for the group to maintain the style of Abkhazian polyphony. It was also sad that there seemed to be no replacements among the younger generation. Azar was regarded as the last bastion of Abkhazian table singing. As is often the case, people were more focused on preserving the image of the last and most valuable bearers of tradition than on acquiring their knowledge and skills.
Fortunately, Tolat Sadzba was still alive — an elder who still remembered the song lyrics and was willing to sing them. That day, after several dishes and traditional blessings, we managed to record only two songs. A heroic ballad from the Russo-Caucasian War about Ajgerei-ipa Kuchuk (about whom there are both Circassian and Ossetian songs) and a song-melody for choral dances — “Aurasha.”
Perhaps we could have recorded more, but the informants were more interested in talking and asking about the homeland (both Abkhazia and the Circassian republics) than in singing songs. The first expedition is often introductory, where we establish contact, and the main part of the material is recorded during the second visit when people are no longer trying to impress us with their hospitality. We left Sakarya firmly believing we would return later and record the rest. But just a few months after our recording, Tolat Sadzba passed away. Thus, these two incredible songs became our only recording of the legendary Azar.
Recording in Düzce
Erhan also organized the recording in Düzce. There, elders (mostly Shapsugs and a few Abkhazians) formed a home ensemble with the ironic name “70-Year-Old Youth” (70’lik Delikanlılar). This joke not only accurately described the participants’ age and enthusiasm but also the music played by the unofficial group — wedding music for games — dzhegu.
The lively elders passed the accordion, played the melodies from hand to hand, sang dance refrains in chorus, and used large wooden benches as percussion instruments, hitting them with wooden sticks (called pkhachag here).
The musicians energized each other, getting into a groove and creating a festive atmosphere for themselves. However, this was not a real wedding but a recording session, so the “70-Year-Old Youth” quickly grew tired and switched to having tea with guests from Nalchik. We managed to record a few very bright but too short tunes. If it had been a real wedding, the release would have consisted of many hours of melodies. Even so, the release conveys an atmosphere of joy and musical festivity.
Hope Instead of Despair
We cannot find reasons for joy or even for optimistic forecasts regarding the attitude of official institutions towards Circassian and Abkhazian history. The situation is either stagnating or worsening, with less space for free discussion of colonialism. Circassians march in mourning despite unjustified bans, and Abkhazians fight against the distribution of their lands and the pressure on civil activists. Instead of developing and striving for the future, our people are forced to defend basic things.
Nevertheless, it is fundamentally important for us to release something every May 21st that speaks not only of mourning but more about hope. Yes, Tolat Sadzba is no longer with us, but his voice and the voices of his friends are preserved in digital formats. These people sang songs and found reasons for joy in the harshest conditions. What they preserved, new generations can take and infuse this music with new meanings and moods.
The joy lies in the fact that there are people for whom these recordings are made. There are those for whom these songs can be sung.
Дызэкъуэтымэ – дылэщщ.
Sound: Timur Kodzoko
Sound editing: Timur Kodzoko
Cover image: Timur Kodzoko
Cover art: Milana Khalilova
Notes: Bulat Khalilov, Sergey Zotov and Bella Mirzoeva
Special thanks to Erhan Turkaw for organization and Fatih Ersem for contacts. Also we want to thank Aslanbek Nacho for his financial support.
Recorded in Sakarya and Düzce, Turkey, November 2017
Source: Ored Recordings (Bandcamp). I would strongly encourage all my readers to buy and download this digital album (paying as much as you wish) and thus support the unique, vital mission of Ored Recordings. |||TRR
The Russian Reader 