Azat Miftakhov is being transferred to the colony where Alexei Navalny was murdered
Anarchist, mathematician, and political prisoner Azat Miftakhov was sentenced on March 28, 2024, to 4 additional years in prison. On September 4, 2023, he was detained upon leaving IK-17 [Correctional Colony No. 17] in Omutninsk, Kirov region, where he had already served his first sentence—allegedly for breaking a window at a United Russia office in Moscow’s Khovrino district. The basis for the new prosecution for “justifying terrorism” was (allegedly) comments Azat made while watching a TV program with other inmates about anarchist Mikhail Zhlobitsky, who carried out an explosion at the FSB office in Arkhangelsk. Testimony against Azat was given by fellow prisoners and a prison employee.
Recently, the political prisoner was transferred from a prison in Dimitrovgrad, Ulyanovsk region. In a letter dated April 19, Azat reported on his transfer from Kirov to Vorkuta:
“I’m writing to you from Vorkuta. And as you understand, I’m heading to Kharp. I think no further comments are needed.
“Two days on the train have worn me out quite a bit. The toilet—once every 4 hours, hot water—three times a day, there’s no room to turn around in the compartments, my bones ache from constantly lying on a hard bunk and the shaking of the train. So the stop in Vorkuta is very welcome. Tomorrow morning we depart, and we’ll arrive in Kharp the same day. It seems I’ll go straight from the train to the camp without intermediate stops (apparently there are no detention centers there).”
The prisoner’s support group comment[ed] on this news:
“It is quite obvious that transferring Azat to Kharp is nothing other than a desire to take revenge on him for his firm stance. It is both a threat that his life depends on the will of the security apparatus and the creation of significant hardship for the remaining 1.5 years of his sentence.
“Kharp is one of the northernmost places of detention in Russia; it is located beyond the Arctic Circle, in permafrost conditions. It was established in 1961 on the basis of preserved buildings of a former camp unit of the Gulag’s Construction Site No. 501.
“In addition to Alexei Navalny, who was unable to leave the colony alive, well-known political prisoners held in Kharp include Platon Lebedev (2005–2006) and Oleg Sentsov (2017–2019).”
“As his lawyer, I visited Azat monthly in the Ulyanovsk region, spending under 10,000 rubles (circa 110 euros) on travel (or not much more, depending on circumstances). Now I understand that a trip to the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug will cost closer to 40,000 (circa 440 euros): 5000 for two nights in a hostel, 12000 and 20000 for flights… (12000 is with a middle-of-the-night layover and worst possible service).
“I’ll also have to cross the Ob River to and from the airport. And I hope I won’t have to open and close the swimming season immediately… since, according to a hostel worker, ice crossing is still operational.
“Maybe later I’ll figure out how to make these trips cheaper, but it’s unlikely I’ll manage without expensive flights… after all, two days by train one way, especially when trains don’t run daily, is not something you can do regularly.
“Oh, and if Azat ends up specifically in the colony in the village of Kharp, and not in Labytnangi (the nearest city), then it seems there’s no electronic mail there. That already borders on torture.”
On [5 August 2025] Russia’s Supreme Court rejected the final appeal for Azat Miftakhov, a mathematician and anarchist serving his second politically motivated prison sentence. His latest conviction, for “justifying terrorism,” rests entirely on the testimony of a fellow inmate who claimed Miftakhov had praised an attack on the security services. For over six years, Miftakhov has navigated two coexisting identities in Russia’s brutal penal system: that of a political prisoner and a member of the “obizhennye”, or the “degraded”—the untouchable caste at the bottom of the prison hierarchy. In letters from behind bars, he tells Mediazona how he survives.
Azat Miftakhov, 31, was a graduate student in mathematics at Moscow State University when he was first arrested in February 2019.
Initially accused of making explosives, he was beaten and tortured by security service agents who threatened to rape him with an electric screwdriver. Another detainee was tortured with an electric shocker by security forces who demanded he incriminate the mathematician. After his detention, Miftakhov attempted to slit his wrists but gave no confession.
Bespectacled, short and soft-spoken, the anarchist has not yielded to this day, despite pressure from the FSB and a second fabricated terrorism case.
Back in February 2019, when the security forces failed to find evidence that the young man had been making explosives, Miftakhov was accused in a case concerning a window broken a year earlier at a ruling United Russia party office in Moscow’s Khovrino district.
The pressure campaign continued inside the prison. Officers from the FSB informed other inmates of Miftakhov’s bisexuality. The move was a calculated effort to have him ostracised and forced into the “degraded” caste, a group subject to constant humiliation, violence, and forced labour. Miftakhov did not deny the officers’ words; back in 2019, intimate photos of him were published by Telegram channels linked to security services and later by the state-run TV channel Rossiya-1.
A vigorous public campaign in support of Miftakhov began from the first days of his arrest, so he could not hide his status as a political prisoner from other detainees, though he did not deliberately advertise it.
“During mail call, the whole prison section is standing in formation,” he explains. “An activist comes up with a stack of letters. The first is for me, the second for me, the third, the fourth… In the end, only two or three letters go to other inmates. The rest are mine.” He often received letters and postcards from France, Germany, and Sweden, something extraordinary for other prisoners. “They’re writing even from America!” they would marvel. The camp’s population changed, but newcomers would often approach me and ask: “Is it true that Oxxxymiron wrote a song about you?”
—
In the winter of 2021, Azat Miftakhov was sentenced to six years in a penal colony. A secret witness, interrogated a year after the case was opened, claimed to have identified Miftakhov among the group that broke the United Russia office window and threw a smoke bomb inside, recognising him by his “expressive eyebrows.” The anarchist himself denied any involvement in the action.
After his time in Moscow’s pre-trial detention centres, Miftakhov was transferred in August 2021 to serve his sentence at Penal Colony No. 17 (IK-17) in Omutninsk, Kirov region. The prison was “red”, or tightly controlled by the administration through “activists” from among the prisoners.
Although severe physical violence had become a rarity there in recent decades, the colony’s reputation for torture dated back to the late 1980s, especially as punishment for refusing to prepare for official holidays. For many years, the most important of these was Victory Day, and all prisoners without exception were required to participate in preparations for a “parade” featuring models of military equipment.
“It was considered an absolutely mandatory thing, and to refuse meant condemning yourself to unimaginable torment: torture with shockers, bleach, and the punishment cell,” recalls Timur Isayev, who was incarcerated in IK-17 at the same time as Miftakhov. He was serving a sentence for organising an escort agency. After his release, Isayev left Russia.
Miftakhov impressed Isayev immediately upon his arrival at the colony. The inmates learned that during quarantine, security officers had offered the mathematician the chance to “hide” his “degraded” status in exchange for cooperation, but he refused.
“He told them: ‘Chief, you protect laws and rights, yet you speak to me in some kind of criminal jargon that you yourself are supposed to fight against. I don’t recognise your stinking ponyatiya. I don’t recognise this division of people either. Do what you think is necessary.’ The cops were just stunned by such audacity and directness,” Isayev recalls.
Thus, from the perspective of the other prisoners, Miftakhov had essentially “defined” himself as “degraded”, since he had the opportunity to hide his status, explains the source to Mediazona. Therefore, each of [the] muzhiki, or “the men”, regular prisoners, had to decide for himself whether it was appropriate to communicate with him. Isayev says he spoke with him without regard for others: “He had a normal social life in the zone, he was treated very well—not like the others in that caste, with whom he could still interact. He had a completely special position.”
From Azat Miftakhov’s letter to Mediazona (abridged)
You can’t get “infected”’ by talking to someone who is “degraded”, but it’s considered improper for one of “the men” to hang around a “degraded” person for too long. You won’t be “called to account” for it, but you might catch ridicule and taunts from others, even provocations. They might suggest that a “man” “share” living quarters with the “degraded” since he gets along with them so well.
The life of a “degraded” person consists of many prohibitions. Many of them are so fundamental that they cannot be ignored without getting into a conflict with “the men”. Take, for example, the obligation for the “degraded” to be last in every queue: for the canteen, the shop, the medical unit. It happened more than once, for instance, that I’d stand in line for the shop all day. The queue is long, and as always, they’ve brought in an insufficient amount of goods. Every now and then, you hear that this or that has already run out. And then, just as the queue reaches the “degraded” inmates, a dozen more of “the men” suddenly appear from around the corner, having only just decided to join the line. You have to let them go first. It’s frustrating, of course, but what can you do? If you don’t like it, you can get locked in a punishment cell or a cell-type unit. But then you can forget about parcels and visits.
There is only one prohibition that I refuse to accept—the ban on fighting one of “the men”. If someone tries to humiliate my human dignity with an insult or by forcing me to do something, I consider it my sacred right to respond with force. The only thing I have to be wary of when exercising this right is punishment from the activists or the criminal elites. They can beat you severely for it, causing serious injury. However, I value my human dignity too highly to allow it to be debased, even under the threat of injury. Prison is a place where you’d better not “swallow” humiliation. If you “swallow” it once, you convince those around you that you can “swallow” it again and again. It’s better to nip it in the bud. That’s my philosophy on the matter.
I have had to fight “the men” several times, and each time it was over my status. It didn’t always lead to a scandal. Sometimes we managed to make peace with my opponent afterwards. A couple of times, a “case” was brought against me. The “trial” took place in a storeroom. Activists and various influential people as “judges” would cram in there, along with both sides of the conflict, meaning me and my “victim”. Witnesses were also called. Some “judges” seemed eager to pass a harsh sentence, which could have been carried out on the spot. I had to be prepared for such a turn of events and at the same time maintain my composure while justifying my position. Although according to the “prison” law, I was already in the wrong from the start, so my universal human arguments were unlikely to work there.
Fragment of Miftakhov’s letter to Mediazona
—
Miftakhov’s principles faced a major test in the spring of 2022, as the colony prepared for its annual Victory Day parade.
When Miftakhov saw other prisoners painting the “Z” and “V” symbols of the Ukraine invasion onto military props, he informed his detachment chief he would not participate. He expected to be sent to a punishment cell, but the administration, wary of his high profile, opted for a different strategy.
The day before the parade, Miftakhov was summoned; he expected to be tortured there, but instead, an inspector led him to a windowless room hidden deep within the medical unit, furnished only with a bed, a bedside table, and a toilet. Soon, the head of the operational department arrived. He explained that the room would temporarily become a “safe place” for the political prisoner.
From Azat Miftakhov’s letter to Mediazona (abridged)
“We’ve received information that some convicts are unhappy with your position,” the officer told me. “They want to teach you a lesson.”
“Therefore,” he continued, “it was decided to provide you with a safe place. Due to the threat to your health.”
“And how long will I be in this safe place?” I asked.
“Well,” the officer seemed to ponder, “I don’t know. Maybe a month, maybe a year. Or maybe until the last convict who wants to beat your ass is released.”
After talking with me a little more, he left, and I remained in that room. That’s how I began to learn what a “safe place” was. And I must say, it was the best gift the IK-17 administration could have possibly given me.
From then on, I didn’t have to go to work. I could spend all day on self-development, solving math problems and reading books. But most importantly, I could rest from the constant hustle and bustle of the common area. I wished it could last until my release. However, my happiness was not destined to last long. A week later, some random people were asked to sign off that the threat against me was gone. I had to return.
—
It was in IK-17 that Miftakhov formed a friendship with Evgeny Trushkov, another “degraded” prisoner serving a long sentence for charges including group rape. This friendship would prove to be his undoing. As Miftakhov’s release date in September 2023 approached, the FSB scrambled to build a new case against him. Trushkov became their star witness.
He testified that Miftakhov had “justified terrorism” in conversations with him, allegedly praising Mikhail Zhlobitsky, a teenager who bombed an FSB office in 2018. “I admire the actions of Mikhail Zhlobitsky, who was not afraid to lay down his life in the fight against Putin’s regime,” Trushkov claimed Miftakhov had said.
From Azat Miftakhov’s letter to Mediazona (abridged)
In the two years we knew each other, I received nothing but support from him. Sometimes he would tell me how he wanted to help me evade the FSB’s attention, that he was even willing to postpone his own freedom for it. Some of his suggestions were naive, which only convinced me of their sincerity. So when I found out that Trushkov had testified against me, I didn’t believe it at first. Only gradually, as I got acquainted with my new criminal case, did I begin to understand that he had betrayed me.
I do not think Trushkov initiated the criminal case, as he claimed in court. I am sure his story about how he, out of patriotic feelings, went to report the alleged crime to the detachment chief was fabricated to make the prosecution’s evidence seem coherent.
I believe this is what happened. On July 20, he was presented with a choice: either you give us the testimony we need against Azat, or you get “spun up” with him on a terrorism charge, but a more severe one. And they probably made it clear that the necessary witnesses for such a charge would be found. From there, I see two possible scenarios. First: he got scared for himself. Second: he made a deal with the FSB for my own good. I do not rule out either of these options, nor do I justify them.
Making deals with the FSB is a losing game from the start. One should not think that you can outsmart them this way, gaining more than you lose. Such underestimation of the enemy is extremely dangerous. Once you make one concession to them, they will force you to make a second, a third, and so on, until you give them your soul. In my conversations with him, I noticed this naive underestimation of the special services.
—
On the day he was due to be freed, Miftakhov was met at the prison gates by FSB agents who immediately re-arrested him. In a new trial based on his friend’s testimony, he was sentenced to another four years for “justifying terrorism.”
He is now held in a high-security prison in Dimitrovgrad, mostly in solitary confinement. His mental health has declined sharply. Trushkov, meanwhile, was released from the colony to fight for [the Wagner Group] in Ukraine. In a phone call to Miftakhov’s wife from the front, he slurred, “Get the kid out of there,” knowing Dimitrovgrad prison’s reputation.
Miftakhov is not scheduled for release until September 2027.
From Azat Miftakhov’s letter to Mediazona (abridged)
“There are no friends in prison,” as the inmates say. I don’t like such generalisations, but there is a certain amount of truth in it. Inmates are inherently placed in a vulnerable position. One wants to be released as soon as possible, another hopes for an unscheduled visit with his wife, and all of this depends on the goodwill of the administration. The administration knows the value of these benefits and sells them for special services. Snitching and betrayal are among them. And yes, prison status has no meaning here: “snitches” are found among both the “degraded” and “the men”. And you can’t say that the proportion among the former is noticeably different from the proportion among the latter.
Nevertheless, I managed to get burned by my friendship with Trushkov. Well, I have to admit that I am apparently a poor judge of character. This incident has significantly affected my perception of people in places of detention. When I meet a new person, I can’t help but start to assess whether he is capable of refusing the chekists if they try to force him to testify against me with threats and promises.
A verdict was handed down in the Vesna case in Petersburg today. In 2018, members of this movement, which Russia designated “extremist” and “hostile” (or something along those lines, “undesirable,” etc.), held a protest: a funeral for Russia’s future. It turned out to be a long process: burying the future, imprisoning spring… Today is a bad day. The activists were convicted and sentenced to extremely long prison terms! The only female defendant, Anna Arkhipova, was sentenced to twelve years in prison; Yan Ksenzhepolsky, to eleven years; Vasily Neustroyev, to ten years; Pavel Sinelnikov, to seven and a half years; Yevgeny Zateyev, to six years and two months. Valentin Khoroshenin was also sentenced to six years and two months in prison despite the fact that he had testified against his comrades while in jail. It didn’t do him any good…. Look at his face today. He is the only one who looks lost to me. The other defendants were calm and dignified.
