Bizarre Beasts, “Tenrecs Will Not Stay in Their Lane”
If all crustaceans “want” to look like crabs, then tenrecs “want” to look like basically any other small mammal. These weird little guys are endemic to Madagascar—they’re native to nowhere else on Earth.
Новый культурный (или мультикультурный?) код Европы (если это правда Финляндия). https://t.co/ktnP1D1fp0
— Геннадий Гудков Gennady Gudkov (@gudkov_g) July 7, 2024
Prominent Russian liberal in exile Gennady Gudkov wrings his hands over what the “coloreds” are doing to his Russian liberal fantasy “Europe”: “Europe’s new cultural (or multicultural?) code (if that really is Finland).” ||| TRR
We can build and work. We have been creating many new things — from cleaning firms [kliningovykh firm] and journalism projects to organizing impressive professional conferences and medical services the likes of which have never been seen!
We can overcome animosities and help one another! We have built outstanding platforms on the internet to help those who have it worse than we do. (However, it is still difficult to say this about the Russian opposition.)
Sciences Po and its Provost Sergei Guriev, a world-renowned Russian academic and economist who had to flee his country in a day in 2013, were honoured to welcome @Ekaterina_Schulmann for a very exclusive conference on 20 April, 2023. This political scientist and social media sensation guest speaker addressed the serious matters of the Russian regime stability and the dynamics of public opinion.
Source: Sciences Po (YouTube), 8 May 2023. My question, had I been in the auditorium for this fascinating lecture, would have been to the audience: how many of you are neither Russian nationals nor speak Russian? I suspect that the numbers of such non-Russian nationals and non-Russian speakers were quite low. And why was this lecture delivered in English, not French?||| TRR
Source: unsolicited ad on Facebook
On 2 July 2024, International Law Club successfully organized an academic discourse entitled “Russia and NATO: Ceasefire in Ukraine.”
The speakers for the program included Dr. Yubaraj Sangroula (Professor of International Law), Dipak Gyawali (Former Minister of Ministry of Water Resources, Nepal), Dr. Govind Kusum (Former Secretary of Ministry of Home Affairs), Prem Chandra Rai (From Himalayan Development Affairs Council, Nepal), Yugichha Sangroula (Masters in International Humanitarian Law from Geneva), Dmitry Stefanovich (From IMEMO RAS, Moscow)
The welcoming remarks for the discourse were delivered by Anton Maslov, First Secretary and Director of the Russian House. The distinguished Chief Guest of the program was Seniormost Advocate Krishna Prasad Bhandari.
Dr. Dipak Gyawali provided valuable insights into the historical context of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, emphasizing its longstanding nature within the framework of NATO-Russia dynamics.
Professor Dr. Yubaraj Sangraoula shed light on the hegemonic influences and Western interference in global affairs, highlighting the concept of a rule-based international order that has been divisive.
Assoc. Prof. Yuggichhya Sangroula emphasized the importance of interpreting international law in a balanced manner, noting the significant contributions of Asian nations to its development alongside European nations.
Assoc. Prof. Prem Chandra Rai advocated for adherence to the UN Charter as the foundation of international law, stressing the need for inclusive peace initiatives that engage all relevant parties, including Russia.
Dr. Govind P. Kusum underscored the disproportionate impact of global conflicts on developing nations and emphasized the urgent global need for peace and security.
Mr. Dmitry Stefanovich discussed the inadequacy of mere ceasefires and called for sustainable solutions and increased global cooperation, particularly from the Global South, to address ongoing conflicts.
The subsequent question and answer session facilitated critical discussions on ceasefire strategies and institutional reform. Speakers analyzed geopolitical dynamics, and Western dominance, and proposed measures for achieving global peace and security, with a focus on strategies applicable to third-world nations.
Overall, the seminar provided a platform for robust dialogue and strategic insights into resolving international conflicts and fostering a more peaceful world order.
We sincerely express our gratitude towards the speakers, guests, and participants for their involvement.
The Club would like to thank the Russian House, especially the Director of Russian House, Mr. Anton Maslov for supporting us in organizing this academic discourse and acknowledge the presence of Ms. Alena Danilova, Press Secretary from the Russian Embassy at this program of ours.
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.”
Alexander Skobov. Photo courtesy of V. Izotov/Deutsche Welle
A new criminal case, on charges of “involvement in a terrorist community,” has been opened against former Soviet dissident and Russian political journalist Alexander Skobov, who has been detained for over a month on charges of “condoning terrorism.” This news was reported on Saturday, 18 May, on Skobov’s official Facebook account by his wife, Olga Shcheglova.
Shcheglova said that she visited her husband on 14 May in the pretrial detention center in Syktyvkar, where he had been transferred from St. Petersburg. During a conversation with him, his lawyer and local police investigators, she learned that Skobov has also been charged with “condoning terrorism” and “involvement in a terrorist community.” The dissident’s wife is convinced that these two charges stem from her husband’s affiliation with the Free Russia Forum.
According to Shcheglova, on 21 May, Skobov will be sent to the regional psychiatric hospital in Komi for a forensic psychiatric examination. Skobov himself has stated that he would not participate in the investigation and forensic expertise, and he would appear in court only if his mother were present at the hearings. Skobov’s defense has filed an appeal, which will be heard by the court on 22 May.
Skobov’s Persecution in the USSR and Russia
On 22 March 2024, Russian authorities designated Skobov a “foreign agent.” According to the Justice Ministry, he had “disseminated unreliable information” about the decisions of public officials, opposed the war, “identified the Russian Federation with a terrorist organization,” been involved in the work of an “undesirable organization,” and produced and distributed “foreign agent materials” [sic], the human rights project OVD Info reports.
In 1978, Skobov was arrested over his active involvement in the Left Opposition group and the samizdat publication of an anti-government magazine. He was later sentenced by the court to undergo treatment at a psychiatric hospital, from which he was released in the summer of 1987.
This time around, the political journalist was arrested on charges of “condoning terrorism.” Skobov was detained in St. Petersburg on 2 April 2024. In protest, the dissident refused to take with him to jail his diabetes medication and his glasses, despite his poor eyesight. According to the Telegram channel Memorial Support for Political Prisoners, the real reason for his arrest was “a [social media] post condoning the bombing of the Crimean Bridge.”
In early April, 66-year-old dissident Alexander Skobov was arrested for allegedly “justifying terrorism” in his posts online. For his friends and family members, the arrest came as no surprise.
Skobov, a long-time dissident who was made to spend seven years in a psychiatric ward after taking part in protests against the Soviet authorities in the 1970s, had published multiple posts condemning Russia’s actions in Ukraine since 2014. In March he was named a “foreign agent”, and since then people close to him said his arrest had seemed inevitable.
“He and I talked a hundred times about the fact that he would be arrested — if not today then tomorrow,” said Skobov’s friend Yuly Rybakov, a human rights activist and former deputy in the State Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament. “People have been imprisoned for much less.”
Skobov’s 90-year-old mother, whom he lives with and cares for, said she had been having nightmares about his arrest for months before it happened, and Rybakov recalled that Skobov himself said he “didn’t understand” why the authorities hadn’t come for him yet.
Skobov’s children, who moved abroad long before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, urged their father to flee the country when they saw him in Istanbul in early March. Other friends have also tried to convince him to leave and avoid arrest, citing his many health issues, including severe diabetes, hepatitis C, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and near blindness.
But, Rybakov said, Skobov was resolute, telling him that he “wanted to be part of his own judicial process” when he was inevitably arrested.
Rybakov said that Skobov had been “driven to despair” by what had been happening in Russia in recent years and “felt that someone had to be radical”.
Another friend, Mikhail Sedunov, said that trying to convince Skobov to change his course of action was like “grabbing the wing of a plane that was already accelerating down the runway”.
On 2 April, masked policemen arrived at Rybakov’s flat, where Skobov had been staying. When Rybakov left to take the dog for a walk, the police reportedly entered the property, threw Skobov to the ground, twisted his arms and handcuffed him. According to Rybakov, Skobov “defiantly” refused to take either warm clothing, his diabetes medication, or his glasses with him, intending these gestures as an “act of protest”.
Skobov’s wife, Olga Shcheglova, managed to buy him replacement medication and glasses, which she brought to him ahead of his interrogation by Russia’s Investigative Committee. But Skobov refused to accept them — a reaction Shcheglova said she had “expected” from her husband.
Resistance to the authorities and a fight for justice had defined Skobov’s life for more than four decades. His first foray into political activism was in 1976, when he and other university students in St. Petersburg scattered leaflets calling for the “establishment of true humane socialism” and the “overthrow of the tyranny of officials” ahead of a meeting of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The students were expelled from university and brought before a court, and some, like Skobov, were then sentenced to compulsory treatment in psychiatric hospitals because, according to Rybakov, it was believed that “only crazy people could dislike the Soviet regime”.
