The number of Russians who find themselves behind bars for opposing the authorities who launched the war with Ukraine grows by the day. There are hundreds of political prisoners in the country. We try to remind our readers about these people every chance we get. Today, Mediazona’s David Frenkel tells the story of Alexander Skobov, 67, a historian from St Petersburg, a defendant in the last criminal case against ‘anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda’ in Soviet history, a convinced Marxist, and a veteran of the dissident movement, who after decades has found himself on a very familiar path: searches, arrest, psychiatric ward, jail.
Alexander Skobov is one of the most experienced political prisoners in Russia. In the 1970s and 1980s, he was twice sent to a psychiatric hospital for compulsory treatment: the first time as an editor of samizdat, the second time for slogans in favour of political prisoners, which Skobov wrote on the walls of Leningrad houses.
Almost half a century later, in April 2024, the authorities came after him again. Skobov was accused of ‘justifying terrorism’ because of his post about the explosion on the Crimean Bridge and sent to a pre-trial detention centre. In protest, he refused to take his glasses and medication with him. Later, an article on participation in a ‘terrorist community’ was added to the charge, and Skobov was transferred from St Petersburg to Syktyvkar.
“We were left alone for a long time. The reasoning being: we’ll die out on our own. Or we’ll leave and live out the rest of our lives off the once acquired (quite deservedly) political and moral capital. The blow came to other people, most of them much younger,” he wrote from the pre-trial detention centre.
Skobov maintains an active correspondence in pre-trial detention. He discusses philosophical and political topics, his letters are even published in historical journals. Write to Alexander, argue with him, disagree with him, I’m sure it would be valuable to him. The only thing is that his wife asks that the letters to him be written in 18-point Sans Serif font. Skobov can’t even see his own texts well: he first drafts them on the back of used sheets of paper and then blindly transfers the texts to the reply form.
Address:
167028, г. Сыктывкар, поселок Верхний Чов, д. 99 , ФКУ СИЗО-1 УФСИН России по Республике Коми. Скобову Александру Валерьевичу 1957 года рождения
Please write letters in Russian, otherwise the prison censors won’t let them through. You can send letters online via a special services called PrisonMail.
You can also write in English, using the websites Letters Across Borders and Lifeline, two projects by OVD Info, a media outlet and human rights defense group.
The story of Zakhar Zaripov, dying of cancer in prison while serving time for a social media post
Prison medicine is not known for its diligence. It can do little to help seriously ill people and plays on the side of the officials who run penal colonies and pretrial detention centres. The story of Zakhar Zaripov is a case in point. For a year doctors delayed doing analyses and making a diagnosis, even as he was writing things like this to his wife: “I feel bad, it hurts, I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, it’s hard for me to breathe, I’m dying.”
Zaripov is indeed dying: he has stage IV salivary gland cancer. According to the law, the authorities are obliged to release him, but the appeals court hearing on the matter has been postponed for over six months, says Zaripov’s defense lawyer Konstantin Bubon.
Zakhar Zaripov was born and lived in Sovetskaya Gavan, a town in the Khabarovsk Territory. He taught maths at evening schools in penal colonies. He was also fond of science fiction and wrote novels about popadantsy (accidental time travelers). Zaripov also wrote about politics at the LiveJournal account scribble_33. As the teacher himself says, many people had access to the account.
On 2 March 2022, a post was published on scribble_33 suggesting that Ramzan Kadyrov oust Putin and make Chechnya independent. It is not known who wrote it; Zaripov says it wasn’t him. Police investigators, citing indirect testimony by the staff at the penal colony where the teacher worked, decided that it was Zaripov.
The court agreed with the findings of the investigators and sentenced Zaripov to five years in a medium security penal colony. The teacher was arrested when his wife was in the last months of being pregnant with their second child. Zaripov has not seen his youngest daughter yet, as he is imprisoned in Khabarovsk, which is far away and expensive to visit. It is unclear whether he will see her at all.
In September 2023, Zaripov discovered a strange tumour in his mouth. He was able to see a surgeon only two months later. The doctors then began doing analyses and ultrasounds on him, but they failed to diagnose him and kept postponing his treatment. Because of the pain, Zaripov stopped sleeping on his right side, and because the tumor in his mouth has grown so large it hurts when he eats.
In July 2024, Zaripov was diagnosed with stage IV salivary gland cancer. But the final case conference did not meet until September. Prison officials plan to hospitalize Zaripov, but it is known whether he will have time to receive any treatment and whether he will be released home.
Russia’s best troops are now concentrated in another country. Moscow and Putin are completely defenseless. Hold back your troops. Do not send your best men to die in Kiev — send them to take Moscow!
Under current conditions, a limited contingent of a few thousand bayonets would easily take control of government buildings in Russia. You would declare that you have taken power, overthrow a dictator already condemned by the entire world, and stop the war.
This would allow Chechnya to gain independence and avenge all the deaths and humiliation inflicted by the Russian authorities over the past twenty-six years.
This is a perfect historical chance. There may not be another one in your lifetime.
Lenin took Russia with 1,500 men personally devoted to him. You have 40,000 top-notch fighters at your disposal. That’s quite enough.
Screenshot of Mediazona infographic, as published here
Russia is losing more and more men in its war against Ukraine.
As of 5 July 2024, Mediazona and its partners in the casualty counting project have ascertained the names of more than 58,000 Russian soldiers killed in action.
The real losses are twice as many, however. Journalists have calculated the actual number of war dead based on information from the probate registry. How they did their work is described in this article by Mediazona. You can read here about how our methodology has been corroborated.
The real losses of the Russian army, including mercenaries, in the war against Ukraine, come to 120,000 dead. The Russian army’s casualties are thus already greater than both the number of US military deaths since the Second World War and all the losses of the Soviet and Russian armies since 1945. Most of the men killed were between the ages of twenty and forty. Those who were younger were usually draftees and prison inmates, while those who were older were “volunteers.”
Seventeen thousand prison inmates recruited by the Wagner Group perished at Bakhmut, according to the mercenary organization’s own documents, as examined by Mediazona. Meanwhile, journalists had estimated that Wagner had lost around sixteen thousand men, which is nearly the same number. Wagner has recruited a total of 48,366 men during the war, meaning that a third of them were killed in the so-called Bakhmut meat grinder.
Prison inmates, “volunteers,” and conscripts, if we judge only by confirmed deaths, have borne the brunt of the losses in the war. At 47.4 percent, they constitute almost half of those who have been killed.
In over two years of war, 3,700 officers of the Russian army and other security forces have been killed, 430 of them in the rank of lieutenant colonel and above.
Between 200 and 250 men are killed every day. This year, the Russian army’s losses have risen dramatically. In 2023, an average of about 120 men were killed every day.
There are two points of view on Russia during the full-scale war. The first is that Russia has turned into a fascist militaristic state in which everyone marches in step and sincerely hates Ukraine. The second is that cynicism and apathy have won the day in Russia: people don’t care about the war as long as it doesn’t affect them personally. Both of these views are mistaken, according to the authors of “We Have to Live Somehow,” a study from the Public Sociology Laboratory (PS Lab).
The researchers traveled to Krasnodar Territory, Buryatia, and the Sverdlovsk Region, living there for a month and interacting closely with the locals. What they tell us does not fit into either of the two common stereotypes about Russians and the war. Here are a few of the tendencies they observed.
The war is invisible in daily urban life. Residents in the Sverdlovsk Region town of Cheryomushkin (whose name was deliberately changed by the researchers) could not recall a single event in support of (or against) the war during the year. In Ulan-Ude, the capital of Buryatia, the pro-war agitprop consisted of a single poster on a Lenin monument. In Krasnodar, pro-war banners still hung on buildings, but people had long ago removed pro-war stickers from their cars. There is no institutional support for the war at the municipal level: such support is the bailiwick of ideological loners and small groups of pro-war volunteers.
Apolitical Russians justify the war, but arguments like “NATO soldiers” and “defending Donbas” are not of primary importance to them. Rather, they simply want to save face themselves, because they take the accusations directed at their country personally. For this reason, Russians have previously been inclined to justify the actions of the state, even when they do not understand or approve them.
The majority of the populace is not opposed to the war. They may disapprove of it in some respects, but they simultaneously defend the state. For example, in the Sverdlovsk Region, women were outraged by the deaths of young soldiers at the front (“They are sending children to fight! Why?!”) while also parroting the propagandists’ arguments about the war against the “collective West” (“Them United States are hammering civilians!”). Non-opponents of the war argue that Russia has been proactive, defending itself rather than attacking (“Now the Luhansk and Donetsk Republics are part of Russia, but our guys aren’t advancing any further—they’re defending all of it”).
Non-opponents of the war regard the residents of Donbas as Ukrainians, not Russians. They scold Ukrainians from the “Donetsk People’s Republic” and the “Luhansk People’s Republic” (“They don’t defend themselves. They’ll be coming here [to Russia], and what, I’ll have to go fight in their place? I don’t want that”) and do not regard these areas as “their own” (“They are not my blood relatives, they are not my own people”).