I may be naive, but I still believe that the future isn’t buried, that spring will come, that the gloom and the cold will simply fade away. It will happen naturally because that’s how the world works, and I believe this especially during Holy Week. “Wind and weather [will] change direction,” and spring will arrive.
I hadn’t taken photos in a courtroom for nearly nine months. Today was tough. I can recall only one case which dragged on longer than the Vesna case—the trial of the twenty-four fighters from the Azov Regiment. My sister Lizka has provided a detailed account of the Vesna case and the young people sentenced today. Give it a listen and/or a read! [See the embedded YouTube video and translation of the Mediazona article below—TRR.]
The natural flow of life suffices to make spring come, but to ensure that the earth hasn’t been depopulated by the time it does come—so that there is someone other than the beasties left to welcome that spring—we must remain human beings: we must know what is going on, empathize, and help out.
A judge in St. Petersburg on Wednesday sentenced six former members of the democratic youth organization Vesna to prison sentences of varying lengths after they were found guilty of charges including extremism and spreading “war fakes.”
The activists, including one woman and five men, were no longer members of Vesna at the time of their arrests in June 2023.
Vesna, which means spring in Russian, was founded in St. Petersburg in 2013. After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it staged anti-war rallies in Russian cities, shortly after which it was designated as an “extremist” organization.
The human rights group Memorial recognized the six former members sentenced to jail on Wednesday as political prisoners.
St. Petersburg’s City Court found all six guilty of organizing an extremist group, mass unrest, disseminating “fakes” about the Russian army, calling for actions that undermine national security and rehabilitating [sic] Nazism.
The longest prison sentence of 12 years was handed to Anna Arkhipova, followed by 11 years for Yan Ksenzhepolsky and 10 years for Vasily Neustroyev.
Pavel Sinelnikov was sentenced to 7.5 years in prison, while Yevgeny Zateyev and Valentin Khoroshenin each received six years and two months.
State prosecutors had requested prison sentences between eight years and 13 years.
The former activists initially pleaded not guilty in October 2024, but last July, Khoroshenin provided a “full confession” and testified against his co-defendants.
Arkhipova later said that Khoroshenin had told her after giving his confession that “what really matters isn’t what actually happened, but how the investigator wrote it up.”
Vesna declined a request for comment when contacted by the Moscow Times.
“Russia’s Future”: a 2018 protest action by Vesna. Photo: David Frenkel/Mediazona
Saint Petersburg City Court has handed down sentences to six former activists in the Vesna movement: Yevgeny Zateyev, Vasily Neustroyev, and Valentin Khoroshenin, of Petersburg; Yan Ksenzhepolsky, of Tver; Anna Arkhipova, of Novosibirsk; and Pavel Sinelnikov, of Barnaul. They were sentenced to stints in prison ranging from six to twelve years. In total, the case involves twenty-one suspects from thirteen regions. One of the defendants unexpectedly testified against his comrades in court. Mediazona offers its readers this brief overview of one of the most wide-ranging and dramatic trials against dissidents in recent years.
The democratic youth movement Vesna came to life with spirited, theatrical street protests in Petersburg over a dozen years ago. It came to an end in 2022 when it was banned, followed by the launching of a criminal case against it, leading to the arrests of some activists, and the exile of others.
“They made up their minds that [Vesna] was something along the lines of [Alexei Navalny’s] Anti-Corruption Foundation, I suppose,” muses one former Vesna member. The young woman asked not to be named, even though she had stepped away from politics before the movement was officially deemed “extremist.” She continues to live in Russia and hopes that the security services will “continue to overlook her.”
The playbooks for dismantling the Anti-Corruption Foundation and Vesna are indeed broadly similar:
The prosecution of Vesna activists began with searches warranted under an obscure criminal law statute concerning the creation of NGOs which infringe on people’s personal and civil rights. Charges of violating this very same statute had also formed the core of the case against the Anti-Corruption Foundation.
As happened with the Anti-Corruption Foundation, the security forces got Vesna designated an “extremist” organization. Following this, any public activity that police investigators deemed as “continuing” the movement’s work, such as posting on its social media, was regarded as a punishable offense.
In both cases, a wave of police searches of activists’ homes swept across various regions of Russia, and this was followed by a series of arrests.
Vesna’s most prominent figures were designated “foreign agents.” Many of them fled Russia and were placed on the wanted list. The security forces then took their revenge on those who remained behind.
The trial of the six Vesna activists in Petersburg had dragged on since the summer of 2024 and been one of the most high-profile political trials in wartime Russia, owing both to the steadfast stance taken by some of the defendants and to the dramatic about-face by others.
Vesna was founded in February 2013. The new movement consisted of approximately fifty activists, many of whom hailed from the Petersburg branch of Youth Yabloko, which had dissolved a short time earlier. The goals Vesna voiced at the time were far removed from radicalism: “increasing the level of political engagement among young people” and “participating in Petersburg’s legislature and local government through elections.”
In their hometown, Vesna’s theatricalized processions and pickets quickly became a familiar fixture on the cultural and political scenes.
In the summer of 2015, Vesna held an anti-war protest on Nevsky Prospekt, [Petersburg’s main thoroughfare]. Five activists stood holding signs that read “Write kind words to Ukraine” and a box where anyone could drop a postcard with words of support for the Ukrainian people.
In May 2016, Vesna marched through the city holding a banner reading “Circus, go away!” Opposition activists had not been permitted to hold May Day marches on Nevsky Prospekt, even though the country’s ruling United Russia party had been granted permission to march down the same route without any issues. In protest, Vesna activists staged an alternative procession in guise of a carnival: a young woman in church vestments with a fake belly demanded a ban on abortions, while another waved a censer by way of blessing a silver “Rogozin 1” rocket. Behind them walked a man with a TV set instead of a head. Someone carried a huge saw with the slogan “I support embezzlement!” Another carried a cello case stuffed with banknotes.
“Russia’s Future”: a 2018 protest action by Vesna. Photo: David Frenkel/Mediazona
In January 2018, Vesna staged a mock funeral for Russia’s future: people dressed in mourning attire and with sorrowful expressions on their faces carried a coffin through the streets, adorned with children’s drawings that symbolized hopes for life in a free, democratic country.
Photo: David Frenkel/Mediazona
In the summer of 2018, when Russia was hosting the FIFA World Cup, Vesna activists unfurled a banner reading “This World Cup Is Filled with Blood” on Palace Bridge in Petersburg. Vesna timed another protest against [torture in police custody] to coincide with the World Cup—a young woman, doused in red paint, lay down on a pedestal beneath a replica of the tournament’s official mascot, the wolf Zabivaka.
Photo: David Frenkel/Mediazona
The movement grew rapidly. Regional chapters emerged, and by 2018 there were already around a dozen of them. By the late 2010s, Vesna was the most prominent youth organization in the Russian opposition’s ecosystem. No major protest took place without its activists being present. And yet, Vesna activists emphasized their commitment to legal methods of campaigning, as stated in their charter: “The movement pursues its work in accordance with the current laws of the Russian Federation.”
Vesna during the war: the first raids and interrogations
After Russia invaded Ukraine, the price of political dissent in Russia skyrocketed for all opponents of the government, and Vesna activists were no exception. On 3 May 2022, the movement announced the campaign “They Didn’t Fight for This,” calling on dissenters to attend the Immortal Regiment marches on 9 May (WWII Victory Day) but to carry anti-war placards at them.
A few days later, Vesna activists Yevgeny Zateyev and Valentin Khoroshenin, of Petersburg, and Roman Maximov, of Veliky Novgorod, who had already quit the movement, were targeted with searches of their homes. All three men were taken to Moscow for questioning and held in a temporary detention center pending trial.
These were the first steps in the investigation against Vesna activists. It was then that law enforcement authorities launched a criminal case into the setting up of an NGO that infringes on the personal rights of citizens.
The same day, search warrants were executed in Petersburg at the homes of the parents of Bogdan Litvin, Vesna’s federal coordinator, who had already left Russia, and activist Polina Barabash, as well as at the homes of former movement members Alexei Bezrukov and Artem Uimanen. In Moscow, searches were conducted at the homes of Timofei Vaskin, Angelina Roshchupko, Daria Pak, and Ivan Drobotov.
On 10 and 11 May 2022, the court issued restraining orders against Vaskin, Drobotov, Angelina Roshchupko, Maximov, Zateyev, and Khoroshenin, prohibiting them from certain actions. Soon after, Litvin and Drobotov were placed on the wanted list, as they had managed to leave Russia.
This did not stop Vesna, however. In September 2022, the youth activists announced protests against the military mobilization across Russia. Less than a month later, the Justice Ministry added the movement to its list of “foreign agents,” and the Saint Petersburg City Court ruled Vesna an “extremist” organization on 6 December 2022.
The charges and the trial
On 5 June 2023, the Investigative Committee opened a new criminal case, which later came to be known simply as the “big Vesna case.”
Searches were carried out the following day in Barnaul, Novosibirsk, Petersburg, and Tver. Six people were detained and taken to Moscow: Zateyev, Pavel Sinelnikov, Anna Arkhipova, Vasily Neustroyev, Yan Ksenzhepolsky, and Khoroshenin. On 8 June, a Moscow court remanded them to pretrial detention.
During the same pretrial detention hearing, the prosecution listed five charges: organizing and participating in an extremist group, desecrating the memory of defenders of the Fatherland, spreading “fake news” about the army, and calling for actions contrary to national security.
A year later, when the Saint Petersburg City Court began hearing the case against the six activists on its merits, there were seven charges. Incitement to mass unrest and the creation of an NGO infringing on citizens’ rights (the very same charge under which the activists’ homes had initially been searched in 2022) had been added to the bill of particulars.
The investigation assigned the role of leader and ideological instigator to Vesna’s federal coordinator Bogdan Litvin, who had managed to flee the country. According to law enforcement officials, it was Litvin who had driven the movement toward “extremism.”
Most of the charges were related to posts on Vesna’s social media accounts. Entered into the recorded were ninety posts made in Vesna’s name at various times on various platforms. When presenting evidence in court, the prosecution primarily read these posts aloud, listed the names of Telegram channels, cited viewer statistics, and read out the comments.
The indictment placed particular emphasis on a comment posted by a user known as “Kanoki Nagato,” on 1 May 2022. On one of Vesna’s Telegram channels, he suggested that Russians would one day start “killing the pigs, just like the Ukrainians did at Maidan.” According to the prosecution, the appearance of such a comment proved that Vesna was inciting dangerous actions. None of the defendants knows who “Kanoki Nagato” is, and law enforcement officials have not been able to identify this person either.
They did examine the personal accounts of the six defendants, however. Some of their Instagram accounts were found to be private. Speaking in court, the prosecutor called this “an attempt to conceal information from the investigation.”
When the prosecution presented its evidence in court, some of the hearings were held in closed session at the prosecutor’s office’s request, and members of the public and journalists were not allowed in the courtroom. Those involved in the proceedings are not permitted to disclose what they heard behind closed doors, but it is known that during at least some of these sessions, the court examined the results of intelligence operations—a term used in the Code of Criminal Procedure to refer, among other things, to wiretapping, undercover operations, and the interception and vetting of correspondence.
When it was the defense attorneys’ turn to present evidence, Arkhipova’s support group issued a public appeal: “The defense now urgently needs witnesses—people who actually took part in peaceful anti-war protests between February and May 2022 and have already suffered administrative penalties for doing so.”
Witnesses who responded to this post testified in court.
“To my mind, every citizen took to the streets out of a sense of duty and conscience. It was an entirely peaceful demonstration,” said one of them.
Another witness recounted that she was detained at an Immortal Regiment rally while holding up a portrait of her great-grandfather, and an administrative charge was filed against her for “discrediting” the army.
“I came out of my own free will. I’d participated in Immortal Regiment rallies before as well. At the time I made my decision, I hadn’t seen any notices on Telegram channels,” she explained.
A placard hung in the courthouse on the day the verdict in the Vesna trial was read out: “Yes to Vesna,* / No to war*! / And the truth* about them / is not extremism. / *Vesna, war, and truth are words forbidden in Russia in 2026.” Photo: Mediazona
At nearly every hearing in the trial, the defense insisted that the prosecution had no evidence that the accused activists were involved in posting most of the messages mentioned in the case file. Moreover, some of the defendants not only did not know each other prior to their arrest, but were also not members of Vesna at the time it was classified as an “extremist” organization.
Who’s who in the Vesna case
Yevgeny Zateyev. Photo: Mediazona
Yevgeny Zateyev, 24 years old
A resident of Petersburg, Zateyev was charged with violating Article 354.1.4 (“condoning Nazism”) and Article 282.1.1 (“establishing an extremist community”) of the Russian Federal Criminal Code. The charge that he had violated Article 239.2 (“organizing an association that infringes on the personhood and rights of citizens”) was dropped due to the statute of limitations. The prosecutor asked the court to sentence Zateyev to ten years in a penal colony. The actual sentence was six years and two months.
Zateyev served as the press secretary for the Vesna movement’s Petersburg branch. In court, he insisted that his duties were limited to local topics: news about life in Petersburg, announcements of lectures, and film screenings.
He viewed the outbreak of the war as a “personal tragedy.”
“Vesna tried to prevent further destruction and loss of life on both sides of the border—among both civilians and military personnel—through peaceful means. I still regard this goal in an entirely positive light,” Zateyev said in court.
He was one of the first Vesna activists to face criminal charges in the spring of 2022. Some of his comrades left Russia, but Zateyev stayed behind and wound up in a pretrial detention center a year later.
In the summer of 2023, Zateyev wrote a letter from jail explaining why he had decided against fleeing the country.
“I made a very difficult and very painful choice. Was it a painful choice? Of course it was. I find it hard to imagine, though, how I could have left everything behind, gone away, and watched as my friends and acquaintances were imprisoned. This choice was easy for some, but I don’t judge them.”
In the same letter, Zateyev asked that his family not be judged for failing to “change [his] mind.”
In November 2023, Zateyev partially admitted his guilt in the hope of having his pretrial detention conditions eased. He was concerned about his family, especially his grandmother, who was seventy-seven years old at the time of his arrest. Zateyev was not released from pretrial detention, and so he withdrew his confession.
In January 2024, Zateyev’s grandmother died. Four months later, his mother also died, from cirrhosis of the liver.
Zateyev’s pretrial detention was extended once again shortly thereafter. Addressing the court, he mentioned the deaths of his loved ones. Judge Irina Furmanova interrupted him.
“Please do not try to pressure the court by bringing up the deaths of your relatives.”
“I am not putting any pressure on the court. I am simply stating the facts of my life.”
“We are familiar with them. You can merely note what you’ve been through. There’s no need to pressure us like that.”
“Your Honor, pressure—”
“Everyone has, or some people no longer have, a mother. There’s no need to pressure us in that regard. I’ll say it again. Let’s continue.”
In his closing statement, Zateyev said that he was forgiving the investigators, prosecutors, and judges.
“I caution against the false belief that forgiveness absolves one of responsibility. It does not. I do believe, however, that through forgiveness, we can understand the reasons behind what is happening—why and for what purpose. By ridding ourselves of an age-old evil, learning to treat one another with understanding, we can finally find love. I believe that this is possible and even inevitable in Russia. Spring [vesna] is inevitable. The season, of course. What did you think I meant?”
