Category: protest

Rusebo!


Rusebo is Georgian for “Russians” in the vocative case. The word is chanted in Tbilisi by demonstrators protesting against the Georgian government’s draft law on “Transparency of Foreign Influence.” The draft law is called the “Russian law” because it is similar to the Russian law on so-called foreign agents, targeting organizations that receive funding from abroad.

In 2023, large-scale protests in Georgia stopped the law from being passed, but now the government is trying to pass it again in order, according to the opposition, to demonstrate loyalty to Russia and distance itself from the European Union.

The chant rusebo! is directed at the police officers dispersing the protests and, more generally, at the Georgian authorities, which the opposition labels pro-Russian. However, the word rusebo is also taken personally by many Russian emigrants who fled to Georgia after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. They include persecuted political activists, men fearing mobilization, and ordinary people who disagree with Putin’s politics. The attitude of Georgians toward them is wary and often outright negative, simply because they are from Russia. As one of the emigrants puts it, “Tough people, they resist, I wish they could be like that in Russia too. But I also feel a little bit on the other side. They shout rusebo—that’s literally me.”

Russian emigrants amidst the protests in Georgia is the subject of Rusebo!, a film by Yulia Vishnevetskaya.

Yulia Vishnevetskaya, “Rusebo! Russian Emigrants Amidst the Protests in Georgia”
(2024; in Russian, English and Georgian; no subtitles)

An argument between a Georgian activist and a Russian emigrant

— I was walking down the street, and a Russian was walking towards me. I didn’t know whether tomorrow he would change into a Russian uniform and shoot at me. The people who have no money but who had the opportunity to settle down here in some way I understand very well. But those who could go anywhere in the world because they had money, why did they come here too? They eat khinkali, it’s all they talk about. They post pictures on Facebook of themselves swanning around here, but I don’t understand why they left Russia. Just to tag along?

— Would you just leave your home like that and run away?

— No. The only thing I do know is that running away won’t change anything.

— You think you can change anything by not running away?

— Well, they’d be put in prison.

— So, it’s okay to “emigrate” to a place where people are raped with mops? Wouldn’t that scare you?

— I understand perfectly well. I feel sorry for the people who had to leave their homes, their beloved dachas, and so on. But it doesn’t change my attitude at all. I would not have run off to any country. Maybe I would have sent my son away so that he would not be mobilized, but I would have stayed and continued to fight.

“Russian is terrible.” A still from the film “Rusebo!”

— Do you hold it against us that we ran away?

— Navalny was not afraid: he went back and did the right thing, despite everything that happened afterwards. I respected him after he came back: he knew that he would be imprisoned and killed, but he went back anyway. I’m not encouraging anyone to go back and die in prison, but the man did the right thing. That’s what justified him in my eyes.

— I care more about a living person than symbolic ones….

— A living person who can’t do anything?

— Yes, as opposed to a dead man who wanted to do something. I’m not willing to pay with lives.

— And I’m willing to pay with my life for my freedom.

— You don’t understand how infuriating it is. When you realize that there is Putin, who is ten times stronger than you, who can do anything to you, when people you respect, whom you know perfectly well, are in prison, dying there, and then you come to Georgia and are told, “You are trying badly, we want you to win, but you somehow don’t want it badly enough.” I just don’t understand how you can seriously say this. I am quite offended that you say it.

— You occupied twenty percent of Georgia, your country occupied us.

— I am not responsible for my country.

— But we are responsible for our country, that’s the difference. Why do you take offense at me for complaining? You’ve been letting it happen for three hundred years—all of you, there are many of you and not enough of us. And for three hundred years you’ve been allowing it to happen and occupying us. You speak for everyone now. We have a shitty government, we’ve been sitting in shit for twelve years and we’re fighting our government. Take offense at your fellow Russians, not at me. I’m not at war with you, I’m at war with our regime and your regime. Everything was taken away from us, they took away the place where I had been going since I was a child. I cried, I stood and sobbed, there were Russians standing there with machine guns. And this is my life, this is how we have been living for so many years.

— Everything was taken away from us too, can you understand that?

— No, I can’t. Nothing was taken from you. Did you have a protest rally when we were bombed in 2008, when they took away more Georgian territory? This building shook because a bomb was dropped nearby. I walked around for three months, looking up at the sky to see if any airplanes were flying by. It was a fright. So I understand Ukrainians perfectly well. We will win.

— No.

— Why won’t we win?

— Because you’re outnumbered.

— We are few but we are strong.

— It is just important that there is a moment when you have to start believing.

Monologues of Georgians and Russians

— I had a friend from Russia. We would meet at international conferences. He was a young Russian, very interesting, very fond of Georgia and Georgians. We became friends, and one day, right after the war in 2008, he and I met. He hadn’t written anything to me during the war, which seemed crazy to me. He never once asked how we were doing. And so we met, and I expected him to say something, but he didn’t say anything. So I told him I was very upset about it. And he said, “Oh, come on! Did those few little firecrackers make you scared?” That reinforced my feelings about Russia. If an ordinary, normal, good Russian has these feelings about a war that was terrible, that took people’s lives and people’s homes and divided their lands, and says, “You were scared of a couple of firecrackers,” I thought that it must be true that everyone in Russia thinks that way. Before 2008, my university friends still went to Russia to get their residency training. But if someone went after 2008, everyone said, “What? What are you doing?” That was really a turning point.

I was anti-Russian from the age of eight when I learned that members of my family had been murdered in a single night in 1924. My parents joined the anti-Soviet movement in the 1980s. In 2008, some of my friends went off to fight against the Russians. We have a lot of reasons to hold grudges. But I think this war, which brought so many anti-Putin Russians to Georgia, has shown a different side of Russia. I thought, Okay, these people can bring us know-how and knowledge of how to fight Putin. They came here to survive. I see Russians in Tbilisi, some of them have even opened their own establishments on my street, and if the fact that I buy a cup of coffee from them will help defeat Putin, and if they are here without guns, not killing Ukrainians, then I support that.

— I lived most of my life in Nizhny Novgorod, but the last ten years I lived in Petersburg. I was a carpenter, a joiner: I built ships and did all sorts of renovations. I was involved in the anarchist, anti-fascist and environmentalist movements. Then it all became about helping political prisoners. The rumors that the borders would be closed was the last straw: I realized that I had to move while I had the chance. I hoped that the regime would not withstand such a thing, that there would be mass strikes and so on. No way.

The unemployment here [in Georgia] is serious, of course. There is little purchasing power. The rates for all work are lower than in Russia. While an IT guy can tuck his laptop under his arm and throw everything he has into crypto, I have a workshop and machines. I’m not a little boy anymore: you’ll break down drilling all your life. You can’t go back. If you’ve made that choice, go on pivoting as you wish.

With its values—its love of freedom, love of nature, love of history, and love of human rights—Georgia has everything I need, except that “I am part of the power which forever wills good and forever works evil.”* Georgians have the sense that there is a mighty power on their doorstep and that it is hostile. Accordingly, you can be seen as part of this danger, even amongst those Georgians who are friendly to Russians. I have local friends here who treat me normally: there is nothing imperialist about you, they say to me. But you can’t expect to fit in in a country that has been experiencing Russian aggression essentially nonstop for better or worse since it gained independence. Some Russians intend to stay here, but I don’t think it will be particularly possible.

But we should support the people protesting for their freedom if only out of gratitude to this country that they put up with us here. Anarchists basically have this principle: we are always on the side of the oppressed and against the oppressors. I do not wish any country to suffer the same fate as Russia. I do not want the same idiotic regime to be established here. No one has any use for it, neither the Georgians nor us.

* An inversion of the quotation from Goethe’s Faust that serves as the epigraph to Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita: “I am part of the power which forever wills evil and forever works good.”

Source: “A life for freedom’: Russian emigrants amidst the protests in Georgia,” Radio Svoboda, 12 May 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader. The film also features a former auditor from Rostov who moved to Tbilisi after the war started and now works as a cleaner, but her monologue wasn’t included in this online article. I have translated the Georgian doctor’s monologue as reproduced here in Russian, although her original remarks, made in English, are nearly entirely audible through the Russian overdub.

A Shaman’s Tale

The trailer to A Shaman’s Tale (Beata Bashkirova & Mikhail Bashkirov, 2024). Thanks to Pavel Sulyandziga for the heads-up

A Shaman’s Tale

A modern-day shaman sets out across Siberia to Moscow on a protest march and is gradually joined by others. How will the Russian authorities react?

Alexander Gabyshev, a shaman from Yakutia in the Russian Far East, has a revelation: God has chosen him to be a crusader, whose role is to exorcise a demon – Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin – from the Kremlin. He’s willing to sacrifice his life to fulfil this task, which will lead to a new and bright future for Russia. Alexander’s walking pilgrimage captures the attention of many people as well as the police. He discusses his ambitious plan with passers-by in remote parts of Siberia and with lorry drivers travelling on the endless roads. His 8,000 km journey offers a mosaic of current pro- and anti-Putin opinions, and highlights the social instability in both the eastern and the western parts of Russia.

Source: One World

Alexander Gabyshev

Five years ago, in the spring of 2019, Alexander Gabyshev, who calls himself a warrior shaman, set out on foot from Yakutsk to Moscow. When he arrived in the Russian capital, he wanted to perform a ritual to exorcise Vladimir Putin from the Kremlin. Along the way he was joined by kindred spirits, and he held numerous protest rallies.