While opponents and supporters of the war initially had bitter conflicts, solidarity between them has emerged despite their differences of opinion. Those who generally condone the war are increasingly questioning the official version of events, while those who oppose the war are beginning to listen to their opponents (“I have to build a life and continue living with these people”).
Russians try to pretend that the war has not impacted their daily lives in any way, but its signs still permeate their everyday lives and conversations. In the Sverdlovsk Region, a woman is going to “go to great lengths” to prevent her son from serving as a contract serviceman. In Buryatia, a volunteer says mundanely, “I have eight grandchildren, all boys. And it just happened that four more died at the front.” In Krasnodar, a sociologist’s source says he is glad that the city is not being bombed and that the “Wagnerians” did not come their way, but then confesses in a low voice that the future is hazy and “let’s put it this way: things have become a bit tense.”
The big takeaway, however, is that Russians are pushing the war to the back of their minds. And this is bad news for the Kremlin: it has failed to convince the public, over the past two years, that the invasion was launched in pursuit of noble ends. Even as they justify Russia, its citizens don’t understand what good the war does for them personally.
A week ago, a Moscow court sentenced fifteen-year-old Arseny Turbin to five years in prison after convicting him on charges of “involvement in a terrorist organization.” The security forces accused the schoolboy of aiding the Free Russia Legion, which has been officially banned in Russia.
Arseny lived with his mother Irina in the small city of Livny in the Oryol Region. Although he was one of the most successful pupils at the local prep school, he was bullied by his classmates, and yet his teachers did not respond to his complaints. At the war’s outset, Turbin supported the Kremlin’s actions, but later became disillusioned with the government and took an interest in politics, even telephoning [exiled online news channel] TV Rain and telling them that the Conversations about Important Things lessons at school were “utter nonsense.”
In early June 2023, Arseny wrote an email to the Free Russia Legion (an organization we described in detail in a previous newsletter). He wanted to сampaign against the war, but they asked him for too much personal information and he did not send the application form to these strangers. Instead, he started distributing leaflets criticizing the authorities and taking pictures of himself in front of the white-blue-white flag. (The Russian authorities regard this flag as a symbol of the Legion, which has been fighting against Russian forces in Ukraine.)
Meanwhile, a strange thing happened. Turbin made the acquaintance of someone called Maxim, who immediately gave him access to the Telegram channel Occupy Slutophilia 14 (similar names have been used on the Web by the fans of the late Russian neo-Nazi activist Maxim “Tesak” Martsinkevich) and asked him to help with the channel’s content by editing videos. The channel had only a few subscribers, and it featured posts in support of Yevgeny Prigozhin and far-right content revolving around Tesak. Investigators then used Turbin’s involvement in the channel to accuse him of neo-Nazism, despite the fact that the schoolboy’s father was from the UAE, and Turbin himself had been bullied at school due to his dark skin.
At the end of the summer, FSB officers searched the Turbins’ home and summoned Arseny for questioning. It was a very strange conversation: for almost an hour and a half, in different ways, two investigators questioned the schoolboy about his connections with the Free Russia Legion. At the end of the conversation, as Mediazonadiscovered, they assured the teenager that it was “normal” and “not against the law” to send an application to the Legion, which has been declared a “terrorist organization” by the Russian authorities.
The court was not interested in this peculiar circumstance, however. It was interested in Turbin’s statement, allegedly made during the interrogation, that he had sent the application: this was the basis for the charge that he had “joined” the “terrorist organization.” The thing is that Turbin did not say this. Mediazona has in its possession a full transcript of the conversation, and it simply does not contain mention of Turbin’s sending off the application. The investigators inserted it for their own convenience.
Irina Turbina was present at the interrogation. She says that the investigators retyped the statement three times because of mistakes, and suggests that they could have discreetly amended it after lulling her into a false sense of security.
After seeing the transcript, the investigator, Trunov, had even wanted to close the case. In February 2024, however, the investigation was assigned to another investigator, Irina Simonova. She spun the line about Turbin’s alleged neo-Nazi views, obtaining testimony from the boy’s classmates, who assured her that his “idol was the so-called Tesak,” that he had advocated “exterminating the Ukrainians,” and had supported Alexei Navalny. Irina Turbina does not believe this testimony, producing correspondence in which her son called Tesak a “blockhead” and himself a “liberal.” Turbina argues that her son’s classmates testified against him in exchange for “excellent high school diplomas.”
Due to the increased harassment at school, Turbina transferred Arseny to home schooling. He managed to pass his year-nine exams before the verdict was handed down. On 21 June, the court sentenced Arseny to five years in prison, although the prosecution had requested an even longer sentence of eight years. After the sentence was read, he burst into tears, telling his mother, “Mom, I’m sorry—forgive me for letting you down. But I really didn’t know I was violating any laws.”
No one looked for the mysterious Maxim. The court was also uninterested in Turbin’s conversation with the FSB officers who openly provoked the schoolboy and falsified his statement.
PROMPT: Make an illustration on the theme of “Russia’s Fascist Meltdown”
Creating an illustration on the theme “Russia’s Fascist Meltdown” involves capturing the essence of nationalism, authoritarianism, and geopolitical tension. Here’s a description of an illustration:
The illustration features a powerful and imposing figure symbolizing the Kremlin, with a stern-faced leader resembling Vladimir Putin at the forefront. Behind him, the Russian flag waves prominently, but instead of the usual tricolor, it blends with darker hues suggestive of authoritarian control. The background is a stark urban landscape, reminiscent of Moscow’s skyline, but with ominous shadows and smoke rising in the distance.
In the foreground, there are smaller figures representing dissenters and protestors, their faces obscured in shadows or masked to symbolize anonymity and resistance. They hold signs with slogans advocating for freedom and democracy, contrasting sharply with the dominant figure of Putin. The atmosphere is tense, with a palpable sense of division and discord.
To further emphasize the theme of “meltdown,” the illustration includes elements like cracked ice or fire, symbolizing internal turmoil and instability within Russian society. The color palette leans towards shades of red, black, and grey, evoking a sense of danger and crisis.
Overall, the illustration aims to visually convey the complex and contentious dynamics surrounding Russia’s shift towards authoritarian nationalism, capturing both the gravity of the situation and the resilience of those who oppose it.
Accused terrorist Shamsidin Fariduni, with bruising on his face, inside a Moscow courtroom. Photo: Yulia Morozova/Reuters via the New York Times
It seems that one of the consequences of this tragedy [i.e., the terrorist attack on the concert hall in suburban Moscow] has been the legalization, or legitimization, of torture. Torture existed before, but it was concealed and formally condemned. Now torture is openly praised and flaunted, and state institutions, including courts, do not react in any way. Another step towards fascization.
Warning: this newsletter contains numerous descriptions of violence and torture.
People are tortured every day in Russia. For a long time we have been hearing about torture in penal colonies and police departments from victims and human rights activists. Mops and electric shockers have been mentioned in reports in the independent media and in the accounts of people who were subjected to violence, but the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) and the police themselves have usually denied the accusations. Even in today’s Russia, however, the courts have periodically tried to imprison law enforcers who have tortured people, such as those implicated in the Karelian penal colony case, the Yaroslavl case, and the Saratov prison hospital case.
The terrorist attack in suburban Moscow has changed everything.
On 22 March, gunmen killed at least 137 people at the Crocus City Hall concert venue outside Moscow. They set fire to the building and left before the police arrived. Law enforcers have already detained suspects, and the Z bloggers have been salivating over the photos and videos of their abuse at the hands of the authorities. Never before have we had such flagrant acknowledgement of torture.
“The law enforcers have often covered their tracks by sweeping stories of torture under the rug, and we were told that there was no torture, that the reports were nonsense,” Sergei Babinets, head of the Crew Against Torture, said in an interview with Mediazona. “But since yesterday it seems as if there is a path to making torture a little more public.”
Dalerdzhon Mirzoyev (whom propagandist Margarita Simonyan dubbed the “ringleader” of the terrorists) was brought to his arraignment hearing with bruises on his face and remnants of a bag around his neck. He had no bruises at the time of his arrest, and the bag could have been used by law enforcers to strangle Mirzoyev. When the judge announced the pretrial restraint measures (Mirzoyev was remanded in custody to a pretrial detention center) Mirzoyev could not stand up. Instead, he leaned against the wall of the “fish tank” in the courtroom.
Saidakrami Murodali Rachabalizoda was brought to the hearing with his head bandaged. A law enforcer had cut off his ear when he was detained and tried to make him eat it. Neo-Nazi Yevgeny “TopaZ” Rasskazov of the nationalist subversive group Rusich announced an auction for the knife that was allegedly used to cut off Rachabalizoda’s ear.