Mailing address for letters:
Russia 196655 St. Petersburg, Kolpino Kolpinskaya St., d. 9, str. 1 Pretrial Detention Center No. 1 Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia for St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region Yevgeny Artemovich Zateyev, born 2001
Bank card number for donations: 2200 7009 1119 8470
Anna Arkhipova. Photo: Mediazona
Anna Arkhipova, 28 years old
A resident of Novosibirsk, Arkhipova was charged with violating Articles 282.1.1 and 282.1.2 (“organizing an extremist community”), Article 354.1.4 (“condoning Nazism”), Article 280.4.3 (“discrediting the Russian armed forces”), Article 212.1.1 (“repeatedly violating the law on public assemblies”), and Articles 207.3.2.b and 207.3.2.e (“disseminating knowingly false information about the Russian armed forces”) of the Russian Federal Criminal Code. The charge that she had violated Article 239.3 (“organizing an association that infringes on the personhood and rights of citizens”) was dropped due to the statute of limitations. The prosecutor asked the court to sentence Arkhipova to thirteen years in prison. The judge sentenced her to twelve years in prison instead.
Arkhipova joined Vesna in February 2021 to “take a civic stand, engage in publicly vital work, and meet new people.” She wrote posts for the movement’s social media accounts but quickly grew tired of “conflicts within the group” and left in May 2022.
Once the war in Ukraine had kicked off, Vesna’s work became “random and certainly not organized,” according to Arkhipova.
“Everything happened naturally,” Arkhipova said in court. “I felt the need to protest the war, as I regarded it and continue to regard it as a great catastrophe and tragedy. That is why I took part in a street protest in Novosibirsk on 24 February 2022.”
Of the ninety posts listed in the criminal indictment, she wrote one.
“I was involved in the publication dated 29 April 2022, [as charged] under Article 207.3, but I find it difficult to say exactly what role I played. [The text] was discussed at great length, and I didn’t really want to have anything to do with it at all. Either I acted as the author, after which it was heavily edited, or another person was the author, after which I heavily edited it,” the young woman explained in court.
Arkhipova’s support group runs a Telegram channel where her letters to the outside world are posted sometimes. In the “Cell Librarian” section, she talks about the books she has read in pretrial detention.
She also writes about the health problems typically experienced by prisoners. Due to poor nutrition, all women in the detention center lose their hair, and even a simple cold is dangerous.
“The worst part is that you’re not permitted to make your bed during the day, so you’re freezing and shivering, and all you have to cover yourself with is a towel. Illnesses are illnesses, but we still have to follow the prison rules!”
Arkhipova is a vegan. It is difficult to follow this diet in pretrial detention. She is very dependent on care packages, which arrive with considerable delays. Her support group secured permission to send her plant-based milk substitutes, but the detention center declined to accept them, stating, “We don’t even allow dairy products for mothers with children.”
“My motivation is simple: I oppose the war. I want a better future for Russia. I have tried to act on my conscience all my life, even though I haven’t always succeeded. When the war began, it was my conscience that wouldn’t let me stand idly by. People on both sides of the border deserve peace: soldiers should be with their families, not in foxholes, and those who were killed should have lived. I feel the same pain for everyone, regardless of their uniform,” said Arkhipova in her closing statement.
Mailing address for letters:
Russia 195009 St. Petersburg 11 Arsenalnaya St. Pretrial Detention Center No. 5 Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia for St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region Anna Nikolayevna Arkhipova, born 1997
Bank account numbers for donations: 2200 7008 6021 1167 (T-Bank) • 2202 2071 9921 3904 (Sberbank)
You can follow the latest news on the Telegram channel of Arkhipova’s support group.
Vasily Neustroyev. Photo: Mediazona
Vasily Neustroyev, 30 years old
A resident of Petersburg, Vasily Neustroyev was charged with violating Article 280.4.3 (“publicly threatening national security”), Article 212.1.1 (“repeatedly violating the law on public assemblies”), Article 354.1.4 (“condoning Nazism”), Article 282.1.1 (“organizing an extremist community”) and Articles 207.3.2.b and 207.3.2.e (“disseminating knowingly false information about the Russian armed forces”) of the Russian Federal Criminal Code. The charge that Neustroyev had violated Article 239.2 (“organizing an association that infringes on the personhood and rights of citizens”) was dropped due to the statute of limitations. The prosecution asked the court to sentence Neustroyev to twelve years in prison, but the judge sentenced him to ten years instead.
According to the prosecution, Neustroyev was on Vesna’s federal audit commission and was one of its leaders. Neustroyev himself stated in court that he did not make any decisions within the movement. He did not even have access to social media and could not have published any of the posts ascribed to him. He met most of his “accomplices” only after his arrest. Before his arrest, he was acquainted only with Khoroshenin and Maximov, and knew Zateyev only by sight.
When asked about Litvin—whom investigators consider the leader of Vesna and under whose influence the movement allegedly turned into an “extremist organization”—Neustroyev laughed and said that the main topic of their conversations had been cats.
“Since the autumn of 2018, we’ve been the owners of cats—brothers from the same litter, which we got from the same source,” Neustroyev explained. “Since then, Bogdan Gennadyevich has left his cat with me to look after two or three times. You could say that we became something like in-laws through the cats. The cats were the main topic of our conversations in the years leading up to my arrest.”
The Petersburger did not renounce his anti-war views in court.
“I consider the actions of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin not only a crime against both Ukraine and Russia in equal measure, but also a great folly.”
And yet, Neustroyev “remained skeptical of mass street protests.” He was a member of Petersburg Yabloko’s council and was heavily involved in elections work for a long time. He coordinated election monitoring, and since 2020 had been a voting member of one of the city’s Territorial Election Commissions.
In a letter from the detention center, Neustroev voiced deep regret that he had not yet managed to finish his university education. He had just resumed his studies before his arrest, and if not for the criminal case, he might already have a degree.
“Nevertheless, I still plan to eventually obtain a formal tertiary degree and put this source of anxiety behind me.”
He spoke about Russia in his closing statement.
“Russia is strong. Russia will survive all tyrants and dictators, just as it has done before. I know that Russia will be peaceful, Russia will be happy, Russia will be free. And all of us will be peaceful, happy, and free along with her.”
Mailing address for letters:
Russia 196655 St. Petersburg, Kolpino Kolpinskaya St., d. 9, str. 1 Pretrial Detention Center No. 1 Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia for St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region Vasily Petrovich Neustroyev, born 1995
You can follow the latest news on the Telegram channel of Neustroyev’s support group.
Pavel Sinelnikov. Photo: Mediazona
Pavel Sinelnikov, 24 years old
A resident of Barnaul, Pavel Sinelnikov was charged with violating Articles 282.1.1 and 282.1.2 (“organizing and participating in an extremist community”) of the Russian Federal Criminal Code. The prosecution had asked the court to send him down for ten years, but instead the judge sentenced to him to seven and a half years in prison.
Sinelnikov served as Vesna’s executive secretary for several months but left the movement in 2021, long before it had been designated “extremist.”
“The work isn’t hard: you just sit there and write. But taking all those minutes is time-consuming and quite boring. So I really feel for the court clerk,” Sinelnikov explained in court.
He was baffled how the same person could be accused of both establishing an “extremist community” and participating in it, and he made no secret of the fact that the arrest had come as a shock to him.
“I didn’t expect at all that some police investigators would actually fly all the way from Moscow to Barnaul just to get me. As far as I’m concerned, the police search itself is a form of intense coercion, especially the way it’s done. They force their way into your life while yelling and shouting, don’t even let you get dressed, push you face-down on the floor, and then turn everything upside down while cracking high-school-level jokes,” Sinelnikov recalled.
He confessed immediately after his arrest, but later recanted his testimony.
“You can’t take away people’s opinions, but it’s easy to take away their freedom of speech. That’s what happened to me, even though I’m just a binnocent eyestander.”
In court, Sinelnikov explained that he had been fascinated by science and maths at school. He often traveled to academic competitions, and became interested in politics during one such trip to Moscow. He described himself as an introvert and a loner, and his mother even called her son a “slacker” in court.
“Well, Mom knows best,” Sinelnikov replied.
Sinelnikov began his closing statement by admitting that he didn’t really have much to say. But then he called the charges politically motivated and the trial “abhorrent.”
“There was no criminal extremist group. No one planned any crimes, no socially dangerous actions were committed, and there were no socially dangerous consequences either. No harm was done either to society or the public interest. We didn’t even have any motives for or intentions of doing so. Do I deserve ten years in prison for that?”
Mailing address for letters:
Russia 196655 St. Petersburg, Kolpino Kolpinskaya St., d. 9, str. 1 Pretrial Detention Center No. 1 Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia for St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region Pavel Nikolayevich Sinelnikov, born 2001
Bank account number for donations: 2200 7019 7373 4749
You can follow the latest news on the Telegram channel of Sinelnikov’s support group.
Yan Ksenzhepolsky. Photo: Mediazona
Yan Ksenzhepolsky, 25 years old
A resident of Tver, Yan Ksenzhepolsky was charged with violating Article 280.4.3 (“discrediting the Russian armed forces”), Article 212.1.1 (“repeatedly violating the law on public assemblies”), Article 354.1.4 (“condoning Nazism”), Article 282.1.1 (“organizing an extremist community”), and Articles 207.3.2.b and 207.3.2.e (“disseminating knowingly false information about the Russian armed forces”) of the Russian Federal Criminal Code. The charge that he had violated Article 239.2 (“organizing an association that infringes on the personhood and rights of citizens”) was dropped due to the statute of limitations. The prosecution had asked the court to send him down for twelve years, but instead the judge sentenced to him to eleven years in prison.
Ksenzhepolsky joined Vesna’s federal coordinating council in August 2021. According to him, by October–November of that year his involvement in the council had become “nominal” due to his work commitments. He was employed as a welding production specialist at the National Welding Control Agency and served as an aide to a deputy in the Tver Regional Legislative Assembly.
“I realized that the Vesna movement made a lot of noise but didn’t accomplish anything tangible,” Ksenzhepolsky said in court. “Meanwhile, I was involved in real institutional politics at the Legislative Assembly and could actually influence things—or at least try to.”
On paper, however, Ksenzhepolsky remained a member of Vesna until the summer of 2022.
Ksenzhepolsky is accused of posting on the movement’s Telegram channels, although, according to him, he had access to only one of them, “Tver Vesna,” which had sixteen subscribers. He handed over the password to the new administrator in November 2021, when he left the organization.
In court, Ksenzepolsky reiterated that he believes street protests in Russia are ineffective.
“I believe these actions are completely pointless and do more harm than good.”
In September 2022, when Russia announced a military mobilization, Ksenzhepolsky, according to his own testimony, was on holiday in Georgia but returned home—after Vesna had been declared an “extremist” organization.
“In any case, I know that we will ultimately be vindicated in the eyes of society, history, and the Last Judgment. After all, everything was forever, until it was no more. This regime will come to an end too, and within our lifetimes, something tells me. If not, then the Kingdom of Heaven is not a bad consolation prize,” said Ksenzhepolsky in his closing statement.
Mailing address for letters:
Russia 196655 St. Petersburg, Kolpino Kolpinskaya St., d. 9, str. 1 Pretrial Detention Center No. 1 Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia for St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region Yan Alexandrovich Ksenzhepolsky, born 2000
Bank account number for donations: 2200 2479 5715 1401
You can follow the latest news on the Telegram channel of Ksenzhepolsky’s support group.
Valentin Khoroshenin. Photo: Mediazona
Valentin Khoroshenin, 24 years old
A resident of Petersburg, Khoroshenin was charged with violating Article 212.1.1 (“repeatedly violating the law on public assemblies”) and Article 354.1.4 (“condoning Nazism”) of the Russian Federal Criminal Code. The charge that he had violated Article 239.2 of the Criminal Code was dropped due to the statute of limitations. The prosecution asked the court to send Khoroshenin to prison for eight years, but he was sentenced to six years and two months behind bars.
A co-founder of the now-shuttered Fogel lecture bar in Petersburg, Khoroshenin was the sole defendant who not only pleaded guilty to the charges but also testified against the other defendants in the case and many other Vesna activists.
The names mentioned by Valentin Khoroshenin in his testimony: Vladimir Arzhanov, Yekaterina Alexandrova, Makar Andreyev, Nikolai Artemenko, Anna Arkhipova, Yekaterina Bushkova, Alexander Vereshchagin, Yekaterina Goncharova, Timofei Gorodilov, Anastasia Gof, Lev Gyammer, Semyon Yerkin, Yevgeny Zateyev, Semyon Zakhariev, Anastasia Kadetova, Vladimir Kazachenko, Alexander Kashevarov, Gleb Kondratyev, Semyon Kochkin, Yan Ksenzhepolsky, Ilya Kursov, Maria Lakhina, Nikita Levkin, Bogdan Litvin, Andrei Lozitsky, Alexandra Lukyanenko, Yelizaveta Lyubavina (Sofya Manevich), Ilya Lyubimov, Timofei Martynchenko, Daria Mernenko, Anzhelika Mustafina, Anna Nazarova, Vasily Neustroyev, Maxim Potemkin, Konstantin Pokhilchuk, Kira Pushkareva, Lilia Safronova, Pavel Sinelnikov, Yevgenia Fedotova, Anastasia Filippova, Artur Kharitonov, Alexei Shvarts
Khoroshenin’s testimony came as a surprise to everyone in court. He requested that the testimony be heard in closed session and asked that the public and the press be removed from the courtroom, but the judge turned down his request.
Khoroshenin did not merely agree with the charge of “extremism.” He called Vesna “a sort of incubator for Navalny.” His testimony suggested that the movement’s branches were directly linked to the opposition politician’s field offices, where distinguished young activists would then “move up the ranks.” Khoroshenin mentioned the “grant support” that Vesna received, including from “undesirable organizations,” and complained that rank-and-file activists “spent the night in a back room, while Litvin bought himself a new apartment.”
“We systematically violated the law. We held protests and placed ourselves above the law. There were also slogans about undermining the country’s defense capabilities and justifying the use of violence. We organized events that violated existing laws but looked good on the surface,” Khoroshenin said in court.
“I have always believed that everything I am involved in should bring something positive to people. The Vesna movement was perhaps the only exception to this rule,” he argued, adding that he no longer supports any of the points in Vesna’s platform except for the one regarding support for “family and motherhood.”
Toward the end of his court testimony, Khoroshenin urged the other defendants to plead guilty—“to change their stance on the charges against them and set aside ideological pretense.”
“Don’t dig your own graves, colleagues!” he said.
In a letter from the detention center, Anna Arkhipova later quoted the words Khoroshenin had spoken after the hearing: “What really matters isn’t what actually happened, but how the investigator wrote it up.”
In his final statement, Khoroshenin lamented that his former comrades in Vesna had made him look like “some kind of Luntik,” once again acknowledged his guilt, asked for forgiveness “from society and especially from his family,” and voiced his hope that the court would allow him “to return to a normal life for constructive self-realization for the benefit of society.”
Mailing address for letters:
Russia 196655 St. Petersburg, Kolpino Kolpinskaya St., d. 9, str. 1 Pretrial Detention Center No. 1 Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia for St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region Valentin Alexeyevich Khoroshenin, born 2001
Bank account number for donations: 4476 2461 7307 7443
You can follow the latest news on the Telegram channel of Khoroshenin’s support group.
Kazakh authorities have granted Russia’s request to extradite activist Yulia Yemelyanova, a former employee of the late Alexei Navalny’s Petersburg office. According to the Russian opposition-in-exile’s Anti-War Committee, Kazakhstan violated its own protocols in making the decision to extradite Yemelyanova, as the Russian activist’s application for asylum is still under review in the country.