The shaman’s trek was cut short: Gabyshev was detained on the border of Buryatia and the Irkutsk Region and charged with “calling for extremism.” In October 2021, a court ordered him to undergo compulsory treatment at a special psychiatric hospital.

The Memorial Human Rights Centre placed Gabyshev on its list of political prisoners, and Amnesty International recognized him as a prisoner of conscience. Despite an international campaign in his defense, the shaman remains in a psychiatric hospital.

The documentary film A Shaman’s Tale details Alexander Gabyshev’s plight. It was made by documentary filmmaker Beata Bashkirova (née Bubenets) and her husband, playwright Mikhail Bashkirov, who live in France. Bashkirova joined Alexander Gabyshev on his trek, while Mikhail Bashkirov wrote a play about the shaman. Performances of the play at Moscow’s Theatre.doc were disrupted by Putinists. This was not Bashkirova’s first clash with ultra-patriots: in 2017, screenings of her documentary film Flight of the Bullet, about the soldiers of the Ukrainian Aidar Battalion, fighting in Donbas, were disrupted in the same way.

This conversation with Beata Bashkirova for the Radio Svoboda programme “Cultural Diary” was recorded after the film’s premiere at the One World International Film Festival in Prague.

Beata, how did you meet the shaman Gabyshev?

I first heard about the shaman in March 2019, when he had just set off on his journey. At that time he was not yet known throughout Russia, but he was beginning to gain popularity in Yakutia and in the Amur Region. He initially gained popularity thanks to truckers: they shot videos [of him] and posted them on their own network, then on YouTube. When I went to Yakutia in the spring to look for an idea for a film, my friends sent me videos of the shaman, recommending him as my future protagonist. But I decided to film him only in June. That was when Vlad Ketkovich, an independent documentary film producer, contacted me. He had made many political films and not only offered to be my producer, but also contributed his own money to my project. We dreamed of making a road movie about the shaman, of filming for two years on the roads of Russia. It was a beautiful idea, which unfortunately didn’t come to pass, because it ended up being film about the political crackdown. In recent years, nearly all films from Russia are about that.

Did you become friends with the shaman?

Yes, we developed a very good relationship. When we were filming in Yakutsk, we were probably among the people closest to him.

He didn’t mind you filming?

He welcomed us filming: he wanted more people and different people to talk about him, to spread his ideas. He was accompanied by a lot of bloggers, and journalists were heavily filming him. Although in the beginning he didn’t let us in so easily. The distrust was not on his part, but on the part of his entourage. They were wary of us, but later everything was fine.

Gabyshev and his squad marching toward Moscow

The shaman is certainly a charming man. But you can’t say that about some of the people in his entourage, judging by your film. Colourful personalities, I guess, always attract strange people, to put it mildly.

Yes, he had a very motley entourage, and he realised it himself. He gave everyone who joined him fabulous nicknames. He called his first two companions Raven and Angel. One was a good, happy man of the new world (the shaman divided the world into the new world and the old world), while other was a man of the old world, a dark character; he had been in prison before, he was this maverick. Raven had many conflicts with other members of the squad. The shaman told me often that yes, there are very different people walking with me, but this is Russia, you have to accept them as they are. Yes, they are different, everyone has their own peculiarities, not all of them are the nicest people in the world, but at the same time they are not the most terrible evil, which they all oppose.

In the film, Gabyshev tries to explain to a Japanese journalist how he became a shaman. Why did he decide to go to Moscow and exorcise the demon Putin?

The poster for the film “A Shaman’s Tale”

He studied at university and served in the army: he had an ordinary life. Then he got married, but his wife was quite ill and died, and that was a huge blow to him. For some time he went to live in the woods: he lived there for several years. Naturally, he knew who Putin was, but he was not interested in politics. As he says, at some point he heard the voice of God telling him that Putin was a demon and you should go and exorcise him from the Kremlin. It was a very clear thought, a realisation that this was his mission. It didn’t come to him in 2019, when he set out, but much earlier. He started preparing years before his trek, but he prepared in secret; he didn’t tell anyone that he had this mission. He practised martial arts — not to fight, but for the spiritual benefits.

And for quite a long time he travelled unhindered, and the authorities didn’t immediately realise what was happening?

Yes, in fact, not many people took it seriously at first: everyone thought it was a joke. But then people started joining him. A few months later, when we were walking with him, there were thirty people with him, and new people were joining every day. His squad grew quite quickly. Two theories as to why he was stopped. The first is that after a few months there would have been hundreds of people walking with him, and that would have been a political threat. But the second theory is that the authorities were afraid of his mystical power. The closer he got to Moscow, the worse things went for Putin, the more protests kicked off. The protests in Belarus began around the same time. Putin was allegedly having health problems — again this is a matter of rumor. So, perhaps, the shaman has now been exiled to the farthest point from Moscow, not even to Yakutsk, but even farther away. That is, as he got closer to Moscow, the Russian authorities lost their grip on things.

Yes, they say there is a lot of superstition in the Kremlin. And in your film, the lawyer Pryanishnikov also explains that the authorities were afraid of the shaman’s mystical power.

That the authorities are superstitious is, of course, a hypothesis — Putin doesn’t perform rituals for us, and there are a lot of myths around this. It is known that one of his closest associates, Shoigu, is a Tuvan and he practices shamanism. So it is quite possible. My Yakutian acquaintances often said that an acquaintance of their acquaintance performed rituals for Putin himself. But, of course, this is all very secret and impossible to prove. I would not claim that Putin performs shamanistic rituals.

Did you have the feeling that Gabyshev actually has supernatural powers?

The first time was in 2020. When the year 2020 came, the shaman kept saying: guys, new times have come, everything will be different now, this year the worldview of all people on the planet will change. And in 2020 there was a pandemic, and mankind did indeed transit into another reality. His words proved prophetic.

Filmmaker Beata Bashkirova

People who met Rasputin spoke of his incredible magnetism. They say the same thing about many prophets and magicians. Did you feel something similar when you conversed with Gabyshev?

He is very kind and very open, and there were people in his entourage who believed in his mystical power. I am a rather skeptical person in this sense, but still I noticed a good energy emanating from him.

Did people in his entourage regard him as a prophet, as a saint?

Yes, of course, there were people in his entourage who believed primarily in his mystical power. The Moscow crowd, the opposition-minded liberal intelligentsia, basically sympathised with him, but regarded him ironically. If we’re not talking about Moscow, but about the rest of Russia, I had impression that people believed in his mystical power.

When you presented the film in Prague, you compared Gabyshev with Navalny. This is a quite unusual comparison: in Moscow, few people would agree that these people are cut from the same cloth. Why do you think it is possible to put their names in the same sentence?

At the time, it had been forty days since Navalny’s death. Navalny in his last years seemed like a loner who was fighting the system. Our protagonist is also a loner who fights the system. In this way, I think, they are similar.

Were you present at the moment when his journey to Moscow was finally thwarted?

That was 19 September, and I was not with him on that day. Eyewitnesses say it happened at night, and very quickly. For the first few days nobody knew where he was; there were various rumours. Then it transpired that he was in Yakutsk. We met almost immediately, and he was in pretty good spirits despite what had happened.

Why did they decide to permanently isolate him?

He was going to set out again in the spring. Members of his squad had come to see him. I don’t know whether that’s why they decided to shut him down permanently.

Maybe it was the New York Times article, the attention from the West?

Maybe, but that was in September. The first time he was detained, in the spring of 2020, he was taken away from his home, but then he was released. They finally decided to close him down in early 2021.

The Shaman in the Theatre.doc production of A Shaman’s Tale

In the film, you show excerpts from a performance about the shaman at Theatre.doc. Did your husband direct this production based on his own play?

Yes, my husband wrote the play, and he and I staged it together. It was an experimental work. We decided to make a puppet show, a fairy tale, because the shaman conceived his own story as a fairy tale: he gave fairy tale names to all the folks who accompanied him, and he gave Putin a fairy tale name. That was the reason for our fairy-tale production, which did not last long, because on opening day pro-Kremlin provocateurs came and tried to disrupt it. Every time [the play was performed], they put obstacles in the way: they would come in a big group, stage a performance in front of the theatre, call the police, and start shouting from the auditorium during the performance. The owner of the premises where Theatre.doc was located became afraid that he would face consequences nd broke his lease with the theatre. It became apparent that we wouldn’t be able to perform the play.

Beata, when did you leave Russia?

We left in late March 2022.

And it was only in France that you decided to edit the film?

The film had been in post-production while we were still in Russia. The shaman predicted that he had to reach Putin in 2021, because otherwise there would be a catastrophe not only for Russia but for the whole world. Principal filming wrapped in early 2020, but we realised we had to wait. We were editing the film and discussing it with the producers. The producers suggested releasing the film in 2020, when it became clear that the shaman would not be allowed to go [to Moscow], but we understood that the story was not finished: the drama had already been defined by the shaman himself, and we would have to wait until 2022. The events that followed affected how I saw the story; I started to look at it differently, if we’re talking about the mystical aspects. The shaman had been right: he was talking about war. He was saying that there would be a physical war, not a spiritual war, if he wasn’t allowed to reach Moscow. It’s amazing that somehow he knew all the dates.

Did he have a premonition there would be a war in 2022?