The third detainee, Shamsidin Fariduni, was also apparently tortured. Telegram channels associated with law enforcement circulated a photo of Fariduni lying on the ground with his pants pulled down and law enforcement officers standing over him. There are wires from a field telephone attached to his groin. Such wires are used to electrocute detainees. (They have been used, for example, on detained Ukrainians in the occupied territories.) And someone is also stepping on Fariduni with a foot shod in an army tactical boot. Fariduni arrived in court with a swollen and beaten face.
Finally, the fourth detainee, Muhammadsobir Faizov, came to the court from the intensive care unit in a wheelchair. He could barely speak, and was hooked up to a catheter and a urinal. One of his eyes was injured. For the duration of the hearing, his doctors—two women in ambulance corps uniforms who had arrived with Faizov—were asked to leave the courtroom.
Why is this happening? Sergei Babinets argues that law enforcers could have been affected by the absence of major terrorist attacks in recent years.
“Many people were simply not ready for it—not ready emotionally, not ready psychologically, not ready on various fronts. And people may have started to lose their nerve due to this. That’s why there have been calls to reinstate the death penalty, to locate all the guilty parties and execute them, for example,” he said.
Аccording to Babinеts, Russian aggression in Ukraine has also played a role.
“The normalization of violence may have aggravated the situation with torture. We can see that law enforcement officers are really starting to let themselves go more,” he said.
Babinets adds, however, that there is no point to this violence.
“Torture most often leads to the torturer obtaining the information he wanted to obtain initially,” he said. “If they want a person to confess that they had been working, for example, for the Ukrainian army, they can be tortured until they confess. It is impossible to effectively investigate crimes in this way.”
It’s more than two decades since I read the late Stanley Cohen’s ground-breaking States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering (2001). In the introduction, Cohen recalls his own experiences growing up in apartheid South Africa, when he asked himself why his own outrage at the injustice he observed all around was not reflected in the society around him:
Why did others, even those raised in similar families, school and neighbourhoods, who read the same papers, walked the same streets, apparently not “see” what we saw. Could they be living in another perceptual universe — where the horrors of apartheid were invisible and the physical presence of black people often slipped from awareness? Or perhaps they saw exactly what we saw, but just didn’t care or didn’t see anything wrong.
Cohen went on to become a sociologist and a lifelong human rights activist. States of Denial was a valiant attempt to bring his discipline to bear on the subject of why people become become ‘everyday bystanders’ of atrocities who ‘block out, shut off or repress’ troubling or disturbing information to the point when they ‘react as if they do not know what they know.’
Some of these observations related to Israel, where Cohen moved in 1980. A Zionist in his youth, Cohen opposed the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and became a strong critic of Israeli repression of the Palestinians. In his book, he describes his work with the Israeli human rights group B’Ttselemon the torture of Palestinian detainees and the obstacles it encountered:
Our evidence of the routine use of violent and illegal methods of interrogation was to be confirmed by numerous other sources. But we were immediately thrown into the politics of denial. The official and mainstream response was venomous: outright denial (it doesn’t happen); discrediting (the organization was biased, manipulated or gullible); renaming (yes, something does happen, but it is not torture); and justification (anyway ‘it’ was morally justified). Liberals were uneasy and concerned. Yet there was no outrage.
Cohen returned to the UK in 1996, and died in 2013, but were he alive today, I suspect he would have recognized the ongoing devastation of Gaza as a textbook example of the ‘politics of denial’. According to the latest figures from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the IDF has killed more than 31,988 people, most of whom are women and children, with another 7,000 buried in the rubble, and wounded 74,188. To put these figures in perspective, this February civilian casualties in Ukraine were estimated at 10,582 dead and 19,875 injured since the Russian invasion began on 24 February 2022.
So in just under six months, Israel has killed more civilians in Gaza than Russia has killed in two years. It has destroyed or damaged more than 60 percent of Gaza’s housing stock, 3 churches, 224 mosques, 155 health centres, 126 ambulances. Nearly 2.3 million Palestinians have been displaced, and 1.1 million people are facing ‘catastrophic levels of food insecurity,’ which threatens to become a famine.
All this has been done with the indirect support or direct collusion of the United States government, the European Union, and the British government. Despite the outpouring of rage and horror on the streets of so many cities across the world, liberal democracies that claim to uphold an international order based on human rights and universal moral norms have ‘known and not known’ what has been taking place in front of their eyes.
Many of these governments once railed against ‘dictators killing their own people’, and used atrocities and human rights abuses as a moral lubricant for liberal ‘interventions’ and ‘ humanitarian’ wars to prevent ‘massacres’ and ‘bloodbaths.’ Apart from a few tepid words of condemnation, when the obscenity of what is unfolding became too much to ignore, these same governments have enabled Israel to inflict incredible carnage on a mostly unarmed and defenceless population.
None of is taking place in secret. In February, Amnesty claimed that ‘Fresh evidence of deadly unlawful attacks in the occupied Gaza Strip…demonstrates how Israeli forces continue to flout international humanitarian law, obliterating entire families with total impunity.’ Israeli soldiers routinely post tweets and TikTok videos of themselves gleefully blowing up Palestinian homes, wearing Palestinian lingerie and women’s dresses, humiliating Palestinian prisoners made to strip down to their underwear, and generally exulting in the destruction.
The FSB has opened a criminal case on charges of “high treason” against artist and former Mediazona publisher Pyotr Verzilov. The details of the case are not yet known, but as part of their investigation, law enforcers raided the homes of a number of artists and activists across Russia. Many of those whom the law enforcers raided are not personally acquainted with Verzilov.
In the early hours of Tuesday morning, people identifying themselves as FSB officers searched the home of Petersburg artist Katrin Nenasheva and her girlfriend Natasha Chetverio. Nenasheva was taken away for questioning, while Chetverio was released, but both had their electronic devices confiscated. The homes of artist Sasha Blot, Party of the Dead activist Kristina Bubentsova, illustrator Vladlena Milkina, and architect Alexandra Kachko were also searched in St. Petersburg.
Law enforcers simultaneously raided the apartments of Verzilov’s mother Yelena, members of the art group Yav, actionist Anastasia Mikhailova (an associate of the artist Pavel Krisevich), and Pussy Riot members Rita Flores, Olga Pakhtusova, and Olga Kuracheva. The latter two were involved in the action “The Policemen Enters the Game”: along with Verzilov, they ran out onto the field of a Moscow stadium during a World Cup match there.
In Moscow, a female acquaintance of the artist Philippenzo (who is now in exile) was taken from her flat. The Yekaterinburg artist Ilya Mozgi and the Ulyanovsk artist Ilya Kholtov were both taken away for questioning after their homes were searched. Nizhny Novgorod artists Artem Filatov and Andrei Olenev were questioned. Samara artist Denis Mustafin’s home was searched. Although he was not at home, his mother’s computer was confiscated.
Some of these have already been released from interrogation (Nenasheva and Kholtov, for example), while others are still being questioned. It is known that most of them have now been designated as “witnesses” in the case against Verzilov. Many of them were asked about their connection to Verzilov: many did not know him personally and had never had much contact with him. Kristina Gorlanova, the former director of the Urals branch of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, located in Ekaterinburg, whose home was also searched, said that she had “heard nothing” about the “artist” who occasioned the search.
It is still unclear what gave rise to the criminal case. Under new legislation, however, switching to the enemy’s side during a war can be considered “state treason” can be considered as switching to the enemy’s side during a war. In an interview with Yuri Dud last year, Verzilov admitted that he had originally traveled to Ukraine as a documentary filmmaker, but now he was at the front “as a military man.”
“Verzilov: Inside [the] War,” vDud, 5 October 2023. In Russian, with English subtitles
Many of the artists whose homes were raided may never have been involved in Verzilov’s activities, but they themselves have produced works about current events in Russia and Ukraine. We wrote last year about the works of Yav and Philippenzo. Mustafin was fined for flying a a Russian flag inscribed with the phrase “Today is not my day” outside the Ministry of Defense in Moscow on 12 June 2022. Milkina made a public art piece about “people who are scared” on a Petersburg square and T-shirts with the word “Peace” on them.
Petersburg artists find ways to get their messages across even amidst strict censorship. They mount underground apartment exhibitions, “tiny pickets” on city streets, and exhibitions and performances in the woods. It all smacks of the Soviet guerrilla art and actionism from which the international stars of post-Soviet conceptualism later emerged.
Bumaga explores how street art shows have gained popularity in Russia, how guerrilla art has changed in recent decades, and how today’s actionists resemble the organizers of the notorious Bulldozer Exhibition.
Street exhibitions have been around since the 1960s. One of the first such projects was dubbed “the Soviet Woodstock”
Guerrilla street exhibitions in Russia date back to the so-called unofficial art scene of the 1960s and 1970s. Pursuing the idea of coupling art and ideology, the authorities forced undesirable artists out of public art life.
In 1962, Nikita Khrushchev cracked down on the exhibition 30 Years of the Moscow Union of Artists, at the Moscow Manege. The Soviet premier wanted to expel all of its participants from the CPSU and the Union of Artists, although almost none of them were Party or Union members. Artists and connoisseurs reacted to political censorship in the USSR by forming an artistic underground, meaning that the most progressive art was exhibited at apartment exhibitions and in salons.