This past October, Kazakhstan’s Prosecutor General’s Office had guaranteed that extradition requests would not be considered until all administrative procedures related to obtaining asylum were completed. Yemelyanova’s defense intends to appeal the extradition decision to the country’s Supreme Court.
Yemelyanova was detained on Aug. 31, 2025, at Almaty airport while in transit to a third country. She has been held in pretrial detention ever since. In Russia, she is being prosecuted for theft (Part 2, Article 158 of the Criminal Code) in connection with a 2021 incident in which she allegedly stole a mobile phone from a taxi driver. Yemelyanova’s defense calls the case fabricated. It was sent to court in July 2022, by which time the activist had already left Russia.
Yemelyanova is the fourth Russian asylum seeker since late January to be handed a deportation decision from Kazakh officials. The others are Chechen Mansur Movlaev, an open critic of Ramzan Kadyrov; Crimean resident Oleksandr Kachkurkin, who is facing treason charges in Russia; and Yevgeny Korobov, an officer who deserted from the Russian army.
Dmytro Kulyk with his wife Oksana and daughter Elina. Source: Daily Beast
A Ukrainian dad escaped Vladimir Putin’s drone and missile attacks back home only to be grabbed by a band of ICE stooges in a Walmart parking lot in Minneapolis.
“I hoped I would find peace in America. I’ve done everything the government required, I don’t understand why I am behind bars,” Dmytro Kulyk told the Daily Beast from the Kandiyohi County Jail in Willmar, Minnesota.
The 39-year-old father was getting a pickup order at a Walmart in Maple Grove when he found himself surrounded by immigration agents last month. He’d been working as a delivery driver to make ends meet, while also supporting his family by doing roofing work.
Kulyk legally entered the U.S. in late 2023 along with his wife, 38, and daughter, who’s now 5. The family was sponsored by U.S. citizens as part of the Uniting 4 Ukraine program, a humanitarian program set up in April 2022 to allow Ukrainians fleeing Russia’s war to live and work in the U.S. on “parole.”
Once the initial two-year parole period expires, entrants can file for re-parole to remain in the country longer. That’s exactly what Kulyk says he did. His wife and daughter’s applications were approved. But his remained pending.
He said he was putting groceries in his car on Jan. 1 when he was approached by three ICE agents.
“I explained to the ICE officers that the war was killing people, that my wife had a disability, that it was violence, terrorism which we had escaped from but one of them began to laugh,” Kulyk told The Daily Beast. “I asked why he was laughing and I was told that he was pro-Russian, wanted Russia to win the war.”
DHS and ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
He can’t understand why he’s been treated like a criminal. He did everything by the book, he says–paying taxes and filing his immigration paperwork on time, working multiple jobs to take care of his family. He had no criminal record to speak of.
His immigration attorney, Julia Bikbova, suggested his re-parole application may have intentionally been stalled to provide immigration authorities with a pretext to deport him.
“Our government, our Homeland Security, promised Ukrainians to protect them during the war. There are approximately 280,000 Ukrainians on U4U, Uniting for Ukraine program in the United States, including the Kulyk family,” she told the Daily Beast.
“My client did everything the government required him to do: on June 5 he applied for the re-parole and his wife paid $2,040 of fees for her and child’s granted applications. His wife and daughter have recently received their re-paroles but he has not, his application is pending.
“ICE detained him as ‘illegal’ and began deportation proceedings: This is a sick way of forcing a man with a clean criminal record to become unlawful in the U.S. by delaying the review of his application, which the very same authority had requested to file.”
Kulyk is now terrified he’ll be sent to the frontlines to fight Vladimir Putin’s troops if he is deported back home. He and his family endured relentless Russian attacks before finally deciding to flee their home in the Odesa region in 2023. When they saw ruins on their own street in Chornomorsk, they called their friends in Texas and asked for help, leading to their enrollment in the U4U program thanks to having U.S. citizens as sponsors.
Kulyk now can’t stop worrying about his wife, Oksana, and daughter, Elina.
“I am worried they can drag my wife and kid out of our home,” he told The Daily Beast, adding that he wanted to appeal directly to American authorities to make them understand he’d done nothing wrong.
“Please hear me: I came to America to escape the war, to pray in church and work hard. But now my heartbroken and sick wife has lost over 10 pounds since ICE arrested me on January 1. She’s been panicking, and my little daughter has been crying without me every night – this is unjust,” he said.
Oksana says she’s been too “terrified and lost” to leave home while her husband is locked up, afraid that immigration agents might return for the rest of the family.
“I am too scared to drive my 5-year-old daughter to school in my husband’s car. I’m terrified ICE will detain me and our daughter will end up alone,” she told The Daily Beast. “This is just as scary as the war in Ukraine, except now we don’t have Dmytro with us. Our daughter Elina cries herself to sleep with her cat plushie. She says the toy is daddy.”
Most Ukrainian refugees are women and children but some men have also left the country for various reasons. Kulyk was granted a permit to leave in order to care for a family member with a medical condition.
But Kulyk is not the only Ukrainian refugee to be swept up in the Trump administration’s controversial immigration crackdown.
Nearly 1,000 miles away, in Philadelphia, Zhanna was poring over messages in a group chat of 349 other refugees called “Ukrainians in Detention.” She joined the group last month, when her friends Andrii and Yaroslav ended up in detention. Although Bartosh has legal Temporary Protected Status, she stopped going to the office and now works from home.
“ICE rounds up men who buy tools or work in construction, so every day I call my husband, a construction worker, to check if he is OK. Even when the war started in Ukraine and we had to escape abroad, the same morning I wasn’t as stressed as I am now,” she told the Daily Beast. “In our chat I read that all arrestees are men, that at least five of them have signed up for self-deportation… but where is there to go now? Europe is also deporting Ukrainians. Our TPS is good until October but we want to understand, are we really legal in the United States, or is it time to pack up our suitcases again?”
Immigration attorneys count about 300 cases of detained Ukrainians across the United States and up to 150 refugees deported to Ukraine, Bikbova said.
“Most of the arrested Ukrainians are men, the majority of them have a clean criminal record but as we see in Kulyk’s case, they are equated to people who jumped the border, broke the law,” attorney Bikbova told the Daily Beast. “Behind every deported man, there are crying women and children, left without support. For some mysterious reason, we see male Ukrainian refugees being arrested and put on airplanes. If he gets deported, my client Kulyk will most certainly go to the front.”
Trump’s administration has also been deporting Russian asylum seekers. According to a report by Current Times, more than 50,000 Russians have fled the war and political repression to the U.S. since February 2022. Journalist Ilya Azar has been covering the deportations for Novaya Gazeta.
“They send out 40-60 people on each plane. There have been five airplanes,” Azar told the Daily Beast on Tuesday. The deportation planes transit to Russia through Egypt, and Russian security services meet the deported citizens. Azar’s report noted that “all men received draft notices” upon their arrival in December.
German authorities last week denied asylum to 47-year-old engineer Georgy Avaliani, who deserted from the front line in 2022. His wife and two children were rejected alongside him.
“There is no reason to believe that, upon returning to the Russian Federation, they would face a high probability of persecution or serious harm,” wrote an official from the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF), despite Avaliani’s account of being tortured after fleeing the front.
Mediazona has reviewed BAMF decisions in Avaliani’s case and those of other deserters, discovering that officials are producing boilerplate documents that repeat one another almost word for word. In justifying the refusals, the German agency argues, for instance, that mobilisation in Russia was intended to “strengthen the armed forces” rather than repress dissent, and therefore cannot be considered political persecution. They further say that mobilisation has effectively ended because Vladimir Putin announced it—verbally.
When describing potential punishments for deserters, officials cite not the criminal code but an administrative article regarding failure to comply with military registration duties. They even specify that the maximum penalty is a fine of €302.
Most notably, in every decision examined, BAMF cites Mediazona’s own article from 2023, “Evading > refusing > fleeing. A year of mobilization in Russia through trials and verdicts”, as evidence that mobilised men face little more than a fine. That article noted that, at the time of publication, failing to respond to a summons did not yet carry a heavy penalty. While the situation has since changed—an eventuality the original article warned about—the original reference remains in the German files.
Relying on information from that article is also fundamentally flawed because BAMF applies it to people already wanted under serious criminal charges for desertion or abandoning their unit. In its rulings, the agency ignores the severity of these consequences, lumping deserters in with those who simply left Russia when mobilisation was first announced. This is exactly what happened to Georgy Avaliani.
A year in a refugee camp
Avaliani, an engineer, arrived in Germany with his wife, Oksana, and their two children on January 26, 2025. By then Georgy, who was drafted shortly after mobilisation began and later deserted, had been on a federal wanted list for over six months.
The family was granted asylum-seeker status without an initial investigation into the specifics of their escape. Like other applicants, they were placed in temporary housing: a small portacabin with two bunk beds at the former Tempelhof airport site. Their journey to Germany had been arduous. On January 18, Georgy, who had managed to leave Russia before his name appeared on the wanted list, met his wife and children in Bosnia. From there, they travelled to the Croatian border and requested asylum.
In Croatia, the asylum process is largely a formality; in practice, obtaining protection there is nearly impossible. Consequently, many migrants use it only as an entry point into the EU before heading to countries with functioning reception systems. The Avalianis did the same. After a preliminary registration in Croatia, they spent a week travelling to Berlin.
For nearly a year, the family was cramped in a camp with 2,000 other applicants. Finally, just before the start of 2026, they were moved to a hostel in western Berlin. But Georgy’s hopes of integration (he had been diligently learning German and hoped to return to engineering) were soon shuttered. On January 16, just two weeks after their move, BAMF rejected the entire family’s asylum claim.
Avaliani intends to appeal. If he fails, the family must leave Germany within 30 days or face deportation to Russia, where Georgy faces up to 10 years in prison for abandoning his unit during a period of mobilisation. Despite having clear evidence of persecution, the German authorities have ignored his claims.
The two escapes of Private Avaliani
Before the war, Georgy Avaliani was a well-paid engineer at the Moscow water utility, Mosvodokanal. He had no plans to leave Russia. Shortly before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he even enrolled in a seminary to pursue a religious education.
Georgy had never served in the army due to a heart condition. However, following the “partial mobilisation” announcement, he received a summons on October 6, 2022. At the time, his three children were minors; by law, as the father of a large family, he should have been exempt. The couple tried to contest the draft through the military enlistment office and the prosecutor’s office but failed. Georgy chose not to go into hiding, unwilling to abandon his family.
After a medical commission in November, he was sent to a training camp in the Moscow region and then to the occupied Svatove district of the Luhansk region. His unit was stationed in the village of Novoselivske, 20 km from the front line. After a few days, noticing the chaos within the unit, Avaliani decided to slip away, gambling that no one would notice his absence. He reached a nearby road and hitched a ride to the village of Troitske, a gathering point for mobilised men.
Part of a local hospital had been turned into a shelter for soldiers with nowhere else to go—some had lost their units, others were waiting to withdraw their pay, and some were recovering from wounds.
While staying there, Georgy met another mobilised soldier. They shared the same grim impression of the front and a desperate desire to return home. They found three others who felt the same and hired a taxi driver to take them to a spot where they could cross the border on foot.
After the driver dropped them off, the group split up. Along the way, Avaliani and his companion heard a helicopter. Georgy later told journalists and BAMF officials that the second group had been gunned down from the air. While there is no independent confirmation of this, Avaliani and the other man survived only to be detained in an abandoned village.
There is little doubt Georgy made this journey on foot; “Goodbye to Arms”, a project that assists deserters, thoroughly verified his route. Alexei Alshansky, a coordinator for the organisation, says the helicopter story is the only detail rights activists have been unable to confirm.
Following his capture, Avaliani was thrown into “a basement” for 10 days. He says he was beaten repeatedly and subjected to mock executions. Mediazona has previously reported on this location, known as the Zaitsevo Centre for the Detention of Servicemen, based on the testimony of another deserter, Sergei Savchenko. Volunteers from “Goodbye to Arms” identified the site in the occupied village of Rassypne by comparing testimonies with video footage.
From the basement, Georgy was sent to an assault unit. Two days later, an ammunition dump near their position exploded. Avaliani suffered a concussion and a heart attack. He was sent to a distribution point where he befriended the doctor issuing referrals. The medic sent him to a hospital inside Russia, hinting that he could just as easily head straight for Moscow instead of the ward.
Avaliani did exactly that. After reuniting with his family, he hid at a dacha in the Tula region. Occasionally, he ventured to Lyubertsy for medical treatment. As time passed he grew less cautious, but in mid-February 2024 military police arrested him outside his home.
He was sent to Kaliningrad in western Russia, the permanent base of his unit, to await his fate. When a commander learned of Georgy’s engineering background, he set him to work renovating his private dacha. Meanwhile, Georgy pushed for a formal medical commission. When it finally took place, the results were surprising: he was not only declared fit for service but his category was upgraded from “partially fit” to “fit with minor restrictions”.
In May, he was told to report for questioning regarding a criminal case. Georgy fled again. On the way to the commander’s dacha, he got a taxi and flew to St Petersburg. His wife met him there to hand over his passport. From there he flew to Belarus, then Uzbekistan, Georgia and finally Montenegro, where he was taken in by a Swedish artist for whom he helped build a swimming pool.
Oksana remained in Lyubertsy with the children. Weeks after her husband left, an investigator began calling her. Georgy was placed on a federal wanted list.
In September 2024, security forces raided the family home. They confiscated phones from Oksana and the children, returning them only two weeks later. The stress caused Oksana to suffer a nervous breakdown, leading to a month-long stay in a psychiatric clinic. The visits from military police continued; the last raid occurred on January 7, 2025. After that, Oksana finally agreed to leave Russia.
Georgy has spoken openly to the press about his escape. In Montenegro, he was interviewed by Current Time TV. The family crossed the German border accompanied by a journalist from Die Welt, which later published a detailed account. A report for the Franco-German channel Artewas also filmed by Russian journalist in exile Masha Borzunova.
The first six months in Germany were particularly precarious. Under EU law, the migration service could have deported the family back to Croatia, their first point of entry. To prevent this, Georgy sought help from the church.
The tradition of Kirchenasyl, or church asylum, began in 1983 after Cemal Kemal Altun, a 23-year-old Turkish activist, took his own life in a West Berlin court while facing extradition. His death moved church communities to unite to protect refugees from deportation. Every year, hundreds of people receive a reprieve through this practice. The Avalianis were among them.
“It is a semi-legal, more like a cultural phenomenon that works differently in different states,” explains Alshansky. “The church gives the applicant a document stating they are under their care, and the authorities leave them alone.”
Thanks to this intervention, BAMF could not reject the family simply because they entered via Croatia. They were forced to consider the case on its merits. They rejected it anyway.
BAMF’s motivation
During his personal hearing, Georgy Avaliani detailed his service and desertion. When asked what he feared if returned to Russia, he replied: “I fear for my life. Legally, I could be imprisoned for up to 20 years. But more likely, I will be killed before trial or in prison… I know for certain that if they find me, a subhuman death awaits me.”
His wife, Oksana, tried to explain the psychological toll the military police raids had taken on her and the children. The family provided lots of evidence: the mobilisation order, the wanted notice from the interior ministry’s website, a letter from a German humanitarian organisation, medical records and Georgy’s military ID.