He spoke about the fact that mankind, Russia had two ways to evolve. The first way was the good way, the happy way. If he were allowed to reach the Kremlin, Putin would simply resign peacefully, the regime in Russia would change, and then people would move to a new level. If they didn’t let him [reach the Kremlin], a dark path would ensue, the path of warriors, and that meant war. He didn’t say that there would be a war between Russia and Ukraine. He said that there would be a war and only by military means would it be possible to overthrow Putin.

He’s been transferred from one hospital to another several times. What is happening to him now?

He is in a psycho-neurological clinic in the Maritime Territory (Primorsky Krai). Since this system has several levels, the lawyer is trying to ensure he is transferred to Yakutsk, where he can be released through the court. A legal fight is now underway that is aimed at achieving his release step by step.

At first they held him in a high-security facility and tried to “treat” him with haloperidol?

At the very beginning, in Yakutsk, he was given harsh drugs that did have a negative effect on him. Things in the Maritime Territory are now easier: they give him medication, but it’s not so heavy.

You wrote that he knew about the film’s premiere in Prague and conveyed his greetings to the audience. Are you able to correspond with him?

Yes, we communicate through intermediaries; the lawyer Pryanishnikov has the most access to him. His friends talk to him on the telephone from time to time: he is able to call once a week.

What’s his condition? Haloperidol and other serious drugs can be very harmful to a person’s health.

Fortunately, they are not injecting him with these drugs now. He always tries to be in a cheerful mood. You can write him a letter or send him a card. He is very much encouraged by the thought that people remember him. He is, of course, happy that the film has come out because it is a continuation of the message he preached. His emotional state is also very much affected by whether his mission can be completed.

For several years he had many supporters who were will to march with him to Moscow. Did this circle disperse or has the core group remained intact?

We can say that the core has been preserved. For example, Viktor Yegorov (aka Father Frost), who makes videos (you can watch them on YouTube), is constantly in touch with him. Other Yakutian friends of his also continue to support him. There were those who walked with him, and those he met on the road, but there was also the rest of Russia, which did not walk with him, but followed him via YouTube. People still even ask me about him, and so I feel like there are a lot of people who remember him and support him.

“Father Frost from the Shaman’s Squad Appeals to Vladimir Putin,” 25 September 2019 (in Russian; no subtitles)

Did you ever suspect that he might be mentally unwell?

No, never. He’s a fairly well-educated man, he has a broad outlook, and he is quite self-deprecating. I’m not a psychiatrist, but I haven’t detected any mental abnormalities in him. I much more often encounter people on the streets who are crazier looking than he is.

It is quite difficult to make films on Russian topics nowadays: Russian directors are viewed with suspicion in Europe because they are seen as representatives of an aggressor state. Was it complicated for you to make this film?

Yes, it was indeed difficult to make the film because of the tendency towards boycotting. I think that this boycott helps Russian propaganda first of all, because the voices of independent, opposition filmmakers are not heard, but the voices of the propagandists, who cannot be influenced by this boycott, are heard. Consequently, propaganda wins out in the information sphere. The boycott of Russian culture works in favour of Russian propaganda, it seems to me.

Will Russian viewers be able to see your film?

We’re in the festivals stage of screening now. The film will later be shown on Current Time, but it’s hard to say when yet. Current Time broadcasts to a Russophone audience, and so one will be able to watch the film on the internet in Russia.

Source: Dmitry Volchek, “He wanted to exorcise the demon from the Kremlin: a film about the Siberian shaman,” Radio Svoboda, 15 April 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader. All images in the article above courtesy of Radio Svoboda

Azat Miftakhov: “It’s Like They’re Telling Us, It’s No Trouble for Us to Put Anyone Away”

Azat Miftakhov in court. Photo: OVD Info

Anarchist and mathematician Azat Miftakhov has been sentenced to four years in a maximum security facility on criminal charges of “condoning terrorism.” The young man will spend the first two and a half years of his sentence in a closed prison. Miftakhov was detained in September 2023 as he was leaving the penal colony from which he had been released after completing his sentence on charges related to the breaking of a window at a United Russia party office. The next day he was remanded in custody in a pretrial detention center. According to the security forces, while watching TV with other inmates Miftakhov had spoken approvingly of the actions of Mikhail Zhlobitsky, who bombed the FSB’s Arkhangelsk offices [in 2018].

Why do I need to know this? Miftakhov’s wife, Yelena Gorban, argues that this criminal case was launched by members of the security forces who wanted to “extend Azat’s sentence for his past political activity.” In her statement to the court, she said that her husband was aware of the dangers of wiretapping in the penal colony, and so he had avoided discussing political topics in the company of inmates. “The conspicuousness and brazenness with which they fake evidence doesn’t embarrass them. It even plays into their hands. It’s like they’re telling us, ‘It’s no trouble for us to put anyone away,'” the anarchist himself said in [his closing statement at the trial].

Source: It’s Been That Kind of Week newsletter (OVD Info), 30 March 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader

A video and audio recording of Azat Miftakhov’s closing statement at his trial and his sentencing, 28 March 2024, Yekaterinburg. Source: FreeAzat (Telegram), 31 March 2024

During the years I was imprisoned on the charges in previous criminal case, I failed to fall head over heels in love with the state, and now I again find myself in the dock. I am now on trial for what the security forces have deigned to call “condoning terrorism” by faking the evidence, as they did five years ago. The conspicuousness and brazenness with which they fake evidence doesn’t embarrass them. It even plays into their hands. It’s like they’re telling us, “It’s no trouble for us to put anyone away.”

We see the same brazenness in the numerous incidents of barbarous torture perpetrated by the regime’s guardians, the FSB. These guardians don’t care that their shameful deeds are made public. On the contrary, these deeds are flaunted as a source of pride. In this way, the state shows its terrorist nature, as anarchists pointed out before the previous presidential election by taking to the streets with the slogan “The FSB are the main terrorists.”

What we were saying back then has now become obvious not only in our country but all over the world. We how see how the [Russian] state’s entire foreign and domestic policy has become a conveyor belt of murder and intimidation. While fake witnesses attempt to prove the charges that I “condoned terrorism,” national TV channels broadcast calls for the mass murder of people who disagree with state policy. We see that the state, while paying lip service to combating terrorism, in fact seeks to maintain its monopoly on terror.

No matter how the Chekists try to intimidate civil society, we see even in these dark times people who find the courage to resist the terror that has spilled over the state’s borders. Risking their freedom and their lives, their actions awaken our society’s conscience, whose lack we now feel so acutely, and their steadfastness to the bitter end stands as an example for us all.

One such example for me was my friend and comrade Dmitry Petrov (aka Dima the Ecologist), who died defending Bakhmut from soldiers who had become tools of imperialism. I knew him as a fiery anarchist who, amidst a dictatorship, did everything he could to lead us to a society based on the principles of mutual aid and direct democracy.

As a graduate of the history program at Moscow State University and a PhD in history, he was well versed in the structure of society and was able to argue his position well, something I had always lacked. And yet he was not limited to theorizing but was also heavily involved in organizing the guerrilla movement, which did not escape the FSB’s notice. Because of this, he was forced to continue his work as an anarchist in Ukraine.

When the grim events of the last two years kicked off, he could not stay on the sidelines. An enterprising comrade, he sought to create an association of libertarian-minded people who would fight for the freedom of the peoples of Ukraine and Russia. Unfortunately, no war is without casualties, and Dima was one of them. It would be unjustifiably selfish of me to admire the selflessness of strangers alone and not to acknowledge the sacrifice of those who are personally dear to me. I am well aware of this, despite my regret that all my fellowship with him is now irrevocably a thing of the past.

And yet I find it hard to accept this loss. Knowing that he was one of the best of us, and wanting to do my best to ensure his sacrifice was not in vain, I have to recognize that my contribution will be insignificant compared to what he was capable of.

What I’ve just said was perhaps unexpected for some people. I cannot rule out that some of my supporters could be disappointed, as I find it difficult, to my own regret, to speak out publicly. Perhaps someone will disagree with my beliefs, which are at odds with pacifism.

Striving to be rational about everything, however, I reject a belief in things whose existence has not been proven. Among other things, I do not believe in the world’s justice. I do not believe that all evil will be punished as a matter of course. That’s why I support vigorously resisting evil and fighting for a better world for all of us.

But even if some of my supporters do not share all of my beliefs, I am still grateful for all of their help.

I am grateful to everyone who has written me letters full of warmth and good wishes. Even amidst the desolation of the penal colony, I received stacks of them almost every week. I am certain that such great attention to me was borne in mind by the people who set out to make me submissive. I find it quite pleasant and touching that people share a part of their lives with me, whether the experiences are joyful or sad. Every letter is very dear to my heart, and I read every single one of them.

Many thanks to all those who have supported me financially. Thanks to them I have never lacked anything during all the years of my imprisonment. There have been times when I have run out of money to support me, but as soon as I put out a call for help, within a few days people who cared about me brought my budget back to a comfortable level. This is very pleasant and impossible to forget. Special thanks to Vladimir Akimenkov, who for more than ten years has been organizing fundraisers to support political prisoners, including me.

I am extremely grateful to the activists in the FreeAzat and Solidarité FreeAzat collectives, who have organized campaigns and events in solidarity with me on a scale which boggles my mind. Your recent “1001 Letters” campaign was one of them. After reading all those letters, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that people in dozens of different countries are concerned about me. Thank you very much to everyone who was involved in this campaign, thus showing me how much you support me.