The 1970s witnessed open confrontation between the art and the world authorities. The most flamboyant members of the artistic underground were the Lianozovo school, who gathered and held exhibitions in a barrack in Moscow’s Lianozovo neighborhood. The leader of the group, Oscar Rabin, organized one of the most infamous guerrilla street exhibitions in the history of Russian art, which later became known as the Bulldozer Exhibition. On 15 September 1974, the artists staged a show of paintings in a vacant lot in Moscow’s Belyayevo Forest. The authorities sicked police on the participants and attendees and destroyed the show with bulldozers.
This crackdown on artistic expression triggered an international uproar, and the Soviet authorities made concessions. Two weeks later, the artists were allowed to hold an officially sanctioned exhibition featuring an expanded list of participants in Moscow’s Izmailovo Park.
This time the police were tolerant towards the artists and their guests: no one was detained. The exhibition lasted for several hours and, thanks to the beautiful weather, it turned into a big picnic. Western journalists dubbed the event “the Soviet Woodstock.”
Soviet unofficial artists continued this tradition, and one art group published 14 volumes documenting their activities
These exhibitions were sanctioned, but the authorities still created a number of organizational obstacles for the artists. For example, only those artists who had a Moscow residence permit were allowed to show their work at the House of Culture. In addition, the authorities made the condition in which the artists worked unbearable: during the mounting of the show, the temperature in the pavilion topped forty degrees Celsius. Thirty-eight works were banned by the censorship commission. It is not known how many works were exhibited, ultimately, but a total of 145 artists participated in the show.
After the scandals provoked by the “unofficial” artists’ public appearances, the authorities began pursuing a policy of legalizing alternative art. In May 1976, the Painting Section of the Graphic Artists Committee was established, primarily to monitor and control the ideologically dangerous underground.
We should keep in mind that we do not have information about every single Soviet-era guerrilla exhibition. Many were held without leaving any trace in contemporary newspapers and other documents.
Collective Actions, a group led by Andrei Monastyrsky, did a huge amount of work in this sense. The artists compiled fourteen volumes documenting their Trips to the Countryside — actions during which various events took place in particular landscapes, including installations, performances, and minimalist interventions in nature. By going outdoors, the artists showed that art could be implicated in the space outside galleries and museums. Another important feature of the performances was the inclusion of viewers in the works: their participation and reactions were part and parcel of the conceptual actions. The way the actions were staged encouraged the spectators to focus on the processes of anticipating and comprehending the happenings. That is, the spectacle itself was an occasion for reflection, a statement meant to spark a dialogue.
In [1977], for example, Collective Actions simply hung a red banner between trees in the woods. The banner read: “I HAVE NO COMPLAINTS AND I LIKE EVERYTHING, ALTHOUGH I’VE NEVER BEEN HERE AND KNOW NOTHING ABOUT THESE PARTS.”
Guerrilla exhibitions are still organized nowadays, many of them dedicated to political prisoners
As a rule, guerrilla exhibitions and actions have a political agenda, so their organizers can be punished quite severely, even by Russian standards.
Nevertheless, there is activity in this field. For example, on 5 August 2023, Petersburg activists mounted an open-air exhibition on the Sestroretsk Ecotrail on the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Sandarmokh [sic], a tract in the forests of Karelia where victims of the Great Terror were shot and buried in mass graves. Fifty works hung in the open air for a record time — almost an entire day.
Placards in support of Tyumen Case defendant Kirill Brik (left) and the release of political prisoners (right) at 2023 guerrilla exhibition in suburban Petersburg. Photos courtesy of 123ru.net via Bumaga
Several placards were also hung in the woods outside Petersburg this winter — for example, on December 10, Human Rights Day, the work I Dissent, Therefore I Am. And in January, an installation featuring a quotation from the Bulat Okudzhava song “Hope’s Little Band” was mounted outside the city.
“…and wandering amongst people / is hope’s little band, / conducted by love.” Photo: Bumaga reader
“What can I do? What would it change? Who would care? Who would help me? What do I see when I look around? What do I mean?” Part of the installation I Dissent, Therefore I Am. Photo: a Bumaga reader
In 2022, Petersburg hosted Carte Blanche, an international guerrilla street art festival. In addition to street works, a stationary exhibition at the abandoned Sailors Palace of Culture on Vindavskaya Street attracted great attention; it featured over twenty artists, including Vladimir Abikh, Maxim Ima, and Slava PTRK. That same autumn, Petersburg hosted the underground exhibition Continuity, dedicated to political prisoners of the past and present, including the victims of the Great Terror and those caught up in the Network Case. Some of the works were made by political prisoners themselves using improvised means and materials while they were incarcerated in pretrial detention centers and penal colonies.
Contemporary street exhibitions continue the Soviet tradition, but the state’s reaction to them has become tougher
Today’s guerrilla exhibitions in many ways are a continuation of the Soviet and post-Soviet tradition. The Bulldozer Exhibition can hardly be called an artistic event also. It was also a political event. It was a challenge to a repressive regime, “the first and most significant collective performance,” as art historian Yevgeny Barabanov wrote.
Since 2022, such exhibitions also have not only aesthetic but also political goals. Although in the Soviet and post-Soviet years, “unofficial” exhibitions, albeit with certain restrictions, could be legitimated [sic], since 2022, the state does not even attempt to compromise with artists.
Moreover, crackdowns against artists who voice alternative opinions have reached a new level. In 1991, the Moscow actionist Anatoly Osmolovsky and his group E.T.I. used their bodies to spell an indecent word for the phallus [khui] on Red Square. After the action, Osmolovsky was detained and threatened with charges of “malicious disorderly conduct.” However, thanks to the petitions submitted to the authorities by his art world colleagues and the Memorial Society, Osmolovsky was soon released.
Nowadays, petitions and statements of support are not enough to get artists acquitted. Sasha Skochilenko was sentenced to seven years in prison on charges of disseminating “fake news” about the Russian army. The young woman replaced price tags at a Perekrestok chain grocery store with anti-war messages.
Vyacheslav Luthor, as seen in his online CV at Careerist.ru
The Second Western District Military Court in Moscow sentenced Vyacheslav Luthor, a bank clerk from St. Petersburg, to ten years in prison after finding him guilty of charges of high treason, secret collaboration with the representative of a foreign power, and involvement in a terrorist organisation, over his alleged attempt to join the [pro-Ukrainian] Free Russia Legion. Despite the fact that the courts usually hear such cases in closed chambers, our correspondent was able to attend one of the hearings. Thus, it transpired that last summer Luthor had been contacted by a recruiter who promised him a new job, a high salary, and assistance moving abroad.
Born and raised in Krasnoyarsk, Vyacheslav Luthor is thirty-three years old. According to his CV, he graduated from the local affiliate of the Moscow State University of Economics, Statistics and Informatics (MESI) in 2014, before working as an accountant in the local state statistics bureau and as a manager in real estate and trading companies. After moving to Petersburg, he took a job at Bank Saint Petersburg, which is also listed as Luthor’s place of work on his hidden VKontakte page.
The case against the bank clerk came to light last summer. On 29 July 2023, Mediazona found a record of his arrest on the website of Moscow’s Lefortovo District Court. At that time the charges of high treason and involvement in a terrorist organisation were listed there. Apparently, the charges were updated during the investigation, and so the Second Western District Military Court was asked to try Luthor on three charges: attempted high treason, confidential cooperation with the representative of a foreign power, and involvement in a terrorist organisation.
Previously, “high treason,” as defined by Article 275 of the Russian Criminal Code, was rarely charged, but after the outbreak of the full-scale war, involvement in combat on the Ukrainian side (or an attempts to go there to fight) and donations to the Armed Forces of Ukraine were equated with “high treason.” Also, a new article on “confidential collaboration” with foreigners—Article 275.1—was inserted into the Criminal Code.
2023 was a banner year in Russia for charges of “high treason,” according to Mediazona.
Last year, as Mediazona has discovered, at least 107 people were accused of high treason (Article 275), espionage (Article 276), or collaboration with foreign powers or organisations (Article 275.1). Many such cases are classified, so the actual number of people charged with these crimes may be higher.
The human rights project Department One wrote that sixty-three high treason cases and seven cases of collaborating with foreigneers were submitted to lower trial courts. Verdicts have already been handed down in thirty-seven cases. All of them were guilty verdicts.
Unlike the high treason cases of previous years, which were mainly transferred to Moscow, courts in the regions began hearing these cases in 2023, human rights activists note. According to our calculations, more than seventy percent of such cases are now being heard outside Moscow, in the places where the crimes were allegedly committed, but the arrests and indictments are usually made in the capital.
This is what happened to Vyacheslav Luthor. Before he was placed in a pretrial detention centre, he had been jailed twice on administrative charges: on 11 July 2023, for minor disorderly conduct (Luthor was accused of “using foul language, shouting loudly, and waving his hands” at the airport) and on 14 July 2023, for disobeying police officers (Lutor was jailed for fifteen days for allegedly refusing to show his passport to law enforcers). He was to be released from the special detention centre on the day he was sent to the pretrial detention centre on the criminal charges.