In its rejection, the agency claimed the Avalianis were “apolitical people”, making it unclear why they believed the Russian state would view them as opponents. BAMF argued that if they were truly targeted, Georgy would never have been able to leave Russia so easily.
Having erroneously stated that Avaliani faced only an administrative fine, the official added that it was “not evident that in the applicants’ case, due to specific circumstances, a different [punishment] should apply”.
The document also asserted that officials found no evidence that mobilisation continued after Putin’s verbal announcement. Even if it were to resume, BAMF argued, it was not certain Avaliani would be called up again, given Russia’s 25 million reservists.
“Even taking into account that the applicant evaded mobilisation, it is not to be expected that… he would be subjected to the inhuman or degrading treatment required to grant asylum,” the decision stated.
The agency concluded the family could lead a dignified life in Russia. Despite the economic crisis, the official noted that people in Russia are still provided with food, social benefits and pensions. “It is not seen that… they would find themselves in a completely hopeless situation,” the ruling said. Their physical and mental health was also deemed insufficient to require treatment specifically in Germany.
A template for rejection
Alshansky attributes the BAMF decision to the wave of draft evaders who fled to Europe after 2022.
“A crowd of people rushed to claim asylum over mobilisation, some without even a summons,” he says. “I think they have exhausted the Germans to the point where, as soon as they see a Russian applicant and the word ‘mobilisation’, they just churn out this rejection.” Artyom Klyga, from the rights organisation Connection E. V., confirms that around 1,000 Russians have requested asylum in Germany due to mobilisation.
Alshansky points out that the rejection text clearly treats Avaliani as a mere draft dodger rather than a man who fled the front and is now a fugitive. He believes BAMF compiled the document from fragments of other cases without truly studying Georgy’s story. “I have compared this rejection with others. It is a template; paragraph after paragraph is identical. They just changed the personal details in a Word file,” Klyga agrees.
Mediazona compared several BAMF decisions regarding Russians who fled mobilisation. The similarities are striking. In the case of a young man who left after an attempt to serve him a summons, the agency also cited Putin’s words on the end of mobilisation. The description of the economic situation in Russia—including the detail that 15% of Russians live below the poverty line—is identical in both his and Avaliani’s files.
In another case involving a reservist who left on a tourist visa, the agency used the same argument: that mobilisation is about military strength, not political vengeance. That document also cited the same €302 fine.
The same arguments were used against Anton Sh., a deserter from Ufa whose story was covered by Sever.Realii. He had been tortured in the same Zaitsevo cellar, where guards pulled out almost all of his teeth. Despite his ordeal and the fact he is wanted in Russia, BAMF ruled he faced no danger because he had been able to leave the country freely.
Georgy Avaliani is now consulting with lawyers to appeal. “From my interview, it is perfectly clear that my situation is different [from other cases BAMF cited in the rejection]. This rejection shows that these people either cannot read or didn’t bother to try,” he said.
Even if his appeal fails, Georgy has no intention of returning. “I didn’t come here for tastier sausage, but to avoid dying in prison,” he says. “I had a good job in Russia. I will never reach that standard of living here; I’m not 20 or even 30 years old anymore. I didn’t travel far for a better life. I left solely because of persecution. Pity they don’t understand that.”
“Goodbye to Arms” estimates there are currently about 100 Russian deserters in Germany. For others planning to follow Avaliani’s route through Croatia, Alshansky recommends heading to other countries, such as Spain, where he says the bureaucratic logic remains more straightforward than in Germany.
Man repeatedly detained at protest rallies in Perm deported from U.S. to Russia
Today, 25 July, Perm activist Leonid Melekhin, who had been wanted by law enforcement authorities for several years and is on the Russian federal list of “terrorists and extremists,” was remanded to custody in a pretrial detention center, Properm.ru’s correspondent has learned. Melekhin had attempted to emigrate to the U.S. via Mexico, a process about which his friends had written extensively on social media.
Melekhin tried to cross the border between Mexico and America in August last year and spent several months in detenshen (immigration prison in the U.S.), but lost his legal bid to remain in America. This entire time he was wanted by the Russian authorities for his cooperation with the Navalny Headquarters (an organization deemed “extremist” that has been banned in Russia).
According to our correspondent, Melekhin was turned over to the Russian authorities [sic!] before being deported to Russia and detained on suspicion of “condoning terrorism.”
As their source at Perm’s Lenin District Court confirmed to our correspondent, Judge Oksana Korepanova today granted the motion filed by an FSB investigator and remanded Melekhin to a pretrial detention center until 25 September.
Before leaving Russia in late 2023, Melekhin was repeatedly detained by the police for his involvement in unauthorized protests.
“A Russia without profanity. The word mom is sacred! Speak without swearing.” Photo: Igor Stomakhin, Moscow, 2025
What can serve as the basis for new Russian post-war identity? What sort of patriotism can there be in a country which has lived through an aggressive war? Of what should the people of this country be proud? What should they associate themselves with? Republic Weekly presents a programmatic text by the sociologist Oleg Zhuravlev and the poet and activist Kirill Medvedev on how the so-called Russian nation came to 2022 and what its prospects are in 2025.
How can Russia get beyond being either an embryonic nation-state or a vestigial empire? People have been talking about this for three decades now. Does it require years and years of peaceful development? A national idea painstakingly formulated by spin doctors in political science labs? A bourgeois revolution? Or maybe just a small victorious war? The so-called special military operation in Ukraine, which has grown into a global military and political conflict, poses these questions in a new light.
In our view, large-scale social changes are happening inside Russia today, changes which could help shape a new national project.
These changes are not always so easy to spot.
According to the social critique prevalent in the independent media, wartime Russian society is organized roughly as follows. Its freedom-loving segment has been crushed and disoriented, while its loyalist segment is atomized and under the thumb of government propaganda, which preaches xenophobia, imperialism and cynicism. Society is fragmented and polarized, suspended somewhere between apathy and fascism. But these tendencies, which are certainly important — and therefore visible to the naked eye, as well as exaggerated by the liberal discourse — are nevertheless not absolute and probably are not even the most important. Society lives its own life, meaning that different groups within it live their own lives and move in their own directions. When you analyze the trajectories of that movement you get a better sense of the major pathways along which these groups might in the future coalesce into a new nation.
Despite the official rhetoric about unity during the war years, the regime has not managed to consolidate a nation, but it has laid the groundwork for its formation in the future. This has been significantly aided by the west’s anti-Putin policies and the information war waged by the new Russian emigration’s radical wing, which speaks of the collective guilt of all Russians, of their culture and language. Consequently, the only alternative to Putinism and war has seemed to be the disenfranchisement of all Russianness, and the only alternative to official government patriotism has been the “fall of the empire.” Meanwhile, there have been and continue to exist images of the country and modes of attachment to it which cannot be reduced to either of these two options.
THE NEW RUSSIAN PATRIOTISM
The idea of a new Russian identity was expressed succinctly by Boris Yeltsin on 22 August 1991, when he said that the attempted coup had targeted “Russia, her multi-ethnic people” and her “stance on democracy and reform.” The new modern Russian identity was supposed to be the result of choosing Europe, overcoming the archetypes of slavery and subjugation, and transcending the legacies of the October Revolution, interpreted as a criminal conspiracy and lumpenproletarian revolt, and of the Soviet nation as a grim community of “executioners and victims.”
Ultimately, though, it was the reforms themselves, along with the trauma of losing a powerful state, that generated Soviet nostalgia and a new version of Stalinism. [Yeltsin’s] shelling of the [Russian Supreme Soviet] in 1993 and the dubious 1996 presidential election, which many initially regarded as a triumph for the liberal project, proved to be its doom.
Despite the fact that advocates of the radical anti-liberal revanche were momentarily defeated and exited the scene, widespread disappointment and depoliticization was a barrier for further democratization through people’s involvement in politics. The story of 1991 spoke clearly about what the new Russians could take pride in: victory over the revanchists, for which they had taken to the streets and sacrificed the lives of three young men. Subsequently, amid the chaos and bloodshed of 1993, two ideological projects of Russian identity took shape which were mostly in competition with each other, splitting civil society in the period that followed.
LIBERALS VS. THE RED-BROWN COALITION
Vladimir Putin was nominated to strengthen the new capitalism and prevent a “Soviet revanche.” But his most successful project, as was quickly revealed, actually lay in the Soviet legacy’s partial rehabilitation. Putin managed to bridge the gap of 1993: he drew in part of the pro-Soviet audience (by using patriotic rhetoric, bringing back the Soviet national anthem, and taking control of the Communist Party) and drove the most intransigent liberals and democrats into the marginal opposition. The grassroots yearning for a revival of statism, which had taken shape in the early 1990s, was gradually incorporated into the mainstream. Many years later, this enabled things that would have been impossible to imagine even during the Brezhnev era, let alone during perestroika: the erecting of monuments to Stalin, the creeping de-rehabilitation of Stalinism’s victims, the normalization of political crackdowns as the state’s defense mechanism, and, consequently, a greater number of political prisoners than during the late-Soviet period.
Today’s ideal Russians, in Putin’s eyes, are those who identify themselves with all of Russian history from Rurik to the present, see that history as one of continuous statehood, and regard the periods of turmoil (the early sixteenth century, post-revolutionary Russia, the 1990s) as instances of outside meddling which should never be repeated.
The ideological struggle over Russia’s image during the Yeltsin and Putin years was thus rooted in the opposition between the liberal narrative (based on Yeltsin’s reforms) and the Stalinist great power narrative. Putinism, which is institutionally rooted in the Yeltsin legacy, acted as a kind of arbiter in the argument between the Shenderovich and Prokhanov factions, but gradually dissolved 1993’s great power Stalinist and White Russian imperial legacy into semi-official rhetoric.
But was this semi-official rhetoric part of the national identities of ordinary Russians? Or were their national identities not so thoroughly ideologized?
Did most of the country’s citizens even have national identities during early Putinism, which deliberately atomized and depoliticized society?
THE ESCALATION OF NORMALITY
Amid the relative prosperity, socio-economic progress, and apoliticality of the 2000s we see the emergence of a new, rather de-ideologized, “normal” everyday patriotism, involving a decent life, good wages, and an image of the country which made one proud rather than ashamed. Research by the sociologist Carine Clement has shown that this brand of patriotism could be socially critical and emerge from the lower classes (who criticized the authorities for the fact that far from everyone enjoyed good wages), but could also be more loyal to officialdom and come from the middle classes (who believed that the country had on the whole achieved a good standard of living, or had created conditions for those who actually wanted to achieve it).
In any case, early Putinism depoliticized and individualized society, neutralizing the civic conflict between the liberals and the “red-brown coalition,” but one outcome of this ideological neutralization was that it brought into focus something given to citizens by default: their connection to the motherland. This connection is not conceptualized through belonging to one ideological camp or another. It is grasped through one’s sense of the value possessed by a normal, decent life, a life which all the country’s citizens deserve individually and collectively.
This value was politicized after 2011. The Bolotnaya Square protests launched a peculiar mechanism: the escalation of normality. One author of this article recently decided to go back and re-analyze the interviews PS Lab did with people who protested in support of Navalny in 2021. The analysis showed something interesting: the most “radical” protesters, the people most willing to be detained and arrested, who wanted to go all the way and topple Putin, turned out to be the most “normal.” They were middle-class people whose demands were measured and respectable.
They did not dream of building utopias or radically restructuring society, but of a parliamentary republic and combating corruption. Both the Bolotnaya Square and post-Bolotnaya Square democratic movements, including the Navalny supporters, transformed the reasonable demand for a normal, bourgeois, prosperous country into the battle standard of a heroic revolutionary struggle against the Putin regime. Navalnyism, meanwhile, also integrated a measured social critique of inequality into its agenda.
The “normal patriotism” of the lower and middle classes thus became a stake in a fierce political struggle.
The new patriotic pride might have said something like this: “We can expose and vote out corrupt officials, push back against toxic waste dumps and insane development projects, vote in solidarity, and hit the streets to protest for the candidates we support whom Moscow doesn’t like. We have people who look to the west, people who miss the USSR, and people who defended the White House in 1991 and in 1993. We face Putin’s truncheons and paddy wagons together, and together we demand democratic freedoms and social justice.” This was how a civil society made up of Navalny fans, radical communists, and regional movements might have fought together for a “normal” country, how they might have shaped the political project of a vigorous nation pursuing solidarity. They might have done it, but they didn’t have time. They did manage to piss off the Kremlin, though.
In response, the regime launched its own escalation of normality. On the one hand, it responded to the protests with radically conservative counterrevolutionary propaganda and crackdowns. On the other hand, behind the façade of radical conservativism, Putinism erected its own edifice of “normality,” which would prove to be truly durable. Beginning in 2011, the Kremlin appropriated part of the Bolotnaya Square agenda not only in its slogans but also in practice by improving the quality of the bureaucracy, raising living standards, technocratically upgrading public amenities, and advancing technological progress. Sobyanin’s Moscow was the testing ground and façade of a new normalization which involved no democracy at all.
But the real escalation of normality on the Putin regime’s part occurred when the special military operation kicked off in 2022.
WAR, (AB)NORMALITY, AND PATRIOTISM
The war has been something profoundly abnormal for many people. It has meant a break with normal life and with any hopes for a normal country. This is what the war has meant for many people, but not for all of them.
PS Lab’s research has shown that a segment of the Russian populace, the middle-class economic beneficiaries of the new wartime economic policy, argue that Russia is now approaching the image of a normal country, even if they do not support the war. According to them, it is not the war per se but the concomitant economic progress (visible, for example, in the growth of wages and the creation of jobs) and the strengthening of national identity which have finally put paid to the period of crisis and launched a stage of growth.
Their argument goes like this. They do not know the reasons behind the tragic special military operation, which has taken tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of lives, but in trying to cope with this tragedy, they have strengthened the Russian economy and become more patriotic.
What matters is that the idea of growth is firmly separated, in the minds of such people, from the official “goals and objectives” of the special military operation and its ideological framework. It transpires that heavyweight official patriotism is digested by a significant part of society in a milder form. PS Lab’s respondents claim that they do not support violent methods of resolving foreign policy conflicts and are indifferent to the annexation of new territories, but that it has been a good thing that they have begun to think more about the motherland.
Wartime Putinism has two faces, in other words. On the one hand, we see war, increasing crackdowns, and spasms of neo-imperialist ideology. On the other, Russians are not overly fond of those things. They value other things more, such as economic growth and the strengthening of national identity, which unites the segment of society who feel alienated by the state’s ideological and foreign policy projects. When thinking about their own patriotism, many Russians underscore the fact that it is not defined by imperialist ideology. The country is going through a difficult moment, so would it not be better for Russia to take care of itself, rather than worry about acquiring new lands? This has been a leitmotif in many interviews done by PS Lab.
Economic nationalism in the guise of military Keynesianism and the sense of community experienced by citizens going through trials (in their everyday lives, not in terms of ideology) have thus laid the foundations less for an imperial project, and more for the formation of a “normal” nation-state.
Nor is the issue of democracy off the table: it has been missed not only by the opponents but also by the supporters of the special military operation. We welcome the growth of a sovereign economy, but if Putin strangles civil society and lowers the Iron Curtain, we will be opposed to it, say the quasi-pro-war volunteers. For them, however, Putin remains the only possible guarantor of a “normal” future. Many Russians who want an end to the war and a future life without upheaval have pinned their hopes on the president for years.
