Leonid Fyodorov: Mir

The cover of Leonid Fyodorov’s LP *Mir* (2024)

I see that I’m quoted on the web all the time in connection with Shaman and other bastards. Yes, I have had to write a lot about them in the line of duty. But it would be a shame if I were to die tomorrow and be remembered for only this. I want to share something more interesting with you, music I’ve been listening to lately. Oddly enough, there’s very little outward political protest in this music.

Leonid Fyodorov has released an album entitled Mir [which means both “peace” and “world” in Russian]. Yes, I do recall that it [peace? world?] is a forbidden word. We understand what Fyodorov’s stance [on the war?] is, although he doesn’t say anything outright, but then again he is not a person who can be measured in terms of his [political] stance — his music is much more interesting. His music is always strange, chockablock with dissonances, avant-garde twists, noises, and sudden pauses. He doesn’t write songs that are not odd.

And this is despite the fact that Fyodorov is an amazing melodist, one of the best in Russia. But he creates melodies of astonishing beauty, sings them in his magical voice, and in the middle of the melodies he inserts unbearable guitar scrapes or something of the sort, as if he wanted to show that he didn’t believe in the very possibility of harmony. I once asked him about it, and he said something like, “It’s the times, I guess. I feel it’s the right thing to do.”

I got so used to it that I was expecting the same thing from every new album. Yes, the album was going to be great, but it was clear in advance exactly how it would be great. Even weirdness can become familiar and predictable.

Suddenly, over the last few years, I see that something has changed. I listen attentively: almost ubiquitously in Fyodorov’s songs there’s a perfectly even, constant rhythm and repetitive bits in the arrangements. In our country, however, even when I was at school, this has been considered a sign of bubblegum pop. There is nothing to it, in point of fact: you turn on a simple drum machine track and out comes fucking “White Roses” or “Svetka Sokolova.” There’s no creativity involved.

But a craftsman of Fyodorov’s stature doesn’t do anything for no reason. If he had wanted to make the rhythm more complicated, he would have made it more complicated. So he has to do it: he’s trying to say something.

I close my eyes and suddenly I see a river flowing. It flows swiftly, swiftly, and birds of prey circle above it. They are shrieking, trying to scare it, but it cannot be stopped. But they are really trying to scare it with all their might, and at times the music is quite scary.

And the lyrics have become different. Fyodorov used to employ lyrics (most often penned by Dmitry Ozersky) like a musical instrument. He had little interest in their meaning: he was mainly interested in how they sounded, how they fit the music. There was a lot of cosmic absurdity, a lot of onomatopoeia and, again, a lot of weirdness. They were lyrics, not poems.

What do we hear now? Almost the entire album consists of perfectly regular couplets with proper rhymes. The lyrics are eminently intelligible and designed to be listened to carefully.

На вопросы есть ответы.
Бедный мальчик, где ты, где ты?
Сам как будто маленький,
Но как будто старенький.
Было грустно, стало пусто.
У меня такое чувство,
Что зачем-то, почему-то
Мы не нравимся кому-то.

[Questions have answers.
Poor little boy, where are you, where are you?
You look like you’re little yourself,
But you look kind of old.
I was sad and now I’m empty.
I have this feeling:
For some reason, for some reason
Somebody doesn’t like us.]

The strange thing is that the music is quite sad, restrained, and expressionless. [Fyodorov] sings as if the jig is up and there’s no point in trying. But the music goes on anyway, and you can’t stop it. Fyodorov’s strange fluidity gives hope for life and peace. You can defeat man, beast, and the state, but you cannot defeat water.

The link to the album is in the first comment.

Source: Yan Shenkman (Facebook), 16 June 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader

The video for “Mir” (“Peace” or “World”), the title track of Auktyon frontman Leonid Fyodorov’s 2024 solo LP

Следите за нами, смотрите за нами,
Идём в путешествие между мирами,
На лестнице странной находится вход,
Чтоб прыгать обманно, ногами вперёд.
Дверь спрятана в мире 134,
Здесь люди похожи на крем на зефире,
Мы здесь никого ни о чём не попросим,
А спрячемся в мире 178.
И тут же ныряем в созвездие Звон,
Здесь звон геликоновый с разных сторон,
И мы принимаемся сразу за дело,
Чтоб громко гремело и звонко звенело.
Приятно орудовать палкой железной —
И звук интересный и опыт полезный.
А в мире 14 дяди и тёти.
Они сразу спросят: «А где вы живёте?
А как вас зовут? А конфетку хотите?
Уходите? Ладно, тогда уходите…
У нас здесь не любят врунов и смутьянов!
Здесь мир тараканов и мир хулиганов!»
Планета 15, и смотрим мы на…
Здесь нет ничего, здесь одна тишина.
На это приятно смотреть и занятно,
Что нет ничего, лишь какие-то пятна.
Есть мир номер 8 и мир номер 3,
Здесь 5 человек заблудились внутри,
У них не осталось ни воли, ни мнений,
И скорбно блуждают в тени отражений.
И плачут во сне, и глаза прикрывают,
Кричат: «Нам противно, таких не бывает»,
Кричат: «Уходите!», и машут руками,
А это они отражаются сами.
Планета 14-76!
Здесь что не придумаешь — всё уже есть.
Приятно девчонкам, приятно мальчишкам,
Здесь весело — очень! Но, тоже, не слишком.
Есть Розовый Штрудель и Мир Голубой.
Где люди бессмысленно спорят с собой.
Они отрицают, что есть и что будет,
И спорят с судьбой. Интересные люди.
На лестнице странной, в созвездии странном,
В краю безымянном, в щели под диваном,
Есть радостный мир, под названием «Где-то»,
Здесь море и солнце, и вечное лето,
А рядом, конечно, находтится «Что-то»,
Здесь только дремота, тоска и зевота,
И петь неохота, и лень веселиться —
Я чувствую: что-то должно приключиться…
Бежим — нас преследует Мир Сорок-дыр!
Он ловит детей — это призрачный мир!
Здесь только часы, и нельзя оставаться,
Здесь можно в себе навсегда потеряться
Здесь всё забываешь, и сны и мечты
И сам не узнаешь, что ты — это ты!
И будешь ходить и дрожать еле-еле…
Успели, наверное… Если успели.
Есть мир Вычислитель и Чёрная Кошка.
Приятно, что каждый из них понарошку.
Есть мир Колесо и созвездие Спящий.
Ужасно, что каждый из них настоящий…
Есть мир Крокодил и вселенная Горе.
Пожалуй, заделаем дырку в заборе.

Follow us, watch us,
We’re going on a journey between worlds.
On a strange staircase the entrance is such
That you leap deceitfully, feet first.
The door is hidden in World 134,
Where the people are like the fluff in a marshmallow.
We won’t ask anyone here for anything,
But we’ll hide in World 178.
And then we dive into the Ringing Constellation:
There’s heliconic ringing from every corner,
And we get right down to business
Loudly rattling, jingling and jangling.
It’s nice to wield a rod of iron —
It’s an interesting sound and a rewarding experience.
There are uncles and aunties in World 14.
They’ll ask you right off the bat, “Where do you live?
And what’s your name? Would you like some candy?
Are you leaving? Okay, then go away…
We don’t like liars and troublemakers here!
It’s a world of cockroaches and a world of bullies!”
Planet 15, and we’re looking at —
There’s nothing here, there’s only silence.
It’s nice to look at and entertaining
That there’s nothing, just spots and specks.
There’s World No. 8 and World No. 3,
There are five people lost inside,
They have no will, no opinions,
And wander mournfully in the shadows of reflections.
They cry in their sleep and cover their eyes,
They shout, “We’re disgusted, such people don’t exist.”
They shout, “Go away!” and wave their hands,
And that’s them reflecting themselves.
Planet 14-76!
Whatever you can think of, they’ve got it all.
It’s nice for the girls, it’s nice for the boys.
It’s a lot of fun! But it’s not too much fun either.
There’s Pink Strudel and Blue World,
Where people argue senselessly with themselves.
They deny what is and what will be,
And argue with fate. Interesting people.
On a strange staircase, in a strange constellation,
In a nameless corner, in a crevice beneath a sofa,
There’s a joyful world called Somewhere,
There’s sea and sunshine and eternal summer.
And next door, of course, there’s Something.
Here, there’s only slumber, languor and yawning:
You don’t feel like singing, you don’t feel like having fun.
I feel something’s going to happen.
Come on, we’re being chased by World Forty-hole!
He catches children, it’s a ghostly world!
There’s only hours and you can’t stay here.
Here you can lose yourself forever.
Here you forget everything, your dreams and your hopes,
And you’ll never know you’re you!
And you’ll walk around shivering.
They must have made it. If they did make it.
There’s the world of the Calculator and the Black Cat.
It’s nice that each of them is made-up.
There’s the world of the Wheel and the Sleeper Constellation.
The terrible thing is that each one is real….
There’s the world of the Crocodile and the universe of Woe.
Let’s patch up the hole in the fence.