“He asked me to keep my fingers crossed for him”: the testimony of coworkers
The Second Western District Military Court began hearing the case against Vyacheslav Luthor on 5 February. The state’s case was made by prosecutors Igor Potapov and Dmitry Nadysyev.
Trials on charges of treason are held in closed chambers and members of the public are not allowed to attend them, but our correspondent was able to get inside the courtroom at the only open hearing. That day, the court questioned the prosecution witnesses’s from Petersburg via video conference, and it was from these interrogations of Luthor’s former colleagues that it transpired that the bank clerk was accused of having ties with the Free Russia Legion and attempting to leave the country to fight on the Ukrainian side. Luthor himself has denied his guilt.
Luthor’s boss described her attitude to her former employee as “neutral.” She said that last summer Luthor had asked for time off from 10 July to 19 July in order to fly to his hometown of Krasnoyarsk to deal with “family problems.” According to the investigation, Luthor had probably planned to leave Russia on these dates.
Responding to a question from Prosecutor Nadysyev, the defendant’s former supervisor said that she had never spoken to Luthor about politics or the war in Ukraine.
“Tell me, did Luthor ever come to work dressed in military-style clothing?” the prosecutor asked.
The supervisor replied that he came to the bank in regular clothes — a shirt and trousers. When asked by defence lawyer Yulia Kuznetsova whether Luthor had talked about the Free Russia Legion and his desire to leave to fight in Ukraine, she also answered in the negative.
“I didn’t know what this organisation was doing and didn’t pay much attention to it,” the witness said.
“Did Vyacheslav Alexandrovich inform you that he was going to be involved in combat?” the defence counsel clarified.
“No,” the witness replied, and then she added that the word “legion” made her suspicious, as it could be associated with military action.
A female colleague of the defendant said that Luthor had asked her to come with him, but she had turned him down. The woman noted that she had advised him to refrain from the trip, although she did not completely believe that he would dare to go, as she regarded Luthor as a “wallflower.” The prosecutors then petitioned the court to have the testimony given by the same witness during the investigation read aloud due to “significant discrepancies.” The defence counsel objected. Luthor himself, a large man with short hair and dressed in a warm jacket, supported all of his defence lawyer’s motions and answered the court’s questions briefly.
The court granted the prosecutors’ testimony. In her [original] testimony to investigators, the witness had described her correspondence with Luthor in more detail. In it, he said that he had been contacted by a representative of the Free Russia Legion, who had offered him a high salary, and explained his offer to her to go with him by the fact that the recruiter needed two people. In addition, Luthor had specified to her that he would be working in the “frontline zone.” Then he asked if she had acquaintances at the Almaz-Antey military plant [he probably had in mind the company’s Obukhov Plant in St. Petersburg], and afterwards advised her to stay away from it. Luthor himself confirmed in court that he had written this to the witness.
Another colleague of Luthor’s who was questioned in court could not remember what exactly he wrote to her, apart from the fact that he had been invited to work for the Free Russia Legion. Consequently, her [original] testimony during the investigation was also read out in court. When questioned, she had said that in late June 2023, Luthor wrote to her that while he was on sick leave, he had been contacted by “a certain organisation” that offered him a job in Poland. He later clarified that his contact in the “legion” told him that he needed to leave Russia, where a “civil war was about to kick off.” He explained that he was being “actively recruited” and had been asked to “go work in reconnaissance.”
On 5 July, he asked her to “keep [her] fingers crossed for him so that he comes back safe and sound.” The witness said that she “disliked” Luthor. She did not take what he said seriously, thinking he was making things up. Luthor once again confirmed that he had sent the messages.
Human rights activists from Department One have written that people accused of high treason are often “provoked” by Russian law enforcers themselves.
“FSB officers and field agents find those who are subscribed to the Legion’s social media channels (not only the real ones, but also fake ones), and [ask them to] send them messages via bot or fill out a questionnaire to join.”
The provocateurs then introduce themselves as members of the Free Russia Legion, the Russian Volunteer Corps, or the SBU [Security Service of Ukraine], and ask the victim to do something: to take pictures of a military recruitment centre or an FSB building, to paste up [anti-war] leaflets, to set fire to a military recruitment centre or buy equipment, and then to fly to Turkey via a particular airport.
“The FSB denies they are involved in these provocations,” wrote Department One. “The[ir] official position in the courts is that it was allegedly done by the Ukrainian special services.”
The human rights activists also noted that the provocateurs sometimes write even to random people who have not voiced their opinions about the war on social networks. They “initiate friendly chats, introduce themselves as people who work on behalf of Ukraine, and ask [their correspondents] to do something.”
“He was constantly being provoked”: the mother’s testimony
“I’m alarmed — I haven’t seen my son for eight months,” was the first thing the defendant’s mother said when the judge asked how she was feeling.
Luthor’s mother, an energetic red-haired woman, had flown to Moscow from Krasnoyarsk to testify in the first hearing. In court, despite the fact that she had a hard time hearing the questions posed to her, she described Luthor’s childhood and their home life in detail. Even the prosecutor’s provocative question about her attitude to the “special operation” did not trip her up. Clearly understanding where Prosecutor Potapov was going, she said that she and her son considered what had occurred inevitable, but both of them were in favour of a peaceful end to the conflict between the two countries.
“What is your relationship with your son like?” the judge asked.
“It’s very good,” the woman assured him.
According to Luthor’s mother, her son has “a total aversion to violence, so there were problems with that at school.”
“He was constantly being provoked, and he asked his father to help him with it, but [he] has a father who believed that he had to defend himself,” the witness said.
According to his mother, Luthor did not serve in the army due to illnesses, and was not interested in military affairs or martial arts.
“We tried to send him to wrestling as a child, but after two classes he was kicked out for skipping. He just can’t hit [another] human being,” she said.
“My son never wanted to fight, he was afraid of it. He dreamed of travelling around the country and the world, even buying a trailer and driving it,” the witness said.
She said her son has hypertension, “a high degree of vascular and cardiac complications,” a stomach ulcer, and occasional panic attacks. Both she and Luthor’s father had medical conditions “galore”: [the father] had his knee joint replaced with an implant and was scheduled to have the other one replaced soon, but due to his small pension he still had to work despite his aching knees.
“He’s very nice,” the witness continued her account of her son. “He and I are close, and in terms of our views as well. He and I are not of this century: we are very trusting. He couldn’t pass a single beggar by.”
She added that Luthor had been afraid of [the military] mobilisation, although “there were no grounds [for this fear],” and he was not against leaving [Russia] if he had the opportunity.
She said that around the beginning of July he had stopped answering her calls, although they usually contacted each other every day. The mother went to the police and was told that Luthor had been detained for using foul language at the airport, although, according to her, Luthor did not swear as a matter of principle.
The witness said that her son liked his job at the bank and was very fond of Petersburg, where he had gone on her advice. She said that she did not know about his plans to travel abroad and that she was even going to visit him in August.
The prosecutor’s questions made it clear that at some point Luthor had asked his parents to help him pay off a debt.
“Tell me, what was the story when fraudsters allegedly stole money from your son’s [bank] card and you had to sell your property to cover the debts?” asked the prosecutor.
“‘Property’ is too strong a word, but we had to [sell] part of it. It was at MTS Bank,” Luthor’s mother replied. “We sold the garage and just part of that sum—”
“Well, what was the amount? Was it large?” asked the judge, interrupting her.
“Approximately two hundred [thousand rubles],” she replied.
“And did you discourage your son from filing a law suit or going to law enforcement [to tell them] a fraud had been committed?” the judge asked.
“Well, yes, I said it was useless,” she replied.
After the judge sighed heavily, the witness repeated that they were very gullible and she herself had fallen victim to fraudsters.
“Did you contact law enforcement?”
“Yes. They managed to recover part [of the money].”
“You see,” added the prosecutor.
“The rest is being earned back by my husband,” the witness said in conclusion. She was dismissed from the stand, and the journalists were asked to leave the courtroom.
Luthor’s trial took only five hearings, four of which were held in closed chambers. On 28 February, the prosecution asked the court to sentence Luthor to fifteen years in a high-security penal colony. The very same day, the court handed down the sentence: ten years of imprisonment, of which Luthor will spend the first two years in a closed prison, serving out the remaining eight years in a high-security penal colony.
Illustration by Danny Berkovskii for Mediazona. Source: New Tab
Aided by a team of volunteers, journalists at Mediazona and the BBC’s Russian Service have identified 41,731 Russian soldiers killed in the war in Ukraine using open sources. This number includes employees of the Wagner mercenary group, but it does not include those who fought on Russia’s side in military units fielded by the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics,” the BBC noted in an article published on Friday, 12 January.