Skobov’s radical spirit remained unquelled when he was finally released from hospital in 1981, however, and he immediately joined the Free Inter-Professional Association of Workers, a dissident group that led the first attempt to create an independent trade union in the USSR. In 1982 he was arrested for his involvement with the group and sent back to hospital, where he spent another three years.
In the early 1990s Skobov taught history at a secondary school for gifted students, writing and publishing his own award-winning textbooks. But later in the decade political activism again became the focal point of his life as he took part in protests against the Chechen wars.
When Russia annexed Ukraine in 2014, Skobov took to social media to rail against the regime, openly supporting Ukraine and condemning Russia’s military action. The same year, two unidentified men armed with knives attacked him outside his home in what his friends and family members say they are sure was retribution for his criticism of the regime.
Even this did not deter him, however, and his friends said his statements opposing Putin’s rule became “even sharper, more unrestrained, and more radical”. Speaking last year at the Free Russia Forum, an opposition conference held biannually in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius, Skobov condemned the regime more harshly than any of the other attendees, despite being one of the only participants still living in Russia.
Another friend of Skobov, Nikita Yeliseyev, said he doubted Skobov would survive the 7.5-year sentence that he is almost certain to receive.
“He is an old man,” Yeliseyev said. “And he has a number of very serious illnesses.”
Sedunov said all of Skobov’s actions stemmed from a desire to “struggle, as vigorously as possible, against the obvious evil represented by the current Russian government”.
“This is the way he was brought up: he wanted to fight evil any way he could. And this was the only way left,” Sedunov said.
Aleksandr Skobov has been a thorn in the side of authoritarian governments for more than four decades, from the Soviet era to President Vladimir Putin’s long rule. And now, in pretrial detention in St. Petersburg and facing prison, he is in no mood for compromise.
“On principle I refuse to comply with fascist laws,” he told RFE/RL late last month, shortly after the Russian government designated him a “foreign agent” on March 22. “I don’t intend to get into debates with the government. I will not try to prove my innocence. I will not label my writings, and I will not write any financial reports for them.”
“A criminal case could be launched at any moment,” he concluded.
He was right: On April 3, the 66-year-old was arrested and charged with “justifying terrorism” for a social-media post about the Ukrainian attacks that damaged the Crimea Bridge that links Russia with the Ukrainian region of Crimea, which Moscow occupied in 2014. The following day, a St. Petersburg court ordered Skobov held in pretrial detention for at least two months.
“If you take any of my articles or YouTube videos, you can find a whole bouquet of possible charges,” Skobov said in the March 31 interview. “Discrediting the army. Inciting hatred and enmity. Justifying terrorism. The rehabilitation of Nazism. I directly equate the actions of the Stalin regime with those of Hitler’s during World War II.”
Another reason for Skobov’s prosecution, his supporters believe, is his leadership role in the Free Russia Forum, a group of mostly exiled opposition figures founded by former world chess champion Garry Kasparov and activist Ivan Tyutrin in 2016 that has been declared “undesirable” in Russia. If he is charged with participation in an “undesirable” organization, he could face up to six years in prison.
“I am a member of the forum’s council, and I regularly participate in its broadcasts,” Skobov told RFE/RL. “I help write its statements and official pronouncements. Several of them I have written myself. I am actively involved, and I do not intend to stop.”
Skobov said he was drawn to the group because “it was the only opposition organization that categorically rejected the idea of the peaceful transformation of Putin’s dictatorship toward democracy using the procedure established by that dictatorship.”
“It was the only organization that, beginning with the annexation of Crimea, unambiguously stood by Ukraine as a victim of aggression,” he added. “We try to help the Ukrainian Army and the Russian volunteer formations that are fighting with them.”
Writing on Facebook after Skobov’s arrest, writer and critic Mikhail Berg said Skobov suffered from “an unbearable fear of being afraid.”
“And that is why he chooses the most painful forms of criticizing the authorities,” he wrote. “He shouts even though the authorities have long been destroying people for whispering or even for just opening their mouths.”
Parallel Lives
Born in Leningrad, as St. Petersburg was called then, in 1957, Skobov participated in his first anti-government protest when he was 19. He and other members of an underground organization threw about 100 flyers calling for “humanistic socialism” from the roof of a downtown building on the eve of the 25th congress of the Soviet Communist Party. Several of the protesters were kicked out of their universities, but Skobov — a first-year history student at Leningrad State University — got off with a disciplinary meeting of the Komsomol youth group.
In October 1978, he was arrested for publishing an underground, anti-government magazine called Perspectives. He spent half a year in a KGB prison before being sentenced to forced psychiatric treatment.
“In the late 1970s and early 1980s, political prisoners in Soviet psychiatric hospitals were rarely forcibly medicated, although there were such cases, of course,” Skobov said. “But I was treated more or less OK. Most of the doctors that I encountered tried to avoid playing the role of executioners or stranglers.”
He spent three years in confinement.
In 1982, he was again sentenced to psychiatric treatment, this time for a samizdat article he wrote defending Chile’s former socialist president, Salvador Allende, who died in unclear circumstances in 1973, and criticizing the rightist dictator General Augusto Pinochet. That article was deemed “anti-Soviet propaganda.”
This time, Skobov spent five years in the hospital before being released in the summer of 1987 during the initial phase of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s liberalization campaign.
In many ways, Skobov and Putin led parallel lives during this period. Putin was born in Leningrad almost exactly five years before Skobov and studied at Leningrad State University just before him. But as Skobov became drawn into a life of opposition to authoritarianism, Putin joined the KGB secret police.
The president’s official biography insists that Putin always worked for the KGB’s First Directorate, which carried out counterintelligence operations. However, rumors have persisted for years that he worked for some time in the Fifth Directorate, which was responsible for suppressing internal dissent and prosecuting political dissidents. At the time, a senior figure in that department was Viktor Cherkesov, a longtime member of Putin’s inner circle who served as his deputy when he headed the Federal Security Service — the KGB successor organization — in the 1990s and who died in 2022.
In 2022, journalist and researcher Konstantin Sholmov published a photograph of a KGB archival document from 1976 that he said was on display at the Political History Museum in St. Petersburg. The document, a protocol of a search of the residence of Leningrad artist and dissident Oleg Volkov, named “Lieutenant Putin” as one of the officers carrying out the search.
In 2013, a series of photographs emerged showing a 1989 Leningrad protest during which KGB operatives roughly detained dissident Valery Terekhov. One of the men in the photograph resembles Putin. The Kremlin later denied that the man was Putin, saying the future president had already been sent to East Germany by 1989.
Prominent human rights activist Aleksandr Cherkasov of the banned rights group Memorial told the news outlet Agentstvo earlier this month that he believes Putin was involved in the investigation of Skobov. He said Skobov had told him Putin staked out his Leningrad apartment in November 1982 when prominent dissidents gathered to celebrate Skobov’s birthday.
Despite the danger growing around him after he was designated a “foreign agent,” Skobov refused to consider emigration.
“I’m not going to quit,” he said.
“Today anyone in Russia who disagrees with Putin’s Nazi regime is taking a risk,” he added, “even if he doesn’t really stick out or act publicly. Since the regime has already made the transformation from ‘hybrid totalitarian’ to totalitarian, it demands not just silence from its loyal subjects, but active participation. And even avoidance can be dangerous.”
Opposition leader Aleksei Navalny’s suspicious death in prison on February 16 was “to be expected,” Skobov said.
“Navalny constantly laughed in [Putin’s] face, and a dictator cannot stand that,” he added. “Unfortunately, I don’t think it will be the last death of a political prisoner in Putin’s Russia.”
Dark Matter contained a re-recorded version of his Emmy award-winning song ‘It’s a Jungle Out There’, which was used as the theme song for the television series Monk. The album tells countless humorous tales. However, one of its most memorable cuts is the track ‘Putin’, which sees Newman sarcastically attack the Russian president.
The song pokes fun at Putin’s efforts to appear macho, with Newman singing, “And when he takes his shirt off/ He drives the ladies crazy/ When he takes his shirt off/ Makes me wanna be a lady.” A chorus of ‘Putin Girls’ chime in to sing, “Putin if you put it/ Will you put it next to me?”
To accompany the scathing lyrics, Newman uses chaotic instrumentation that sounds like the perfect theme for a cartoon villain. The musician explained that he wrote the song when “all those pictures were appearing of him with his shirt off, and I couldn’t understand why. What did he want?”
He continued: “I think it was just personal vanity of some kind, like he wanted to be Tom Cruise. It wasn’t enough to be the richest and most powerful. He wanted to be the most handsome and a superhero, throwing young people around and wrestling.”
Newman claims that he originally wrote a much harsher version but had to tone down the insults. In 2018, the song won the singer his seventh Grammy, this time for the relatively obscure category of Best Arrangement, Instrumentals and Vocals.