I am extremely grateful to mathematicians all over the world, and specifically to the Azat Miftakhov Committee, for supporting me on behalf of the mathematical community. I am very touched that people to whom I look up, whose scholarly prowess I dream of achieving someday, know about me and voice their solidarity.

Thank you very much to everyone who has spoken publicly about me. And special thanks to Mikhail Lobanov, who was forced to emigrate to France for vigorously supporting me. But even there, despite all the difficulties of exile, his solidarity with me has been as strong as ever.

Many thanks to the Russian activists, including those who don’t belong to collectives mentioned above, who have risked their comfort by showing solidarity with me while living under a dictatorship. I am very grateful to all who came to support me with their presence by attending the trial. Some of you traveled hundreds of kilometers for this purpose, and some of you did it more than once and more than twice. I was once again pleasantly surprised by such a huge attention to me.

Many thanks to all the honest members of the press who, through their work, have been helping the public to follow my trial.

I thank my defense counsel, Svetlana Sidorkina, for her dedication in defending me at my trials. I never cease to admire her professionalism and I am convinced that I am very lucky to have her. Finally, I would like to thank Lena, my main support in my tribulations. She has helped me through her dedication to overcoming all the difficulties of my imprisonment. On top of that, I am blessed to be in love with her.

As I finish my acknowledgements, I am left with the feeling that someone may have been overlooked. This is a consequence of the tremendous, steady support I have received since the moment of my arrest. I am pleased to see I am not the only one who has been the object of your support—that, despite the dark events of recent years, your solidarity knows no territorial boundaries. This is what gives me hope for a bright future for all of us.

Source: “Azat Miftakhov’s Closing Statement in Court: Yekaterinburg, 28 March 2024,” Telegra.ph. The emphasis is in the original. Translated by the Russian Reader. Thanks to the Fabulous AM for the heads-up.

On Her Knees

This security footage of apparent ballot stuffing at a polling station in Petersburg was released by the Petersburg [Elections] Observers movement on their Telegram channel on 20 March. The polling station was later identified as No. 5, housed in School No. 260 in the city’s Admiralty District. The women shown doing their patriotic duty to prolong Russia’s current fascist regime were identified by another source as school teachers.

Vladimir Putin was re-elected as Russian president. Officially it’s his fifth term in the Kremlin — although in practice it’s six if we include his stint pulling the strings as prime minister. The official results have Putin polling even higher than predicted, taking 87% of the vote. That figure looks utterly implausible and places Putin among the likes of Asian, Middle Eastern and Central Asian autocrats. The election itself went ahead against a tense background, with Ukrainian shelling and attempted incursions into Russia’s border regions along with on-going drone attacks on Russian oil refineries.

The official election result is already out — Vladimir Putin secured 87.28% on a turnout of 77.44%. Both those numbers are record highs since the collapse of the Soviet Union. And both are about 10 percentage points up on 2018 (when Putin polled 76.8% on a 67% turnout). This suggests that the Kremlin’s political managers were tasked with delivering a significant increase in Putin’s popularity. That in itself is not surprising: in the current circumstances an autocrat needs to demonstrate how his people have rallied around the flag.

Initial research by journalists and independent experts suggests the vote could have been the most heavily falsified in the history of post-Soviet Russia. Analysis by IStories and Ivan Shukshin, a researcher and activist with the Golos vote monitoring NGO, estimated that around 22 million of the 76.3 million votes cast for Putin were “anomalous.” In other words, almost a third of Putin’s official tally could have been false. 

Their methodology is based on analyzing the turnout and vote shares at individual polling stations, using the central election commission’s official data. Districts with higher turnouts also have larger vote shares for Putin — a fact which suggests ballot-stuffing since the two shouldn’t be strongly correlated. IStories and Shukshin didn’t include results in Moscow, where online voting makes the analysis trickier. A third report by Novaya Gazeta Europe said as many as 31.6 million votes — almost half of Putin’s total — could have been fake.

Many experienced observers of Russian politics (1,2) believe that election organizers in provincial Russia “overdid it” this time round. Most pre-election leaks of the Kremlin’s vote strategy featured more modest targets. In spring 2023, for instance, RBC wrote that the Kremlin wanted to secure 75% of the vote on a 70% turnout. A few months later, Meduza wrote that regional authorities were advised that they should secure at least 80% of the vote for Putin. The final pre-election opinion polls conducted by state pollster VTsIOM (which also represent indirect instructions to regional election officials for polling day) showed Putin’s result was at the initial target level of 75%.

The record result places Putin firmly among his fellow autocrats. In free democratic elections, it’s a rare anomaly for a candidate to poll even at 60-70%. Only once, in extreme circumstances, have we seen more than 80% in a democratic country — a huge protest vote that gave France’s Jacques Chirac 82% in a presidential run-off against Jean-Marie le Pen in 2002, the BBC reported. In Russian history, Putin still has something to aim for if we look back to Soviet times. The turnout in 2024 was slightly higher than when Boris Yeltsin was voted president of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in 1991, but there is still some way to go to match the Stalin era of 100% turnout in votes to appoint new deputies.

Since Putin was re-elected in 2018, voting in Russia has become even less transparent, and offered greater opportunities for fraud. Remote electronic voting was conducted in 29 Russian regions. Some 70% of the 4.7 million voters registered to vote online apparently cast their votes on the first of the three-day poll. Monitoring violations at physical polling stations is an almost impossible task. The Central Electoral Commission stopped broadcasting live footage from monitoring cameras in polling stations after the pictures from 2018 had depicted numerous violations and led observers to conclude that the scale of ballot stuffing was so great that the real result could not be determined in at least 11 regions. 

The 2024 poll also differed from Putin’s two most recent victories in the selection of candidates who ran against the Kremlin leader. In 2012, political strategists allowed businessman Mikhail Prokhorov to stand, proposing that Russia’s marginal liberal opposition would consolidate around him. And in 2018, that same role went to TV presenter Ksenia Sobchak. But this time round there was no acceptable liberal candidate. Even the little-known politician Boris Nadezhdin, who timidly spoke out against the war in Ukraine, was denied registration. On the ballot were only Putin’s “rivals” from the systemic opposition parties. All of them have been equally supportive of Russia’s repressive turn, backing various crackdown measures that have come before the State Duma in recent years.

The extras in the 2024 race — Communist Nikolai Kharitonov, Vladislav Davankov of New People, and Leonid Slutsky of the LDPR — polled less than 12% combined. That’s slightly less than communist candidate Pavel Grudinin managed on his own in 2018. The 75-year-old Kharitonov’s 4.3% was better than the youthful Davankov’s 3.8%, while Slutsky, the unsuccessful heir to charismatic populist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, trailed in last with 3.2%.

Source: “‘Record’ victory cements Putin’s autocrat status,” The Bell, 19 March 2024

Despite intimidation by the authorities, many Russians went to polling stations across the country and abroad at noon on 17 March as part of the Noon Against Putin protest, which was conceived as one of the few safe ways for Russians to voice their dissent. After all, it is hard to punish people for going to a polling station on election day and queueing.

The protest was the brainchild of Maxim Reznik, a former member of St. Petersburg’s legislative assembly, and it was endorsed by Alexei Navalny. After the opposition politician was murdered in a Russian penal colony, his supporters and other Kremlin opponents urged Russians to take part in Midday Against Putin.

This time round the last day of the election fell on the end of Shrovetide, and the powers that be tried to take advantage of it. For example, in Tomsk, they organized Shrovetide festivities at one of the polling stations to generate “hustle and bustle.” In Arkhangelsk, local restaurants were forced to cook pancakes for free distribution at the polling stations. Festivities were also organized, for example, in Moscow Region, Perm, Chuvashia, Murmansk Region, and Kamchatka.

Investigative journalist Andrei Zakharov quoted an anonymous agitator who, along with his colleagues, was tasked with “inviting people to a Shrovetide party in a park while also suggesting they take their [internal] passports with them in order to vote. It’s not far to the polling station.”

Those who decided to take part in the noonday protest were intimidated by fake mailings. As early as 13 March, some users in Russia received messages purporting to be from Navalny supporters postponing the Noon Against Putin protest to late Sunday. On Saturday, some Muscovites got messages accusing them of supporting “extremist ideas” and demands to vote “without waiting in line.”

There was also intimidation from actual law enforcers. The Moscow Prosecutor’s Office issued three warnings about the danger of the protest and possible criminal chargers against the protesters.

In spite of this, people in Russia and around the world came to the polling stations at noon on 17 March.

The huge queues abroad attracted a lot of media attention. Just look at the number of people at [Russia’s] diplomatic missions in Almaty and Bishkek. In European countries, people stood in line for many hours.

The long waits at polling stations abroad were sometimes caused by the deliberately slow work of the election commissions. For example, in Riga, voters were let in two at a time, although there were six voting booths and four polling station officials available. Voting was also delayed because many embassies and consulates banned cell phones, searched voters as they entered, and made them temporarily surrender their belongings.

In Russia, people were also searched in many polling places after dozens of incidents of attempted arson and spoiling ballot boxes with paint (the handiwork of phone scammers) took place. “First, two policemen search the bags [of voters] very thoroughly outside. I even had to show them my deodorant stick,” a reader of Dmitry Kolezev’s Telegram channel from Moscow wrote.