According to the article, more than 1,100 Russian military personnel killed in the war were under 20 years of age. Since the State Duma approved amendments to the relevant laws, in April 2023, thus permitting 18-year-old high school graduates to sign military service contracts, 48 Russians born in 2004 and five born in 2005 (who were thus “barely 18 years old” when they enlisted) have perished in the war.
As of 11 January, 2,377 airborne troops, 913 marines, 537 members of the Russian National Guard’s special forces, 450 members of the GRU’s special forces, 206 military pilots, and 77 FSB and FSO officers have been killed in combat operations.
The BBC points out that the number of casualties among those who voluntarily signed a contract to serve in the Russian armed forces has increased in recent months. Thus, volunteers, prisoners, and private mercenary company “recruits” now account for 37 percent of all confirmed losses 0n the Russian side. Another 12 percent of the identified casualties were draftees (of whom 5,005 died in Ukraine and 62 in Russia).
According to Ukrainian intelligence, the Russian forces in Ukraine currently consist of 462,000 military and 35,000 National Guard troops, responsible for the functioning of the occupation regime. This number of troops allows the Russians to carry out rotation — to withdraw units and subdivisions and bring them to the front line.
When looking for a new advertising/PR agency in Ukraine in autumn 2023, PepsiCo made it a condition for a potential partner to exclude any mention of the war, or support for Ukraine and its army in future communications, according to a brief seen by B4Ukraine.
“NO: mention of war, hostilities, aggression, military personnel (from Brand side), Armed Forces of Ukraine. NO: support Ukraine and the army. NO: negative connotation, creating a feeling of ‘unsafe,’” states the “Pepsi restrictions” section of the brief.
The B4Ukraine Coalition contacted Pepsi offices in Ukraine and the US to ask for comment on this article but at the time of publication had not received any response.
In the meantime, the October 17 message on PepsiCo’s Instagram page announced that “PepsiCo volunteers distributed food kits to 1,200 families in the city of Borodyanka, whose homes were destroyed.” The message does not specify who exactly brutally destroyed the homes of these people.
Perhaps because PepsiCo’s Russia net profit increased by 333% to $525 million last year and the company paid about $115 million in taxes to the Kremlin? Treating such contributions as support for the economy of the aggressor state, Ukraine’s National Agency on Corruption Prevention (NACP) in September included PepsiCo in the list of international sponsors of war.
PepsiCo produces soft drinks, juices, chips, snacks, dairy products and other food products under the main brands Chester’s, Chipsy, Lay’s, Mirinda, Pasta Roni, Pepsi, Propel, Sandora, 7Up, Simba, Snack a Jacks, Sonric’s, Tropicana, etc.
The company has 19 factories, about 20,000 employees, 40,000 agricultural workers, and 600 open vacancies in Russia, according to the NACP.
The company announced the cessation of advertising activities and the production of some beverages in Russia in March 2022, while still allowing other products, such as infant formula and baby food to be sold, in order, as PepsiCo put it, “stay true to the humanitarian aspect of its business.” Yet in fact, the company continues the production and distribution of chips, snacks, and soft drinks. According to Bloomberg, PepsiCo’s revenue rose 16% in Russia and profits quadrupled, and the soda maker said operations in Russia accounted for 5% of consolidated net revenue for 2022, up from 4% a year earlier.
Now the iconic Pepsi cola is sold under the Evervess-Cola brand, although regular Pepsi Cola is still easy easily purchasable in Russian supermarkets due to the so-called parallel imports, when goods are imported without the manufacturer’s permission.
At the beginning of September last year, PepsiCo came under fire over its Russian business when the firm’s products were dropped by the Finnish parliament and Scandinavian Airlines’ operator SAS, and already on September 21, ironically, [a] Russian missile damaged a PepsiCo plant near Ukraine’s capital Kyiv.
A global [c]oalition of civil society organizations, B4Ukraine, is calling on PepsiCo to exit Russia ASAP and for the US government to issue a business advisory, warning US businesses of the growing legal, reputational, and financial risks of doing business under military control in Russia.
The war has markedly changed the Russian economy. Moscow has had to adjust its policy to fund its armed conflict against Kyiv, maintaining its military apparatus and police force, and integrating the territories it has annexed from Ukraine. These priorities have necessitated significant spending commitments that collectively threaten Russia’s economic stability. The Kremlin will spend six percent of GDP (more than eight percent when combined with spending on national security) on the war in 2024. This is more than the 3.8 percent of GDP that the United States spent during the Iraq war, although it falls short of the prodigious sums the Soviet Union allocated during the years of stagnation and its invasion of Afghanistan (18 percent of GDP).
Military spending has even eclipsed social spending—currently less than five percent of GDP—for the first time in Russia’s post-Soviet history. This pivot toward a militarized economy threatens social and developmental needs. The four annexed regions of Ukraine have already received the equivalent of $18 billion, and in 2024 almost $5 billion is expected to be transferred from the federal budget to regional budgets. No other regions in Russia receive this level of investment, which only increases interregional inequality. Rather than restore dilapidated housing in Russia, the Kremlin prefers to spend money on building houses and roads in annexed territories, to replace the houses and roads that Russian troops destroyed during their brutal invasion.
Russian industry has been transformed, with defense sectors now overshadowing civilian industries. The defense sector’s enterprises are now operating at a fever pitch and, as a consequence, any surge in demand is likely to force prices to rise because of the sector’s inability to increase supply. The military sector is receiving a disproportionately high amount of government spending, and it is also siphoning off labor from the civilian workforce, leading to an abnormally low unemployment rate of 2.9 percent. Before the war, Russia’s unemployment rate typically stood at aroundfour to five percent. The military and public sectors now employ 850,000 more people than in late 2022–23. The invasion of Ukraine also prompted about 500,000 Russians to emigrate in 2022, driving shortages of qualified specialists and blue-collar workers.
Meanwhile, living standards have risen across Russia, and the percentage of Russians living below the poverty line has dropped to 9.8 percent, the lowest since 1992. Naturally, there are regional variations, and areas that have sent a significant number of their men to fight in Ukraine—including Altai Krai, the Altai Republic, Buryatia, Chechnya, and Dagestan—have witnessed the fastest income growth in low-income groups. This relative increase in prosperity can be expected to continue as Moscow disburses funds to the families of the deceased and wounded.
Overall, the Kremlin wishes to maintain an illusion of normality and even increasing prosperity for its citizens. The distortions in the labor market have pushed up salaries in military industry, as well as in civilian manufacturing, because of the need to compete to attract workers from well-paying military plants. Moscow is, meanwhile, making high payments to soldiers and people mobilized to fight in Ukraine, which are driving consumption. At the same time, thanks to a supply of cheap credit, the government is handing out subsidized mortgages, that are, for the moment, shielding families from economic reality.
Elsewhere there are signs that the invasion of Ukraine may have disrupted the Russian economy more severely than the frothy party scene suggests. The Olivier salad, a mayonnaise-drenched confection of root vegetables, sausage and boiled eggs, is a staple at every table during the holidays. This winter the price of eggs suddenly rocketed (no one is quite sure why, but it may have been because farms were short of labour since so many workers have been conscripted or left the country). In some regions people cannot afford a box of six eggs and have to buy them individually. One pensioner even raised this with Putin during the president’s annual end-of-year call-in with the public. Putin promised to look into it.
In the two years that have passed since the start of Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine, residents of Ukraine have become less likely to use the Russian language, according to a press release on the outcome of research done by the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in cooperation with the University of Bath and the Technical University of Munich, which was published on Wednesday, 10 January.
Language plays a leading role in the identity of post-Soviet Ukraine, the authors of the study say. Many Ukrainians are fluent in both Ukrainian and Russian. And yet, only a few years ago, 50 to 60 percent of the country’s residents called Ukrainian their principal language of communication. After the Maidan protests in late 2013, sparked by then-Ukrainian President [Viktor] Yanukovych’s refusal to sign an association agreement with the EU, and Russia’s subsequent annexation of Crimea in 2014, more Ukrainians abandoned Russian.
[…]
The researchers explore this trend in a study published in the journal Communications Psychology. Using artificial intelligence and statistical analysis, they examined more than four million messages posted by 63,000 Ukrainian users on the social network X (formerly Twitter) between January 2020 and October 2022.
According to the study’s authors, users began switching from Russian to Ukrainian even before the large-scale Russian invasion, but this trend increased dramatically after the war began. In their opinion, this change in user behavior was a political reaction to events. Users wanted to distance themselves from both support for the war and Russia as such, so they started using Ukrainian en masse.
The full-scale war in Ukraine, which began almost two years ago, has led to increased violence in Russia itself. Military personnel with PTSD and criminals recruited into combat return from the front and maim and kill people in civilian life. Sometimes conversations about the war even end in violence. Mediazona and New Tab have uncovered over thirty criminal convictions for assaults and murders that occurred during quarrels about the “special military operation.” (The courts use the official wording for the war as mandated by the authorities.)