Source: Leonid Fyodorov (YouTube), 14 April 2024. Music: Leonid Fyodorov; lyrics: Dmitry Ozersky; video: Lydia and Leonid Fyodorov. Translated by the Russian Reader

New Trumped-Up Criminal Charges Against Soviet Dissident and Russian Opposition Activist Alexander Skobov

Alexander Skobov. Photo courtesy of V. Izotov/Deutsche Welle

A new criminal case, on charges of “involvement in a terrorist community,” has been opened against former Soviet dissident and Russian political journalist Alexander Skobov, who has been detained for over a month on charges of “condoning terrorism.” This news was reported on Saturday, 18 May, on Skobov’s official Facebook account by his wife, Olga Shcheglova.

Shcheglova said that she visited her husband on 14 May in the pretrial detention center in Syktyvkar, where he had been transferred from St. Petersburg. During a conversation with him, his lawyer and local police investigators, she learned that Skobov has also been charged with “condoning terrorism” and “involvement in a terrorist community.” The dissident’s wife is convinced that these two charges stem from her husband’s affiliation with the Free Russia Forum.

According to Shcheglova, on 21 May, Skobov will be sent to the regional psychiatric hospital in Komi for a forensic psychiatric examination. Skobov himself has stated that he would not participate in the investigation and forensic expertise, and he would appear in court only if his mother were present at the hearings. Skobov’s defense has filed an appeal, which will be heard by the court on 22 May.

Skobov’s Persecution in the USSR and Russia

On 22 March 2024, Russian authorities designated Skobov a “foreign agent.” According to the Justice Ministry, he had “disseminated unreliable information” about the decisions of public officials, opposed the war, “identified the Russian Federation with a terrorist organization,” been involved in the work of an “undesirable organization,” and produced and distributed “foreign agent materials” [sic], the human rights project OVD Info reports.

In 1978, Skobov was arrested over his active involvement in the Left Opposition group and the samizdat publication of an anti-government magazine. He was later sentenced by the court to undergo treatment at a psychiatric hospital, from which he was released in the summer of 1987.

This time around, the political journalist was arrested on charges of “condoning terrorism.” Skobov was detained in St. Petersburg on 2 April 2024. In protest, the dissident refused to take with him to jail his diabetes medication and his glasses, despite his poor eyesight. According to the Telegram channel Memorial Support for Political Prisoners, the real reason for his arrest was “a [social media] post condoning the bombing of the Crimean Bridge.”

Source: Asya Miller, “New criminal case opened against dissident Skobov,” Deutsche Welle Russian Service, 18 May 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader

In early April, 66-year-old dissident Alexander Skobov was arrested for allegedly “justifying terrorism” in his posts online. For his friends and family members, the arrest came as no surprise.

Skobov, a long-time dissident who was made to spend seven years in a psychiatric ward after taking part in protests against the Soviet authorities in the 1970s, had published multiple posts condemning Russia’s actions in Ukraine since 2014. In March he was named a “foreign agent”, and since then people close to him said his arrest had seemed inevitable.

“He and I talked a hundred times about the fact that he would be arrested — if not today then tomorrow,” said Skobov’s friend Yuly Rybakov, a human rights activist and former deputy in the State Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament. “People have been imprisoned for much less.”

Skobov’s 90-year-old mother, whom he lives with and cares for, said she had been having nightmares about his arrest for months before it happened, and Rybakov recalled that Skobov himself said he “didn’t understand” why the authorities hadn’t come for him yet.

Skobov’s children, who moved abroad long before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, urged their father to flee the country when they saw him in Istanbul in early March. Other friends have also tried to convince him to leave and avoid arrest, citing his many health issues, including severe diabetes, hepatitis C, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and near blindness.

But, Rybakov said, Skobov was resolute, telling him that he “wanted to be part of his own judicial process” when he was inevitably arrested.

Rybakov said that Skobov had been “driven to despair” by what had been happening in Russia in recent years and “felt that someone had to be radical”.

Another friend, Mikhail Sedunov, said that trying to convince Skobov to change his course of action was like “grabbing the wing of a plane that was already accelerating down the runway”.

On 2 April, masked policemen arrived at Rybakov’s flat, where Skobov had been staying. When Rybakov left to take the dog for a walk, the police reportedly entered the property, threw Skobov to the ground, twisted his arms and handcuffed him. According to Rybakov, Skobov “defiantly” refused to take either warm clothing, his diabetes medication, or his glasses with him, intending these gestures as an “act of protest”.

Skobov’s wife, Olga Shcheglova, managed to buy him replacement medication and glasses, which she brought to him ahead of his interrogation by Russia’s Investigative Committee. But Skobov refused to accept them — a reaction Shcheglova said she had “expected” from her husband.

Resistance to the authorities and a fight for justice had defined Skobov’s life for more than four decades. His first foray into political activism was in 1976, when he and other university students in St. Petersburg scattered leaflets calling for the “establishment of true humane socialism” and the “overthrow of the tyranny of officials” ahead of a meeting of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The students were expelled from university and brought before a court, and some, like Skobov, were then sentenced to compulsory treatment in psychiatric hospitals because, according to Rybakov, it was believed that “only crazy people could dislike the Soviet regime”.

Skobov’s radical spirit remained unquelled when he was finally released from hospital in 1981, however, and he immediately joined the Free Inter-Professional Association of Workers, a dissident group that led the first attempt to create an independent trade union in the USSR. In 1982 he was arrested for his involvement with the group and sent back to hospital, where he spent another three years.

In the early 1990s Skobov taught history at a secondary school for gifted students, writing and publishing his own award-winning textbooks. But later in the decade political activism again became the focal point of his life as he took part in protests against the Chechen wars.

When Russia annexed Ukraine in 2014, Skobov took to social media to rail against the regime, openly supporting Ukraine and condemning Russia’s military action. The same year, two unidentified men armed with knives attacked him outside his home in what his friends and family members say they are sure was retribution for his criticism of the regime.

Even this did not deter him, however, and his friends said his statements opposing Putin’s rule became “even sharper, more unrestrained, and more radical”. Speaking last year at the Free Russia Forum, an opposition conference held biannually in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius, Skobov condemned the regime more harshly than any of the other attendees, despite being one of the only participants still living in Russia.

Another friend of Skobov, Nikita Yeliseyev, said he doubted Skobov would survive the 7.5-year sentence that he is almost certain to receive.

“He is an old man,” Yeliseyev said. “And he has a number of very serious illnesses.”

Sedunov said all of Skobov’s actions stemmed from a desire to “struggle, as vigorously as possible, against the obvious evil represented by the current Russian government”.

“This is the way he was brought up: he wanted to fight evil any way he could. And this was the only way left,” Sedunov said.

Source: Dmitry Tsyganov, “‘Someone has to be radical’: Former Soviet dissident Alexander Skobov is determined to defend his beliefs — even if it means dying in prison,” Novaya Gazeta Europe, 8 May 2024

Aleksandr Skobov has been a thorn in the side of authoritarian governments for more than four decades, from the Soviet era to President Vladimir Putin’s long rule. And now, in pretrial detention in St. Petersburg and facing prison, he is in no mood for compromise.

“On principle I refuse to comply with fascist laws,” he told RFE/RL late last month, shortly after the Russian government designated him a “foreign agent” on March 22. “I don’t intend to get into debates with the government. I will not try to prove my innocence. I will not label my writings, and I will not write any financial reports for them.”

“A criminal case could be launched at any moment,” he concluded.

He was right: On April 3, the 66-year-old was arrested and charged with “justifying terrorism” for a social-media post about the Ukrainian attacks that damaged the Crimea Bridge that links Russia with the Ukrainian region of Crimea, which Moscow occupied in 2014. The following day, a St. Petersburg court ordered Skobov held in pretrial detention for at least two months.

“If you take any of my articles or YouTube videos, you can find a whole bouquet of possible charges,” Skobov said in the March 31 interview. “Discrediting the army. Inciting hatred and enmity. Justifying terrorism. The rehabilitation of Nazism. I directly equate the actions of the Stalin regime with those of Hitler’s during World War II.”

Another reason for Skobov’s prosecution, his supporters believe, is his leadership role in the Free Russia Forum, a group of mostly exiled opposition figures founded by former world chess champion Garry Kasparov and activist Ivan Tyutrin in 2016 that has been declared “undesirable” in Russia. If he is charged with participation in an “undesirable” organization, he could face up to six years in prison.