Source: Aimee Ferrier, “Remembering Randy Newman’s satirical warning about Vladimir Putin,” Far Out, 14 October 2022
“RUSSIAN PROPAGANDA HAS MADE ITS WAY into the United States, unfortunately, and it’s infected a good chunk of my party’s base.” That acknowledgement from Michael McCaul, Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, was echoed a few days later by Michael Turner, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee. “It is absolutely true, we see, directly coming from Russia, attempts to mask communications that are anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia messages, some of which we even hear being uttered on the House floor.” Among the falsehoods that GOP members of Congress are repeating is the notion that the Ukraine war is actually a battle between NATO and Russia. “Of course it is not,” Turner told CNN. “To the extent that this propaganda takes hold, it makes it more difficult for us to really see this as an authoritarian versus democracy battle.”
What makes it even more difficult to see reality plainly is the presence in the GOP of dunderheads like Sen. Tommy Tuberville, who gushed to an Alabama radio show that “Putin is on top of his game,” while scorning U.S. media accounts of Russian behavior. “The propaganda media machine over here, they sell anything they possibly can to go after Russia.” Tuberville may be the dimmest Putin booster on the Hill, but he is hardly lonely.
It has been two months since the Senate passed, in a 70–29 vote (including 22 Republican yes votes), a $95 billion foreign aid bill that included $60 billion for Ukraine. The Republican-controlled House, by contrast, has been paralyzed. Stories leak out that Speaker Mike Johnson, apparently influenced by high-level briefings he’s received since capturing the gavel, has changed his posture and wants to approve the aid. But Johnson leads, or is at least is the titular congressional chief, of a party that contains a passionate “Putinwing,” and so he dithers. This week, Volodomyr Zelensky has warned that Ukraine will lose the war if the aid is not approved. Yet Johnson is heading not to Kyiv but to Mar-a-Lago.
Pause on that for a moment. The Republican party is now poised to let a brave, democratic ally be defeated by the power that the last GOP presidential nominee save one called “without question, our number one greatest geopolitical foe.” One member of Congress has sworn to introduce a resolution to vacate the speaker’s chair if Johnson puts aid for Ukraine on the floor. And the entertainment wing of conservatism—most egregiously Tucker Carlson—has gone into full truckling mode toward the ex-KGB colonel in the Kremlin.
It’s worth exploring how the Republican party, the party of “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” became the party that now credulously traffics in blatant Russian disinformation while it flirts with betraying an important ally—along with all of its principles.
To some degree, people’s foreign policy inclinations are reflections of their domestic views. During the later years of the Cold War, large numbers of liberals and Democrats were more sympathetic to leftist regimes like Cuba (see Bernie Sanders) and Nicaragua (see Michael Harrington) than were conservatives and Republicans. I wrote a book about liberal softness toward left-wing authoritarianism and, though I haven’t yet read it, I gather that Jacob Heilbrunn’s new book does some similar spelunking about conservatives’ tolerance for right-wing dictators. Certainly some conservatives were more inclined than any liberal to go easy on South Africa because it was perceived to be a Cold War ally. On the other hand, Republican administrations did push allies to clean up their act on corruption, democratic elections, and other matters where they could (as for example in El Salvador).
Trump’s particular preferences and ego needs play a starring role in the GOP’s devolution. Cast your minds back to 2016 and the revelation that the Russians had hacked the Democratic National Committee. To rebut this damaging development, Fox News conjurers got busy inventing a tale about CrowdStrike, the company that documented the hack, alleging that the servers had been mysteriously moved to Ukraine so that the FBI could not examine them. In his infamous phone call with Zelensky, Trump fished out this debunked nugget and asked Ukraine’s president, who was then already fighting Russia in the Donbas, to do him a favor before he released the weapons Congress had approved:
I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike. . . . I guess you have one of your wealthy people. . . . The server, they say, Ukraine has it. I would like to have the attorney general call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it.
This was bonkers. As the Mueller report made clear, the FBI did get all the data regarding the DNC hack. There was never a shred of evidence that the servers were moved to Ukraine, and in any case physical control of the servers was unnecessary. But what was Zelensky supposed to say? He promised to look into it just as a courtier to a mad king will say, “Yes, your majesty, we will look into why your slippers are turning into marshmallows when the sun goes down.”
As Fiona Hill told me, Tom Bossert, Trump’s first homeland security advisor, tried “a million times” to disabuse Trump of this Ukraine myth, as did CIA Director Gina Haspel, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Chris Krebs, and many others, to no avail. It was, Hill notes, “a too-convenient fiction.”
Because Trump regarded any implication that he had received assistance from Russia as impugning his victory, he latched onto the idea (perhaps whispered by Putin himself in one of their many private conversations) that, yes, there had indeed been foreign interference in the election, but it was Ukraine boosting Hillary Clinton, not Russia aiding Trump. Now, it’s true that Ukraine’s friends reached out to Clinton, but why wouldn’t they? Trump’s campaign manager was Paul Manafort, a paid agent of Viktor Yanukovych, the ousted pro-Putin Ukrainian leader.
Trump nurtured his misplaced grudge for years. Recall that when Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Trump’s initial response was that it was a “genius” move.
I went in yesterday and there was a television screen, and I said, “This is genius.” Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine—of Ukraine—Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful. He used the word “independent” and “we’re gonna go out and we’re gonna go in and we’re gonna help keep peace.” You gotta say that’s pretty savvy.
A non-sociopath would say it was raw aggression of the worst kind. A normal Republican of the pre-Trump mold would have been outraged at the attempted rape of a peaceful, democratic neighbor.
Most Republican officeholders are not sociopaths, but they take their marching orders from one and have adjusted their consciences accordingly. The talking point J.D. Vance and his ilk favor is that they cannot be concerned about Ukraine’s border when our southern border is also being invaded. Of course it’s absurd to compare immigrants looking for work or safety to tanks, bombs, and missiles, but that’s what passes for Republican reasoning these days. In any case, it was revealed to be hollow when Biden and the Democrats offered an extremely strict border bill to sweeten aid for Ukraine, and the GOP turned it down flat.
Russia’s fingerprints are all over the Republicans’ failed attempt to impeach (in all senses of the word) Joe Biden. Their star witness, Alexander Smirnov—who alleged that Hunter and Joe Biden had been paid $5 million in bribes by Burisma—was indicted in February for making false statements. High-ranking Russians appear to be his sources.
Whether the subject is Ukraine, Biden’s so-called corruption, or NATO, Putin seems to have pulled off the most successful foreign influence operation in American history. If Trump were being blackmailed by Putin it’s hard to imagine how he would behave any differently. And though it started with Trump, it has not ended there. Putin now wields more power over the GOP than anyone other than Trump. GOP propagandists indulge fictions that even many Russians can see through: Ukraine is governed by Nazis; Russia is a religious, Christian nation; Russia is fighting “wokeness.”
Republicans are not so much isolationist as pro-authoritarian. They’ve made Hungary’s Viktor Orbán a pinup and they mouth Russian disinformation without shame. Putin must be pinching himself.
Putin recommends reviving ‘Come On, Girls!’ contest, following Uralvagonzavod’s example
Following his visit to the Sverdlovsk and Chelyabinsk regions, President Vladimir Putin instructed regional heads to explore the initiative.
This isn’t the winner of the Come On, Girls! contest in Nizhny Tagil, but a stock image that Rabota.ru figured was good enough.
The list of the head of state’s mandates includes holding corporate Come On, Girls! contests, as is already being done at Uralvagonzavod in Nizhny Tagil, where Putin met with the event’s winner.
Top officials have until November to submit a report detailing how they have implemented the mandate.
Come On, Girls! was a televised Soviet competition that aired from 1970 to 1987. Members of particular professions competed both for the title of best specialist and in creative contests.
During the same visit to Uralvagonzavod, it was suggested to Putin that excursions by schoolchildren to industrial enterprises be made mandatory. For the time being, authorities are drafting labor education lessons for pupils modeled on the Soviet system.
The trailer to A Shaman’s Tale (Beata Bashkirova & Mikhail Bashkirov, 2024). Thanks to Pavel Sulyandziga for the heads-up
A Shaman’s Tale
A modern-day shaman sets out across Siberia to Moscow on a protest march and is gradually joined by others. How will the Russian authorities react?
Alexander Gabyshev, a shaman from Yakutia in the Russian Far East, has a revelation: God has chosen him to be a crusader, whose role is to exorcise a demon – Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin – from the Kremlin. He’s willing to sacrifice his life to fulfil this task, which will lead to a new and bright future for Russia. Alexander’s walking pilgrimage captures the attention of many people as well as the police. He discusses his ambitious plan with passers-by in remote parts of Siberia and with lorry drivers travelling on the endless roads. His 8,000 km journey offers a mosaic of current pro- and anti-Putin opinions, and highlights the social instability in both the eastern and the western parts of Russia.