In Berdsk, Novosibirsk Region, draftee Khuler Mongush stabbed Nikolai Berezutsky, a passerby. The latter had asked Mongush why he was going to Ukraine. Saying that he was going there “to defend the Motherland,” the mobilized man attacked Berezutsky. Mongush was sentenced to eight years in prison for murder.
In the Irkutsk Region, farmer Maxim Khalapkhanov was drinking with an acquaintance, who began ridiculing the state of the Russian army during the war. Khalapkhanov eventually got angry and killed the acquaintance with a knife, whose handle was decorated in the colors of the Russian flag, and drew the letter Z on his stomach with a fireplace poker. Khalapkhanov was sentenced to seven years in a high-security penal colony.
Anton Rakov, a resident of Orenburg, was drinking with a new acquaintance. They began arguing about the war. Rakov did not like what his interlocutor was saying and killed him. While his victim breathed his final breaths, Rakov recorded a video with the dying man in the background, shouting, “This is what will happen to anyone who disagrees with me!”
Viktor Konnov of Zlatoust beat up a friend who said something nice about Ukraine, while Ivanovo resident Mikhail Vitruk received two and a half years in a penal colony for beating up his girlfriend, who allegedly called him a “Nazi” while they were watching the news.
In 2020, Mikhail Taskin attempted to shoot three people over a parking space and was sentenced to nine years in a penal colony, whence he was freed by the Wagner Group. Taskin spent several months in combat, where he lost a leg, eventually returning to his native village of Nerchinskiy Zavod in the Transbaikal Territory. In August 2023, he got into a fight at a local cafe. Taskin mocked the waitresses and promised to “hump all of them.” The incident ended in a brawl, and the police detained five people, but not Taskin was not among them. His sister and the local authorities argued that the disabled man had been assaulted by “opponents of the war.” But the news website Regnum discovered that two of the detainees were certainly not against the war because they had been involved in patriotic campaigns in the region.
It is not only drinking buddies and casual acquaintances who quarrel and fight over the war. Mediazona and New Tab turned up no less than seven court rulings in cases where the defendants and the victims were members of the same family. Vladimir Tofel from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky killed his nephew during an argument about the war. Yuri Makarkin stabbed his son, while Anna Cheremnova, a resident of the Altai Territory, stabbed her husband.
The experts asked for comment by Mediazona and New Tab argue that these are signs of a deep split within society, and the policy of the authorities does not help society to overcome this fissure. On the contrary, the hysterical rhetoric of propaganda only heightens the degree of intolerance, and people are increasingly willing to maim and kill each other.
The town’s coroner and mortician, Dr. Ivan Malinin, a Russian immigrant who barely spoke English, performed the autopsy on Williams at the Tyree Funeral House. Malinin found hemorrhages in the heart and neck and pronounced the cause of death as “insufficiency of [the] right ventricle of [the] heart.” Malinin also found that, apparently unrelated to his death, Williams had also been severely kicked in the groin during a fight in a Montgomery bar a few days earlier in which he had also injured his left arm, which had been subsequently bandaged. That evening, when the announcer at Canton announced Williams’s death to the gathered crowd, they started laughing, thinking that it was just another excuse. After Hawkshaw Hawkins and other performers started singing “I Saw the Light” as a tribute to Williams, the crowd, now realizing that he was indeed dead, followed them.
This can be translated as “Goodbye, Finland,” or it can be translated as “Adieu, Finland.” The correct translation will depend on our neighbors.
Source: “News Roundup” email newsletter (Delovoi Peterburg), 24 November 2023. Translated by the Russian Reader
Finland has temporarily closed all but one of its eight passenger crossings to Russia in response to an unusually high inflow of migrants for which the Nordic country accuses Moscow.More than 700 migrants from nations such as Yemen, Afghanistan, Kenya, Morocco, Pakistan, Somalia and Syria, have in the past couple of weeks entered Finland via Russia. Helsinki says Russia is funneling migrants to the border, a charge the Kremlin has denied.
Having last week closed four border stations, Finland overnight closed all remaining passenger crossings except its northernmost one, Raja-Jooseppi located high north in the Arctic region, for a month.
Raja-Jooseppi opened its gates for traffic this morning and will continue to accept asylum applications during its four daily opening hours, the Finnish Border Guard said.
No migrants arrived overnight outside opening hours, it added.
The Border Guard is stepping up patrolling along the length of its 833-mile frontier with Russia.
It will get additional resources for the task from the European Union’s border agency Frontex, which said on Thursday it would deploy 50 border guard officers and other staff to Finland along with equipment such as patrol cars to bolster control activities.
HS: Russia wants to create an image of a hostile West that is of benefit to the Russian leadership. Finland has not fit this image in the past, but now they are trying to build it. Relations between Finland and Russia are at a turning point. The Russians have realised that they do not know Finland after all. They want to see who Finland cooperates with and at the same time try to stir up discord within Finnish society. Building a new relationship will be a long-term process.
JS: Russia can create a fortress mindset due to a perceived ‘threat’ from the West. Finland’s eastern border is becoming a useful confrontational narrative for the Kremlin. When the same narrative is repeated, a kind of protection mechanism kicks in and even sceptics will start to believe it.
Civic Council named “undesirable organization” in the Russian Federation
The Prosecutor General’s Office added us to this list on November 3, exactly one year after we announced the creation of our Mobilization Center. We have openly stated that we are working to ensure that the Russian Federation in its current form, with its current government and all that this government calls the state, ceases to exist.
Today it is the Russian state that is criminal, and armed struggle against it is legitimate and necessary. So the Prosecutor’s Office and the Justice Ministry are formally correct: we are their enemies.
In fact, our status as an undesirable organization has not changed anything. Supporting the Civic Council within Russia was also a criminal offense before we were give this status, just like all other independent political and civic activities. The Russian authorities hand down approximately the same prison sentences for making [anti-war] comments on social media and engaging in armed resistance. So, we propose fighting effectively, rather than commenting in vain.
We have to resist intelligently, so we suggest that our supporters inside Russia observe the rules of information security and be vigilant.
We do not accept donations payable to Russian bank cards and do not have accounts in Russian banks.
We are not urging you to attend protest rallies right now. The time to go to the public squares will come later.
We invite those who are ready to take up arms to fight, fully aware of the consequences.
For those who do not want to stay on the sidelines but cannot fight for various reasons, there are other ways to support our cause:
donating money, including anonymously through crypto wallets (including Monero)
providing information to our OSINT service
disseminating information about the opportunity to volunteer
To volunteer for the Siberian Battalion, fill out this form.
Anyone who wants to make a donation should go here. All options are a help to us.
Anyone who wants to help with information or other work inside the Russian Federation should write to us at civic_council@proton.me.
Sincerely yours,
Civic Council, an undesirable organization in the Russian Federation
Foreign luxury brands are closing their flagship stores on Nevsky Prospect, but they could be replaced by Russian fashion retailers, say market participants.
Analysts expect a reduction in rental rates on Nevsky Prospect.
According to sources cited by Kommersant-SPb and NF Group, Breitling, Fendi, Omega, Rolex, and Salvatore Ferragamo have already vacated their spaces in downtown Petersburg. Louis Vuitton has the same plans. Market participants ascribed the mass exodus of luxury sellers to political pressure in the brands’ home countries and logistical and supply chain challenges.
“Luxury retailers initially took a wait-and-see attitude, but now it has become clear that there are no prospects for stabilizing the economic situation in the medium term,” said a source who spoke to Kommersant-SPb.
KNRU development director Polina Fiofilova noted that western brands that have been operating in the fashionable part of Nevsky Prospect for years have driven rents “sky-high” and inflated the expectations of landlords.
In the first half of 2023, the rates per square meter in this locale ranged from 2,600 to 6,700 rubles per month (VAT included), while in the adjacent Telezhny Lane they amounted to 2,500 to 5,200 rubles per square meter per month. Local fashion retailers simply would not be able to afford such rents, analysts said.
Nevsky Prospect is still empty. Despite a reduction in vacancies compared to the peak period, their level remains quite high, thus generating pressure on rental costs, added Mikhail Burmistrov, CEO of the agency Infoline Analytics.
As Delovoi Peterburgwrote earlier, despite the departure of a number of foreign brands, fashion retail sales increased by nine percent, a nineteen percent increase compared to the same period last year. But the average receipt remained at the level of last year or even decreased.
In period from July to September, ten international brand stores opened in Petersburg shopping centers. Most of the new boutiques belong to the fashion segment.
Three new Turkish clothing brand stores opened in Petersburg, along with Quiksilver (Australia), Mark Formelle (Belorussia), Woolrich (USA), Yamaguchi (Japan), Liu Jo (Italy) and two Stockmann’s stores (Finland).
We reported in October that the Italian clothing brand OVS would return to Petersburg after a ten-year hiatus.