“I am a member of the forum’s council, and I regularly participate in its broadcasts,” Skobov told RFE/RL. “I help write its statements and official pronouncements. Several of them I have written myself. I am actively involved, and I do not intend to stop.”

Skobov said he was drawn to the group because “it was the only opposition organization that categorically rejected the idea of the peaceful transformation of Putin’s dictatorship toward democracy using the procedure established by that dictatorship.”

“It was the only organization that, beginning with the annexation of Crimea, unambiguously stood by Ukraine as a victim of aggression,” he added. “We try to help the Ukrainian Army and the Russian volunteer formations that are fighting with them.”

Writing on Facebook after Skobov’s arrest, writer and critic Mikhail Berg said Skobov suffered from “an unbearable fear of being afraid.”

“And that is why he chooses the most painful forms of criticizing the authorities,” he wrote. “He shouts even though the authorities have long been destroying people for whispering or even for just opening their mouths.”

Parallel Lives

Born in Leningrad, as St. Petersburg was called then, in 1957, Skobov participated in his first anti-government protest when he was 19. He and other members of an underground organization threw about 100 flyers calling for “humanistic socialism” from the roof of a downtown building on the eve of the 25th congress of the Soviet Communist Party. Several of the protesters were kicked out of their universities, but Skobov — a first-year history student at Leningrad State University — got off with a disciplinary meeting of the Komsomol youth group.

In October 1978, he was arrested for publishing an underground, anti-government magazine called Perspectives. He spent half a year in a KGB prison before being sentenced to forced psychiatric treatment.

“In the late 1970s and early 1980s, political prisoners in Soviet psychiatric hospitals were rarely forcibly medicated, although there were such cases, of course,” Skobov said. “But I was treated more or less OK. Most of the doctors that I encountered tried to avoid playing the role of executioners or stranglers.”

He spent three years in confinement.

In 1982, he was again sentenced to psychiatric treatment, this time for a samizdat article he wrote defending Chile’s former socialist president, Salvador Allende, who died in unclear circumstances in 1973, and criticizing the rightist dictator General Augusto Pinochet. That article was deemed “anti-Soviet propaganda.”

This time, Skobov spent five years in the hospital before being released in the summer of 1987 during the initial phase of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s liberalization campaign.

In many ways, Skobov and Putin led parallel lives during this period. Putin was born in Leningrad almost exactly five years before Skobov and studied at Leningrad State University just before him. But as Skobov became drawn into a life of opposition to authoritarianism, Putin joined the KGB secret police.

The president’s official biography insists that Putin always worked for the KGB’s First Directorate, which carried out counterintelligence operations. However, rumors have persisted for years that he worked for some time in the Fifth Directorate, which was responsible for suppressing internal dissent and prosecuting political dissidents. At the time, a senior figure in that department was Viktor Cherkesov, a longtime member of Putin’s inner circle who served as his deputy when he headed the Federal Security Service — the KGB successor organization — in the 1990s and who died in 2022.

In 2022, journalist and researcher Konstantin Sholmov published a photograph of a KGB archival document from 1976 that he said was on display at the Political History Museum in St. Petersburg. The document, a protocol of a search of the residence of Leningrad artist and dissident Oleg Volkov, named “Lieutenant Putin” as one of the officers carrying out the search.

In 2013, a series of photographs emerged showing a 1989 Leningrad protest during which KGB operatives roughly detained dissident Valery Terekhov. One of the men in the photograph resembles Putin. The Kremlin later denied that the man was Putin, saying the future president had already been sent to East Germany by 1989.

Prominent human rights activist Aleksandr Cherkasov of the banned rights group Memorial told the news outlet Agentstvo earlier this month that he believes Putin was involved in the investigation of Skobov. He said Skobov had told him Putin staked out his Leningrad apartment in November 1982 when prominent dissidents gathered to celebrate Skobov’s birthday.

Despite the danger growing around him after he was designated a “foreign agent,” Skobov refused to consider emigration.

“I’m not going to quit,” he said.

“Today anyone in Russia who disagrees with Putin’s Nazi regime is taking a risk,” he added, “even if he doesn’t really stick out or act publicly. Since the regime has already made the transformation from ‘hybrid totalitarian’ to totalitarian, it demands not just silence from its loyal subjects, but active participation. And even avoidance can be dangerous.”

Opposition leader Aleksei Navalny’s suspicious death in prison on February 16 was “to be expected,” Skobov said.

“Navalny constantly laughed in [Putin’s] face, and a dictator cannot stand that,” he added. “Unfortunately, I don’t think it will be the last death of a political prisoner in Putin’s Russia.”

Source: Robert Coalson & RFE/RL’s North.Realities, “‘I’m Not Going To Quit’: Facing Prison, Soviet-Era Dissident Skobov Speaks Out Against War, Repression,” RFE/RL, 10 April 2024

Russian Bus Plunges into River, Killing Passengers

Security camera footage shows a bus in St. Petersburg, Russia, veering across the road and off a bridge into the Moika River. At least three people were killed, with several others in serious condition in hospital.

Source: NBC News, 10 May 2024. Thanks to Marina Varchenko for the heads-up.

While the international far right was busy meeting in Washington, D.C., for the CPAC 2024 conference in late February, on the other side of the world, a grab bag of “anti-Western” groups, including a handful of far-right leaders from Europe, North America, and South America, gathered in the Lomonosov innovation cluster in Moscow for two conferences held in parallel. One was the Multipolarity Forum (Форум многополярности) and the other, the Second Congress of the International Russophile Movement (Второй конгресс Международного движения русофилов, МДР).

The two meetings, which centered on support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, attacking the LGBTQ+ community, opposition to “Western hegemony,” and opposition to the “russophobia” of the West, brought together an odd assortment of leaders. There were representatives from the Global South, National Bolsheviks, acolytes of far right Russian ideologue Alexander Dugin, European neo-fascists, revolutionary leftists, and leaders of various religious denominations. All in all, the gathering included more than 300 representatives from 130 countries.

While Moscow has hosted large conferences attended by significant far-right groups in the past, these two events mark a shift towards official institutional support as high-ranking government officials officially sanctioned the gathering. Present were two members of Putin’s cabinet, Maria Zakharova, the director of the information and press department of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, who presented opening remarks from Putin.

Other foreign state officials were invited to the congress as well. They included Darko Mladić, the son of General Ratko Mladić, convicted war criminal for genocide and former general of the Republika Srpska (RS), Zhang Weiwei, an ideologue for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Syrian diploma and current ambassador to Russia Bashar Al Jaafari, former Prime Minister of the Slovak Republic Jan Czarnogursky, and South African MP for the African National Congress (ANC) and grandson of Nelson Mandela, Zwelivelile “Mandla” Mandela. Pierre de Gaulle, the grandson of former French President Charles de Gaulle, who has expressed pro-Russian sympathies throughout the war, noted his grandfather’s alleged support for relations with Russia.

“Russophobia,” the “racism” of the West, and the “canceling of Russia” were common themes at the event. Tsargrad TV founder Konstantin Malofeev claimed that the current wave of alleged xenophobia and racism against Russians was comparable to what happened in Nazi Germany. Going further, he underlined that, “we understand that this is the hatred of the globalist elite, not the people.” However, at times, some speakers revealed that the “russophobia” they were referring to was not simply a perceived xenophobia towards Russians, but the West’s insistence that LGBTQ+ people simply not be discriminated against. In fact, one of the three thematic sections for the International Russophile Movement Congress included a section on “traditional values.” In his speech, Alexander Dugin mentioned the following:

“The West has racistly and imperialistically identified itself with humanity. There was a time when Britain claimed all seas and oceans as its own. Western civilisation declared all of humanity its property — primarily its consciousness. This led to the formation of a unipolar world. In this world, there are only Western values. Only one political system — liberal democracy. Only one economic model — neoliberal capitalism. Only one culture — postmodernism. Only one conception of genders and family — LGBT. Only one version of development — technological perfection up to post-humanism and the complete displacement of humanity by AI and cyborgs.”

Dugin, the leader of the International Eurasian Movement (Международная евразийская движения, MED), and theorist of “Eurasianism,” and the neo-fascist “Fourth Political Theory” which aims to unite far right and far left groups around the world to destabilize Western democracies, was a key speaker at the event. He received widespread attention from conference attendees and Russian propaganda outlets RT, Sputnik, and Tsargrad. Other followers of the “Fourth Political theory” present at the conference included Raphael Machado, leader of the far right Brazilian group Nova Resistência (New Resistance), which the U.S. State Department recently classified as a source of “Pro-Kremlin Disinformation” in Brazil. According to Machado, the conferences, which were first organized in 2023, are the brainchild of he and Dugin, with support from the Thinkers Forum in China and the International Movement of Russophiles. Following the 2023 conferences, Machado was named the Latin American coordinator for the event. During Machado’s trip to Moscow, he met with many of the speakers, including Maria Zakharova, the President of the Eurasian Youth Union (Евразийский союз молодежи) chapter in Russia, Pavel Kiselev, and Leonid Savin, the longtime editor of Dugin’s website Geopolitika.ru.