Five years ago, in the spring of 2019, Alexander Gabyshev, who calls himself a warrior shaman, set out on foot from Yakutsk to Moscow. When he arrived in the Russian capital, he wanted to perform a ritual to exorcise Vladimir Putin from the Kremlin. Along the way he was joined by kindred spirits, and he held numerous protest rallies.
The shaman’s trek was cut short: Gabyshev was detained on the border of Buryatia and the Irkutsk Region and charged with “calling for extremism.” In October 2021, a court ordered him to undergo compulsory treatment at a special psychiatric hospital.
The Memorial Human Rights Centre placed Gabyshev on its list of political prisoners, and Amnesty International recognized him as a prisoner of conscience. Despite an international campaign in his defense, the shaman remains in a psychiatric hospital.
The documentary film A Shaman’s Tale details Alexander Gabyshev’s plight. It was made by documentary filmmaker Beata Bashkirova (née Bubenets) and her husband, playwright Mikhail Bashkirov, who live in France. Bashkirova joined Alexander Gabyshev on his trek, while Mikhail Bashkirov wrote a play about the shaman. Performances of the play at Moscow’s Theatre.doc were disrupted by Putinists. This was not Bashkirova’s first clash with ultra-patriots: in 2017, screenings of her documentary film Flight of the Bullet, about the soldiers of the Ukrainian Aidar Battalion, fighting in Donbas, were disrupted in the same way.
This conversation with Beata Bashkirova for the Radio Svoboda programme “Cultural Diary” was recorded after the film’s premiere at the One World International Film Festival in Prague.
Beata, how did you meet the shaman Gabyshev?
I first heard about the shaman in March 2019, when he had just set off on his journey. At that time he was not yet known throughout Russia, but he was beginning to gain popularity in Yakutia and in the Amur Region. He initially gained popularity thanks to truckers: they shot videos [of him] and posted them on their own network, then on YouTube. When I went to Yakutia in the spring to look for an idea for a film, my friends sent me videos of the shaman, recommending him as my future protagonist. But I decided to film him only in June. That was when Vlad Ketkovich, an independent documentary film producer, contacted me. He had made many political films and not only offered to be my producer, but also contributed his own money to my project. We dreamed of making a road movie about the shaman, of filming for two years on the roads of Russia. It was a beautiful idea, which unfortunately didn’t come to pass, because it ended up being film about the political crackdown. In recent years, nearly all films from Russia are about that.
Did you become friends with the shaman?
Yes, we developed a very good relationship. When we were filming in Yakutsk, we were probably among the people closest to him.
He didn’t mind you filming?
He welcomed us filming: he wanted more people and different people to talk about him, to spread his ideas. He was accompanied by a lot of bloggers, and journalists were heavily filming him. Although in the beginning he didn’t let us in so easily. The distrust was not on his part, but on the part of his entourage. They were wary of us, but later everything was fine.
Gabyshev and his squad marching toward Moscow
The shaman is certainly a charming man. But you can’t say that about some of the people in his entourage, judging by your film. Colourful personalities, I guess, always attract strange people, to put it mildly.
Yes, he had a very motley entourage, and he realised it himself. He gave everyone who joined him fabulous nicknames. He called his first two companions Raven and Angel. One was a good, happy man of the new world (the shaman divided the world into the new world and the old world), while other was a man of the old world, a dark character; he had been in prison before, he was this maverick. Raven had many conflicts with other members of the squad. The shaman told me often that yes, there are very different people walking with me, but this is Russia, you have to accept them as they are. Yes, they are different, everyone has their own peculiarities, not all of them are the nicest people in the world, but at the same time they are not the most terrible evil, which they all oppose.
In the film, Gabyshev tries to explain to a Japanese journalist how he became a shaman. Why did he decide to go to Moscow and exorcise the demon Putin?
The poster for the film “A Shaman’s Tale”
He studied at university and served in the army: he had an ordinary life. Then he got married, but his wife was quite ill and died, and that was a huge blow to him. For some time he went to live in the woods: he lived there for several years. Naturally, he knew who Putin was, but he was not interested in politics. As he says, at some point he heard the voice of God telling him that Putin was a demon and you should go and exorcise him from the Kremlin. It was a very clear thought, a realisation that this was his mission. It didn’t come to him in 2019, when he set out, but much earlier. He started preparing years before his trek, but he prepared in secret; he didn’t tell anyone that he had this mission. He practised martial arts — not to fight, but for the spiritual benefits.
And for quite a long time he travelled unhindered, and the authorities didn’t immediately realise what was happening?
Yes, in fact, not many people took it seriously at first: everyone thought it was a joke. But then people started joining him. A few months later, when we were walking with him, there were thirty people with him, and new people were joining every day. His squad grew quite quickly. Two theories as to why he was stopped. The first is that after a few months there would have been hundreds of people walking with him, and that would have been a political threat. But the second theory is that the authorities were afraid of his mystical power. The closer he got to Moscow, the worse things went for Putin, the more protests kicked off. The protests in Belarus began around the same time. Putin was allegedly having health problems — again this is a matter of rumor. So, perhaps, the shaman has now been exiled to the farthest point from Moscow, not even to Yakutsk, but even farther away. That is, as he got closer to Moscow, the Russian authorities lost their grip on things.
Yes, they say there is a lot of superstition in the Kremlin. And in your film, the lawyer Pryanishnikov also explains that the authorities were afraid of the shaman’s mystical power.
That the authorities are superstitious is, of course, a hypothesis — Putin doesn’t perform rituals for us, and there are a lot of myths around this. It is known that one of his closest associates, Shoigu, is a Tuvan and he practices shamanism. So it is quite possible. My Yakutian acquaintances often said that an acquaintance of their acquaintance performed rituals for Putin himself. But, of course, this is all very secret and impossible to prove. I would not claim that Putin performs shamanistic rituals.
Did you have the feeling that Gabyshev actually has supernatural powers?
The first time was in 2020. When the year 2020 came, the shaman kept saying: guys, new times have come, everything will be different now, this year the worldview of all people on the planet will change. And in 2020 there was a pandemic, and mankind did indeed transit into another reality. His words proved prophetic.
Filmmaker Beata Bashkirova
People who met Rasputin spoke of his incredible magnetism. They say the same thing about many prophets and magicians. Did you feel something similar when you conversed with Gabyshev?
He is very kind and very open, and there were people in his entourage who believed in his mystical power. I am a rather skeptical person in this sense, but still I noticed a good energy emanating from him.
Did people in his entourage regard him as a prophet, as a saint?
Yes, of course, there were people in his entourage who believed primarily in his mystical power. The Moscow crowd, the opposition-minded liberal intelligentsia, basically sympathised with him, but regarded him ironically. If we’re not talking about Moscow, but about the rest of Russia, I had impression that people believed in his mystical power.
When you presented the film in Prague, you compared Gabyshev with Navalny. This is a quite unusual comparison: in Moscow, few people would agree that these people are cut from the same cloth. Why do you think it is possible to put their names in the same sentence?
At the time, it had been forty days since Navalny’s death. Navalny in his last years seemed like a loner who was fighting the system. Our protagonist is also a loner who fights the system. In this way, I think, they are similar.
Were you present at the moment when his journey to Moscow was finally thwarted?
That was 19 September, and I was not with him on that day. Eyewitnesses say it happened at night, and very quickly. For the first few days nobody knew where he was; there were various rumours. Then it transpired that he was in Yakutsk. We met almost immediately, and he was in pretty good spirits despite what had happened.
Why did they decide to permanently isolate him?
He was going to set out again in the spring. Members of his squad had come to see him. I don’t know whether that’s why they decided to shut him down permanently.
Maybe it was the New York Times article, the attention from the West?
Maybe, but that was in September. The first time he was detained, in the spring of 2020, he was taken away from his home, but then he was released. They finally decided to close him down in early 2021.
The Shaman in the Theatre.doc production of A Shaman’s Tale
In the film, you show excerpts from a performance about the shaman at Theatre.doc. Did your husband direct this production based on his own play?
Yes, my husband wrote the play, and he and I staged it together. It was an experimental work. We decided to make a puppet show, a fairy tale, because the shaman conceived his own story as a fairy tale: he gave fairy tale names to all the folks who accompanied him, and he gave Putin a fairy tale name. That was the reason for our fairy-tale production, which did not last long, because on opening day pro-Kremlin provocateurs came and tried to disrupt it. Every time [the play was performed], they put obstacles in the way: they would come in a big group, stage a performance in front of the theatre, call the police, and start shouting from the auditorium during the performance. The owner of the premises where Theatre.doc was located became afraid that he would face consequences nd broke his lease with the theatre. It became apparent that we wouldn’t be able to perform the play.
