Programmer Viktor Filinkov was released after seven years in police custody and prison as a defendant and convict in the Network Case. Filinkov himself told Mediazona that he had been released in the morning from Penal Colony No. 1 in Orenburg, after which police officers drove him to the border with Kazakhstan and turned him over to local border guards.
Before his release, Filinkov was interviewed by the penal colony’s case officers, who warned him not to return to Russia after he was deported. Police officers transported him to the border in handcuffs.
Filinkov is a Kazakhstani national. In 2021, while he was still incarcerated, the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) ruled that Filinkov’s presence in Russia was “undesirable” and banned him from entering Russia for eight years, a common practice for those convicted on terrorism charges. Based on this ruling, the Orenburg office of the Interior Ministry ordered Filinkov deported.
Filinkov and his wife Yevgenia [aka Jenya] Kulakova are now in Kazakhstan. They are headed to Petropavlovsk in the north of the country, where Filinkov’s mother resides.
Before his release, FSIN officers laundered and gave Filinkov the green jacket in which Filinkov was detained seven years ago and tortured with a stun gun by FSB officers.
Programmer and antifascist Viktor Filinkov was detained in St. Petersburg on 23 January 2018. He was twenty-three years old at the time. After his arrest, Filinkov described in detail how FSB officers had taken him to the woods and tortured him with a stun gun, forcing him to memorize the testimony they wanted him to give. Other defendants and even witnesses in the case described similar torture.
FSB investigators then charged eleven antifascists and anarchists in Penza and St. Petersburg under Article 205.4 of the Criminal Code (which criminalizes “organization of a terrorist group”). According to the FSB, the young men had banded together into “the Network terrorist community” and were preparing for an“armed overthrow of the regime.”
The sentences handed down to the Penza defendants ranged from six to eighteen years in prison, while the Petersburg defendants were handed sentences of between three and a half to seven years in prison. Filinkov was the final of the Petersburg activists to serve out his sentence.
Since the summer of 2021, Filinkov had been incarcerated at Orenburg Penal Colony No. 1, where at first he faced pressure from the prison wardens: he was repeatedly sent to solitary confinement, and his letters were constantly stolen and forged. Filinkov, however, consistently filed legal appeals against the penal colony’s punishments with the assistance of his lawyer Vitaly Cherkasov and his public defender Yevgenia Kulakova. When they began to win one court case after another against the penal colony, the wardens preferred to leave Filinkov alone. They had not harassed him during the last couple of years.
Source: “Viktor Filinkov, convicted in Network case, released and deported to Kazakhstan,” Mediazona, 22 January 2025. Translated by the Russian Reader. The periodically updated Network Case dossier contains links to everything I have posted on the Network Case over the past seven years.
Vitya and I are finally together and free. There was no certainty until the last moment that everything would work out, so today’s event is a miracle to me and a relief after a lot of effort and tension.
Thank you all so much for the congratulations that have been pouring in from everywhere! It’s quite cool to know that a happy event in my life has brought so much joy to people who know me. And thanks to the media for their coverage of Vitya’s release (and, consequently, their requests for interviews).
All of this is quite precious to me, but right now neither Vitya nor I can even read everything that has come in, let alone reply. Please understand that both of us (Vitya especially) need time to come to our senses and experience these moments.
Thanks to Alina for this photo!
Source: Jenya Kulakova (Facebook), 22 January 2025. Translated by her friend Thomas Campbell