Another individual with whom Machado had contact while on his trip was a member of the ultranationalist Two-Headed Eagle movement (Всероссийский съезд общества “Двуглавый Орел”), led by Malofeev, and which Machado claims has a formal partnership with Nova Resistência and is currently fighting in Ukraine. The Two-Headed Eagle movement was created by Malofeev in 2017 with the objective of supporting Putin, ridding the country of secularism and returning the Orthodox monarchy to the country, as well as the demolition of Lenin’s mausoleum.

Malofeev, the director of Russian Christian nationalist and conspiracist media platform Tsargrad (Царьград), and wealthy financier of anti-LGBTQ+ causes around the world, who has paid millions of dollars to separatists in the Donbass region of Ukraine, was another star speaker. During his speech, he made the following comments directed at the LGBTQ+ community:

“I think everyone in this room is well aware that the World Health Organization was created with Rockefeller money, and now its main sponsor is the Bill Gates Foundation. Therefore, transnational corporations and international organizations have long merged and serve the interests of the globalist elite. WHO recently adopted the International Classification of Diseases No. 11 (ICD-11), which excluded perversion from mental disorders and pedophilia ceased to be a disease, but became just a disorder. This is not the imposition of new social norms, but rather it is the abandonment of God and the embodiment of Satanism.”

Formally, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the head of the International Movement of Russophiles (MDR) Nikolai Malinov, a former Bulgarian politician who was once accused of spying for Russia and sanctioned by the United States, organized the events. In practice, however, it is understood that Malofeev was the primary financier of the congresses.

Italian far right leader Roberto Fiore, acting as a representative on behalf of his neo-fascist political party Forza Nuova (New Force, FN) and the EU parliamentary far-right coalition Alliance for Peace and Freedom (APF), made up of the Die Heimat (DH), Parti Nationaliste Français (PNF), Democracia Nacional (DN) and other far-right parties, was also an invited attendee of the conferences. Fiore presented a proposal for “a Russian intervention of 50 billion euros to regenerate the agriculture of our territory and consequently its social fabric, eroded by years of capitalism and policies distant from the earth.” This would apparently “allow Italy to gradually move away from the diabolical Western world that is leading our country to the abyss.”

Another attendee was Belgian Kris Roman, a Russian propagandist with ties to both Russian intelligence, and various groups on the international far right. Roman, who considers himself a “reformed racist,” has a history steeped in Nazism and white supremacist politics, which later led him to make connections with the Russian far right in the early 2000s and build bridges with Russians over the years through his organization Euro-Rus. During the event, Roman met with Maria Zakharova. Other far-right attendees included Zmago Jelinčič Plemeniti, the leader of the far right, anti-LGBTQ+, anti-Roma party Slovenska Nacionalna Stranka (Slovenian National Party, SNS), Mitsuhiro Kimura, the leader of the Japanese ultranationalist and anti-American group Issuikai (一水会), and Kemi Seba, a French-Beninese, pro-Russian activist against French colonialism in Africa with a history of holding strongly antisemitic beliefs.

A number of pro-Russian journalists, who frequently speak on air on Russian propaganda channels such as RT and Sputnik, were present for the event. Brazilian journalist for the Asia Times Pepe Escobar, who commonly appears on Russian media channels, was invited to speak alongside Maria Zakharova. Another attendee was conspiracist and Syrian dictator Bashar Assad propagandist Maram Susli, AKA “Syrian Girl,” known for her television appearances on Russia Today (Россия Сегодня, RT) and the American conspiracy outfit Infowars, who has ties to white nationalist identitarian groups in Austria and the US. Other influencers present at the conferences were Peruvian war correspondent and Russian propagandist Carlos Mamani, American MMA fighter and RT host Jeff Monson, and Russian-American television host for Channel One Russia (Первый канал) Dimitri K. Simes. A representative from the far right conspiracist website Counterspin New Zealand was present to cover the event.

A cohort of representatives from religious movements were invited to the conference, including the Archbishop Savva of Zelenograd, the Catholic Cardinal Viganò, Sheikh Iman Hussein, and Archpriest Tkachev. The Duginist outlet Geopolitika’s summary of the event described their speeches as follows:

“In the speeches of Cardinal Viganò and Archpriest Tkachev, a verdict was made on the hegemony of Western elites, a condemnation of their diabolical roots and the closed club of Satan worshipers. They openly criticized the hatred of traditional biblical man, dotting the i’s and calling a spade a spade.”

The Portuguese commentator Alexandre Guerreiro, was also present to give a speech on multipolarity. Guerreiro was previously named in a report by Portuguese news outlet Sábado to be a part of the “far-right network spreading Russian propaganda in Portugal,” and has appeared several times on the podcast of Nova Resistência. From Poland, Tomasz Jankowski, previously the general secretary of the pro-Russian Zmiana political party (Change), and the magazine Myśl Polska, made an appearance. CIA veteran Larry Johnson was another popular guest who claimed in his speech that the United States had become a country like the Soviet Union that “restricted free speech, jailed political opponents, and had elderly leaders.”

Finally, testifying to the Red-Brown alliance (between far left, far right, and nationalist groups) that the Russian government has done so much to help foster in recent years, members of the traditional radical left also sent representatives to the conferences. Chief amongst them was Jesus Salazar Velásquez, the Venezuelan ambassador to Russia who voiced his support for “Russia and the country’s fight for a just world without the hegemony of the ‘collective West.’” From the U.S., the pro-Russian communist Haz Al-Din, and the German communist Liane Kilinc, president of the “Peace Bridge – War Victims Aid,” met with other pro-Russian influencers outside of the event. Two attendees coming from Latin America, Elier Ramírez Cañedo, the Deputy director of the Fidel Castro Ruz Center, and the Argentinian sociologist Atilio Boron, were in attendance. Jackson Hinkle the “MAGA Communist” from the United States, was another attendee who met with many of the speakers including Alexander Dugin, Maria Zakharova, Sergey Lavrov, and Kris Roman.

Source: “Russia Hosts Large Far Right Conference Attacking LGBTQ+ Rights, ‘Russophobes,’ and ‘Globalists,'” Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, 5 March 2024

Crimean pensioner Maria Zamyrailo-Levytska has been jailed for five days and fined 35 thousand roubles over ‘liked’ posts on the social network Odnoklassniki, including one containing the Ukrainian trident. The 64-year-old is one of a huge number of Ukrainian men and women who have been ‘denounced’ by so-called ‘Crimean SMERSH’ vigilantes working closely with the Russian occupation enforcement bodies to hunt down those expressing pro-Ukrainian views or opposition to Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine.

Judging by the material shown on the Crimean SMERSH Telegram channel, Zamyrailo-Levytska may well have only ‘liked’ the posts of others, with this on Odnoklassniki meaning that the posts appear on her page also. All of the posts which Crimean SMERSH and the Russian occupation regime found ‘incriminating’ demonstrate support for Ukraine, as well as gratitude and deep respect for Ukraine’s defenders.

The occupation enforcement bodies came up with two charges. She was accused of ‘discrediting’ the Russian armed forces, under Article 20.3.3 of Russia’s code of administrative offences. This was one of four charges hastily added to Russian legislation following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and it is standardly used in occupied Crimea to prosecute for Ukrainian patriotic songs, the Ukrainian flag or for expressing opposition to the war. She was, however, also charged under Article 20.3 § 1 because of the Ukrainian Trident on posts. Although the ‘court press service’ typically reported this as being a conviction for “publicly demonstrating Nazi symbols”, it went on to explain that it was, in fact, because it was considered to be a symbol of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, one of many Ukrainian organizations banned in Russia and in parts of Ukraine while they remain under Russian occupation. There were, seemingly, two separate ‘hearings’ on 7 May 2024, with both under ‘judge’ Georgy Davidovich Tsertsvadze from the occupation ‘Kirovske district court’. It is likely that she received the five-day term of imprisonment over the Trident, and the 35-thousand rouble fine over posts claimed to ‘discredit’ the invading country’s armed forces.

‘Crimean SMERSH’ do not appear to have extracted one of their standard videoed ‘confessions’ which are normally shot in occupation ‘police’ offices. It is clear from the part of the ‘court’ hearing that Crimean SMERSH, or the latter’s most notorious collaborator Aleksandr Talipov, posted, that Zamyrailo-Levytska was clearly terrorized, and can be seen ‘admitting guilt’ and promising not to do it again.