Beata, when did you leave Russia?
We left in late March 2022.
And it was only in France that you decided to edit the film?
The film had been in post-production while we were still in Russia. The shaman predicted that he had to reach Putin in 2021, because otherwise there would be a catastrophe not only for Russia but for the whole world. Principal filming wrapped in early 2020, but we realised we had to wait. We were editing the film and discussing it with the producers. The producers suggested releasing the film in 2020, when it became clear that the shaman would not be allowed to go [to Moscow], but we understood that the story was not finished: the drama had already been defined by the shaman himself, and we would have to wait until 2022. The events that followed affected how I saw the story; I started to look at it differently, if we’re talking about the mystical aspects. The shaman had been right: he was talking about war. He was saying that there would be a physical war, not a spiritual war, if he wasn’t allowed to reach Moscow. It’s amazing that somehow he knew all the dates.
Did he have a premonition there would be a war in 2022?
He spoke about the fact that mankind, Russia had two ways to evolve. The first way was the good way, the happy way. If he were allowed to reach the Kremlin, Putin would simply resign peacefully, the regime in Russia would change, and then people would move to a new level. If they didn’t let him [reach the Kremlin], a dark path would ensue, the path of warriors, and that meant war. He didn’t say that there would be a war between Russia and Ukraine. He said that there would be a war and only by military means would it be possible to overthrow Putin.
He’s been transferred from one hospital to another several times. What is happening to him now?
He is in a psycho-neurological clinic in the Maritime Territory (Primorsky Krai). Since this system has several levels, the lawyer is trying to ensure he is transferred to Yakutsk, where he can be released through the court. A legal fight is now underway that is aimed at achieving his release step by step.
At first they held him in a high-security facility and tried to “treat” him with haloperidol?
At the very beginning, in Yakutsk, he was given harsh drugs that did have a negative effect on him. Things in the Maritime Territory are now easier: they give him medication, but it’s not so heavy.
You wrote that he knew about the film’s premiere in Prague and conveyed his greetings to the audience. Are you able to correspond with him?
Yes, we communicate through intermediaries; the lawyer Pryanishnikov has the most access to him. His friends talk to him on the telephone from time to time: he is able to call once a week.
What’s his condition? Haloperidol and other serious drugs can be very harmful to a person’s health.
Fortunately, they are not injecting him with these drugs now. He always tries to be in a cheerful mood. You can write him a letter or send him a card. He is very much encouraged by the thought that people remember him. He is, of course, happy that the film has come out because it is a continuation of the message he preached. His emotional state is also very much affected by whether his mission can be completed.
For several years he had many supporters who were will to march with him to Moscow. Did this circle disperse or has the core group remained intact?
We can say that the core has been preserved. For example, Viktor Yegorov (aka Father Frost), who makes videos (you can watch them on YouTube), is constantly in touch with him. Other Yakutian friends of his also continue to support him. There were those who walked with him, and those he met on the road, but there was also the rest of Russia, which did not walk with him, but followed him via YouTube. People still even ask me about him, and so I feel like there are a lot of people who remember him and support him.
“Father Frost from the Shaman’s Squad Appeals to Vladimir Putin,” 25 September 2019 (in Russian; no subtitles)
Did you ever suspect that he might be mentally unwell?
No, never. He’s a fairly well-educated man, he has a broad outlook, and he is quite self-deprecating. I’m not a psychiatrist, but I haven’t detected any mental abnormalities in him. I much more often encounter people on the streets who are crazier looking than he is.
It is quite difficult to make films on Russian topics nowadays: Russian directors are viewed with suspicion in Europe because they are seen as representatives of an aggressor state. Was it complicated for you to make this film?
Yes, it was indeed difficult to make the film because of the tendency towards boycotting. I think that this boycott helps Russian propaganda first of all, because the voices of independent, opposition filmmakers are not heard, but the voices of the propagandists, who cannot be influenced by this boycott, are heard. Consequently, propaganda wins out in the information sphere. The boycott of Russian culture works in favour of Russian propaganda, it seems to me.
Will Russian viewers be able to see your film?
We’re in the festivals stage of screening now. The film will later be shown on Current Time, but it’s hard to say when yet. Current Time broadcasts to a Russophone audience, and so one will be able to watch the film on the internet in Russia.
This is not the first time the editors of our local newspaper have “platformed” the lies of the mendacious and violent fascist butcher Vladimir Putin.
1. US warns that Russia will invade Ukraine. General disbelief, daily Russian mockery. (December 3 2021-February 24 2022)
2. Russia invades Ukraine, kills tens of thousands of people, kidnaps tens of thousands of children, commits other ongoing war crimes (February 24 2022-present)
3. Russia blames US for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (March 2022-present)
4. US warns of terror attack in Moscow. Putin denies any risk and mocks the United States. (March 7 and March 19 2024).
5. Terror attack near Moscow, ISIS takes responsibility, Russia meanwhile kills Ukrainian citizens with drones and missiles as it has for more than two years. (today, March 22 2024)
6. Russia’s security apparatus, focused on bringing carnage to Ukraine, has failed in Moscow. Russia’s leaders, focused on demonizing the US, did not protect Russians. What next? Where to direct the blame?
7. It would not be very surprising if the Kremlin blames Ukraine and the United States for terror in Moscow and uses the Moscow attack to justify continuing and future atrocities in Ukraine.
This past Friday, 22 March, a horrifying terrorist attack took place in Crocus City Hall in the outskirts of Moscow. Islamic State plausibly claimed responsibility.
Earlier that day, Russian authorities had designated international LGBT organizations as “terrorist.” Also earlier that day, Russia had carried out massive terror attacks on Ukrainian cities. Those actions reveal the enemies Putin has chosen. As the attack on Crocus City Hall demonstrated, his choices have nothing to do with actual threats facing Russians.
Russia and the Islamic State have long been engaged in conflict. Russia has been bombing Syria since 2015. Russia and the Islamic State compete for territory and resources in Africa. Islamic State attacked the Russian embassy in Kabul. This is the relevant context for the attack outside Moscow. The horror at Crocus City Hall obviously has nothing to do with gays or Ukrainians or any other of Putin’s enemies of choice.
Putin had publicly dismissed the real threat. The United States had warned Russia of a coming attack by Islamic State. The United States operates under a “duty to warn,” which means that summaries of intelligence about coming terrorist attacks are passed on, even to states considered hostile, including (to take recent examples) Iran and Russia. Putin chose to mock the United States in public three days before the attack.
People reasonably ask how a terror attack could succeed in Russia, which is a police state. Regimes like Russia’s devote their energy to defining and combating fake threats. When a real threat emerges, the fake threats must be emphasized. Predictably (and as predicted), Putin sought to blame Ukraine for Crocus City Hall.
What if Russians realize that Putin’s designations of threats are self-serving and dangerous? What if they understand that there are real threats to Russians ignored by Putin? He has devoted the security apparatus to the project [of] destroying the Ukrainian nation and state. What if Putin’s obsession with Ukraine has only made life worse for Russians, including by opening [t]he way to actors who are in fact threats to Russian life, such as Islamic State?
These are the questions Putin must head off. It is not easy, however, to blame Ukraine for Islamic State terrorism. Putin’s first media appearance, nearly a day after the attack, was far from convincing. The specifics he offered were nonsensical. He claimed that the suspects in the terrorist act were heading for an open “window” on the Russian-Ukrainian border.
The term “window” is KGB jargon for a spot where the border has been cleared for a covert crossing. That the leader of the Russian Federation uses this term in a public address is a reminder of his own career inside the KGB. Yet Putin had obviously not thought this claim through, since a “window” must involve a clear space on both sides of the border. For escaping terrorists, it would be the Russian side that opened the window. By speaking of a “window” Putin indicated that the terrorists had Russian confederates preparing their exit, which he presumably did not mean. It seems that Putin was hastily making things up.
Setting aside the “window” business, though, the whole idea that escaping terrorists would head for Ukraine is daft. Russia has 20,000 miles of border. The Russian-Ukrainian part of it is covered with Russian soldiers and security forces. On the Ukrainian side it is heavily mined. It is a site of active combat. It is the last place an escaping terrorist would choose.
And there is no evidence that this is what happened. Russia claims that it has apprehended suspects in Bryansk, and claimed that this means that they were headed for Ukraine. (Western media have unfortunately repeated this part of the claim.) Regardless of whether anything about these claims is true, Bryansk would suggest flight in the direction of Belarus. Indeed, the first version of the story involved Belarus, before someone had a “better” idea.