Due to the [long] queues in Riga, Vienna and Yerevan, for example, the polls were kept open for at least another hour [after they were to have been closed]. But in Berlin, the embassy was immediately closed, prompting the people gathered there to stage an impromptu protest. One of the staffers at the diplomatic mission danced a little jig as they shouted “Shame!”

But the principal queues were in Russia.

The first lines formed at precincts in Siberia and the Urals — for example, in Perm and Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk and Akademgorodok. In the last place, by the way, Putin lost to [Vladislav] Davankov, a rare case for electoral precincts in Russia itself.

The queues were de facto protest rallies. People lined up outside polling stations in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Arkhangelsk, and Sochi. Officials tried to persuade them to cast their votes on electronic terminals — it is easier to rig the vote that way — but people took paper ballots and either voted for someone other than Putin or defaced them by writing on them such things as “Love is stronger than hate,” or “You have the blood of Ukrainians on your hands, scumbag” (the latter remark was addressed to Vladimir Putin).

As it turned out, nobody interfered with the queues; the police were not violent and did not detain anyone. Most of the detentions that did occur were of independent observers and members of elections commissions who had tried to prevent violations. According to OVD Info, 17 March was “relatively calm.”

The election’s outcome surprised no one in a country where wartime censorship has virtually been introduced. Vladimir Putin took more than 87% of the vote according to the official count — a result almost like that of Central Asian dictators, and greater than that of [Belarusian dictator Alexander] Lukashenko.

The main outcome was that many Russians took advantage of the procedure as one of the few remaining opportunities to safely speak out against Putin and his policies. And they saw that they were not alone.

Source: “What the Noon Against Putin queues showed,” WTF? newsletter (Mediazona), 18 March 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader

In a third video, another man detained by law enforcement agents identified himself as Rajab Alizadeh.

A man off camera asked him: “When you fled from Moscow, you had weapons. Where did you throw them? There or here?”

Alizadeh, whose face and shirt were covered in blood and whose head was wrapped in medical gauze, said “somewhere along the road,” but could not recall exactly where he and his accomplices left their weapons.

An unverified graphic video shared online showed what was said to be Alizadeh lying face down on the ground as Russian law enforcement agents cut off his ear, which, if confirmed, could explain why the man’s head was wrapped in bandages in the interrogation video. 

Source: “Russian State Media Release Interrogation Videos of Concert Attack Suspects,” Moscow Times, 23 March 2024

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

Degenerate Art

The FSB has opened a criminal case on charges of “high treason” against artist and former Mediazona publisher Pyotr Verzilov. The details of the case are not yet known, but as part of their investigation, law enforcers raided the homes of a number of artists and activists across Russia. Many of those whom the law enforcers raided are not personally acquainted with Verzilov.

In the early hours of Tuesday morning, people identifying themselves as FSB officers searched the home of Petersburg artist Katrin Nenasheva and her girlfriend Natasha Chetverio. Nenasheva was taken away for questioning, while Chetverio was released, but both had their electronic devices confiscated. The homes of artist Sasha Blot, Party of the Dead activist Kristina Bubentsova, illustrator Vladlena Milkina, and architect Alexandra Kachko were also searched in St. Petersburg.

Law enforcers simultaneously raided the apartments of Verzilov’s mother Yelena, members of the art group Yav, actionist Anastasia Mikhailova (an associate of the artist Pavel Krisevich), and Pussy Riot members Rita Flores, Olga Pakhtusova, and Olga Kuracheva. The latter two were involved in the action “The Policemen Enters the Game”: along with Verzilov, they ran out onto the field of a Moscow stadium during a World Cup match there.

In Moscow, a female acquaintance of the artist Philippenzo (who is now in exile) was taken from her flat. The Yekaterinburg artist Ilya Mozgi and the Ulyanovsk artist Ilya Kholtov were both taken away for questioning after their homes were searched. Nizhny Novgorod artists Artem Filatov and Andrei Olenev were questioned. Samara artist Denis Mustafin’s home was searched. Although he was not at home, his mother’s computer was confiscated.

Some of these have already been released from interrogation (Nenasheva and Kholtov, for example), while others are still being questioned. It is known that most of them have now been designated as “witnesses” in the case against Verzilov. Many of them were asked about their connection to Verzilov: many did not know him personally and had never had much contact with him. Kristina Gorlanova, the former director of the Urals branch of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, located in Ekaterinburg, whose home was also searched, said that she had “heard nothing” about the “artist” who occasioned the search.

It is still unclear what gave rise to the criminal case. Under new legislation, however, switching to the enemy’s side during a war can be considered “state treason” can be considered as switching to the enemy’s side during a war. In an interview with Yuri Dud last year, Verzilov admitted that he had originally traveled to Ukraine as a documentary filmmaker, but now he was at the front “as a military man.”

“Verzilov: Inside [the] War,” vDud, 5 October 2023. In Russian, with English subtitles

Many of the artists whose homes were raided may never have been involved in Verzilov’s activities, but they themselves have produced works about current events in Russia and Ukraine. We wrote last year about the works of Yav and Philippenzo. Mustafin was fined for flying a a Russian flag inscribed with the phrase “Today is not my day” outside the Ministry of Defense in Moscow on 12 June 2022. Milkina made a public art piece about “people who are scared” on a Petersburg square and T-shirts with the word “Peace” on them.

Source: “Law enforcers raid homes of artists and actionists on eve of elections,” WTF? newsletter (Mediazona), 12 March 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader

Petersburg artists find ways to get their messages across even amidst strict censorship. They mount underground apartment exhibitions, “tiny pickets” on city streets, and exhibitions and performances in the woods. It all smacks of the Soviet guerrilla art and actionism from which the international stars of post-Soviet conceptualism later emerged.

Bumaga explores how street art shows have gained popularity in Russia, how guerrilla art has changed in recent decades, and how today’s actionists resemble the organizers of the notorious Bulldozer Exhibition.

“I’m for peace!” Photo: Tiny Picket (Instagram)

Street exhibitions have been around since the 1960s. One of the first such projects was dubbed “the Soviet Woodstock”

Guerrilla street exhibitions in Russia date back to the so-called unofficial art scene of the 1960s and 1970s. Pursuing the idea of coupling art and ideology, the authorities forced undesirable artists out of public art life.

In 1962, Nikita Khrushchev cracked down on the exhibition 30 Years of the Moscow Union of Artists, at the Moscow Manege. The Soviet premier wanted to expel all of its participants from the CPSU and the Union of Artists, although almost none of them were Party or Union members. Artists and connoisseurs reacted to political censorship in the USSR by forming an artistic underground, meaning that the most progressive art was exhibited at apartment exhibitions and in salons.

The 1970s witnessed open confrontation between the art and the world authorities. The most flamboyant members of the artistic underground were the Lianozovo school, who gathered and held exhibitions in a barrack in Moscow’s Lianozovo neighborhood. The leader of the group, Oscar Rabin, organized one of the most infamous guerrilla street exhibitions in the history of Russian art, which later became known as the Bulldozer Exhibition. On 15 September 1974, the artists staged a show of paintings in a vacant lot in Moscow’s Belyayevo Forest. The authorities sicked police on the participants and attendees and destroyed the show with bulldozers.

This crackdown on artistic expression triggered an international uproar, and the Soviet authorities made concessions. Two weeks later, the artists were allowed to hold an officially sanctioned exhibition featuring an expanded list of participants in Moscow’s Izmailovo Park.

This time the police were tolerant towards the artists and their guests: no one was detained. The exhibition lasted for several hours and, thanks to the beautiful weather, it turned into a big picnic. Western journalists dubbed the event “the Soviet Woodstock.”

Soviet unofficial artists continued this tradition, and one art group published 14 volumes documenting their activities

However, the underground’s victory at the Bulldozer Exhibition was not unequivocal. Unofficial art continued to defend its right to exist at an exhibition in the Beekeeping Pavilion at VDNKh (February 1975), at the Preliminary Apartment Previews for the All-Union Exhibition (spring 1975), and at an exhibition in the House of Culture Pavilion at VDNKh (September 1975).

These exhibitions were sanctioned, but the authorities still created a number of organizational obstacles for the artists. For example, only those artists who had a Moscow residence permit were allowed to show their work at the House of Culture. In addition, the authorities made the condition in which the artists worked unbearable: during the mounting of the show, the temperature in the pavilion topped forty degrees Celsius. Thirty-eight works were banned by the censorship commission. It is not known how many works were exhibited, ultimately, but a total of 145 artists participated in the show.

After the scandals provoked by the “unofficial” artists’ public appearances, the authorities began pursuing a policy of legalizing alternative art. In May 1976, the Painting Section of the Graphic Artists Committee was established, primarily to monitor and control the ideologically dangerous underground.

We should keep in mind that we do not have information about every single Soviet-era guerrilla exhibition. Many were held without leaving any trace in contemporary newspapers and other documents.

Collective Actions, a group led by Andrei Monastyrsky, did a huge amount of work in this sense. The artists compiled fourteen volumes documenting their Trips to the Countryside — actions during which various events took place in particular landscapes, including installations, performances, and minimalist interventions in nature. By going outdoors, the artists showed that art could be implicated in the space outside galleries and museums. Another important feature of the performances was the inclusion of viewers in the works: their participation and reactions were part and parcel of the conceptual actions. The way the actions were staged encouraged the spectators to focus on the processes of anticipating and comprehending the happenings. That is, the spectacle itself was an occasion for reflection, a statement meant to spark a dialogue.