This focus on gradually developing and civilizing the country is nothing new. Since the 1990s, part of the intelligentsia and, later, the new middle class, pinned their hopes first on the reforms of the pro-market technocrats, then on the successes of a then-still-liberal Putinism, then on Kudrin’s systemic liberals, then on Sobyanin’s policies, and so on.
Something went wrong, and many of these people are now in exile, but it is quite natural that images of a normal life and a normal country, albeit in radically altered circumstances, continue to excite Russians. Normality can be politicized, however, as it was between 2011 and 2022.
The social movements and the independent opposition which emerged after the Bolotnaya Square uprising have been virtually destroyed by the regime: the last bright flashes of this tradition faded before our eyes at the 2022 anti-war rallies. Nevertheless, the tradition of democratic protest continues. As before the war, the latter can grow from the demand for normalcy.
Moreover, the demand for normalcy can sound particularly radical in wartime.
The hardships of war have given rise to movements such as The Way Home, whose activists, wives of mobilized military personnel, have evolved from human rights loyalism to collective protest as they have demanded a return to normal life. Starting with individual demands for the protection and return of their loved ones from the front, they then arrived at a national agenda of fighting for a “normal” and even “traditional” country in which every family should have the right to a dignified, happy and peaceful life.
After a period of struggle between the two versions of patriotism born in the 1990s, liberal and neo-Soviet, the time for everyday “normal” patriotism has thus dawned. Initially, it existed as a public mood which was not fully articulated, but subsequently we witnessed a mutual escalation of normality on the part of warring protesters and the Kremlin.
The “post-Bolotnaya” opposition, led by Navalny, launched a revolutionary struggle with the regime over the project for a “normal” bourgeois country, attempting to create a broad movement that would reach far beyond the former liberal crowd. In response, the Kremlin unveiled its neo-imperialist militarist project with one hand, while with the other hand it satisfied the public demand for normality on its own after the opposition had been defeated.
TWO SCENARIOS FOR A NORMAL RUSSIA
The above-mentioned contradictions of the Putinist discourse and the complex realities of wartime (and the postwar period?) allow us to imagine two scenarios for society’s growth, the realization of two images of Russian patriotism. In other words, we see two scenarios for a socio-political dynamic which could culminate in the creation of a new nation.
Military Putinism, contrary to its radically imperialist image, has in terms of realpolitik and public sentiment put down certain foundations for the formation of a nation-state in Russia.
If economic growth, redistributive policies, and the strengthening of everyday patriotism continue after the end of the war and captivate the majority or at least a significant segment of society, the project of turning Russia into a nation-state from above will have a chance.
Whether it materializes depends on many unknowns. Will the government be able to maintain economic dynamism after dismantling the wartime economy? Will everyday patriotism turn into a solid ideological edifice? Will the end of the war be followed by a liberalization of political life? (Is this possible at all?) Will the current pro-war and anti-war volunteerism serve as the basis for an industrious, widespread civil society? Will there be a change of elites?
Russia’s transformation into a nation-state under these circumstances would constitute a serious paradox. It would thus emerge not after a lost imperialist war or a war of national liberation, but in the wake of a partly successful war, which evolved from an imperialist war into a nationalist war. What would hold such a society together?
It is easiest to envision an identity based on Russia’s opposition to the west on the basis of geopolitical confrontation or economic and technological competition, especially if a fierce struggle between newly emerging geopolitical blocs lies ahead. This confrontation with the west, which we allegedly have pulled off with dignity (even if we are willing to recognize the special military operation itself as a dubious event), will be accompanied by various practices and emblems of cultural uniqueness.
But will this new nation be capable of producing a powerful culture, as in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? Or will this future Russia be doomed to cultural and intellectual degradation as presaged by Dugin’s philosophy and pro-war poetry?
There are serious doubts that the grounds listed above would be sufficient for a multi-ethnic and multicultural entity like the Russian Federation to turn into a national community united by an understanding of a common destiny and values. The USSR as a community was based on the complex mix of the new Soviet individual and Russocentrism that took shape in the Stalinist period. The roles of this dynamic duo are currently played by the adjective rossiyskiy, which is a designation of civic membership in a multi-ethnic community, and the similar-sounding adjective russkiy, which is a grab bag of several easily manipulated meanings.
Putin is responsible for regular messages about multi-ethnicism, while numerous actors in the government and the loyalist media are charged with sending signals about Russian ethnicism. In this bizarre system, ethnic Russians, on the one hand, constitute a “single nation” with Belarusians and Ukrainians; on the other hand, they vouchsafe the coexistence of hundreds of other ethnic communities, supposedly united by “traditional values” (and, no matter how you look at it, the most important of these values is the rejection of homosexuality); while, on the third hand, they have a special message for the world either about their own humility, or about the fact that they will soon “fuck everyone over” again.
This complex edifice has been looking less and less persuasive. The zigzags and wobbles of the political top brass — Russia has swerved from alliances with North Korea and China to newfound friendship with the United States; from casting itself as a global hegemon to posing as an aggrieved victim — do nothing to help Russians understand who we are. They have, however, stimulated the growth of local, regional, ethnic narratives and identities which are much more reliable and comfortable. Ethnic brands, music and art projects involving folkloric reconstructions, the vogue for studying the languages of the peoples of the Russian Federation, and the plethora of Telegram channels about ethnic cultures and literatures are all outward signs of the new ethnic revival. Although they do not seem as provocative as the forums of radical decolonizers, they correspond less and less with a vision in which ethnic Russianness is accorded a formative role, while “multi-ethnicity” is relegated to a formal and ceremonial role.
When we draw parallels with the Soviet identity, we should remember that it was based not simply on a set of ideological apparatuses (as the current fans of censored patriotic cinema and literature imagine), but on a universal idea of the future, on the radical Enlightenment project of involving the masses and nations in history (including through “nativization” and the establishment of new territorial entities). The project had many weaknesses from the outset, and it was radically undermined by the deportation of whole ethnic groups and the anti-Semitic campaign (for which the current regime has less and less desire to apologize), but as the British historian Geoffrey Hosking has argued, the fundamental reason for the Soviet Union’s collapse was the lack of civil institutions in which the emerging inter-ethnic solidarity could find expression.
If an ethnic cultural and regional revival really awaits us amid war trauma, confusion, possible economic problems, and the deficit of a common identity, how would Moscow handle it? Would it try to control or guide the process? Or maybe it would focus on loyal nationalists and fundamentalists in a replay of the Chechen scenario? This may turn out to be a prologue to disintegration, or it may serve as the field for establishing new community. The radical democratic opposition, once it has a chance, would simply have to combine local, regional, and ethnic cultural demands with general social and democratic ones.
It is for the sake of this that we must rethink the imperial legacy, the Soviet project with its complex mix of colonialism, federalism and modernization, the way communities have lived together for centuries on this land, sometimes fighting and competing, sometimes suffering from each other and from Moscow, sometimes evolving, and sometimes coming together to fight the central government (as during the Pugachev Rebellion).
This combination of civil struggle and intellectual reflection can not only generate a fresh political counter-agenda but also reanimate the worn-out leitmotifs and narratives of Russian culture.
It can reintroduce the productive tension and contradiction, the universality inherent in a great culture, which the regime, while oppressing and exiling critical voices, has been trying to replace with an emasculated, captive patriotism.
***
We want a quiet private life without upheaval, the life which generations of Russians have dreamed of; we want to be independent, stick to our roots and remain who we are, says one group of our compatriots.
We want to overcome dictatorship, political oppression, inequality, corruption and war; we want to live in a society based on freedom and solidarity, says another group of our compatriots.
Interestingly, both of these scenarios are revolutionary. The first scenario, despite its adoration of technocracy and the petit bourgeois lifestyle, is the result of an anti-democratic revolution from above, during which the authoritarian regime has been transformed from a predominantly technocratic to a counter-revolutionary one and has challenged both the world order and the domestic political order. The abrupt transition to a redistributive military Keynesian macroeconomic policy, which was unthinkable ten years ago, and which fuels the current workaday patriotism, has emerged as part of the war. The war itself has been the decisive event of Putin’s counterrevolution, which, like any counterrevolution, always bears certain revolutionary traits.
But while the first scenario (albeit with a new, rather sinister twist) epitomizes the long-standing dream of a bourgeois life based on comfort and tradition, the second draws on a more grassroots and rebellious vision of social progress and related practices. It hearkens back to the defenders of the Russian White House in 1991 and 1993, the protesters against the monetization of benefits and the Marches of the Dissenters, the radical segment of the Bolotnaya Square movement, and the street movements in support of Navalny and Sergei Furgal. History, including Russian history, knows many such examples of new national communities emerging in radical joint struggles for democracy and justice.
Both scenarios could be generated by the current catastrophic reality, and both are fraught with fresh dangers: the first with the threat of a new descent into fascism, the second with violent civil conflicts. In our opinion, though, it is these two scenarios which shape the field for analyzing, discussing and imagining the country’s future.
“Yevgeny Zhumabekov, 96 kilograms” is how he introduces himself. Yevgeny is the person who came up with the idea of replacing Last Address plaques that had been torn down with homemade copies and who did this work incognito for almost a year. Now he can identify himself.
Bumaga has detailed the struggle that erupted over the plaques in December 2023. They began to disappear en masse, but copies subsequently appeared in place of the ones that had been torn down. These copies were also removed, after which a plaque appeared on the 14th Line on Vasilyevsky Island bearing the following message: “Plaques [memorializing] people who had been politically repressed in this place were repressed eight times.”
Here you can read Yevgeny’s own account of how the [Stalinist] crackdowns touched his family, what shaped his views, how his wife and children got involved in the fight for historical justice, why the Zhumabekovs had to leave the country, and who continues to install the plaques in their wake.
How the repressions touched Yevgeny’s family
I was born in the Sverdlovsk Region, in the town of Kushva, which has gradually been turning into a village. It’s a depressing place. Two of the industrial enterprises that supported the town have shut down. People have been leaving, while the old people are dying off.
It so happened that my history teacher at school was a good friend of my grandfather’s. He would come to my grandfather’s house, and they would drink hard alcohol together, play chess, and talk a lot. I often visited my grandmother and grandfather and heard these conversations. That’s how I learned that my grandfather came from a family of a person who had been politically repressed.
His parents had come from the Perm Region. My great-grandmother and great-grandfather were completely ordinary peasants. It was forbidden in their house to drink alcohol, [and because they were teetotalers] they harvested large crops. In 1931 or 1932, they were dekulakized and exiled far beyond the Arctic Circle, while their children were sent to orphanages. After a while great-grandmother and great-grandfather managed to escape, but great-grandmother had fallen ill in exile and died soon after returning home, while great-grandfather had to hide out in remote villages all the rest of his life.
I know that my grandfather also had a hard time as a member of a politically repressed family, but he never told me about it, although I tried to find out. It was such a profound trauma for him that he could discuss it only when he got drunk with his sole friend.
How the FSB visited Yevgeny’s workplace
In 2006, I moved to St. Petersburg, where I worked for a time in the car business. I held various positions: sales manager, head of the customer engagement department, manager of a car showroom. Then, before the war, I transferred to a construction company, where I sold real estate.
In 2021, I went to a rally in support of Alexei Navalny after he had returned from Germany. Then there was the protest action with flashlights and others. Not only did I attend these events but I also talked about them with my colleagues at work. I was just sharing my pain, not encouraging them to do anything.
Lawyer Dmitry Talantov has been sentenced to seven years in a penal colony on charges of disseminating “fake news” about the Russian army and inciting hatred in connection with several social media posts about the war. Talantov had been on the defense team of journalist Ivan Safronov, who was sentenced to twenty-two years in a penal colony for high treason. Talantov had also served for many years as the head of the Udmurtia bar association, so it is likely that both the judge who sentenced Talantov and the prosecutor who petitioned the judge to sentence the respected 64-year-old defense lawyer to twelve years in prison knew him personally.
Talantov delivered a memorable closing statement today in court.
Dmitry Talantov, sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment for antiwar social media posts:
Brodsky once said that “prison is a lack of space counterbalanced by a surplus of time.” I didn’t completely understand this phrase. I didn’t get it. I’m certain that none of you totally understands it, because it is the surplus of time which is frightening about this situation, not the lack of space. It is the time during which you suffer, and the time that tries to kill you. Every minute tries to kill you, and every minute in there [in prison] is equal to an hour.
[…]
People often ask for forgiveness during their closing statement. I also want to ask for it. I’m saying this to my wife. Forgive me, Olga. I love you. If this is overdoing it emotionally, then I’ll put it this way. Olya, if you’re ever sent to prison for twelve years for some reason, I’ll wait for you to get out. Take it easy.
Sasha Skochilenko, the Petersburg artist and musician sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment for posting antiwar price tags in a supermarket and released as part of a prisoner swap in August 2024:
Alexei Gorinov, the Moscow municipal district council member who was initially sentenced to seven years in prison for “disseminating fake news” during an argument about whether it was appropriate to hold celebrations for children during a war, and who is now on trial a second time for allegedly “condoning terrorism” in conversations with cellmates:
I was also a municipal council member during the August 1991 coup. I stood with other defenders outside the Russian Supreme Soviet, the so-called White House. We were defending our freedom, our right to live freely and, thus, to speak freely, voice our thoughts, gather information, and share it. If they had told me then that thirty years later I would be tried by a criminal court for my words, for my opinion, I wouldn’t have believed them.
Nadezhda Buyanova, a pediatrician, was sentenced to five and a half years in prison for “disseminating fake news,” after she was denounced by the widow of an army officer killed in Ukraine: the doctor had allegedly said to the woman’s seven-year-old son that his father had been a “legitimate target”:
If there used to were doctors and patients, nowadays there are providers and clients. That’s what we were told at the planning meetings: “Humiliate yourself. And us.” We medics can be slandered, we can be insulted, we can be called every name in the book. We can’t defend ourselves, our explanations are not heard by our superiors, and conflicts are not resolved.
There was no interrogation and the child had nothing to say. “At the end of the appointment, he walked out of the office.” You cannot believe such a tale. You cannot lie like that: it’s a disgrace. How can you accuse a person without evidence, on the basis of a false accusation? Where is the logic? Where is the justice? Earlier, in ancient times, there were wise men. They would have said: “Well, what do you expect from a person without proof?”
Roman Ivanov, a journalist for RusNews, was sentenced to seven years in prison for three social media posts. During his closing statement in court, he knelt down to apologize to Ukrainians:
What can we do in this situation? I honestly don’t even know anymore. But I want to ask for forgiveness from all the citizens of Ukraine, to whom our country has brought grief, whom our country has robbed of their relatives, their loved ones, and their friends, who will never come back.
And [I ask for forgiveness] not for the whole country, but for me personally, for Roman Viktorovich Ivanov, a citizen of the Russian Federation. I would like to get down on my knees before the relatives of the people who were murdered in Bucha, although I don’t know who murdered them. But they are the consequences of what our country has become.
The politician Alexei Navalny was repeatedly tried on trumped-up charges before he was murdered in a penal colony on 16 February 2024. Perhaps it was Navalny, during his endless trials, who revived the closing statement in court as a literary genre. Here is an excerpt from his speech at his trial for “extremism” in July 2023:
Former Moscow politician Alexei Gorinov, the first known Russian to be imprisoned for denouncing the invasion of Ukraine, was sentenced to three more years on Friday on charges of “justifying terrorism” that he says he was framed for.