In moments of stress, Russian propaganda tries out various ways to spin the story in the direction preferred by the Kremlin. The reputed suspects are being tortured, presumably with the goal of “finding” some connection to Ukraine. The Kremlin has instructed Russian media to emphasize any possible Ukrainian elements in the story. Russian television propaganda published a fake video implicating a Ukrainian official. The idea is to release a junk into the media, including the international media, and to see if anything works.
Amidst the flotsam and jetsam are those who spread Russian propaganda abroad, who try out versions more extreme than Putin’s. Putin does not directly deny that Islamic State was the perpetrator — he simply wants to direct attention towards Ukraine. But actors outside Russia can simply claim that Ukraine was at fault. Such actors push the discussion further than the Kremlin, and thereby allow Russia to test what might work abroad.
As a result, we have a bizarre discussion that leads to a harmful place. Islamic State claims responsibility for Crocus City Hall. The Islamic State publishes dreadful video footage. Russia cannot directly deny this but seeks help anyway in somehow pushing Ukraine into the picture. Those providing that help open a “debate” by denying that Islamic State was involved and making far more direct claims about Ukraine than the Kremlin does. (This brazen lying leads others to share [a] Islamic State perpetration video (don’t share it; don’t watch it). So the senseless “debate” helps Islamic State, since the reason it publishes perpetration videos is to recruit future killers.)
Meanwhile, Russia’s senseless war of aggression against Ukraine continues. In its occupied zones, Russia continues to kidnap Ukrainian children for assimilation and continues to torture Ukrainians and place them in concentration camps. It continues to send glider bombs, drones, cruise missiles and rockets at Ukrainian towns and cities.
On the same day as the attack at Crocus City Hall, Russia carried out its single largest attack to date on the Ukrainian energy grid, leaving more than a million people without power. Among other things it fired eight cruise missiles at the largest Ukrainian dam. Russia attacked the city of Zaporizhzhia (the consequences are in the four photos) and other cities throughout Ukraine.
On Friday Russia fired, in all, eighty-eight missiles and sixty-three explosive drones into Ukraine. And that represents just a single day (if an unusually bad one) of a Russian war of terror in Ukraine that has gone on for more than two years.
Putin is responsible for his mistakes inside Russia. And he is at fault for the war in Ukraine. He is trying to turn two wrongs into a right: into his own right to define reality however he likes, which means his right to kill whomever he chooses.
It is obvious that the terrorist attack at Crocus City Hall on the evening of 22 March 2024, during which 133 people were killed, according to the official count, has clear goals and objectives. A week before Putin’s “election” I wrote that, after receiving a “mandate from the people,” Putin would unleash a mass terror campaign. But for this, of course, he needs a decent and obvious excuse. The exemplary terrorist attack in broad daylight in politically unreliable Moscow is intended to convince society that “decisive action” is what it needs now.
Why would Putin do that? It’s simple logic. Come hell or high water he has to win the war he has unleashed. This is obvious, for it is a matter of self-preservation. If Putin does not win, he is a weakling, a lowlife, and at the same time the person to blame for hundreds of thousands of deaths not only of Ukrainians, but also of Russians. It is clear that he will not last long in this state. Not to mention such a trifle as his sick, wounded ego, repeatedly insulted by Ukraine. But victory would wipe everything out, because victors are not judged, Putin is convinced, taking his cue from his idol Catherine the Great.
So, Putin has to have victory at any cost. But two things have long prevented him from achieving it: 1) his numerous domestic enemies, and 2) a lack of “manpower” in the ranks of the army.
Putin intends to solve problem number one by means of a mass terror campaign against malcontents, especially since he has long been urged to do so by a well-rehearsed chorus of heralds, from Dmitry Medvedev and General Gurulyov to a host of other, lower-ranking epigones of contemporary Russian fascism. Guessing the mood of their Führer, they demand that, at very least, he restore the death penalty; at most, that he carry out “total executions of the terrorists and crackdowns against their families” (per the latest quotable quote from Medvedev).
We can only guess at this point whether Putin’s forthcoming terror will exceed Stalin’s body count or whether the current ruler in the Kremlin will limit himself to “merely” increasing the number of prison sentences meted out to dissidents by a factor of two and carrying out demonstrative executions of dozens or hundreds of his fellow citizens. But there is no doubt that a serious expansion of such tactics is on his agenda.
Putin will solve problem number two through a mass mobilization. This is nothing new either. Piling hundreds of thousands of soldiers into the enemy’s trenches is a time-honored tactic practiced by both the Russian and Soviet military, and, as Putin has seen, it has worked well in the “meat assaults” on Avdiivka, Bakhmut, Severodonetsk, and many other small Ukrainian towns. But these towns are nothing compared to the million-strong cities of Kharkiv, Dnipro, Zaporizhzhia, and Odesa, not to mention the three-million-strong Kyiv. So there must be massively more cannon fodder. The second problem is directly related to the first.
Combined with large-scale crackdowns, the mobilization is sure to proceed more vigorously this time round.
As a bonus for the Kremlin, this terrorist attack diverts public attention (at least for a while) from such things as Russia’s largest-ever strike on Ukraine, involving a hundred and fifty missiles and drones, which happened just a day before the events at Crocus City Hall.
I’d now like to talk about other explanations of this terrorist attack. Looking through the news related to it, I honestly could not help but marvel at the comments of certain respected colleagues, opposition Russian analysts, who easily took the bait about IS, Islamist terrorists, and the other nonsense that the FSB obligingly leaked to the public in the first hours after the attack through the Russian media and Telegram channels.
To clarify, certain people of “non-Slavic ethnicity” were chosen to directly perpetrate this heinous crime. There are hundreds of thousands of Tajik, Uzbek, and Kyrgyz migrant workers in Russia, EVERY ONE of whom is literally turned inside out by the Russian Interior Ministry upon arriving in Russia, including with regard to their attitudes to radical Islam and similar things. The Russian secret services thus have the broadest selection of perpetrators available for such a terrorist attack.
Let us ask ourselves an elementary question: how could Islamist radicals purchase not only assault rifles and pistols but also the flamethrower with which the terrorists torched the unfortunate audience members at Crocus City Hall without the knowledge and support of Russian “law enforcement”? Is such a thing possible in today’s Russia, and in Moscow to boot? If someone thinks that it is possible, I would simply remind them that when members of Eduard Limonov’s National Bolshevik Party tried to buy weapons somewhere in the Altai Territory back in the 2000s, their plan was instantly exposed. The idea of Tajiks buying assault rifles and flamethrowers in today’s militarized Russia, which is chockablock with surveillance cameras and special services, is a bad joke.
Let me also remind you that the initial semi-official Russian explanation was that the terrorist attack at Crocus City Hall was revenge on Russia for its actions in Syria and Chechnya. Seriously? So, it matters not a whit that the Russian army and its air force have not conducted any active operations in Syria for two years now? If you have not been paying attention during this time, let me just remind you that the Kremlin is certainly not concerned with Syria right now. For the last two years all Russian armed forces, including those operating from military bases in Syria and in Armenia, have been deployed in destroying Ukraine. There have been no large-scale military operations in Chechnya for almost twenty years.
However, as it turned out, all this argumentation was completely superfluous, because my gullible colleagues were made to eat their lunch by Putin himself and his favorite propagandist, Margarita Simonyan. As a shadow of her “boss” (as she herself dubs Putin), Simonyan naturally cannot afford to indulge in improvisations not vetted by him, and especially at such a crucial moment. On her Telegram channel, she bluntly pointed out who, in her (and therefore her boss’s) opinion, had organized and perpetrated the terrorist attack: “It wasn’t IS. It was the Khokhols.”
The “boss” himself, who was supposed to address the nation in the early hours after the terrorist attack, unexpectedly postponed his address by twenty-four hours. The delay appears to have been caused by technical blunders. Obviously, organizing the details of a terrorist attack is not Putin’s pay grade. It is clear that in such cases the relevant special services are simply given the go-ahead from the top brass. They are told to do their job. The operation was entrusted, of course, to professional hatchet men. As usual, they made a miserable mess of it. You need a large-scale terrorist attack? The Russian security services always have two or three dozen Tajiks on hand for this purpose, who can be hastily given their marching orders, paid, and… And that’s basically it. The Tajik passport found in a car allegedly belonging to the terrorists is, of course, a masterpiece. It is clear that no terrorist, as he sets off to carry out an attack, ever forgets to take his passport with him. It was meant as a helpful hint to law enforcers, and also so decent folk would know whom to hate. It is strange that the business card of the already half-forgotten Dmytro Yarosh was not found in the car as well.
But the point is that this special operation were certainly not meant to spoil relations with the Islamic world. Russia’s allies—Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas—might take offense.
In addition to the domestic agenda we mentioned above, the terrorist attack was meant to firmly link the globally condemned villains of IS with Ukraine in world public opinion.