In [1977], for example, Collective Actions simply hung a red banner between trees in the woods. The banner read: “I HAVE NO COMPLAINTS AND I LIKE EVERYTHING, ALTHOUGH I’VE NEVER BEEN HERE AND KNOW NOTHING ABOUT THESE PARTS.”

Collective Actions, Slogan (1977). Photo courtesy of New East Digital Archive via Bumaga

Guerrilla exhibitions are still organized nowadays, many of them dedicated to political prisoners

As a rule, guerrilla exhibitions and actions have a political agenda, so their organizers can be punished quite severely, even by Russian standards.

Nevertheless, there is activity in this field. For example, on 5 August 2023, Petersburg activists mounted an open-air exhibition on the Sestroretsk Ecotrail on the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Sandarmokh [sic], a tract in the forests of Karelia where victims of the Great Terror were shot and buried in mass graves. Fifty works hung in the open air for a record time — almost an entire day.

Placards in support of Tyumen Case defendant Kirill Brik (left) and the release of political prisoners (right) at 2023 guerrilla exhibition in suburban Petersburg. Photos courtesy of 123ru.net via Bumaga

Several placards were also hung in the woods outside Petersburg this winter — for example, on December 10, Human Rights Day, the work I Dissent, Therefore I Am. And in January, an installation featuring a quotation from the Bulat Okudzhava song “Hope’s Little Band” was mounted outside the city.

“…and wandering amongst people / is hope’s little band, / conducted by love.” Photo: Bumaga reader
“What can I do? What would it change? Who would care? Who would help me? What do I see when I look around? What do I mean?” Part of the installation I Dissent, Therefore I Am. Photo: a Bumaga reader

In 2022, Petersburg hosted Carte Blanche, an international guerrilla street art festival. In addition to street works, a stationary exhibition at the abandoned Sailors Palace of Culture on Vindavskaya Street attracted great attention; it featured over twenty artists, including Vladimir Abikh, Maxim Ima, and Slava PTRK. That same autumn, Petersburg hosted the underground exhibition Continuity, dedicated to political prisoners of the past and present, including the victims of the Great Terror and those caught up in the Network Case. Some of the works were made by political prisoners themselves using improvised means and materials while they were incarcerated in pretrial detention centers and penal colonies.

Contemporary street exhibitions continue the Soviet tradition, but the state’s reaction to them has become tougher

Today’s guerrilla exhibitions in many ways are a continuation of the Soviet and post-Soviet tradition. The Bulldozer Exhibition can hardly be called an artistic event also. It was also a political event. It was a challenge to a repressive regime, “the first and most significant collective performance,” as art historian Yevgeny Barabanov wrote.

Since 2022, such exhibitions also have not only aesthetic but also political goals. Although in the Soviet and post-Soviet years, “unofficial” exhibitions, albeit with certain restrictions, could be legitimated [sic], since 2022, the state does not even attempt to compromise with artists.

Moreover, crackdowns against artists who voice alternative opinions have reached a new level. In 1991, the Moscow actionist Anatoly Osmolovsky and his group E.T.I. used their bodies to spell an indecent word for the phallus [khui] on Red Square. After the action, Osmolovsky was detained and threatened with charges of “malicious disorderly conduct.” However, thanks to the petitions submitted to the authorities by his art world colleagues and the Memorial Society, Osmolovsky was soon released.

Nowadays, petitions and statements of support are not enough to get artists acquitted. Sasha Skochilenko was sentenced to seven years in prison on charges of disseminating “fake news” about the Russian army. The young woman replaced price tags at a Perekrestok chain grocery store with anti-war messages.

Source: “Placards in the woods and art shows in flats: how this differs from Soviet guerrilla art,” Bumaga, 12 March 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader

Bohdan Ziza: “A Cry from the Heart”

Bohdan Ziza, a Ukrainian artist, poet and activist, is serving a 15-year sentence for “terrorism” after pouring blue and yellow paint – the colours of the Ukrainian flag – on to a municipal administration building in Evpatoria, Crimea, his home town. He made and circulated a video of the action – on 16 May 2022, shortly after the all-out Russian invasion of Ukraine – and for that was also charged with “incitement to terrorism”.

Bohdan Ziza. From his instagram channel

This is Bohdan’s speech from the dock, before being sentenced by a Russian military court on 5 June last year.

Do I regret what I have done?

I am sorry that I over-reached, and that my action resulted in charges under the Article [of the Russian criminal code] on terrorism. I am sorry that my grandmother is now without the care and support that she needs. Apart from me, she has nobody. And I am sorry that I can not now help others who are close to me, who need that help now.

As for the rest: I acted according to my conscience.

And also, according to my conscience, I do not deny or disavow what I did. I behaved stupidly, and could have expressed my opinion in some other way. But did I deserve, for what I did, to be deprived of my freedom for ten years or more?

I would like to appeal to the court: do not follow the regime’s script, do not participate in these awful repressions. But obviously that would have no effect. The judges and other similar political actors are just doing what they are told.

For these reasons, I will continue to protest, even in prison. And I am well aware of the sentence I may receive, and how it may affect my health and even my life.

But am I worthy of the life that I live? Is each one of us worthy of a carefree life, when we stay silent at a time when, every day, innocent people’s lives are being taken?

This was the worst night of my life. I never experienced anything like it. I thought we would die. There were three Kinzhal rockets, and loads of Kalibrs. They fell very close, they were right above our building. The building shook – several explosions, one after the other. For the first time in the war there was a white glow, the sky was white from the explosions. It was as though we were in a trench, not in our own home. At one moment I thought that it was all flying towards us. There was the very clear sound of a rocket, and then a very powerful explosion. But we have been lucky, again, and we are still alive.

That was a message from my sister, in Kyiv, who had to live through another night of bombardment of the city by the Russian armed forces.

When she went out in the morning, she learned that one of the rockets had hit the next-door building.

For many people, this war that is going on now is happening over there somewhere, far away.

One of the staff at the pre-trial detention centre said to me: “Bloody hell, I am sick of this war. Whenever you turn on the TV, it’s more of the same.” I answered that the war is not over and so you can not get away from it. And then he said: “Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s just that everything is getting more expensive. The cost of running a car now!”

And that’s the problem, here in Russia. For you, this war is an inconvenience, an irritation. You try to wait it out, living your usual life, trying to avoid bad news, and in that way simply not valuing simple things, not valuing the fact that you can wake up in a warm bed, in a warm flat, and say to someone who is dear to you, “good morning”. At a time when in the country next door, millions of people are losing their homes, losing their loved ones, when whole cities are being destroyed. Every day. That’s the everyday reality for Ukrainian citizens now.

In theory, Russian people’s failure to act could be explained, if only what is happening was not being done by Russian hands. The hands of those who bear arms, and those who don’t do anything to stop them. Every day that an ordinary Russian person carries on, reasoning that this is all politics and doesn’t concern him, and living his normal life, he adds money to the Russian Federation budget and in that way sponsors this criminal war.

Of course there are those who do not support what is happening, who take action, who are not silent participants: journalists, various activists – those who refuse to keep quiet.

My action was a cry from the heart, from my conscience, to those who were and are afraid – just as I was afraid – but who also did not want, and do not want, this war. Each of us separately are small, unnoticed people – but people whose loud actions can be heard. Yes, it is frightening. Yes, you can end up behind bars – where I, for sure, did not plan to be. Even for these words I could face a new criminal case. But it is better to be in prison with a clear conscience, than to be a wretched, dumb beast on the outside.

I am also an ordinary citizen of my country – Ukraine – who is not used to keeping quiet when confronted with lawlessness. I am not alone here today in this “goldfish bowl” [slang for the glass cage in which the accused appears in Russian courts]. There are more than 200 people with me: Ukrainian political prisoners, serving time in Russian prisons on fabricated charges. Many of them are Crimean Tatars, who are once again faced with repression by Russia. I am myself half Crimean Tatar, and angry at our people’s suffering.

Many Ukrainians are serving time in Russian prisons simply because they are Ukrainians, and were somewhere that the Russian state thought they should not be. In Russian prisons people are beaten up for speaking in Ukrainian. Or not even for speaking it, but simply for understanding it. Bastards among the guards at pre-trial detention centres or other places where people are imprisoned address prisoners in Ukrainian, to see if they get a reaction, to see if they provoke an answer or a response. If a person reacts, they beat him up.

Those who so passionately seek “Nazis” in Ukraine have not opened their eyes to the Nazism that has emerged in Russia, with its ephemeral “Russian world”, with which armed forces have come to us, to try to extirpate Ukrainian identity.

People in prison suffer in the most terrible conditions. Many of them are elderly. More than 40 people [in the pre-trial detention centre] have critical health problems, and can not access the medical treatment that they need. People die in prison. They are not criminals. Deport them from the country! Why do you keep them here?

I am no kind of terrorist. It sounds ridiculous to even say that. I am a person with morals and principles, who would rather give his own life than take the life of another person. But I am not ready to give my life to the Federal Penal Enforcement Service of the Russian Federation.

I declare a hunger strike, and demand that I be stripped of my Russian citizenship. I demand that all Ukrainian political prisoners be freed. If anything happens to me in prison, I want the world to know that it happened only because I am a Ukrainian, who took a stand against the war in his country.