Rosstat reports that the retail price of bananas increased to 143 rubles per kilo for the first time since it has been tracking their price. Compared to October last year, the cost of bananas increased by 47 percent, which was the biggest single-month increase since 2000. Oranges led the price growth among fruits: in October, they rose in price to 209 rubles per kilo, or by almost 80% year on year. Fruit prices were affected by the weakening of the ruble, which led to an increase in suppliers’ purchase prices and a rise in the cost of logistics, according to market participants. Albina Koryagina, a partner at NEO, a consulting company, says that last year the Russian authorities controlled the growth of retail prices for socially significant products, including bananas (aka “the poor people’s fruit”), as much as they were able, but this year retailers can no longer afford to hold down prices “even when pressured.”
4,121 criminal absence without leave [AWOL] cases have been delivered to Russia’s military courts since the start of the military mobilization in September 2022, as reported on Friday, November 24, by Mediazona, which studied information available on the websites of the military courts.
The courts have already made rulings in 3,470 of the cases. “Most AWOL cases result in suspended sentences. The percentage of such rulings is sixty-three for volunteer soldiers, while for mobilized [conscripted] soldiers, it is slightly lower—fifty-six percent,” the article says. A suspended sentence, it notes, makes it possible to return a serviceman to the front.
In addition to criminal AWOL cases, Mediazona found 317 cases of disobeying orders, 96 cases of desertion, 54 cases of assaulting a commanding officer, and 42 cases for other offenses on which the authorities have doubled down during the mobilization.
According to the infographic published by Mediazona, the most cases were launched in the Moscow Region (309), the Rostov Region (224), and the Maritime Territory (181). 123 cases were launched in Moscow, and 116 in St. Petersburg.
The Justice Ministry has filed a lawsuit with [Russia’s] Supreme Court asking it to declare LGBT an “extremist organization.” The first hearing should take place on November 30. Officials have detected in the activities of the “movement”—even though LGBT is not a community—the “incitement of social and religious discord.”
At the same time, NTV broadcast a story claiming that LGBT individuals are easily recruited by Ukrainian security forces. The program even showed arrested “LGBT activists” who, according to the propagandists, wanted to simultaneously burn down military recruitment offices, send money to the Ukrainian army, and join the Free Russia Legion. There are obvious holes in the story’s veracity, but viewers will be left with a clear conclusion: those who support LGBT individuals are ready to fight against Russia.
Meanwhile Vladimir Putin unexpectedly made a statement in defense of LGBT people. He said that they are also “part of society.” But journalist Farida Rustamova noted that the fight against LGBT might be part of Putin’s re-election campaign.
“Extremist” status provides the state with tons of possibilities for censorship and new court cases. This can be seen through the example of other “extremist organizations” that were essentially invented by the authorities.
For instance, in 2020 the Justice Ministry declaredAUE an “extremist organization.” AUE is a teenage subculture; the acronym stands for “Arestantskii uklad edin” [“Prison order universal”]. No actual organization exists—there’s a bunch of adolescents across the country who are in various ways aesthetically and ethically excited about the life of people adjacent to the criminal world. The name first got wide publicity thanks to an article in Novaya Gazeta.
In any event, now the security forces can launch criminal cases on extremist grounds against people who are already in prison. They say they are establishing “AUE cells” in prison colonies. There are no actual cells—but there is a new way of putting pressure on incarcerated people who have already been disenfranchised.
The Justice Ministry also invented the so-called Columbine terrorist movement. Columbine is the name of an American school where two teenagers killed thirteen people in 1999. Subsequently, “columbine” became the term for all mass shootings in schools. No actual subculture exists. But now you can get sent to prison for twenty years for involvement in the “terrorist organization.” And a journalist can be fined if, when writing about the latest school shooting, they fail to mention that the shooters belong to the “terrorist organization”—even though this must, of course, be proven.
So belonging to an “extremist LGBT movement” that doesn’t actually exist is an excellent lever for putting the squeeze on anyone you like—from LGBT individuals to someone who draws a a picture of a rainbow.
Ksenia Mikhailova, a lawyer for the LGBT group Coming Out, toldAgentstvo News that the new lawsuit completely criminalizes working in organizations that support gay people. For instance, directing a LGBT organization could get you ten years in prison, while working there could get you eight years. Ksenia Prosvirkina, a lawyer at OVD Info, thinks that even old social media posts expressing support for the LGBT community will end up counting as a “continuing violation.”
Prosvirkina notes that symbols like the rainbow could lead to getting fined up to a million rubles or four years of prison. Valeria Vetoshkina, a lawyer for First Department, thinks that in the worst possible scenario, belonging to LGBT might be interpreted by the authorities as involvement in the activities of an extremist organization.
The Justice Ministry lawsuit is far from the first move against LGBT individuals on the Russian government’s part. Over the past year and a half alone, both “LGBT propaganda” of any kind and transgender transitioning have been prohibited.
At a recent report to the UN, Deputy Justice Minister Andrei Loginov said that there is no discrimination against LGBT people in Russia. “The rights of LGBT citizens in Russia are protected by the appropriate statutes.” How this jibes with the lawsuit brought by the ministry where Loginov works is unclear (evidently, not at all).
Alexander Bakhtin (right) says farewell to his mother after his trial. Photo: SOTA via Mediazona
Today, the Mytishchi City Court sentenced 51-year-old animal rights activist Alexander Bakhtin to six years in a penal colony. He was charged with disseminating “fake news” about the Russian army over three VKontakte (VK) posts written in the spring of 2022—about the possible blockade of Kyiv, about the murders of civilians in Bucha, and about Ukrainian volunteers who risked their lives saving homeless animals during the war. In addition to the time in the penal colony, the court ordered Bakhtin to undergo compulsory outpatient treatment supervised by a psychiatrist. The prosecution’s expert witness claimed that Bakhtin “could not have been fully cognizant of the actual nature and social danger of his actions and control them.” Mediazona publishes excerpts from Bakhtin’s rebuttal of the charges, which he asked to be entered into the case file before the verdict was announced. After reading these notes, readers will be able to assess for themselves the clarity and consistency of the convicted man’s thoughts.
In keeping with the principle of the presumption of innocence, it is not for me to prove that the materials I published are true, but for the prosecution to prove that these materials are “knowingly false.” But it was not proved who exactly committed the [war] crimes, which means it was not ascertained whether my actions constituted a crime.
Censorship is prohibited by the Constitution of the Russian Federation, and this Constitution is directly applicable [to my case]. Human rights can be restricted in the Russian Federation only when a nationwide state of emergency and martial law have been declared. But they have not been declared, which means that publishing materials that challenge the stance of the Defense Ministry is not a punishable offense.
I committed the actions that I am charged with in order to inform and familiarize my readers with an alternative point of view to the one that was then disseminated in the Russian media. At the same time, realizing that Ukraine’s official media are also an interested party in this conflict, I tried mainly to find information on the internet not in the official Ukrainian media, but as directly reported by local residents of Ukraine on their pages in social networks and online forums. My ultimate goal was to make what contribution I could to stopping this war, because, for example, the First Chechen War in 1996 was, as I believe, halted largely due to Russian society’s negative attitude towards it.
If we speak of “hatred and enmity” (as encountered in my posts in the form of harsh epithets directed at the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation), then these epithets do not apply to all [members of] the Armed Forces, but only to those [members] who employed various kinds of violence against civilians in Ukraine, or to those individuals who unleashed this war or called for unleashing it—that is, to war criminals. Perhaps, in terms of “generally accepted” definitions, those negative epithets of mine do apply to all their members, but I do not agree with this interpretation because, as follows from the findings of the forensic psychiatric commission, I am also generally partial to subjectivism, including when employing various definitions. So when I was asked by a psychologist to symbolically depict the concept of “justice,” I drew Putin behind bars. And when the psychologist asked me what that had to with justice, I replied that this was what justice looked liked to me right at that moment.
The severity [of a crime] should be defined by its effects. But can the prosecution prove that my publishing these posts produced any specific effects? For example, that they caused someone to lose their faith in the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation and commit an illegal action? At the time of my arrest, I had a little more than sixty friends on VK, and each criminal episode had about 100 views. There are no victims in the case. I myself stopped publishing these posts around the summer of 2022 precisely because they had no effect. By that time, the overwhelming majority of Russian citizens had already made up their minds about this war. Some of them sincerely supported the Russian authorities, while others supported them for opportunistic reasons (in order not to lose their jobs, etc.). Huge numbers of people were intimidated (including by disproportionate punishments meted out for anti-war stances) and kept quiet. Quite a large number of people emigrated from the Russian Federation altogether, while a huge number of Russians decided that this war did not concern them at all. Thus, not only my posts but also anti-war publications in general were unable to change anything, unfortunately. It was only on the battlefield that matters were decided.
If my posts are so socially dangerous, then why was my VK page not blocked for such a long time?
You can write a letter to Alexander Bakhtin through the Zonatelecom or FSIN-Pismo, or by regular mail to:
Bakhtin Alexander Sergeyevich (born 1971)219 ul. Gorval, SIZO-2Volokalamsk, Moscow Region 143600 Russian Federation
Mediazona thanks Nikita Spivak, a lawyer with OVD Info, for the opportunity to read his client’s manuscript.