This was why Putin’s speech on the terrorist attack was postponed for almost twenty-four hours. The dictator’s dodgy mind was deciding how to clean up the mess made by his numbskulls and tie up the loose ends. That is, to tie IS (or any other Islamists) to Ukraine. And he probably thinks he has figured out how to do it. As he put it, [the terrorists were trying to escape through] “a window prepared for them on the Ukrainian side of the border.”
All these tricks of Putin’s are painfully obvious to people capable of thinking, but he doesn’t care about that. Moreover, having sensed a change in the mood of his American “partners” (remember the reports that the U.S. has been pressuring Ukraine to stop hitting Russian oil refineries, and the fact that for almost two months no American aid has arrived in Ukraine and it is not known whether it will arrive in the future), Putin makes a high-pitched appeal to all countries to unite against this inhuman evil—that is, against Ukraine + Daesh.
Another very important point from Putin’s speech, indicating that he is paving the way for a mass terror campaign at home, is that he called the shooting of civilians at Crocus City Hall nothing more or less than “a blow to Russia, to our people.” He, his propagandists, and the Russian media have already established the link between Islamist terrorists and Ukraine. The next logical step is to claim that those Russians who support Ukraine are direct and immediate supporters of the terrorists who struck “a blow to Russia, to our people”—that is, that they are enemies of the people.
To be honest, all of this is as monstrous as it is predictable. I will repeat what I have said many times before: as long as Putin is alive and in power, things will get even worse and even scarier.
In the wake of Alexei Navalny’s murder by the Russian fascist state, his message to the Russian people, at the end of the award-winning documentary film Navalny, has been quoted ten thousand times and turned into a meme on social media, to wit:
“If they decide to kill me, we are incredibly strong,” he said, addressing Russian citizens. “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good people to do nothing. So don’t be inactive.”
[…]
“You’re not allowed to give up,” Navalny said in the Daniel Rohr film, adding that “we need to utilize this power to not give up, to remember we are a huge power that is being oppressed by these bad dudes.”
Based on what I’ve witnessed firsthand and secondhand over the past twenty-five years, Navalny’s assessment of Russian society’s incredible strength was wishful thinking on his part. Or, to put it more charitably, it was an incredibly hopeful political project.
To my mind, this Facebook post by longtime TRR contributor Sergey Abashin gets closer to truth about the state of affairs in Russian society, although it’s emphatically not a political project. Nor will it be righteously memed to death by Russia and the world’s well-meaning liberal masses.
Today is the day when [Boris] Nemtsov, a politician who united everyone, was despicably murdered for dissenting. And today is the day when Oleg Orlov, a man of impeccable integrity, was “awarded” two and a half years in prison for dissenting. I hate myself for being powerless. I hate society for being submissive. I hate the authorities for their fascism.
Dmitry Kuzmin in 2019. Photo courtesy of Wikipedia
“It is probably too late for the world, but for the individual man there always remains a chance.” This formulation from Joseph Brodsky’s Nobel Prize speech grew out of the two-hundred-year Russian liberal tradition of tiny, good deeds accomplished in the maw of Leviathan, and over the past two years it has inspired many. Each refugee rescued from the occupied Ukrainian territories via the Rubikus volunteer network is the best evidence of this inspiration. But we of course know that this is not true. There is not always a chance to save the individual. And the death of Alexei Navalny has reminded us of this with irrefutable clarity. Although with no greater clarity than the death a few days earlier of three children, burned alive with their parents at their home in Kharkiv as a result of a Russian rocket strike.
But empathy is only ever individual: in your head you may be on the side of all the Ukrainians and all the political prisoners, but your heart responds to concrete stories, names, and faces. And the media reality of today brings them to us. By following a couple of links, you can look into the eyes of every victim of a rocket attack. You can read the last text messages sent by Ukrainian women to their loved ones killed in this war. You can see the frontline dugout where the phenomenal poet Maksym Kryvtsov, the hope of Ukraine’s rising literary generation, slept alongside his tabby cat—just a few days before they were both killed there.
It’s a little more complicated with the victims on the other side of the frontlines, the ones whom the Kremlin regime is trying to exterminate on its own soil. Navalny’s singularity and even exceptionalism lies in the fact that even in a prison camp literally at the ends of the earth he was still able to turn his story into a gripping, if agonizing, show. Others do not have this opportunity. Where is Nikita Uvarov, the teenager sentenced to five years for talking with his friends about anarchism and for constructing an FSB building in Minecraft and planning to blow it up? Where are Salekh Magamadov and Ismail Isayev, the Chechen youths who dared to start a chat group for atheists and received eight- and six-year prison sentences, respectively? Or this thing that didn’t even get picked up in the news: where is the “transgender LGBT activist and OVD Info volunteer” who sent money to the Ukrainian army? Their name is unknown but their prison sentence, they say, is twelve years. And this is not to mention Belarus, which has practically disappeared from the Russian news, and where one of the main opposition figures, Maria Kolesnikova, is in prison and has not been heard from for over a year. Navalny, who even from the Yamal Peninsula was able to maintain Russian society’s focus and interest, was also doing this for all the above-named individuals and many more unnamed ones, even if it didn’t actually help them at all. Along with Navalny’s murder, the topic of internal crackdowns, the domestic frontline in the Putinist walking dead’s war against all the living, will inevitably exit the field of daily scrutiny. It is entirely likely that this was indeed the motivation for finishing off a reprisal that had lasted for years, and now we can expect an abrupt post-election uptick in those selfsame crackdowns.
In theory, there are people working on the other side. But they are, in typical fashion, incapable of drawing attention to themselves—and they intentionally avoid it. The prosecutors advocating for the prosecution, the judges issuing the sentences, the prison wardens carrying out their dirty work (even if we don’t take straight-up murder into account)—they all have names and faces, but no one worries about them: it seems that only the extremely scrupulous Gabriel Superfin remembered today who is nominally responsible for the tragedy on the Yamal Peninsula. After all, every rocket dropped onto Ukrainian targets was designed by someone, assembled, shipped by someone, and someone pressed the button. You can fantasize about how each of these people will eventually pay for their involvement, but we know from historical experience that at best their grandchildren and great-grandchildren will feel ashamed of them. In the stand-off between individuals and the system it is immaterial who personally represents the system. In the recent story of the rock group Bi-2’s lucky liberation from imprisonment in Thailand it was openly discussed how the Russian consul was pulling the strings in the devilish machinations—but where is this consul, who has seen him? He is probably an inventive paper-pusher—a “first-rate pupil,” in Yevgeny Schwartz’s words—but he is not meant to have any personal qualities.
Safe to say we won’t get anything out of Thailand: this country, so beloved by Russian tourists, where the king can kick his former wife out to a dilapidated shack, having first ordered his minions to destroy the shack’s toilet and to hang a sign over the waste pit saying, “I hope you are as comfortable here as in the palace,” should easily find common cause with a country where the president’s main opponent had his underpants smeared with poison. Yet a month earlier, for example, Russian national Yevgeny Gerasimenko was arrested at Russia’s request in Prague, at Vaclav Havel Airport (you can imagine what Havel would have said about this). It seems that no one had to lobby for this arrest, the system worked on its own: some Russian agency put in a request to Interpol, some international bureaucratic authority received the request, some Czech law enforcement officials carried out their routine duty. What does it matter that Gerasimenko’s application for political asylum was already being reviewed by the authorities of a different EU country: they were looking for him, the former manager of a computer school in Norilsk, a city built on the bones of political prisoners, allegedly for dangerous financial crimes… Wait, and of what crimes had Alexei Navalny been convicted, sent to a village built on the bones of political prisoners, and murdered there? Does no one remember anymore?
A long time ago there was a Soviet film about a group of teenagers who got lost in caves: they ran out of food and water, they lost their sense of time, all the underground passages led them again and again to a bunker built by the Germans in WWII, with the word Tod (“death”) written in huge letters on the wall. When they’re on their last legs one of the boys has the thought that Death, in fact, is fascist, that everything that’s bad for the Nazis has to be good, everything that the Nazis prohibit should be allowed—and he pulls the lever below the word. The wall collapses and they’re set free. And that’s what the story by Magsud Ibrahimbeyov, on which the film is based, is called: “Death to All That’s Good.”
You might think that something which was clear to Soviet teens has become unclear to many people in today’s democratic world: when you are up against an inhuman system, the whole system is inhumane. Its criminal sentences for discrediting the army and its legitimation of Nazism are legal to the same extent as its fines for traffic violations. Its special services aim to root out good and inculcate evil to exactly the same extent as its therapists who have developed “acceptance and responsibility” therapy for Russian LGBT people, or its preschool teachers who dress the little ones in camouflage and line them up to make the letter “Z.” There are no such scales that could determine which of the system’s nodes and mechanisms are more harmful or more guilty: the rabid steamroller that has decided to crush you moves all the more efficiently because its rollers, hydraulics, and electric starter are working in perfect unison.