The original SMERSH was active in the Soviet Union during World War II and immediately afterwards. While supposedly created to hunt down those working for the Nazis, it is most notorious for having targeted opponents of the communist regime. The term SMERSH was, apparently, coined by Joseph Stalin as an abbreviation for ‘death to spies’. As in Stalin’s USSR, the victims of the modern day ‘Crimean SMERSH’ are those who oppose the current occupation regime. Russia originally used ‘videoed confessions’ as part of its terror in Chechnya, however the Russian human rights monitors OVD.info reported in June 2023 that two thirds of these alleged ‘confessions’ now come from occupied Crimea.

If, in occupied Crimea, Talipov & Co. carry out their denunciations and use torture or terror to extract ‘confessions’ in obvious, yet not officially stated collaboration with the occupation authorities, that may well be about to change.

In December 2023, Russian Duma deputy Andrei Gurulev, a lieutenant general on the Duma defence committee, announced the creation of SMERSH in occupied parts of Ukraine. The aim of SMERSH, he claimed, was “to fight saboteurs and spies” and he called for SMERSH to be revived throughout Russia. While the security service is working all out, he wrote, they could miss something, and claimed that there are internal enemies acting against Russia’s interests “with the help of Western security services”. Although both Russian-installed Crimean leader Sergei Aksyonov and Yan Gagin from the Russian proxy ‘Donetsk people’s republic’ were cited as having called for such units, this was seemingly the first time that a Russian official said that SMERSH was already functioning in occupied parts of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts.

Source: Halya Coynash, “64-year-old pensioner jailed in Russian-occupied Crimea for social media posts of a Ukrainian Trident and thanking Ukraine’s defenders,” Human Rights in Ukraine, 10 May 2024

The Russian capture of Avdiivka and its military’s slow subsequent advance this spring has come at the cost of thousands of deaths of its own servicemen, to say nothing of Ukrainian losses. Since the summer of 2022, Russian commanders have repeatedly sent their soldiers on suicidal assaults, essentially using them as cannon fodder. Deprived of proper support, sapped of motivation, denied medical aid, and left with no route of retreat that does not involve the high risk of being shot by their own side, Russian soldiers are dying in droves for every kilometer of uninhabitable territory “liberated” by Kremlin forces.

Survivors of these “meat grinder” assaults supplied The Insider with harrowing accounts. They took cover behind the corpses of their former comrades during shelling. They were tasked with collecting the shredded remains of blown apart bodies. They were trapped in trenches for days with no food, water, ammunition, or hope of evacuation.

[…]

Source: Victoria Ponomareva, “‘Shreds of bodies hung from the branches’: Confessions of ‘meat grinder’ assault veterans,” The Insider, 8 May 2024

Adios, America!

This ultra-patriotic gem was just beamed to me by my fellow Petersburg psychogeographer V., who found it forlornly pasted up in the former “party zone” on Dumskaya and Lomonosov streets in downtown Petersburg, a quarter which was thoroughly purged last year by the local powers that be for no good reason.

A quick scan of the QR code leads to the now-equally shuttered website El-Chapo.rf. According to the restaurant review site Restoclub, El Chapo is “closed indefinitely.” But what it must have been back in its heyday, during the first year of Russia’s glorious war against fascist Ukraine and its Western puppet masters!

Dance bar with Mexican cuisine on Lomonosov Street. El Chapo serves Mexican cuisine: quesadillas with oyster mushrooms, burritos with shredded beef and shrimp in coconut. To try the spicy chimichanga tortillas with meat, you have to sign a special contract. Here they mix cocktails based on tequila, rum and house-made tinctures. At the bar you can have your photo taken with local star Frida the Pig. El Chapo hosts DJ sets and parties, and plays Mexican rap, funk, and sometimes disco.

The once lively (and, in the early 2000s, avowedly ethnically and internationally tolerant) Dumskaya bar district is indeed now a ghost town, as witnessed by another snapshot which V. sent to me. ||| TRR

After breathing a sigh of relief, this was the first question that popped in my head:

Who are the 112 U.S. representatives who thought it was a great idea to unilaterally disarm Ukraine, an ally that is fighting for its survival against a U.S. adversary?

The list was published almost immediately.

My reflection is not about these particular people in particular, but the fact that in Washington, and in capitals across Europe, a hefty number of our democratically elected representatives are brazenly siding with Russia, a totalitarian state which has the aim of not only weakening our democracies but bringing defeat to our entire system and the international rules based system. They are siding with the destruction of a sovereign state, Ukraine, and the occupation of its territory and citizens.

Marjorie Taylor Greene is in the company of Matteo Salvini (head of the League), Giuseppe Conte (former Italian PM), and so many other European politicians who may be motivated to side with Russia for a variety of reasons. It speaks to the penetration of Russian capture in some cases, or industrial and commercial interests influencing our political base. Since Russia has no ideology at the present time, I’m assuming they agree with the neo-realist worldview which would see large states eat up smaller ones by force simply because they can, throwing out the entire concept of state sovereignty.

If they have been captured and are working for a foreign adversary, there is no indication that any of them (at least in Italy) are under investigation. The only way we can rid our system of elected representatives working openly in the interests of an adversary to the detriment of our national interests is to vote them out. In Italy, that isn’t possible because even if a head of a party loses an election, he/she can still remain in their place and continue working in the interests of Russia: see Salvini and Conte.

This is why I am overjoyed that the House has belatedly passed the aid to Ukraine bill, but unspeakably frustrated with our inability to rid ourselves of people who are ready to throw our security, and Ukraine, under the bus.

Dmitri Medvedev meltdown: He’s hoping for a civil war in the U.S.

No one doubted that American lawmakers would approve “aid” to a gang of neo-Nazis. It was a vote by the joyous bastards of the state:

a) in favour of continuing the civil war of the divided people of our formerly united country;

b) for maximising the number of victims of this war.

We will win, of course, despite the 61 billion bloody dollars that will mostly go down the throats of their insatiable military-industrial complex. Strength and Truth are behind us.

But in view of this Russophobic decision, I cannot but wish with all sincerity that the United States would plunge into a new civil war as soon as possible. Which, I hope, will be cardinally different from war of the North and the South in XIX century and will be conducted with application of planes, tanks, artillery, MLRS, all kinds of missiles and other weapons. And which will finally lead to the ignominious collapse of the vile evil empire of the XXI century – the United States of America

Source: Monique Camarra, Eurofile, 21 April 2024

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev became the first Russian to get the brand new iPhone 4, which are to go on sale on Thursday.

The Russian leader received the smarthphone [sic] as a present from Apple CEO Steve Jobs during his visit to the company’s headquarters in Cupertino, California.

At 9.3 mm the iPhone 4 is 25 percent thinner than its predecessors and the thinnest smartphone on the market. The gizmo also boasts a state of the art battery, with seven hours of talk time and 300 hours of standby.

According to the Russian mobile operator Beeline, the brand new device may appear on the Russian market no earlier than September.

During his visit to the Silicon Valley the Russian leader also visited the U.S. office of the Russian search engine Yandex.

The Yandex Labs center, based in Paolo Alto, California, is involved in scientific projects concerning mainly the optimization of online search technologies and other advanced research activities.

The president was accompanied by Yandex CEO Arkady Volozh and the chief technology officer of the Silicon Valley-based Yandex Labs, Arkady Borkovsky.

Source: “Medvedev becomes first iPhone 4 owner in Russia,” Sputnik, 23 June 2010

Volunteers

The St. Petersburg Natural Resources Management Committee has stopped signing up volunteers willing to carry gray toads across the road at the Sestroretsk Wetlands Wildlife Preserve. The committee was able to recruit the number of volunteers it needed in a single day.

The committee itself reported the end of the volunteer enrollment, thanking all those who had responded to the call to help the amphibians.

“Registration has been temporarily suspended, as enough volunteers have been recruited for the coming weeks,” the committee stated in its message.

Delovoi Peterburg learned that officials received an unprecedented number of calls and appeals during the day. Six hundred volunteers signed up to save the gray toads.

The largest population of gray toads in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region lives in the Sestroretsk Wetlands. Annually in early spring, they migrate en masse to the eastern shore of the Sestroretsk Reservoir to lay their eggs before returning to the forest [sic]. They cross the highway during their migration and can be hit by passing cars.

The Sestroretsk Wetlands Wildlife Reserve announced on April 8 that it was recruiting volunteers to ferry the amphibians over the road. Volunteers are allowed to carry amphibians across the highway after special training. Passersby who have not been trained are asked not to touch the toads, as improper actions can traumatize the amphibians and even cause their death.