And if this is my last word, let it be my last word in the Russian language. The last thing I will say publicly in Russian in this country, as long as this regime lasts. The reddish regime.

[Ziza then switched from Russian to Ukrainian, and recited this poem. Explanation of names mentioned below.]

I am not Red, I am Crimson!

I am not playing to the gallery!

These are not rhymes, they are wounds!

And I am not Melnik, I am Bandera!

The weather: it’s snowing in my summer,

From Symonenko’s motherland

I go to the end, like Teliha!

And I believe in wings, like Kostenko!

□ Note. The Ukrainian for “crimson” (“bahrianyi”), was also the pseudonym of Ivan Lozoviaha, a dissident writer and political exile from 1932 to his death in 1963. Andriy Melnik and Stepan Bandera were leaders of Ukrainian nationalist partisan military formations in the 1940s. Vasyl Symonenko was a Ukrainian poet, active in dissident circles until his death in 1963. Olena Teliha was a feminist poet, member of a nationalist underground cell in Nazi-occupied Kyiv, killed by the Nazis in 1942. Lina Kostenko is a Soviet-era dissident who has continued working as a poet and writer in post-Soviet Ukraine.

□ This is translated from the Russian text on the Graty news site, with reference to the Crimea Human Rights Group report. Thanks to M for help with translation.

□ What happened next. After Bohdan Ziza made this speech to the Southern District Military Court in Rostov, Russia, on 5 June 2023, he was sentenced by the judge, Roman Plisko, to 15 years in a high-security penal colony. Shortly after that, Ziza wrote to Zmina, the Ukrainian human rights organisation. He ended his hunger strike and then wrote to Uznik on-line, which coordinates correspondence with anti-war prisoners in Russia, to thank them and the many supporters who had written to him.

On 27 September 2023 Bohdan Ziza’s appeal against his sentence was rejected by Maksym Panin at the military court of appeal in Vlasikha, near Moscow.

Bohdan, who marked his 29th birthday on 23 November, was moved to Vladimir prison. On 5 December, the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group reported that he had been visited by his lawyer and is in good spirits. He is sharing a cell with Appaz Kurtamet, another Crimean Tatar political prisoner, and was serving time in a punishment cell after stating that he is not a criminal and refusing to wear prison clothing.

□ What we can do. Advice to non-Russian speakers who wish to write to Bohdan and Appaz is included in this article on the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group site. The group also appeals to other countries’ diplomats to help Ukrainian citizens in Russian prisons (although this does not include Bohdan, since he was compelled, as a teenager, to take Russian citizenship after Crimea was annexed by Russia in 2014).

□ More information. Solidarity Zone (see facebook, telegram and twitter) supports anti-war activists jailed in Russia. The Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, Crimea SOS and Zmina are among the Ukrainian human rights organisation that publicise the fate of more than 180 Crimean political prisoners in Russian jails. SP, 17 January 2024.  

□ Bohdan Ziza’s own art and poetry is on instagram and youtube.

Source: “Crimean political prisoner Bohdan Ziza: ‘My anti-war action was a cry from the heart’,” People and Nature, 17 January 2024. Thanks to my friend and comrade Simon Pirani for his outstanding work here and elsewhere, and for his kind encouragement to repost this important document of Ukrainian resistance to Russian fascism.

The Way Home: Wives of the Mobilized

The wife of a Russian soldier killed in action recorded a video message.

I would like to tell this story, if possible, from the very beginning. My name is Maria Ishkova, and I’m from St. Petersburg. I’m an absolutely genuine, living person. I’m no agent engaged in PSYOP.

All in all, my husband had been mobilized and deployed in the field with the Russian federal armed forces since September 2022, with periodic withdrawals [from the front] for rest and relaxation. But he had only one [home] leave during that whole time.

But none of that matters because yesterday—or rather, today—I learned that my husband passed away yesterday.

And that’s not all. The big thing I want to tell all the people who are fighting for the men they love—for their love, for their heart, for their life, for their fate—is that you’re out of time. You’re completely out of time because any day may be the fateful one.

I also want to say that I’ve now arrived in those selfsame new territories. I’ve come for my husband to Berdiansk, in the Zaporizzhia Region. And you know, I want to tell you that the people here have no need of [the war], no one has any need for it.

The people we love are simply getting killed for nothing. They’re of no worth to anyone.

I want to say that today—precisely today because I found out about it—my mind has split in two. One part of my mind, the lower part, it understands this grief, it grieves, it feels like weeping—all that stuff.

The second part of my mind, which has split off, it looks at all this a little bit from above and tries to understand how the world order could let such things happen.

And you know, I think that we ourselves are probably to blame for everything. I think that we let it happen by taking the minimal civic stance that we did—when each of us says, I don’t get involved in politics, it doesn’t interest me, it doesn’t worry me.

Each of us lived in this little world—where nothing mattered, where politics was decided by itself, where things happened of their own accord.

Now we find ourselves in a situation in which, basically, the chickens have home to roost because of our world view, because of our outlook on life. We were indifferent to these things, and now these things have devoured us.

The BBC and Mediazona have been able to ascertain the names of at least 40,000 Russians killed in Ukraine.

“Bring back my husband. I’m fucking tired of this shit.”

All over Russia, the wives and relatives of mobilized soldiers have been organizing protests to demand that their loved ones be returned home.

Source: Current Time TV (Instagram), 2 January 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader

I’m standing next to the Russian Defense Ministry. I’m doing a solo picket in the hope that we, the wives and mothers of mobilized men, will be heard. [I hope that] our pain will be heard, that our request to bring our husbands [and] our boys back home will be heard.

They are tired. They’ve been deployed in the special military operation zone for a year and four months with no rotation.

Personally, my husband has been sent on the attack. He has a master’s in applied physics. He works in IT. He has a child who is one and a half years old. When he was [mobilized], the child was three months old. But now he’s on the attack. People like him shouldn’t be sent on the attack.

Generally, all the mobilized men should be brought home: they need to rest. We demand that the period of mobilization of no more than a year be restored.

That’s why I’m here today, and I expect to be heard.

And what else do you plan to do if you’re not heard?

We’ll keep on going. We’ll continue to fight for our boys because we don’t really have a choice. Each time there are more and more of us. More and more wives, mothers, and sisters are beginning to understand that their inaction could get their husbands or brothers killed.

You don’t have as much time as you think you do. Every days could be the decisive one, the last one.

How long are you going to stand here?

I’m probably going to stand here until I’m finally frozen. Because the weather outside is frightful, to be honest. But I also know that my husband is facing even worse conditions, and the fact that I’m standing here in the cold for an hour or two cannot be compared with the fact that for a year and four months he has faced simply inhumane conditions without being relieved, and now, to make matters worse, he’s on the attack.

I’m not afraid to talk about it. I’m not afraid to fight because the worst thing that could happen has already happened.

Source: SOTA (Twitter), 6 January 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader

The Russian Army in 2024

Nevertheless, if we disregard volunteers, prisoners and mercenaries, we can say with a high degree of certainty that by the beginning of 2024 the Russian armed forces will not have recovered the number of contract-based personnel that they had on the eve of February 2022. This is indirectly evidenced by other figures cited by the Kremlin: approx. 244,000 military personnel are officially at war today, while 650,000 people have gained combat experience since February last year, 458,000 of whom have already received certificates confirming their status as combat veterans. This, of course, includes both regular servicemen and mobilised personnel from various combat units, as well as those serving in the navy and combat support units, ground staff of military airfields, etc., servicemen of the Rosgvardia and Federal Security Service (FSB), mercenaries and volunteers, military personnel from the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, as well as police officers. And apparently, these 650,000 veterans include all: the living, the dead, the missing, the captives and the disabled.

And given the Russian servicemen’s numerous complaints about the lack of rotation, it is not clear—even taking all the losses into account—where the claimed 490,000 new contract soldiers could have dissolved, alongside the unclear number of ‘old’ contract soldiers and the remaining mobilised troops. Simply put, the figures on paper have ultimately diverged from the actual number of people in Russian troops.

Female activists calling for the return of mobilized Russians from Russia’s war against Ukraine held a series of solo pickets in Moscow. The actions took place near the presidential administration offices and the Defense Ministry, according to a post on the Telegram channel of the movement The Way Home (Путь домой) on Saturday, January 6.

None of the picketers were detained. According to a female activist who picketed outside the offices of the presidential administration, a Federal Protective Service called the police, but the latter, after arriving at the site, confirmed that solo pickets were a legal form of protest.

At the same time, SOTA notes that about fifteen wives of mobilized Russians laid flowers at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier near the Kremlin. According to SOTA, five relatives of mobilized men laid flowers at the Eternal Flame in St. Petersburg, demanding the return of their loved ones from the front.

Calling for the return of mobilized men home

Wives of mobilized Russians have been increasingly active in recent months in demanding the return home of men who have been at the front for over a year. They have been holding flash mobs, going to protest rallies, and sending official letters to the authorities, demanding that the tour of combat duty for mobilized men limited to one year, that all wounded men be discharged, and that the list of illnesses for which they cannot be drafted be expanded.

The leaders of many regions have refused to allow relatives to hold protest rallies, citing the threat of COVID-19. The Kremlin has practically not commented on their demands.