Ahead of his sentencing, he read the following statement to the court and the press:
Imprisoned Kremlin critic Alexei Gorinov, sits in a cage of the courtroom as his second trial for criticizing Russia’s actions in Ukraine swiftly nears its conclusion in Vladimir, Russia, Friday, Nov. 29, 2024. Photo: Dmitry Serebryakov/AP
“All my life I have been an opponent of aggression, violence and war, and devoted myself exclusively to peaceful activities: science, teaching, education, governance and public activities as a deputy, human rights activist, member of election commissions and controller of the electoral process. I never thought that I would live to see such a level of degradation of my country’s political system and its foreign policy, when ordinary citizens who favor peace and are against war, who number in the thousands, would be accused of slandering the Armed Forces and justifying terrorism, and would be put on trial.
“The third year of the war is coming to an end. The third year of casualties and destruction on European territory, of deprivation and suffering of millions of people on a level unprecedented since World War II. We cannot remain silent about this.
“Back in late April, our former defense minister announced the losses of the Ukrainian side in the armed conflict – 500,000 people. Think about this number! And what losses have been suffered by Russia, which, according to official information, is constantly successfully advancing along the entire front? We still do not know. And who will be responsible for this? What is all this for?
“Our authorities and those who support them in their militaristic aspirations wanted this war so much — and now it has come to our land.
“I would like to ask them: has our life become better? Is this how you understand the well-being and security of our country and its population? Or did you not envision these developments in your calculations?
“But for now we have to answer not to those who organized the war, continue to kill, propagandize the war and engage in mercenarism. Rather, we ordinary citizens of Russia, who raise our voices against war and for peace, have to answer, paying with our freedom and, for some, with our lives.
“I belong to the outgoing generation of people whose parents took part in World War II or survived it with all its hardships. The generation that has already passed away entrusted us with preserving peace with all our might as the most precious thing on Earth for all its inhabitants. But we have neglected these principles and devalued our memory of these people and the victims of that war.
“My guilt is that I, as a citizen of my country, allowed this war to happen and failed to stop it. And I ask you to note this in the verdict. But I would like my guilt and responsibility to be shared with me by the organizers, participants and supporters of the war, as well as the persecutors of those who advocate peace.
“I continue to live with the hope that someday it will be so. In the meantime, I ask the people of Ukraine and my fellow citizens affected by the war to forgive me.
“Within the framework of the case in which I was accused and tried for my opinion that we need to seek an end to the war, I have expressed my attitude fully to this abominable human endeavor. I can only say that violence and aggression breed nothing but reciprocal violence. This is the true cause of our troubles, our suffering, our senseless sacrifices, the destruction of civilian and industrial infrastructure and our homes.
“Let us stop this bloody, needless slaughter — neither for us nor the inhabitants of Ukraine. Isn’t it time to leave our neighbors alone and deal with our own snowballing domestic problems? Long ago we proved to the world how brave, resilient and peace-loving we are. So, maybe enough is enough?
“Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy — from a letter to his son (1904): ‘For me, the madness and criminality of war is so clear that I can see nothing in it except for this madness and criminality.’
“I too join and subscribe to these words of our great compatriot.
“You can join too!”
SOTAVision reported that Judge Vladimirov interrupted Gorinov when he started to talk about losses in the war in Ukraine and called a 15-minute break so Gorinov could “think over his speech again.”
I wouldn’t want Navalny to be remembered the way he has been remembered this past year.
I haven’t read the book Patriot yet, but I was quite upset by Mikhail Zygar’s review of it. Zygar compares Navalny to Jesus and concludes that by dying, Navalny bequeathed us an idea that would rid future generations of cynicism and teach them to believe.
This is feeble sentimentalization, in my opinion. Navalny didn’t not dream up any particular ideas. He called for action, not faith. The meaning of his sacrifice, in my mind, is practical and political, not abstract and ideological. It can and should benefit the current generation, not some future generation.
Navalny didn’t dream up a new ideal. The “beautiful Russia of the future” is a feeble image, but Navalny understood better than anyone how tyranny operates on the mechanical level. I often complain that the FSB understands better how Russian society functions than do opposition politicians, sociologists and psychologists. Navalny couldn’t be accused of this shortcoming.
He was the only person in Russian politics who talked about power relations as a two-way street. He didn’t talk about the enormous resources Putin has, but about the fact that we give Putin power. It is not the security services, the army and the tanks that give Putin power. We give Putin power.
This view evolved over the course of Navalny’s career, becoming more and more central. As time went by, it separated Alexei more and more from his colleagues in the opposition. Toward the end of his life, Navalny’s writings centered on the idea that power consists in consenting to obedience, in “obeying in advance.” We say to ourselves: I cannot disobey, because if I don’t obey, they will (notice me/file administrative charges against me/fire me/banish me from my profession/send me to jail/kill me).
Only by obeying in advance can governing by unfulfilled threat be scaled up indefinitely, to a country of 140 million people, because this means of governing doesn’t require any resources. We obey without taking resources from the state. Putin’s estimates for the war in Ukraine include every dollar, euro, and pound spent on Ukraine’s defense. They are what counts against Russian budgets, not “faith in democracy” or “anti-war sentiment.” I understand Alexei’s decision to return to Russia in this sense; I see it as logical and unusually tenderhearted on the personal level. By returning to Russia, Alexei was able to provide Russians with one more example of tyranny’s limits: Putin never had power over Alexei. Had he stayed in Germany, Putin’s power would have extended to Navalny.
Navalny was concerned not with the thoughts in our heads, but with whether our deeds matched our thoughts. I appreciate Christian philosophy, but I could never accept the postulate that a second of faith can save a person, no matter their actions — “Now thou shalt be with me in paradise,” and so forth. The Russian opposition, for as long as I’ve been watching it, wants to get to democracy approximately the same way the thief gets to paradise — by believing in it. The notion that we are democrats and decent because we believe in democracy while all remaining Russians are slaves and awful because they don’t believe in it is the main obstacle to democracy in Russia, in my mind, and the Koshchei’s egg of tyranny. A “democracy” in which only “democrats” have a stake and which only they want is an oxymoron that makes democracy impossible and tyranny in Russia perennial. Democracy cannot be for Muscovites alone. It cannot be built via media outlets in which only Petersburg and Moscow have a voice. It cannot be built without equal representation of activists, issues, and interests from other regions and ethnicities.
Late in life, Navalny hated talk about the “freewheeling ’90s” and the good Chekists/bad democrats dichotomy, which doesn’t prevent his supporters from remaining stuck in this selfsame paradigm.
Alexei started his career in Russia’s faux democracy project, which was unfair from the get-go. He entered politics as a “democratic nationalist,” desiring greatness and a better elite for Russia. It was within this same paradigm that he pursued the most successful project of his life: “fighting the regime by legal means.” By the end of his life, however, he came to realize that Russian power is held by a hypocritical elite which justifies its obedience by talking about white coats, and is not willing to share power. It is not even willing to think about being the equals of other Russians, let alone the equals of Ukrainians, for example.
This, in my opinion, is what Navalny left behind. It pains me to see how the legacy he left at such a high cost is being frittered away by films about traitors, stupid speeches, and sentimental religious comparisons.
Andrei Loshak, “The Age of Dissent 2024” (in Russian, with English subtitles)
The eve of the 2018 presidential election saw the release of Andrei Loshak’s series Age of Dissent, about young supporters of Alexei Navalny who were involved in his election campaign.
The sequel to the series, filmed on the eve of the latest presidential “election,” recounts how the lives of the activists who dreamed together with Navalny of “the wonderful Russia of the future” have changed dramatically in six years. Filming was almost completed when news came Navalny’s death. The movie’s protagonists ask themselves how to live without dreams and hope.
The protagonists of Andrei Loshak’s documentary film Age of Dissent 2024: (clockwise, from upper left corner) Filipp Simpkins, Lilia Chanysheva, Ksenia Fadeeva, Yegor Chernyuk, and Violetta Grudina
On June 3, Current Time hosted the premiere of Russian filmmaker Andrei Loshak’s documentary Age of Dissent 2024. It is a sequel to Age of Dissent, which was filmed on the eve of the 2018 presidential election in Russia and focused on opposition politician Aleksei Navalny and the young supporters who helped him with his unofficial campaign. He was denied registration as a candidate but campaigned as if he was on the ballot.
Fast forward six years, to 2024, and another Russian presidential election, which was held in March and won, again, by Vladimir Putin with what the state said was 87.3 percent of the vote. Loshak’s new film, commissioned by Current Time, RFE/RL’s Russian-language TV and digital network, tells how the lives of the same activists who had dreamed, together with Navalny, of a “beautiful Russia of the future” changed dramatically.
Filming was almost completed when news broke in February of Navalny’s mysterious death in a Russian Arctic prison while serving a 19-year term on charges his supporters and many Western governments considered politically motivated.
On the eve of the film’s premiere, Current Time journalist Ksenia Sokolyanskaya met with Loshak in Tel Aviv.
RFE/RL: Did you think from the very beginning that this story would have some kind of sequel? Or did something happen at a certain moment that made you want to return to these people?
Andrei Loshak: I must say that, probably, this idea was there from the very beginning. After I released the first film, I saw that it kind of took off. People began to tell me that they wondered what would happen to the subjects next. And I thought, yeah, it’s really interesting that it will be a new election cycle six years later.
I had to monitor their fates, so I asked to film some things, although I didn’t know for whom it was to be done or when. But then I realized that they had all left Russia, that their fates had changed very dramatically, and that everything that they had fought for and lived for, all of it was destroyed in these past six years.
Yes, it seemed to me that this was enough to return to them and film what had happened to them. But you have to understand that we finished filming in January and early February [of 2024]. I sat in Tbilisi and thought about what to do with all of this.
What was my idea? To draw attention to Aleksei Navalny, because for me, this was such a serious motivator. There was a moment when he was being transferred to [the Polar Wolf prison in Russia’s Arctic town of] Kharp, and he disappeared, and I was struck by how few people wrote about it. For two weeks, it was not clear whether he was alive or not.
They killed Aleksei on February 16. At that moment, I was simply lost. I didn’t understand what to do with the material.
I think it was important to record the reactions of [the film’s subjects] to the news of that day, before they had time to get used to it. Although, to be honest, I’m still not used to it. It killed me, too.
This is probably the most personal film I’ve made in a long time. Because usually you take the position of an observer and film all sorts of things, but in this film I lived with the subjects — with one dream, one hope — and Aleksei was as important a figure for me as he was for them.
RFE/RL: I read the comments under the teaser for the film, which was posted the other day. People wrote that it was painful to watch, that their hearts were broken. We live in a Russia we don’t want to live in, and Violetta in the film talks about “those traumatized by Russia.”
Loshak: Moreover, a psychotherapist gave them such a diagnosis.
RFE/RL: In the film, a separate theme is the question: How do you live when the main thing you’re living for is taken away? Do you think there is an answer?
Loshak: We are all asking this question now, and few people understand how to overcome all this. This is a recording of this moment, when our homeland rejected us. We found ourselves superfluous and unnecessary there. She needs us, but the circumstances are such that they don’t expect us there, they don’t want us there, they push us out of there.
Hope is such a straw. You still clutch at it. Of course, a few months is not enough time to understand how to live now. I am in this process, and my heroes are in this process of understanding. [In the film,] Oleg says this [phrase] from the point of view of common sense: “We need to stop this, guys.”
RFE/RL: Meaning that political activism is not a profession?
Loshak: Yes. It is possible in some historical cycles, but in others it is impossible. And when you find yourself rejected, uprooted and without a homeland, your plan must change….
That’s why I always look at this whole “opposition movement” with great skepticism. I don’t know who looks at it without skepticism. But on the other hand, I don’t deny it. It’s kind of necessary, because they’re doing the right things, but it’s virtually impossible to influence anything in Russia from [exile]. This must be understood clearly.
This feeling of helplessness with which Violetta says: “What, how, and why?” — the loss of these meanings is very painful. But we always have to say goodbye to something; everything has its own lifespan. And unfortunately, we are now at this point where we need to say goodbye to all this and start something new. The question is: What?
RFE/RL: Do you have faith? In the film people talk a lot about faith, and it ends with Aleksei’s words about the need to believe. Do you have faith that Aleksei’s story can also transform into something that people will watch, and that if they don’t know the story of Jan Palach, they will learn it from your film? (Editor’s Note: On January 16, 1969, 20-year-old university student Jan Palach set himself on fire in Prague to protest the August 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops. He died of his burns three days later.)
Loshak: I’m sure of it. I’m convinced of it. Such sacrifices, heroic deeds of such magnitude, cannot be in vain. I am absolutely sure that this is not a wasted sacrifice and that Aleksei will remain in the history of Russia forever as one of these heroic figures, which, of course, will acquire its own mythology. And in what our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will read about him, we would hardly recognize Aleksei.
There are always few such figures in history. I have never encountered anything like this in my life, such a level of self-sacrifice.
RFE/RL: The scale.
Loshak: Yes, but we also had, of course, our own Jan Palach: [Russian journalist] Irina Slavina, who set herself on fire in Nizhny Novgorod [in 2020], opposite the city police headquarters. (Editor’s Note: Before self-immolating, Slavina wrote on Facebook, “Blame the Russian Federation for my death.” A day earlier, she had written that police had searched her apartment, trying to find evidence linking her with the opposition Open Russia group and confiscated her computers and mobile phone.)
She didn’t do it in vain, either. I’m absolutely sure. Although who remembers her now? This was just a few years ago, before the war [in Ukraine]…. She will also be in this pantheon of heroic people who openly came out against evil.
Of course, Aleksei and what he did, and the way he died — all of this will later inspire people because everyone always needs bright examples, everyone needs these myths. And Aleksei has already become this myth. I can already see how people who never appreciated him during his lifetime — and, in general, I heard little good from them about Navalny — are now writing: “But Navalny would not have said that,” or, “Navalny would not have done that.”
His wings have already grown; he is already soaring over this unfortunate Russia, and he will always soar there from now on. This is actually good because you have to believe in something.
RFE/RL: After Navalny’s death, a discussion appeared in the Russian-speaking, mostly emigrant, community. It seems to me that the impetus was Shura Burtin’s manifesto on Meduza that a “beautiful Russia of the future” will not happen and that hope for some kind of good future is harmful. One of your subjects, Violetta, also talks about how she doesn’t feel joy, that she can’t say she lives, she just exists. Do you think you should actually believe such stories?
Loshak: Believe in what?
RFE/RL: You said Aleksei’s sacrifice was not in vain, but it seems to me that for a large number of people this is not true.
Loshak: That everything is in vain, that evil triumphs over good, and that this has always been the case in Russia? It has always been this way. But it seems to me that everything has its time. Even if we look at the history of Russia, evil has always defeated good, but there have also been moments when good had a chance.
There have always been thaws, rollbacks toward democratization, and liberation from the shackles with which the state always entangles people in Russia. We have always had this chance; we just never took advantage of it.
With Aleksei there was this chance; he gave us this chance throughout his political life, starting in 2017, but this liberal layer of us, so to speak, simply looked at it all with the curiosity of a TV viewer, nothing more.
Then he returned. He returned [to Russia from Germany in January 2021 after being treated for poisoning], realizing that, of course, he would most likely be imprisoned. But he gave us this chance again, and it was as if it was all staged. He returned, his documentary Putin’s Palace was released, which was watched by 100 million people. Then there was a rally, and the usual 20,000 to 40,000 people came out.
We wasted the chances that Navalny gave us.