Specialists consider toads to be particularly useful amphibians. According to scientists, toads consume about three times more pests than do frogs.

Source: “Smolny’s call to save toads in Sestroretsk causes stir among Petersburgers,” Delovoi Peterburg, 8 April 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader. Photo, above, courtesy of Delovoi Peterburg via vk.com/infoeco_spb.

Russian volunteer Alexander Demidenko, who helped Ukrainian refugees [cross the border with Russia], has died in a pretrial detention center in the Belgorod Region, report Vot Tak and iStories, citing sources. It is claimed that Demidenko died on April 5, but news of his death was made public only today, after his lawyer had informed the deceased man’s wife and son.

The cause of death has not been reported, and there have been no official comments from the authorities yet.

Alexander Demidenko had been in custody since mid-October [2023] on charges of illegal arms trafficking. According to iStories, the authorities were planning to transfer Demidenko to St. Petersburg, where he was to have been charged with more serious crimes.

Since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the 61-year-old Demidenko had attended anti-war pickets and helped Ukrainian refugees return to their homeland, driving them to the border and hosting them at his home. As many as 900 people who needed a place to sleep stayed in his home, as the border checkpoint was often closed due to shelling, Mediazona writes.

Demidenko disappeared at the Kolotilovka border checkpoint in the Belgorod Region on 17 October [2023]. According to volunteers, he had driven an elderly woman to the checkpoint, but in the parking lot he was stopped by two members of the the territorial defense forces. Subsequently, communication with Demidenko was lost.

Three days later, police officers brought Demidenko home and conducted a search, during which they allegedly found a grenade and detonator fuses from the 1940s. There were numerous bruises on Demidenko’s body.

On 20 October, Alexander Demidenko was jailed for ten days on administrative charges of drinking alcoholic beverages. He was released on 31 October, but the next day he was detained again and jailed for thirty days. During the second administrative arrest, he was arraigned on charges of illegal weapons trafficking and remanded in custody in the pretrial detention center.

In November, it was reported that Demidenko had also been charged with high treason. His lawyer, however, denied these reports. The volunteer’s stay at the pretrial detention center was extended several times on the original weapons charges.

Source: “Volunteer Demidenko, who helped Ukrainians, dies in pretrial detention center,” Radio Svoboda, 8 April 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader. Photo of Mr. Demidenko, above, courtesy of Radio Svoboda, via social media.

Muslims

Muslims performing the morning prayer on Uraza Bayram [Eid al-Fitr] at Saint Petersburg Mosque, 10 April 2024.

Source: Andrei Bok (Facebook), 11 April 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader

In Russia where 14 million Muslims reside as of 2017, Eid al-Fitr is often known as Uraza Bayram (Russian: Ураза-байрам) and is a public holiday in the republics of Adygea, Bashkortostan, Dagestan, Ingushetia, Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachay-Cherkessia, Tatarstan and Chechnya. Most festive dishes consist of mutton, but salads and various soups are also popular. As the Muslim population is diverse, traditional festive dishes differ between regions – for example in Tatarstan pancakes are popularly baked.

Russian Muslims go to festive worships at mosques in the morning of Eid al-Fitr, after which they often visit older relatives as a sign of respect. In the North Caucasian republics, children popularly go past various houses with a bag to get it filled with candy, specially stored by locals for the celebration. In Dagestan, eggs with bright stickers is a popular traditional dish served there during Eid al-Fitr. People generally dress more during this day – women choose bright dresses with beads while older people would wear papakhas. In many places in the country master classes are also hosted where families take part in activities such as embroidery and clay making.

Source: “Eid al-Fitr” (Wikipedia)

The festival of Eid Al-Fitr, or “Uraza Bayram,” marks the end of the holy month of Ramadan in Islam. This year 180,000 worshippers marked the event in Moscow, a figure below half of last year’s number.

Photo: Arthur Novosiltsev/Moskva News Agency

Source: Moscow Times, 10 April 2024

2 Russia Problem

Boris Akunin

I think that most of us have not yet understood that the world of Russia has once again, like a century ago, split in two, like an iceberg, and its two halves, the bigger and the smaller, are rapidly drifting apart. It’s just that the split happened less dramatically, without the crowding onto the last steamship, without the “we departed from Crimea amidst smoke and fire” [lines from a poem by White émigré Nikolai Turoverov]. The split has been dragged out in time, and the crack wasn’t so wide at the beginning. Some people are still hopping from one iceberg to the other.

And yet—that’s it. There are two Russias again. Many people—in both halves—cannot or are afraid to recognize this. It’s time to stop hopping, otherwise you’ll leap to one side and won’t be able to hop back again.

Hopes for the swift fall of the rotten regime (also just like one hundred years ago) have been disappointed. It’s plenty rotten but rot, as everyone knows, spreads.

Last time it took seventy years to root it out. This time it probably won’t take as much time; time moves more quickly in the twenty-first century, but you still have to unpack the suitcases and settle in for a long wait.

What will happen with the ‘little’ Russia, scattered across different countries, is pretty clear. [Russians] who are younger or more active or more professionally cosmopolitan will assimilate with varying degrees of success. [Russians] who are older and professionally tied to the language and culture will sadly sing “while the light has not gone out, while the candle burns” [a line from a famous Mashina vremeni song] and will support that little flame as long as they have the life and strength for it. This work of theirs is not pointless or in vain, because in ‘big’ Russia there are still a great many people for whom that light will be precious and necessary.

In the mother country—goddamn déjà-vu—things will soon be utterly unbearable. In the longstanding two-hundred-year struggle between the Asiatic state and European culture the Horde has triumphed once again, now zealously working to asiatize the culture. (There is nothing malign about Asia and its culture, which of all people I, a specialist in Asian studies, should know; I am talking about political Asia, in which the state is everything and the individual is nothing.)

The culture of the mother country will be censored, hollowed out, thrust onto all fours and taught to wag its tail. We’ve seen it, we remember. Later, of course, a counterculture will take shape, [yielding] virtuosos of Aesopian language and furtive rude gestures. We remember that too: we had plenty of it. The emigres will coo condescendingly over any vivid manifestations of censored culture—like Nabokov did over Okudzhava. Those in Russia will secretly pass around tamizdat editions. And publish in the West using pseudonyms.

How dreadful and boring this all is, ladies and gentlemen. Russia’s national anthem: “We sowed and sowed the grain, we will stomp and stomp the grain” [lines from a Russian folk song].

And the number-one national poem: “Everyone chooses for themselves.”

It’s time to choose again: shield and armor, walking stick and patches, a religion, a road, to serve the devil, a measure of final reckoning—and so on down the list.

For some the price will be their profession, for others poverty or emigration. The most noble will give up their freedom. And even their lives. The higher quality the person, the greater the cost.

And it is all worth it. This is what I’ve been thinking and why I wrote this text, not at all because I wanted to drive you into even greater despondency.

More so than all of us together, each of us individually is facing a big test. We can’t flunk.

Sergey Abashin

Stop referring to “Asia” and “the Horde.” Why insult millions of people in the world and in Russia itself? You are not helping the “little” Russia” in any way.

Ivan Babitski

I see that Akunin has again written something about Asia (where “the state is everything and the individual is nothing”) defeating European values in one particular country.

The point is that Russian intellectuals are, historically, not so fond of anything as repeating German vulgarities. And “Asian” metaphors are the favorites of Germans, and there is no degree of blatant idiocy at which they would stop.

For example, Adenauer explicitly claimed that the “Asian steppes” begin east of the Elbe. (He considered Prussia to be Asian, and so Bismarck’s triumph was an Asian conquest of Germany. Adenauer added the steppe by association.)

No matter how many decades have passed, the pre-war German spirit cannot be taken out of the Russian pamphleteer, and the fear of appearing ridiculous is as alien to them as it was to their mentors.

Pavel Sulyandziga

Quite correct thoughts in general, but there is one big catch.

How does Akunin (Chkhartishvili) differ from those Sieg Heiling in Russia when he starts using “Asia” in such a context, in such a comparison, even with a caveat? Maybe someone will say that I am wrong to try and compare him with the Sieg Heilers. Let me put it another way, then. How does a very good writer differ from those who are called white supremacists in the west?

I recently listened to a very interesting lecture on racism. The lecturer made a rather loose, but interesting ranking, singling out the racism of Soviet people as a separate species.

For some reason, some Europeans, when speaking about Asianness, “forget” about the Inquisition, concentration camps, and many other terrible events in history. Or are these also manifestations of Asianness?

We should also not forget that the current world order is also largely a product of European civilization with all its pros and cons.