At the end of 2023, the Russian Defense Ministry turned down a request by Boris Vishnevsky, a member of the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly, to limit the tour of duty of mobilized Russians to one year. Their tour of duty will end as soon as the country’s President Vladimir Putin signs a decree ending the mobilization, the ministry explained. At the same time, presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on 1 November 2022 that Putin’s decree was not required to end the mobilization.

Source: Pavel Mylnikov, “Wives of the mobilized hold solo pickets in Moscow,” Deutsche Welle Russian Service, 7 January 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader

“The Way Home: Wives of the Mobilized.” In Russian, with Russian subtitles.
Maria Ishkova (above) and the young female solo picketer featured in the second part of this post both make appearances in this film.

Russia mobilized 318,000 men for its war against Ukraine, according to Vladimir Putin. The so-called partial mobilization was announced in September 2022, six months after the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Many mobilized men and their relatives believed that the mobilization would be for a relatively short period of time, up to six months, although no official announcement was made.

Almost a year later, in August 2023, The Way Home movement emerged in Russia, uniting relatives of mobilized soldiers. Several female activists who had met in one of the numerous online groups for the wives and mothers of Russian soldiers decided to move from talk to action and created a chat room to coordinate their efforts. Initially, most of the chat room participants were loyal to the government and avoided politics. Over time, they realized that the mobilized soldiers were not going to be brought home, the local authorities were making empty promises, and the topic was taboo to the federal press, and so the activists turned to public protests to make themselves heard. They have refrained from criticizing the government’s decisions and the war itself, focusing on the sole goal of bringing the mobilized men back home.

On 7 November 2023, a group of women armed with placards attended a Communist Party rally on Manezhnaya Square in downtown Moscow. On December 7, the movement published a collective manifesto demanding demobilization. The Way Home became the talk of the town, and the community began growing rapidly while also coming under increasingly harsh attacks. Opponents of the war ridicule those who did not dodge the draft and obediently reported to military recruitment centers. Supporters of the war have declared the female activists “Navalny supporters. Television propagandist Vladimir Solovyov said that The Way Home was created by foreign special services for subversive activities. The community’s rallies are banned under the pretext of preventing the spread of covid, its female members and their husbands are visited by law enforcers, and The Way Home’s Telegram channel has been labeled “Fake.” (Pro-government blogger Ilya Remeslo said this was done after he filed a complaint.) Despite the pressure, the community continues to function.

Vladimir Sevrinovsky’s film Wives of the Mobilized tells the story of an activist in The Way Home who wished to remain anonymous.

Source: Signs of Life—Documentary Films by Radio Svoboda (YouTube), 5 January 2024. Annotation translated by the Russian Reader

Maxim Chishkovsky: 11 Years in Prison for “Terrorism”

Unlike the dozens of celebrity Russian “anti-war exiles” profiled and lauded in periodicals like the New York Times, Maxim Chishkovsky’s courageous direct-action anti-war protest is utterly invisible to the so-called international community.

“I finally decided to demonstrate my civic stance and commit arson”: a letter from Maxim Chishkovsky

On the night of 28 September 2022, a person unknown shattered the window of a military registration and enlistment office in Vladivostok with a hammer and threw a Molotov cocktail through it. The media wrote that the window sill and window frame caught fire as a result, but the fire was extinguished by persons on the scene without contacting firefighters.

Forty-three-year-old Maxim Chishkovsky was later arrested on suspicion of the arson. In April of this year, he was sentenced to eleven (11) years in prison for “terrorism” (per Article 205.1 of the Russian Federal Criminal Code). His sentence has been upheld on appeal.

A penpal of Maxim’s shared his letter to her with us, excerpts from which we publish below.

There’s nothing special I can tell you about myself—work, home, family. I worked as a construction manager, would go skiing in the winter, would dive into an ice hole on Epiphany, once used to ride bike in the summer, had an interest in motocross, and studied the Polish language. Someday after my release I’m thinking of changing my occupation. I’ll be an estimator: the work is not dirty, and your weekends are free.

In 2014, I was against the “Ukro-Nazis,” and was glad that Crimea was Russia’s again. But when the LPR and DPR “stopped short” of joining Russia, doubts crept into my mind about whether the objective was to aid a fraternal people and who really benefited from the domestic turmoil in Ukraine. I did not take a public stand except for comments on Instagram: I was not at all opposed to what was happening. I regularly watched Channels 1 and 2, and conscientiously voted for Putin, but one day I realized that TV was all propaganda and stopped watching. And after the pension reforms and the amendments to the Constitution, I came across a video from 2004, in which [Putin] said that “brains need to be changed, not the Constitution.” And, basically, I still adhere to this opinion, but I cannot explain what has happened except in terms of insanity. I thus regarded the special military operation extremely negatively, but I did not take part in protests, although I wanted to, but I was afraid of trouble at work, fines, and arrests. And, having taken the stance that it was no business of mine, I simply followed the situation on Telegram. I saw reports about the torching of military registration and enlistment offices, and it seemed to me that this was a good way of taking a public stand, better than holding protest rallies.🙂

When the military mobilization began, I felt that now I was affected too. Amidst all the confusion of those days over uniforms, equipment, salaries for the mobilized, and, basically, the lack of understanding of what would happen to my family if something happened and why I should go off and kill people for some reason, I experienced absolutely no increase in “patriotism.” When the [conscription] summons was delivered, I was not at home, but I figured that if not today, then the next day it would be hand-delivered to me, and I was not going to run and hide. I finally decided to take a public stand and commit arson. Of course, to a greater extent, it was a protest action, but if my son’s personal file had been burned, that would have been a good outcome. I also knew that, sitting in the trenches, I would regret that I had not done it. Considering that, in the near future, I would be mobilized anyway, when I went out to do what I did, I didn’t take great pains to conceal my identity, which now, after I’ve received a prison sentence of eleven years, of course, I regret. But I think that such sentences aren’t handed out for nothing, which means that I did wasn’t in vain, and at least I somehow delayed the second wave [of mobilization].🙂

I am interested in the history of Poland, both medieval and more modern. I would like to read books in Polish. And I would like news that is different from the news provided by Komsomolskaya Pravda and Vesti FM. My cellmate was getting the prison newsletter, but the local [prison] administration banned it: they didn’t seem to like the pictures.

💌📦 Address for letters to Maxim:

Chishkovsky Maxim Sergeyevich (born 21.05.1980)
28B Partizansky proyezd, SIZO-1
Vladivostok, Maritime Territory 690106 Russian Federation

📧 You can also send letters via Zonatelecom.

❌ We ask you not to send parcels, since the verdict has entered into legal force and Maxim is now under restrictions.

#politicalprisoners #crackdown #torture #solidarity #torchingofmilitaryenlistmentoffices #wewriteletters

Source: Solidarity Zone (Facebook), 28 November 2023. Translated by the Russian Reader. People living outside of Russia will find it difficult or impossible to send letters to Russian prisons via Zonatelecom or regular mail. In many cases, however, you can send letters (which must be written in Russian or translated into Russian) via the free, volunteer-run service RosUznik. Mr. Chishkovsky has not yet appeared on their list of supported addressees, however. You can write to me (avvakum@pm.me) for assistance and advice in sending letters and messages to him and other Russian political prisoners.

In the Woods

Petersburg human rights attorney extraordinaire Vitaly Cherkasov found this placard in the woods southeast of the city whilst hiking there: “Verily I say unto you that people diagnosed with psychiatric conditions are the finest people in our society, for they are good, they help the poor and the sick. O how many good deeds are done in St. Petersburg by people diagnosed with psychiatric conditions.”

Today we walked in Nevsky Forest Park, where we unexpectedly found this message on a tree branch.

I’ll tell you one thing: the person acted wisely. Nowadays it is safer to express your opinion publicly in the woods.

Source: Vitaly Cherkasov (Facebook), 25 November 2023. Translated by the Russian Reader

There is an apocryphal story that Berwick is (or recently has been) officially at war with Russia. According to a story by George Hawthorne in The Guardian of 28 December 1966, the London correspondent of Pravda visited the Mayor of Berwick, Councillor Robert Knox, and the two made a mutual declaration of peace. Knox said, “Please tell the Russian people through your newspaper that they can sleep peacefully in their beds.” The same story, cited to the Associated Press, appeared in The Baltimore Sun of 17 December 1966; The Washington Post of 18 December 1966; and The Christian Science Monitor of 22 December 1966. At some point in time, the real events seem to have been turned into a story of a “Soviet official” having signed a “peace treaty” with Mayor Knox; Knox’s remark to the Pravda correspondent was preserved in this version.

The basis for such status was the claim that Berwick had changed hands several times, was traditionally regarded as a special, separate entity, and some proclamations referred to “England, Scotland and the town of Berwick-upon-Tweed”. One such was the declaration of the Crimean War against Russia in 1853, which Queen Victoria supposedly signed as “Victoria, Queen of Great Britain, Ireland, Berwick-upon-Tweed and all British Dominions”. When the Treaty of Paris was signed to conclude the war, “Berwick-upon-Tweed” was left out. This meant that, supposedly, one of Britain’s smallest towns was officially at war with one of the world’s largest powers – and the conflict extended by the lack of a peace treaty for over a century. In reality, Berwick-upon-Tweed was not mentioned in either the declaration of war or the final peace treaty and was legally part of the United Kingdom for both.

Source: “Berwick-upon-Tweed,” Wikipedia