I really believe that at some point people will understand how important it is to participate in politics, how important it is to be a citizen, and not just to be a resident of this country. One of the subjects in the first part of the documentary in 2017 said to me — I won’t say his name now, because he is in Russia, but he was on the Maidan; by accident, he ended up there — “When 10,000 people come out, it’s nothing. But when 1 million people come out, you can’t do anything about it.”
This is why I endlessly respect Navalny: for the fact that he did everything he could, and more than he could, to give us these chances. And we blew them. And I hope that someday this will become obvious. You see, what is happening to Russia now cannot last forever.
RFE/RL: Why?
Loshak: Because it’s against common sense, it’s against the passage of time. This is an attempt to turn back time, to turn it around….
In general, history is cyclical. Now there is some moment of crisis in which Western civilization finds itself. We see incredible divisions within Western countries. I don’t remember this before. This is also some kind of new sign of the times. But nevertheless, Western societies have gone through many crises, and their strength is that they are democratic, and thanks to this openness they survive them, work through them, and reach a new level.
But Russia is not doing this. Russia is simply driving us into some kind of Middle Ages with its boots. The rhetoric that is heard now is about a “holy war,” about the defense of traditional values. It all comes down to homophobia really. This is the only thing they found as a scarecrow around which they built this whole structure about the “holy war” of the Russian world with Western civilization, which is satanic, because gay people can openly hold each other’s hands and recognizes their marriages. This is complete bulls**t.
For this generation, about which I filmed in 2017, there was no issue of homophobia at all. They had already grown up in this cross-border world of the Internet. They saw that this was normal. This is how all people live, and they are happy.
I subscribe to Russian-language Iranian opposition channels. You’re amazed how much the same is there. It’s just that these grandfathers look more colorful there. Ours are in secular blue jackets, and in Iran there are bearded ones in dressing gowns. But everything is the same. People want to live freely; they want to be happy. It is impossible to be happy when everything is forbidden.
It is impossible to keep these prohibitions all your life because the reverse process is taking place all over the world. People are following the path of gaining more and more freedom, because it is more comfortable to live this way, and at the same time respect the freedom of others….
But at any moment the Russian state can invade your life and tell you how you should behave, how to dress. You have nothing. You owe them everything for some reason, but they don’t owe you anything.
This is such an old patriarchal model of the world order. If you look at all this more broadly, I see it as a rebellion against patriarchy. And what is happening in Russia is the agony of the patriarchy. In Russia, the strong are always right. To the question, “What is strength?” [I answer that] in Russia there is strength in strength. Not in any truth. This is nonsense. What is the truth? The truth was on Aleksei’s side. And where is he? I’m sure [these grandfathers] are becoming decrepit. Time will simply kill them because time is not on their side. And at some point they will simply stop being strong, and then they will be finished.
Arriving at Jan Palach’s grave [in Prague], Oleg tells the story about what happened in 1969. And in 1989, the Velvet Revolution [in Czechoslovakia] began with people coming to his grave. Yes, we had to wait 20 years for this name and this feat to become an impulse and begin to work. But now, it seems to me, time flows faster. I would like to believe that we will not have to wait another 20 years.
RFE/RL: When you invited people to the premiere in Tel Aviv on Facebook, you wrote: “I don’t wish you a pleasant viewing. That would be hypocritical on my part.” As someone who has seen the film twice, I can say it is indeed very difficult to watch. What effect do you, as an auteur, hope for?
Loshak: Due to what happened during the filming — and it was not I who wrote Navalny’s death into the script — I stopped thinking at all about who I was doing it for. It’s just a film that has a lot of my personal pain in it. I did this in order to try to part with this pain. It’s like psychotherapy: You have to work through it and live it in order to move on….
Navalny was important to so many people. This is a figure on a much larger scale than perhaps even we thought. Both importance and value. Still, his presence in Russia, even in prison, in this political landscape was completely incommensurable. We just don’t even understand yet how important. And we will understand gradually more and more. This film is probably for these people.
RFE/RL: You wrote a big post on Facebook about Aleksei and said that you miss him, and that it doesn’t go away. And in the end you say that despondency is a mortal sin, that Russia is a terrible fairy tale with a bad ending. You say that faith is an irrational thing. Do you want to return to Russia?
Loshak: Of course, I want to return to Russia now…. If Putin dies, then, of course, I will return….
Listen, this is our homeland. It’s not that we’re injured. It’s normal to want to live in your homeland with your people. They turned us into some kind of national traitors, although they are the national traitors. But we ourselves even began to get used to it, feeling that we were somehow different, which means we don’t belong there, that this is not our homeland.
But, damnit, this is our homeland, our roots are there, our everything is there. Why shouldn’t we want to go back? It’s normal to want to go back and desire to live in a different country. That is, to want changes in your country, which has simply turned into a fiend of hell, which threatens the whole world with nuclear disaster and is working to split the whole world and plunge it into some kind of abyss of chaos.
What is Western civilization? If we talk about European values, this is democracy, this is human rights, this is freedom — these are normal things. This is the norm. And they declared the norm to be evil. Who are they after that? This is some kind of madness that will end either in a nuclear apocalypse or in the fact that at some point they will simply die, as generally happens in history with villains: At some point, they simply died, and the world sighed freely until a new one was born.
RFE/RL: In an interview, you said you’d like to shoot a film in [the Ukrainian city of] Odesa, which is an important place for you. Did you have in mind a film that is less heavy than the one you have made for Current Time? Something entirely different?
Loshak: I really want to. I am very tired of politics, of Putin — of this creature, this absolutely insignificant bastard, who forces us to follow him all the time. Then we all write about it, film it, and react in horror. We are forced to because we react to abuse, to constant violence against us, because this person mocks us.
I want to film about something more metaphysical. With hope, with faith, with love. There is a lot of love missing.
Tell Gordeeva: “The Yashins: ‘His Sentence Will End When the Regime Ends'” (in Russian; no subtitles)
In February 2022, opposition politician Ilya Yashin openly spoke out against the war while declaring that he would never leave Russia. In December, he was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison on charges of “discrediting” the army. Yashin has been held in a punishment cell over a month (since 17 May 2024), a visit from his parents was canceled, and nothing is known about the state of his health. We talked to Yashin’s parents about their son, whom they are proud of.
Contents: 00:00 Why do the Yashins not keep their son’s letters at home? 2:45 “A person is jailed for 15 days and until the last minute he doesn’t know whether he’ll be released or not” 7:15 “I’ll be the first to tell you’re wrong” 10:16 “Emigrating means admitting that we lost”11:47 “Gorinov doesn’t have it better because Ilya’s in prison” 13:43 “Who will know whether you gave your consent or not?” 17:36 “I guess I’ll have to be in prison for a while. What’s a little bit?” 21:21 How the clerk at the Tushino district court fell in love with Yashin and quit her job 22:36 Does Ilya Yashin have a fiancee? 25:20 How Yashin’s ex-girlfriends attend his court hearings 27:29 “We don’t communicate with Ksenia Sobchak” 31:27 Why didn’t Yashin become an actor? 33:53 “We accidentally met Lyudmila Navalnaya at the trial” 35:31 How Lyudmila Navalnaya taught Tatyana Yashina to put together prison care packages 36:48 Why do shampoo and toothpaste have to be poured into a plastic bag? 39:08 “His sentence will end when the regime ends” 40:46 “Now nothing good will ever happen” — on Navalny’s death 42:52 “Both my friends are dead” — Yashin’s letter after Navalny’s murder 44:55 “There are people who have it worse than we do” 48:53 Yashin’s health problems 52:49 How did Yashin’s parents meet? 54:58 Who taught Ilya to box and why 56:46 “I did everything to make sure Ilya was a momma’s boy” — Valery Yashin on parenting 1:00:28 “We Spartak fans are indomitable!” 1:02:16 Yashin asked for a wash basin in prison 1:06:01 “Ilya lived in a barracks in the tenth grade” 1:11:09 “He’s serving the longest sentence in the penal colony in Smolensk” 1:13:47 How his son has changed in prison, according to his father 1:14:36 …and according to his mother 1:19:19 “It’s him doing, but I’m the one who’s ashamed” — how Yasha’s mom taught her son to be a good deputy 1:25:00 “He went to his first protest rally in the eleventh grade after school”1:28:08 “Yabloko decided to do a deal with the Kremlin”1:31:24 How did Yashin and Nemtsov become friends? 1:33:48 “Even from prison, Ilya manages to send me flowers for my birthday” 1:34:46 “Mom, I’m in a paddy wagon but I’m okay” 1:36:57 The scariest day in Tatyana Yashina’s life 1:42:52 “I don’t consider Putin my enemy” 1:47:21 “Our son really did something wrong, but your son is paying for everyone” — what relatives of other prisoners say to Yashins 1:58:20 “Absolute strangers made care packages for him” — about the prisoner transport to Izhevsk 2:01:05 How did Yashin end up in the Okrestina detention center in Belarus in 2020? 2:03:48 “If you haven’t raised a person who is smarter than you, you’ve wasted your life” 2:05:34 “This is a marathon, and I have no doubt you’ll make it to the finish line” — a three-day visit with Ilya 2:07:05 “I missed your omelettes the most” 2:08:03 Why does Ilya Yashin’s mom not want him to become president? 2:10:13 “Guys, don’t get upset!”
Russian opposition politician Ilya Yashin is currently serving an eight-and-a-half year sentence in prison for spreading “disinformation” about the Russian army after speaking out against the mass murder of civilians in Bucha, Ukraine. Journalist Katerina Gordeeva sat down with his parents, Tatyana and Valery, who still live in Russia, to learn how they’re coping with his incarceration, how they support their son in prison, and what hopes they have for the future. Meduza shares key points from the interview.
On not persuading him to leave Russia
We never pressured him on any issue — neither small ones nor something like this. It’s his life, and he has to make these decisions; we can only help. I always told him, “Ilya, no matter what happens in life, know that you have a strong support system. That doesn’t mean you’ll always be right. And if I think you’re wrong, I’ll be the first to tell you.” The decision [not to leave Russia] came in 2012, after the Bolotnaya Square case. Leaving would mean giving up, admitting that everything was in vain.
He didn’t leave then. And then Boris Nemtsov was killed, and he said, “Now, even more so, I can’t leave. Leaving would mean admitting that we lost. As long as I’m alive, I don’t believe that I’ve lost.” We didn’t try to talk him out of it because I understood how he felt, and I can’t imagine him being abroad now. I think it would have been such an ordeal that what he’s going through now is still much easier.
On an exchange
He himself doesn’t want an exchange. His main argument is: “Even if there are any exchanges, I’m far from being the first in line, and probably I’m the last, because there are people for whom it’s a matter of life and death. Secondly, I’m not ready to be exchanged for a hired killer who will then be free. Thirdly, agreeing to an exchange means leaving the country. I could have left the country right away.” I told him, “Ilya, it’s clear which way everything is going. Maybe if the opportunity arises, you shouldn’t be stubborn and should agree? After all, who will know whether you gave consent [for the exchange] or not?” He said: “I will know. That’s enough.”
On why they themselves stay in Russia
Because our son is here. We use any possible fleeting opportunity to see [him]. If there’s an appeal hearing, and he’ll be there via teleconference, maybe he’ll see us, and we’ll wave to him. And then he’ll see and make a heart. Maybe we’ll be given five minutes to exchange a few words. Letters are one thing, but it’s another when you can see him and understand by his expression, [by the way] he shuffles papers, what state he’s in, what his mood is. That’s why we attend all the court sessions.
On their son’s sentence
I was shocked when the prosecutor requested nine years for Ilya. I thought I’d misunderstood, I had misheard, because it couldn’t be true. Then, after we’d left the courtroom but before the sentence was pronounced, there was a moment when it overwhelmed me a little. But I quickly pulled myself together, and by the time of the sentencing, we took it quite calmly, philosophically: when the regime ends, the term will end. He chose this path, and we’re walking it with him. We are beside him, we are helping, and what will be, will be.
On family life
We never had any secrets. In our family, we made all our decisions collectively, so to speak. Any decisions — important or unimportant — were discussed by the whole family, and we included Ilya in this from a very young age.
On how Ilya has changed in prison
Tatyana: He’s become kinder and less rigid, paradoxical as it may sound. When he was young, he could break off relationships abruptly. Now, he’s more understanding, he doesn’t judge. Some things make him smile wryly — but without judgment.
Valery: He used to have moments where he was very categorical in his judgments. He’d listen, understand, agree, but still stick to his opinion. Now, he’s grown more tolerant. He’s developed [an open-mindedness]; he’s matured and become more resilient.
On people’s support
We were in Smolensk; the court was hearing an appeal on an administrative case for failing to fulfill the so-called duties of a “foreign agent.” And the [train] arrives just on the dot, so we had to take a taxi and rush into the building. When we got there, a journalist who’d arrived earlier called us and said, “They changed the courtroom because there are a lot of people.” And when we walked in, we saw a full hall — Smolensk residents of all ages. […]
And then these people came up to us — there were these guys, a very young man, a student, young women, and a local lawyer. They said, “Come with us, we’ll show you where you can sit, have coffee, eat, and warm up.” It was so touching. Then a charming woman, about our age, maybe a bit younger, came up to us. She said, “I live nearby too, you can always rely on me.” I’ve met a lot of people who say things like, “Hold on, everything will be fine, this will all end.” But no one has ever called my son a traitor or whispered it behind my back.
On the future
During our last visit, which lasted three days and was the first in two years, we could hug and talk about anything. We talked a lot. He said: “What can you do? It’s a marathon.” I told him, “Ilya, I might not make it to the end.” He said: “You’ll make it. I have no doubt.”
KING CITY, Calif. — A group of men in masks opened fire at an outdoor party in central California, killing four people and injuring three others Sunday evening, police said.
Police responded to a reported shooting around 6 p.m. in King City and found three men with gunshot wounds who were pronounced dead in a front yard, the King City Police Department said in a statement.
Four other people sustained gunshot wounds, including a woman who died after being transported to Mee Memorial Hospital in King City, about 106 miles (170 kilometers) south of San Jose.
The three injured men were transported to Natividad Hospital in Salinas, police said.
Several people were at the party outside a residence when three men with dark masks and clothes got out of a silver car and fired at the group. The suspects, who were not immediately identified, then fled the scene in the car.
The investigation is ongoing, police said.
On Monday French lawmakers will vote on whether to enshrine in the country’s constitution a “guarantee” of women’s “freedom” to have an abortion. They will meet at a joint session of the lower and upper houses of parliament in Versailles, a rarely convened body known as the Congress. A constitutional revision requires three-fifths of the votes.
Such cross-party support is widely expected. Last Wednesday the French senate, which is controlled by the opposition centre-right, voted overwhelmingly in favour of the bill. The revision also enjoys backing from the governing centre and the opposition left. Emmanuel Macron, the president, wants women’s freedom to have an abortion to be made “irreversible”. French politicians of all stripes have worried about the potential for a future rolling-back of such guarantees—especially since America’s [sic] Supreme Court overturned the ruling that protected abortion rights there in 2022.
Sources: Spanishdict.com daily newsletter, 4 March 2024; Monterey Herald, 4 March 2024; Time, 4 March 2024; The Economist daily newsletter, 4 March 2024; the YouTube channels of The Insider (“Navalny’s Last Rally”) and Novaya Gazeta (“The Most Emotional Statements of People Who Came to Say Goodbye to Alexei Navalny”), with thanks to Tiina Pasanen; Andrei Bok (Facebook), 2 March 2024; Duolingo; random internet stock image.