One last thing, about why I decided to react in this way to Akunin’s statement, which are quite congenial to my own thoughts. It seems to me that a respected public figure should always think about the consequences of their words and deeds.

[…]

Source: Asya Rudina, “‘The world has split in two:’ the Runet discusses Akunin’s post about the two Russias,” Radio Svoboda, 1 April 2024. Translated by the Fabulous AM and the Russian Reader. The reactions, above, to Akunin’s outburst were not typical. Most of the best-selling author’s fans echoed his sentiments. The photos, above, by our friends V and M, were taken today at an exhibition currently on view in the former swimming pool and catacombs in the so-called Petrikirche on Nevsky Prospekt in downtown Petersburg. They suggest, I think, that the reality on the ground in “big Russia” (and “little Russia” as well) is slightly more complicated than Akunin would have us believe. ||| TRR

Article of the Week

Article of the week

Each Wednesday we tell you what material has been the most interesting for one of the residents [sic] of the Delovoi Peterburg Experts Club, a reader, or one of our employees.

Today, Zurab Pliyev, first deputy director general of Northern Capital LLC, shared an article with us.

“Putin’s final result in the presidential election was 87.28%”

During the recent Russian presidential election, we were honored to be part of the team that ensured the smooth operation of 248 polling stations in St. Petersburg. Our company was responsible for their catering for all three days.

We catered hot meals for all polling station employees, election commission members, observers, and representatives of law enforcement agencies free of charge.

And we read this article in Delovoi Peterburg with a sense of pride that we had also made a contribution to the way those three days came off.

Article of the week:

Putin’s final result in the presidential election was 87.28%

Read the article

Source: Delovoi Peterburg “Article of the Week” email newsletter, 27 March 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader

Vladimir Putin won the Russian presidential election with 87.28% of the vote. The final vote count was announced by the head of the Central Election Commission, Ella Pamfilova.

76,277,708 people voted for Putin.

After all the votes were tabulated, the candidate from the Communist Party Nikolai Kharitonov garnered 4.31%, the leader of the LDPR Leonid Slutsky received 3.2%, and the candidate from New People, Vladislav Davankov, got 3.85%, Pamfilova said.

Earlier, the CEC had announced a record-high turnout in the history of presidential elections in [post-Soviet] Russia.

The 2024 presidential election also was the first multi-day campaign in the history of [post-Soviet] Russia. It was possible to vote for the new [sic] head of state on March 15, 16 and 17.

The regions of the Northwestern Federal District were among the worst in terms of turnout in the Russian Federation. The lowest turnout for the presidential election was in the Komi Republic, at 58.52%. Karelia, where 60.08% voted in the election, was also among the five regions with the lowest turnout.

Source: “Putin’s final result in the presidential election was 87.28%,” Delovoi Peterburg, 21 March 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader

Northern Capital LLC’s cabbage pasties are only 75 rubles a pop. Photo courtesy of Delovoi Peterburg

The presidential election was held, a decisive event not only for the future of the country, but also for every Russian citizen. Over the course of three days, Russian citizens chose a worthy candidate for the post of the head of state, and, according to experts, the turnout at polling stations was the highest in the history of [post-Soviet] Russia.

The catering service Northern Capital LLC also compiled its own statistics for the three days of elections. The snack bars at the 248 polling stations were supplied with the most relevant and necessary items. Current and future voters enjoyed pancakes, pastries, pies, and drinks. For the Central District alone, Northern Capital produced 23,679 baked goods. Polling station workers, election commissioners, law enforcers, and election observers did not go hungry either. At the behest of Zurab Pliyev, first deputy director general of Northern Capital LLC, they were provided with free hot lunches and beverages.

“We consider it our duty to continue and support the tradition of snack bars at polling stations, which has passed from generation to generation. We want to maintain that special election atmosphere that makes the celebration a family affair. The snack bar is the second largest component of the process. That is why we made sure that there was a wide variety of high-quality and tasty food not only for voters, but also for those who directly implement the electoral process,” said Zurab Izrailovich Pliyev, first deputy director general of Northern Capital LLC.

Source: “Northern Capital catering service carefully preserves the tradition of buffets at the elections,” Delovoi Peterburg, 22 March 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader

“Across the River They’re Making Chocolate”: Vsevolod Korolev’s Closing Statement in Court

<Vsevolod Korolev

During his closing statement in court today the documentary filmmaker Vsevolod Korolev read a poem by Grigori Dashevsky:

Across the river they’re making chocolate.

Out there the river-ice is breaking up.

And upriver we’re waiting, but for now

no bus comes, only its vacant ghost,

a desolate fleshless light flying ahead

to the engine’s howl

and the clatter of

the ad-slates changing.

We’re not cold, we bide our time.

The sky a deeper blue, the burning streetlights.

To wait for each new minute as for a ghost,

to put on stage-paint for him alone,

to powder your face with light––and poorly it sticks,

but without it there’s nothing

to tell you apart: not from the many

faces—multitudes—

but from the lived-through years

which, like a star, are distant and weightless as smoke.

But from the sweet smoke, the glory of heaven,

look up for a moment,

tear your eyes away
as from a book:

As much as a star has its shining

or a factory its smoke,

all things have

their limit: a book’s gilded edges

or a band of cloud.

And turned from weddings not my own, and graves,

not waiting for the end, I rose

and saw an enormous room, a hall,

walls, walls, Moscow, and I asked:

where is the light that lit these pages,

where is the wind that rustled them like leaves?

It’s late to be asking: each person is lit bright,

thrown open to the right dream

for the minutes, like pupils widened,

unscathed, like smoke or sleep:

they fly in, gleam, collect a promise:

Remember, remember (take leave of) me.

“I don’t intend to speak for very long. Your Honor, I am in some sense a colleague of yours, since I’ve worked as a third-tier soccer referee; I understand that you’re in a tough situation, it’s hard to envy someone stuck in the middle of this whole business. But nevertheless I have always believed in people and will continue to do so, even when it makes absolutely no sense. In any case I know this is really hard for you, but I think you’ll figure it out.” (Vsevolod Korolev)

“To ask for ten years when the maximum is ten and given the absence of aggravating circumstances and the evidence of mitigating ones—this goes against the fundamental norms of the criminal code. And this demonstrates for the umpteenth time the invalidity and baselessness of the prosecution’s case.” ([Korolev’s defense] lawyer Maria Zyrianova)

Source: Irina Kravtsova (Facebook), 18 March 2024. Translated by the Fabulous AM. Grigori Dashevsky, “Across the river they’re making chocolate,” trans. Ainsley Morse and Timmy Straw, The Hopkins Review 16.2 (Spring 2023): 18–19. Translation © 2023 Ainsley Morse and Timmy Straw, reproduced here courtesy of the translators.

Discourse journalist and documentary filmmaker Vsevolod Korolev has been sentenced to a three-year prison term on charges of “disseminating fake news” about the army.

During the trial on March 18 defense lawyer Maria Zyrianova noted that the case file did not indicate what information in Korolev’s posts had been determined to be knowingly false. Korolev is accused of making two posts on [the Russian social media network] Vkontakte about the mass murders of civilians in the Ukrainian cities of Bucha and Borodianka, as well as about the shelling of Donetsk.

The prosecution requested a nine-year prison sentence for Korolev. This, noted Discourse, was the longest prison term ever requested by state prosecutors for the charge of disseminating “fake news” about the Russian army.

During the court hearing on March 20, bailiffs at St. Petersburg’s Vyborg District Court recorded the names of those who came to support Korolev, SOTA reports. Earlier, SOTA published a recording of a telephone conversation between the bailiffs, in which they announced their intention to provide the lists of those who came to the trial to Center “E” [the “counter-extremism” police].

The Case of Vsevolod Korolev

Vsevolod Korolev is a documentary filmmaker and poet. He worked as a correspondent for the culture magazine Discourse and made films on social themes — about children with disabilities and political prisoners.
Korolev was detained in July 2022. During the search, his electronic devices were confiscated.
The prosecutors argued that Korolev’s documentaries about the political prisoners Maria Ponomarenko and Alexandra Skochilenko should be deemed an aggravating circumstance.
Linguistic expertise in the case was provided by linguist Alla Teplyashina and political scientist Olga Safonova from the Center for Expertise at St. Petersburg State University.
One of the prosecution’s witnesses later recanted their testimony.
In his closing statement at the trial, Korolev quoted a poem by Grigori Dashevsky: “It’s late to be asking: each person is lit bright, / thrown open to the right dream / for the minutes, like pupils widened, / unscathed, like smoke or sleep: / they fly in, gleam, collect a promise: / Remember, remember (take leave of) me.“
Memorial has designated Korolev a political prisoner.