This unison starts to fall apart when one single individual drops out of the system.
Among the various individual people scattered across the icy wasteland of Russia, for the past six months I’ve been steadily observing two perfectly ordinary schoolchildren (albeit in snatches since it’s not entirely up to me). They have no father, their wingnut mother unfailingly supports the authorities, and every week at their very average school on the outskirts of Moscow they get to listen to the “Important Conversations” lesson—a repulsive propagandist mishmash that make the Brezhnev-era political-information sessions of my youth look like ambrosia. You might think that the fate of these kids in the foreseeable future is predetermined. But here we have an interesting result. The older brother is studying Ukrainian on his own. The young one, who isn’t yet up to that task, is diligently drawing Ukrainian flags in all of his school notebooks. It seems that they haven’t even discussed this with each other.
I don’t know how to convey to these kids that they’re playing with fire. I am not sure it will be possible to save them if it comes to that. But I see in them what Daniil Kharms once promised: “Life has defeated death by means unknown to me.” And if Brodsky was wrong about the possibility of saving the individual person, then maybe he was wrong about the world as well. Although from today’s perspective how the world can be saved is entirely unclear.
A photo showing evidence of the outrageous crime against the Russian state and Russian society committed in Yaroslavl the other day. Fortunately, nearly all mentions of it have been forcibly deleted from local media. However, some traces of the sickening crime are still faintly visible in the photo, alas. Courtesy of Kirill Poputnikov and Yarkub
Russian Law on Offending Authorities Enforced for First Time
Ksenia Boletskaya, Elizaveta Yefimovich and Alexei Nikolsky Vedomosti
April 2, 2019
Over the past several days, officials of Russian federal media watchdog Roskomnadzor and the Federal Security Service (FSB) in Yaroslavl have ordered local media outlets and Telegram channels to delete news about a inscription concerning Putin that was written on the local Interior Ministry headquarters building, 76.ru editor Olga Prokhorova wrote on Facebook and Yarkubwrote on its Telegram channel. Prokhorova claims other Yaroslavl media outlets have been contacted by officials about the report, and many of them have deleted it.
Yarkub reported on the morning of April 1 that police were looking for the person who scrawled “Putin ****r” [presumably, “Putin is a bugger”] on the columns of the local police headquarters building. The inscription consisted of exactly two words, so one could not conclude definitively that it was directed at the Russian president, who has the same surname. 76.ru did not quote the graffiti even in partially concealed form, but both media outlets published photographs of it. The second word in the inscription [i.e., “bugger”] was blanked out in the photos.
Vedomosti examined a copy of Roskomnadzor’s letter to Yarkub. Roskomnadzor did not explain why the news report should be deleted. Roskomnadzor wrote to other Yaroslavl media outlets that the news report violated the new law on offending the authorities. (The website TJournalhas published an excerpt from the letter.)
According to the new law, only the prosecutor general and his deputies can decide whether a piece of published matter offends the authorities and society, and Roskomndazor can send websites orders to remove the matter only when instructed by the prosecutor general’s office.
Roskomnadzor’s only telephone in Yaroslavl, as listed on its website, was turned off today.
A source at the prosecutor general’s office told Vedomosti the office had not sent Roskomnadzor any instructions concerning news of the inscription in Yaroslavl.
“We have had nothing to do with this,” he said.
Roskomnadzor spokesman Vadim Ampelonsky categorically refused to discuss the actions of the agency’s officials in Yaroslavl. After the new law went into force, Roskomnadzor’s local offices had been carrying out preventive work with media outlets, he said. Roskomnadzor officials had thus been trying to quickly stop the dissemination of illegal information without charging media outlets with violating the new law.
When asked whether Roskomnadzor had received instructions from the prosecutor general and his deputies about news of the inscription in Yaroslavl, Ampelonsky avoided answering the question directly.
“We can neither confirm nor deny it,” he said.
Prokhorova argues incredible pressure has been put on local Yaroslavl media.
“Our nerves are frazzled, and we have been left with a nasty taste in our mouths,” she wrote.
Yarkub’s editors claim the incident was an attempt at censorship.
In the letters they sent, Roskomnadzor’s local Yaroslavl officers did not threaten to block media outlets that did not delete the news report. But the letters and telephone calls did their work, and many local media outlets, including newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets in Yaroslavl, the website of radio station Echo of Moscow in Yaroslavl, the website of Yaroslavl TV Channel One, deleted the news report. Our source at Moskovsky Komsomolets in Yaroslavl initially told us the report about the inscription had not been deleted. Subsequently, he explained the report had been deleted at the behest of the newspaper’s Moscow editors. However, the Moscow editors claimed to know nothing about the news report’s removal.
Editors at Echo of Moscow in Yaroslavl radio station told us the news report had been deleted after several conversations with Roskomnadzor officials, but refused to say more. The official requests were recommendations, we were told by a source at the radio station who asked not to be named. Initially, Roskomnadzor asked the radio station to soften the news due to the fact that the main surname [sic] was in it. After some discussion, the editors decided to remove the report from the station’s website altogether, because “an act of hooliganism had ruffled feathers where it counted,” our source told us.
Georgy Ivanov, Kommersant Publishing House’s principal attorney, said the offensive remarks must be voiced in a blatant manner. In the news reports, the inscription has been blurred or blotted out, however. Legally, only the prosecutor general’s office can decide whether published matter is offensive or not, while Roskomnadzor’s function in these cases is more technical, he said. Roskomnadzor has been engaged in constant discussion with the media on implementing laws, but editors are not always able to interpret the agency’s communications with them, to decide whether they are recommendations or orders, and it is thus no wonder regional media perceive their interventions as coercion. Ivanov argues the Russian media had numerous worries about the new regulations on offending the authorities and fake news, and these fears had come true.
“We criticized the proposed regulations primarily because of how law enforcers and regulators act in the regions,” said Vladimir Sungorkin, director general of the popular national newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda. “In Moscow, we can still foster the illusion laws are enforced as written, but out in the sticks the security forces cannot be bothered with the fine points. They often get carried away.”
Sungorkin is certain that incidents in which local officials use the law about offending the authorities and fake news to twist the media’s arm will proliferate.
“It is a birthday gift to the security services in the regions,” he said.
If I were an MP in the Commons or a peer in the Lords, I would ask for a formal inquiry into how the BBC is wildly and, apparently, deliberately misreporting the so-called Russian presidential election campaign by constantly asserting that Vladimir Putin is incredibly popular, that his message of “strength and stability should be enough to persuade voters to give him another term” (I heard that gem on the late late news on Radio 4 last night) and that Alexei Navalny was not admitted to the race because of “previous corruption convictions.”
Only in every third or fourth report do BBC reporters and presenters even bother to hint vaguely that Navalny’s so-called corruption convictions were on trumped-up charges and explicitly meant to hobble and disable him at moments like this, when he is literally the only person in Russia with a political organization and campaign strategy capable of putting a serious dent in the myth of Putin’s popularity.
And it is a myth. A free and fair election—after a campaign run without assistance from the so-called law enforcement agencies (who now, apparently, are gearing up to go after Navalny for calling a boycott) and the other assorted thugs who have been routinely arresting and assaulting Navalny’s campaign workers and volunteers in large numbers all over Russia during the past year, and without a giant leg up from a mainstream media, especially the national TV channels, whose general demeanor gives you a sense of what television would have looked like had the Nazis had it in their agitprop arsenal—would return results that would surprise all the lazy reporters and “Russia experts” who have been aping the discredited pollsters at Levada-VTsIOM-FOM by perpetuating the Putin popularity myth these past seventeen years.
The fix was in from the moment the Family chose Petersburg’s incredibly corrupt ex-deputy mayor to succeed Yeltsin, and truly awful things for which lots of people should be serving life sentences were done to cement the succession in blood.
It’s only been downhill from here, including the period when oil prices were high, because they only discouraged whatever impulses for reform Putin may have had (although I see no evidence he had any such impulses).
There’s no reason to like Putin unless you’re a member of his inner circle, because the real economy has tanked long ago, rampant corruption has become the supreme governing principle, and the security services have launched a selective, targeted Great Terror Lite to remind anyone with a brain what “stability” really means: Putin and his criminal clique are determined to remain in power until they die of natural causes.
This stunning plan will have terrible consequences for Russia and the world. The very least honest news reporting organizations, supposedly devoted to balanced, objective journalism, can do is report the whole story I have just told in brief, instead of repeating the dangerous truisms and outright lies generated by the Kremlin and its minions. TRR
A photo showing evidence of the outrageous crime against the Russian state and Russian society committed in Yaroslavl the other day. Fortunately, nearly all mentions of it have been forcibly deleted from local media. However, some traces of the sickening crime are still faintly visible in the photo, alas. Courtesy of Kirill Poputnikov and 