You can support Vsevolod Korolev by sending him a letter to the following address:

196655 St. Petersburg, Kolpino, Kolpinskaya Street, 9, FKU SIZO-1, Vsevolod Anatolyevich Korolev (born 1987)

You can also use the service FSIN-Pismo.

Source: “Discourse journalist Vsevolod Korolev sentenced to three years for ‘fakes’ about the army,” DOXA, 20 March 2024. Translated by the Fabulous AM and the Russian Reader. People living outside of Russia will find it difficult or impossible to send letters to Russian prisons via regular mail or using online prison correspondence services such as FSIN-Pismo. In many cases, however, you can send letters (which must be written in Russian or translated into Russian) to Russian political prisoners via the free, volunteer-run service RosUznik. You can also write to me (avvakum@pm.me) for assistance and advice in sending such letters.||| TRR

This Russian Life: Alexandra Karaseva’s Election Day Molotov Cocktail

Alexandra Karaseva. Photo from social media account via *Bumaga*

During the three days of the [presidential] election in Russia, the Interior Ministry reports, twenty-one criminal cases were launched over attempts to set fires at polling stations or spoil ballots with brilliant green dye solution. Twenty-one-year-old student Alexandra Karaseva was remanded in custody to a pretrial detention centre after being arraigned on just such charges.

According to police investigators, on 15 March, Karaseva threw a Molotov cocktail at a polling station poster on the porch of School No. 358. No one was injured.

Bumaga explored what we know about Alexandra Karaseva, why she might have committed the arson attack, and what defendants charged with obstructing the work of polling places face.

In St. Petersburg, 21-year-old Alexandra Karaseva was remanded in custody to a pretrial detention centre. Investigators allege that she threw a Molotov cocktail at a polling station

Around three p.m. on the first day of voting, 15 March, a young woman ran up to the porch of School No. 358, in Petersburg’s Moscow District, and threw a Molotov cocktail at the wall, as seen in surveillance footage.

The school housed two election precincts—No. 1395 and No. 1396. The attempted arson only left traces of soot on the upper part of the information sign bearing the elections logo and on the wall of the school. No one was injured and the operation of the polling station was unaffected.

The aftermath of the 15 March arson attempt on the porch of School No. 358 in Petersburg. Photo courtesy of *Bumaga*

The young woman tried to run away but was immediately detained by one of the witnesses. After the incident, the media and the municipal courts press service revealed the suspect’s identity: 21-year-old Alexandra Karaseva. According to the media, the young woman told the police that she had been promised payment for the arson, and that she had received the assignment from a certain “Ukrainian Telegram channel.”

Karaseva was charged with “obstructing the exercise of voting rights” and faces up to five years in prison if convicted. According to police investigators, unidentified persons had inveigled Karaseva “into a criminal plan” over the telephone. The arson attack’s goal was to disrupt the work of polling stations, the investigators claim.

The next day, 16 March, Petersburg’s Moscow District Court remanded Karaseva in custody to a pretrial detention centre. The young woman had pleaded guilty, but asked to be placed under house arrest.

She danced, wasn’t interested in politics, and had financial troubles: how Alexandra Karaseva is described by her acquaintances

Karaseva moved to Petersburg from the Amur Region about four years ago, according to her social media accounts. In 2020, she graduated from school in Blagoveshchensk and enrolled in the computer science and applied mathematics program at Saint Petersburg State University of Economics.

Karaseva had been dancing from the age of five, and at the university she was actively involved in extracurricular activities, her acquaintances told Bumaga. In the autumn of 2023, [the university’s website] mentioned her as a fourth-year student who was a choreographer for the university’s dance team. She worked on a performance celebrating the fifth anniversary of the National Guard department at the Military Institute’s Logistics Academy.

“We worked together on a student talent show. She was responsible for staging the team’s dance numbers. She led a very active lifestyle and was involved in extracurricular activities. She cared about people who needed help. She used to work as a choreographer for children’s dance groups,” said Alisa, a female university acquaintance of Karaseva’s.

While studying at the University of Economics, Karaseva lived at the Inter-University Student Campus (ISC) near the Park Pobedy metro station and competed in the 2023 Miss and Mister ISC contest. According to another university acquaintance of Karaseva’s (who wished to remain anonymous), Karaseva was often short of money, so she took various part-time jobs.

“Frankly, this situation has been a huge shock to me,” said the acquaintance. “Never in my life would I have believed that Sasha could do such a thing. As long as I have known her, she never raised the topic of politics. I’m pretty sure she didn’t do it out of choice. It was probably out of desperation. She was either conned or had money problems.

A few months ago, Karaseva had transferred to the Herzen Russian State Pedagogical University, according to Channel 78. One of Karaseva’s acquaintances also told Bumaga that Karaseva was no longer enrolled at the University of Economics. Officials at the Herzen told Fontanka.ru that a young woman with the same name had recently been expelled from the pedagogical university for skipping classes.

Karaseva’s immediate family members ignored our requests to comment on the story.

Over three day, twenty-one criminal cases were launched in Russia for arson attempts and the pouring of brilliant green dye solution on ballots at polling stations. Some suspects report they were promised payment

Sixty-one criminal cases relating to the presidential election were launched in Russia over the three days of voting, First Deputy Interior Minister Alexander Gorovoy reported on the evening of 17 March. Twenty-one of these cases involved arson attempts at polling stations and attempts to spoil ballot boxes with brilliant green dye solution: they were charged as “obstruction of voting rights.”

In addition to Karaseva, people in other regions of Russia also brought Molotov cocktails and brilliant green dye solution to polling stations. Most cases were recorded on the first day of voting. Here are just a few of them:

A criminal case was launched against a 58-year-old resident of Kogalym who set fire to her ballot and ballot box at a polling station.
Charges were filed against a resident of Volzhsky, in the Volgograd Region, who poured brilliant green dye solution on a ballot box and the ballots in it. The woman herself said that she had been offered a “monetary reward of thirty [thousand rubles]” for spoiling the ballot box.

20-year-old Alina Nevmyanova, who poured green paint into a ballot box at a polling station in Moscow on 15 March 15, was remanded in custody to a pretrial detention centre. According to Baza, the young woman “had received instructions from someone over the phone.”

A Moscow pensioner by the name of Petrukhina, who suffers from cancer and who, according to Mediazona, set fire to voting booths, was placed under house arrest.

In most cases, the suspects in these criminal cases have repented and admitted their guilt. In some cases, they reported that they did it for the money, while eyewitnesses claim that the defendants were allegedly instructed by phone before attempting arson or spoiling ballots with brilliant green dye solution. The details in many of the incidents are still emerging, however.

No Ukrainian organizations have claimed responsibility for the incidents that took place during the Russian elections.

Since the beginning of the full-scale war in Ukraine, acts of sabotage in Russia have been widespread, and they are often committed for payment or after conversations with phone scammers. In Petersburg, they most often have involved arson attacks on military infrastructures, such as military enlistment offices and railroad relay boxes. According to police investigators, the relay box arsonists have usually been hired by persons unknown through Telegram channels for job seekers. For example, the first person convicted of sabotage in Petersburg, Vyacheslav Zaitsev, who was eighteen at the time of his arrest, agreed to destroy a relay box on the railroad in return for ten thousand rubles [approx. 100 euros]. He was sentenced to eight years in prison.

Zhumagul Kurbanova, a 66-year-old employee of a Pyaterochka convenience store in Petersburg, told police officers that she had received a phone call from a certain “Alexander Fyodorovich,” who convinced her to set fire to the door of the military enlistment office on English Avenue, as there were allegedly fraudsters operating there. Kurbanova was sentenced to ten years in prison.

The State Duma has proposed increasing the punishment for attempts to disrupt elections to eight years in prison. Currently, people who torch and vandalize ballot boxes face a maximum of five years in prison

Shortly after a dozen cases of inept “sabotage” at polling stations were recored in Russia on the first day of the election, State Duma deputies proposed toughening the punishment for attempting to disrupt elections by “generally dangerous means” by up to eight years’ imprisonment. Yana Lantratova (A Just Russia–For Truth), a member of the Duma committee investigating foreign interference in Russia’s internal affairs, reported that a bill to this effect was being drafted.

Currently, Article 141.2 of the Russian Federal Criminal Code—”obstructing the exercise of voting rights or the work of election commissions by conspiring to influence the outcome of the vote”—carries a maximum sentence of five years’ imprisonment. Attempts to set fire to polling stations or pour brilliant green dye solution on ballot boxes most often triggered charges of violating this particular article.

Source: “Desperate, deceived, and hard up for money: 21-year-old Alexandra Karaseva threw a Molotov cocktail at a school on election day—now she faces up to five years in prison,” Bumaga, 19 March 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader