Three Last Address plaques on Dostoevsky Street in downtown Petersburg, autumn 2018. Photo by the Russian Reader
Dear participants of the Last Address project!
This coming Sunday, December 4, new Last Address plaques will be installed in St. Petersburg.
At 12:00 p.m. a plaque in memory of Pavel Markovich Tsesinsky, an accountant at the Red Triangle factory, will be mounted at 47 Bolshoi Prospekt, Petrograd Side. Tsesinsky was arrested on September 21, 1937 and shot less than a month later, on October 15, 1937. His wife Bella and five-year-old son Volodar were exiled to the Arkhangelsk region, where his wife was arrested and died, and his son was sent to an orphanage. Another son, Ernest, who was only six months old, was adopted by relatives. The brothers were reunited only eighteen years later. Pavel Markovich’s eldest son is now ninety years old.
At 1:00 p.m., at 15 Tchaikovsky Street, relatives will install a plaque memorializing Solomon Borisovich Davidson, head of procurement at the Bolshevik factory. He was first arrested in 1935, but released a year later, and the case was dismissed. He was re-arrested on July 26, 1938, and shot on October 8, 1938, on charges of espionage. His wife Elizabeth died in 1942 in the Siege of Leningrad, but their daughters Irina and Mariana were evacuated and were able to return to Leningrad after the war.
Pavel Tselinsky was exonerated in 1957, while Solomon Davidson was exonerated in 1964.
We invite you to join the installation ceremonies.
Yours,
The Last Address Team in St. Petersburg
Source: Last Address in Petersburg email newsletter, 27 November 2022. Translated by the Russian Reader
The books on display, from left to right, are: I.A. Ivanova, “Yevgenia Negina: A Novel in Verse”; Klementina Bove, “Is That Really the Same Tatiana? (A Novel)”; A.S. Pushkin, “Yevgeny Onegin: A Graphic Guide”; I.V. Stalin, “Prophecies about Ukraine”
A textbook and resource guide store for school teachers, Lomonosov Street, Petersburg, today.
Source: Marina Varchenko, Facebook, 21 October 2022. Remarking on this post, “Marina Marina” wrote: “I got into a fight with a history teacher from Russia in the comments [to another social media post]. She doesn’t see any historical parallels at all. And she says that it was the Americans who made up the history of Ukraine. And that what she teaches there at home is the only truth in the world.” Translated by the Russian Reader
A photograph of the young Natalia Totskaya, taken at a photo studio in Irkutsk. On January 2, 1938, Totskaya was executed for “counterrevolutionary terrorist propaganda” and “espionage.” Courtesy of Oksana Matiyevskaya
I was just writing an announcement for tomorrow’s Last Address ceremony for a neighborhood group.
Suddenly, I realized that five years ago, when I started doing this, the charges of espionage and terrorist propaganda [made against many victims of the Great Terror] seemed to be the distant past, a clear marker of Stalin’s hysterical spy mania. It seemed, well, unreal, hard to believe. What must have it been like to live in such darkness, huh?
The years have gone by, but, people have asked, does it still seem unreal?
This is Natalia Totskaya, a graduate of an Institute for Noble Maidens. She was a teacher of foreign languages and translator. She corresponded with her sister, who had emigrated.
A plaque bearing her name and four dates — of her birth, arrest, execution and exoneration — will be installed and dedicated tomorrow, Sunday, 3:00 p.m, at 1/2 Solyanka Street, bldg. 1 [in Moscow].
Please come and join us!
Thanks to Marina Bobrik for the link. Translated by the Russian Reader
Come out, come out for a walk with me
Come out for a walk with me
Come out for a walk with me
Come out, come out for a walk with me
Come out for a walk with me
Come out for a walk with me
We gather freely and walk where we will
Come out for a walk, just come out for a walk
We gather freely, though we’re a little scared shitless
Come out for a walk, just come out for a walk
We’ll write the word “Enough!” on the pavement in white chalk
You can take your little sister, my little brother is coming with me
Don’t take toys with you, there are tanks and soldiers
More interesting than walking, there are no more important classes
We gather freely and walk where we will
Come out for a walk, just come out for a walk
We gather freely, though we’re a little scared shitless
Come out for a walk, just come out for a walk
Let them point a finger at us. So what if we get punished?
So what if we get wet and shiver and get goosebumps?
Don’t be afraid, there won’t be enough zelyonka or poop for everyone
Of course, stay at home if you’re younger
Come out, come out for a walk with me
Come out for a walk with me
Come out for a walk with me
Come out, come out for a walk with me
Come out for a walk with me
Come out for a walk with me
Squirt guns, nerf blasters and spitball shooters
Don’t take anything, just come out for a walk
Smoke bombs and slingshots, sticks and jump ropes
Don’t take anything, just come out for a walk
There are cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians
Come out for a walk. Why you sitting on the windowsill?
You can do it on roller skates, but we’ll be shooting videos
There are helmets, elbow pads. In noughts and crosses
We play noughts, don’t put a cross on the noughts
If you want to give them a kick in the ass, you’ll get three years in the pen
They will cut us, they will beat us, be patient and calm
You still need to drive, get out of the house
On the golden porch sat the tsar, the tsarevich, the king’s son
They twist and turn the carousel, and you won’t change anything
One, two, three, four, five, here they come looking for me
I didn’t hide—it wasn’t my fault
Come out, come out for a walk with me
Come out for a walk with me
Come out for a walk with me
Come out, come out for a walk with me
Come out for a walk with me
Come out for a walk with me
Come out
A still from the Kasta video “Come Out for a Walk.” Courtesy of YouTube
Red Red Blood: Kasta’s Video and the End of Post-Soviet Pop Culture
Andrei Arkhangelsky Republic
December 1, 2020
Kasta’s new video “Come Out for a Walk”—about a riot policeman whose body and even clothes bleed, like the people he beats—has already garnered two and a half million views and tens of thousands of comments. Although the song was written a long time ago, the plot of the video, according to Kasta member Shym, was inspired by the police beatings of peaceful protesters in Belarus.
The idea of the video is painfully simple: everything hidden will be revealed sooner or later. In our hyper-speed age, “sooner or later” means in a couple of hours, days, or weeks, at most. But pop culture artists, as we know, always tell us more than they mean to say. The video’s release says several symbolic things that are vital for all of post-Soviet culture.
In this video, it is not people, but blood that plays the starring role. Blood is a silent substance, but as an image it acts magically on us, because it requires no explanation. It captures our attention, fascinating and hypnotizing us. It is like fire or water in this sense: we can’t get away from it.
This is surprising to hear, of course, if you remember how many liters of fake blood are shed every day, for example, in “patriotic” movies. The blood there, however, does not make such an impression, because in its own context it is “normal,” meaning that it is shed “for a just cause.” Violence in peacetime is something fundamentally different: propaganda tries to hide this, instilling in us the need to live in peacetime under military law. Violence in peacetime makes personable poses, primps and preens, dresses in different guises, including white, and sometimes it pulls it off. The idea that for the sake of the country’s “stability” we can shed a couple of “non–fatal” liters of blood, precisely for educational purposes, was until recently considered an unspoken norm in our country. Now, in the public view, it is wrong. Kasta’s video captures this sea change in the public mood, cancelling the previous unspoken agreements between state and society.
In a broad sense, this ubiquitous, oozing, flowing blood is an even more global metaphor for all Russian popular entertainment of the past twenty years. In fact, this entertainment, starting with the historical series of the noughties (the TV adaptations of Rybakov’s Children of the Arbat and even Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle) was a story about the tons of blood spilled by the Stalinist state. However, on screen, this blood was, figuratively speaking, packed in sealed, leak-proof containers and sold to the post-Soviet audience in the form of little hearts—stuffed with love, friendship, loyalty, and so on.
“There was violence, but there were also good things”: this, approximately, is the golden formula of reconciliation (reconciliation with violence, simply put) that worked and still works in popular entertainment. State violence in movies and TV shows is always balanced by a sacrifice made in the name of the common good (the Chekist who committed injustices goes to war and washes away the sin with his own blood) or in the form of a deus ex machina (“the Party sorted the matter out and released the man, who was roughed up but alive”).
All Russian serials about the Soviet era are made with the acceptance of “history as it is,” and with the simultaneous understanding that “this is your motherland,” as former culture minister and current presidential aide Vladimir Medinsky recently suggested. Evoking Kasta’s metaphor, we can say that the blood flows moderately in Stalinist TV series: the Chekist bends over the innocent prisoner and hits him a couple of times, or even kicks him, but he does not beat the man to death. All these series are made exactly in this way: nothing is done “to death.” And so the viewer who watches them gets the feeling that while it is not easy to live with shedding a little blood, it is basically permissible.
Consequently, post-Soviet society has not had a conversation about violence as the vicious underpinning of the former ruling ideology. In contemporary cinema, police and secret service officers are presented as reflective intellectuals, as in the recent TV series Dyatlov Pass. They are tormented by life’s unsolvable problems, not to mention the fact that they are generally positive characters. We should admit that the conversation about violence has been swept under the rug over the past twenty years through targeted ideological work involving popular entertainment.
But the social trauma itself has not disappeared. The habit of violence has remained, and now it has literally leaked out in the form of the real sadism at the jail on Okrestin Street in Minsk, which can be considered a universal symbol for many post-Soviet countries. This sadism is now running down, soaking “through the gold of uniforms”: this is how it could be formulated in a broader context, not only in Belarus.
On the other hand, there is protest. In western culture, it has long been established as a social norm, nor are artists necessarily on the side of the protesters. Pasolini has a poem about police officers who beat up students at a demonstration. It includes the lines, “When you were at the Valle Giulia yesterday you brawled with the police, I sympathized with the policemen!” Then Pasolini explains why:
I know well,
I know how they were as little kids and young men,
the precious penny, the father who never grew up,
because poverty does not bestow authority.
The mother calloused like a porter, or tender,
because of some disease, like a little bird.
The conflict between police and students (protestors) is always unresolvable in some sense, but it is also normal. This paradox is typical of democracy, where, as we know, everything that is not forbidden is allowed. A free society constantly tests the authorities as to what is acceptable and unacceptable, but the very essence of democracy manifests itself in this “qual,” to borrow a term from rap culture.
Popular culture’s natural instinct again, is to discuss and reflect on protest. In Russian movies, however, the topic is taboo or ridiculed. Protest is imagined as a testosterone-fueled fad, something for people with nothing better to do, or as a form of manipulation, but most often protests are not depicted in Russian cinema at all. When we are told that popular entertainment is not to blame and owes nothing to anyone, we should respond by recalling that the silencing of socially important topics today is a way to encourage evil. When we try to answer the question of where this sadism comes from, we can mull over it for a long time in the same old lofty terms: unarticulated trauma, the post-Soviet syndrome.
But there is a simpler explanation. The same riot police officer who beats people because circumstances allow him to do it “does not know,” broadly speaking, that it is wrong precisely because popular culture has never, in the last twenty years, transmitted this simple idea to him. It has not told him that protesting is normal and shedding blood is wrong. What is worse, popular entertainment in Russia has been looking for various sophisticated ways to justify the shedding of innocent blood in the name of higher causes. And since Belarusian and Russian riot policemen have consumed this pop culture in equal measure, the outcome is roughly the same.
Just as the red substance in the video flows from helmets and riot batons, so reality itself today reminds us of its existence despite all the attempts to hide it. While you are controlling the big screen, the truth will leak out on the small screen: this is the video’s symbolic sense. When the time comes, what has been hidden will pour from the screens just as uncompromisingly. It will again be a shock to the audience, like, say, the articles about Stalinism in the perestroika-era press were to readers back then. The blood in the video is a metaphor for truth (or reality) itself, a truth that cannot be canceled in any way. This hidden thing will sooner or later burst the dam, and it will not be subdued, just as it is impossible to stanch the blood flowing in Kasta’s video.
The Public Execution of the Historian Dmitriev Igor Yakovenko’s Blog
September 30, 2020
Three days before the Karelian Supreme Court handed down its ruling in the “case” of the historian Yuri Dmitriev, the program “Vesti” on state TV channel Rossiya 24 ran a segment in which “shocking pictures” of Dmitriev’s foster daughter were aired. The voice of reporter Olga Zhurenkova shook with anger as she said that “hundreds of Internet users were shocked by these terrible pictures that appeared on the Internet on the morning of September 26,” that “the Internet is boiling with indignation” at this monster who “ruined a child’s life.” The security services got into Dmitriev’s computer and pulled out photos of his foster daughter. Then the security services leaked these photos to the Internet for thousands to see. After that, Rossiya 24 showed them on TV to millions. And they also showed a video in which the foster daughter hugs Dmitriev: the girl can clearly be identified in the video, and just to make sure, Rossiya 24’s reporters called her by name.
This goes to the question of who actually ruined the child’s life and why they did it.
Rossiya 24’s handiwork lasts 4 minutes, 48 seconds. The state channel’s reporters managed to pack into this amount of time all the hatred that the ideological heirs of Stalin’s executioners feel towards the man who for many years studied and presented to the public the traces of the latter’s crimes. In all his previous trials, Dmitriev and his defense team managed to fully prove his innocence. And the prosecutors were well aware that he was innocent, so to concoct and pass a monstrous sentence on him, they recreated the ambiance of the show trials during the Great Terror. Back then, the “people’s anger” was fueled by newspaper articles, demonstrations outside the courtroom, and meetings at factories where shockworkers demanded that the Trotskyite-fascist Judases be shot like mad dogs. Now, in the third decade of the 21st century, the Internet and TV organize the “people’s anger.”
The appeals hearing in Dmitriev’s case was orchestrated like a special military operation whose goal was to prevent the human rights defender from getting out of prison alive. To accomplish this, in addition to organizing the “people’s anger,” the authorities virtually deprived Dmitriev of legal counsel. His lead defense attorney, Viktor Anufriev, was quarantined on suspicion of having the coronavirus, while the court-appointed lawyer said that it was a mockery to expect him to review the nineteen volumes of the case file in three days. Despite the fact that Anufriev petitioned to postpone the hearing for a specific period after his release from quarantine, and Dmitriev declined the services of the court-appointed lawyers, the court, contrary to normal practice, refused to postpone the hearing, and so Dmitriev was left virtually with no legal representation.
Yuri Dmitriev’s work touched a very sensitive chord in the collective soul of Russia’s current bosses, who see themselves as the direct heirs of those who organized the Great Terror, which, they are firmly convinced, is a purely internal matter of the “new nobility.” It is virtually a family secret. They believe that Dmitriev—who not only investigated the mass murders at the Sandarmokh killing field, but also invited foreign journalists there and published lists of those who were killed—is a traitor who deserves to die.
Moreover, the Dmitriev case has come to embody one of the most important amendments to the Constitution of the Russian Federation adopted this past summer. Namely, the new Article 67.1, which establishes a completely monstrous norm: “The Russian Federation honors the memory of the defenders of the Fatherland [and] ensures the protection of historical truth.” In other words, the task of protecting the “historical truth” is assumed not by historians, but by the state, that is, by the apparatus of violence and coercion.
In fact, the Dmitriev case has been a demonstrative act of “historical truth enforcement.”
The fact is that on the eve of Dmitriev’s trial, members of the Russian Military History Society attempted to write a “correct history” of the killing field in Sandarmokh. They dug up mass graves and hauled away bags of the remains for “forensic examination,” subsequently that they were Soviet soldiers who had been shot by the Finnish invaders.
There should be no blank or black spots in the history of the Fatherland: everything should shine with cleanliness, resound with military exploits and feats of labor, and smell of patriotism. To this end, MP Alexei Zhuravlyov—the man who recently told Russian TV viewers that Europe has brothels for zoophiles where you can rape a turtle—introduced a bill under which you could get three years in prison for “distorting history.” To Zhuravlyov’s great disappointment, his legislative initiative was not appreciated.
And really, why send someone down for three years for promoting “incorrect history,” when you can send them to a maximum security penal colony for thirteen years, which for the 64-year-old human rights activist is tantamount to a death sentence. It was this verdict that was issued by the Karelian Supreme Court by order of the heirs of those who organized the Great Terror.
Translated by the Russian Reader
Yuri Dmitriev. Photo by Igor Podgorny/TASS. Courtesy of the Moscow Times
Prominent Gulag Historian’s 3.5-Year Prison Sentence Lengthened to 13 Years Moscow Times
September 29, 2020
A Russian court has lengthened the term prominent Gulag historian Yuri Dmitriev must serve in prison to 13 years, the Mediazona news website reported Tuesday, a surprise increase of a lenient sentence for charges his allies say were trumped up to silence him.
Dmitriev was sentenced to 3.5 years in prison in July after a city court in northwestern Russia found him guilty of sexually assaulting his adopted [sic] daughter, a ruling his supporters viewed as a victory given the 15 years requested by prosecutors.
The Supreme Court of the Republic of Karelia overturned that ruling and sentenced him to 13 years in a maximum-security penal colony, Mediazona reported, citing the lawyer of Dmitriev’s adopted [sic] daughter.
Under his previous sentence, Dmitriev, 64, would have been released in November as his time already served in pre-trial detention counted toward his sentence.
Human rights advocates condemned the Karelia Supreme Court’s ruling, calling it a “shame.”
Dmitriev has vehemently denied the charges against him.
The head of the Memorial human rights group’s Karelia branch, Dmitriev is known for helping open the Sandarmokh memorial to the thousands of victims murdered there during Stalin-era political repressions in 1937 and 1938.
On August 9, three new Last Address plaques will be installed in Petersburg.
At 12:00 p.m., relatives will install a plaque in memory of Anatoly Viktorovich Abramson at 77 Chaykovsky Street. Educated as a lawyer, Abramson worked an economic planner. In 1935, as a “socially dangerous element,” he was exiled to Saratov along with his family. He was arrested there in December 1937 and shot on January 6, 1938, after being convicted by an NKVD troika.
At 1:00 p.m., a plaque in memory of Artemy Markovich Markov, a mechanic with the Kirov Railway, will be installed in the courtyard of the house at 44 Ligovsky Prospect. Markov was shot on December 10, 1937, as a member of an alleged “Polish counter-revolutionary sabotage group” of railway workers. The grandson of one of the men shot as part of the case has been installing memorial plaques for all of his grandfather’s co-defendants.
At 2:00 p.m., a plaque in memory of Iosif Kazimorovich Kazanovsky will be installed at 1 Dzhambul Lane. A 38-year-old technician at the Plastics Factory, he was arrested on September 16, 1937, and shot on September 28, 1937, along with classmates from the Polish High School. The plaque is being installed at the behest of the son of one of the executed men.
All three men were exonerated in the 1950s.
We invite you to join us for the installation ceremonies, while asking you to assess the risks and observe safety measures in connection with the ongoing coronavirus pandemic (such as wearing a mask and maintaining physical distance).
Courtesy of the Last Address Petersburg mailing list. Photo and translation by the Russian Reader
Today I will go to Nevsky Prospect and do a solo picket as part of Strategy 18’s indefinite protest campaign in support of the Crimean Tatars.
My placard addresses the huge sentences handed out to people convicted of far-fetched “crimes.”
My family went through all of this once upon a time. My grandfather was arrested in 1934 and shot in 1937, while my grandmother was imprisoned for nearly 20 years in the Gulag. It is a good thing there is a moratorium on the death penalty, and the arrests have not yet become widespread. But otherwise, the same thing is happening.
In November 2019, the following Crimean Tatars—ordinary people, ordinary believers—were sentenced to monstrous terms of imprisonment:
Arsen Dzhepparov, 7 years in prison
Refat Alimov, 8 years in prison
Vadim Siruk, 8 years in prison
Emir-Usein Kuku, 12 years in prison
Enver Bekirov, 18 years in prison
Muslim Aliyev, 19 years in prison
In February 2020, the defendants in the Network Case—ordinary young men, anarchists—were sentenced to the following monstrous terms of imprisonment:
What is happening now with the Crimean Tatars—86 of them have been arrested for being from the “wrong” ethnicity and having the “wrong” faith—tomorrow could happen to anyone.
What is happening now with the lads from the Network Case—they were convicted based on testimony obtained under torture—tomorrow could happen to anyone.
Let’s show solidarity with those who have been marked out as sacrificial victims today.
Let’s try and pull these people out of the dragon’s mouth.
When we are together, we have a chance.
Today’s Strategy 18 protest in support of the Crimean Tatars will take place on the corner of Nevsky Prospect and Malaya Sadovaya at 7 p.m.
This Sunday, December 8, 2019, three new Last Address plaques will be installed in Petersburg.
At 12:00 p.m, a plaque in memory of Nikolai Fabianovich Pavlovsky will be mounted on the house at 6 Kirochnaya Street. An ethnic Pole and driver for the Leningrad Fur Procurement Organization (Lenzagotpushniny), Pavlovsky was executed on October 7, 1937, the same day as his brother Pyotr, who has already been memorialized with a plaque on the same house.
At 1:00 p.m., a plaque in memory of Vladislav Stanislavovich Voronovich will be attached to the house at 147 Nevsky Prospect. Before his arrest, Voronovich worked as head of the thermoelectrical block at the Bolshevik Factory. Voronovich was shot on September 28, 1937.
At 2:00 p.m., a plaque in memory of Anton Filippovich Gribovsky, foreman of the conductors on the Polar Star train, will be installed on the house at 72 Ligovsky Prospect. Gribovsky was shot on November 15, 1937.
All three men were exonerated in 1957–1958.
The installation of all three plaques was initiated not by relatives of the executed men, but by people who cherish their memory. The first plaque will thus be installed by a friend of the family, while the second two will be attached by the descendants of people who were part of the same criminal case as the executed men.
We invite you to join us for the installation ceremonies.
Courtesy of the Last Address Petersburg mailing list. Photo and translation by the Russian Reader
“Alternative” excavations at Sandarmokh. Photo by Irina Tumakova. Courtesy of Novaya Gazeta
Sifting through History: The “Alternative” Excavations at Sandarmokh Are Meant to Shift the Public’s Attention from Great Terror Victims to WWII Casualties
Pavel Aptekar Vedomosti
August 20, 2019
The ongoing excavations by the Russian Military History Society (RVIO) at the Sandarmokh site in [Russian] Karelia, where political prisoners were shot during the Great Terror, reflects the desire of Russian officials to switch the public’s attention to the Second World War.
In August, RVIO employees and a Defense Ministry search battalion resumed digging at Sandarmokh. Karelian Culture Minister Alexei Lesonen said the objective was to “separate artifacts having to do with different layers of history and different circumstances.”
It is a matter of words matching deeds. In 1997, local historian Yuri Dmitriev discovered the mass graves of people shot by the NKVD in 1937–1938. Thanks to Dmitriev’s efforts, Sandarmokh became a symbol of the Great Terror.
International Memorial Society board member Sergei Krivenko puts a number on it: archival documents have confirmed that over 6,100 people were shot and buried at Sandarmokh during the Great Terror.
In keeping with the Kremlin’s policy of “inculcating pride in the past,” the authorities have attempted, in recent years, to diminish Sandarmokh’s status as a memorial site. The authorities have tried to discredit Dmitriev and, by his extension, his work by charging him in a notorious “pedophilia” case [in which two men have already been convicted and sentenced, including Sergei Koltyrin, former director of the Medvezhyegorsk Museum and an ally of Dmitriev’s]. They have claimed Memorial’s figures for the number of victims are inflated. They have pushed an alternate account that the Finnish Army shot and buried Soviet POWS at Sandarmokh between 1941 and 1944.
The RVIO’s August–September 2018 expedition turned up the remains of five people. Historian Sergei Verigin said they corroborated the hypothesis about Soviet POWS because the executed people had not been stripped before they were shot and foreign-made shell casings were found next to them. This proves nothing, however. The NKVD used foreign-made weapons when it executed its prisoners [22,000 Polish officers and members of the Polish intelligentsia] at Katyn, nor have the RVIO established when exactly the people whose remains they found were killed.
The RVIO did not respond to our request to comment on the claim that the people shot and buried at Sandarmokh were “alleged victims.” They keep digging In early August, the remains of five more people were found.
Memorial has demanded an end to the excavations, fearing the mass graves will be disturbed. Archaeologists have also sounded a warning because the traces of dwelling sites used by prehistoric people have been found at Sandarmokh as well and they could be damaged.
The problem, however, is not that artifacts could get mixed up. The problem is there is no comparison between the maximum possible number of Soviet POWs executed and buried at Sandarmokh, as estimated by the Karelian Culture Ministry, and the confirmed numbers of victims of Stalin’s terror campaign who are buried there: 500 versus over 6,100.
The digs at Sandarmokh are a clumsy attempt by Russian officials to alter the meaning of the memorial site and rewrite the past with shovels. More importantly, officials want to juggle the numbers of victims and thus gaslight the Russian public.
Translated by the Russian Reader
Without Fathers, a video made by Anna Artemieva and Gleb Limansky, and published by Novaya Gazeta on August 7, 2017. The annotation reads, “The orphans of Sandarmokh remember their executed relatives. Historian Yuri Dmitriev did not attend memorial day ceremonies there for the first time in twenty years. He is on trial, charged with ‘manufacturing child pornography.'”
It’s an incredible feeling, really. For a year, you see each other only for several seconds in the hallway of the courthouse because they won’t let anyone in the courtroom. Then, for several months, in the courtroom through the bars of the cage. Then, two times, through the double-paned glass in remand prison, and you can even chat a bit.
But [at our wedding] we could hug and hold hands for a whole fifteen minutes, and I still can’t believe it. Yuli [Boyarshinov] was with me and everything was fine again, but then he was led away, of course.
I had a paper veil: I wanted to do something ridiculous. And I had a barbed-wired ring. Yuli probably didn’t expect I wasn’t joking about the veil and the ring.
We were not allowed to bring a camera into the remand prison, of course.
Thank you all for your support: it’s cool and important. Someday this will all be over.
How could we let this happen? When you study the cases of 1936–1938 and see how investigators forced people to give ever more fantastic testimony, you imagine that such things could not happen in the twenty-first century. Stalin is dead, and the cases are part of the gloomy past. But when you read about what has happened to our contemporaries, how they testified under torture, you realize we are not so distant from that awful time when the violence of one group of people against another group of people was the norm. Read, for example, Tatyana Likhanova’s article about the case.
I hope that Yuli and the other [young men accused in the Network case] will soon be freed and the people who cooked up this whole business will be brought to justice.
Thanks to Victoria Andreyeva for the heads-up. Photos courtesy of Yana Sakhipova. Translated by the Russian Reader
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What can you do to support the Penza and Petersburg antifascists and anarchists who have been tortured and imprisoned by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB)?
Donate money to the Anarchist Black Cross via PayPal (abc-msk@riseup.net). Make sure to specify your donation is earmarked for “Rupression.”
Spread the word about the Network Case aka the Penza-Petersburg “terrorism” case. You can find more information about the case and in-depth articles translated into English on this website (see below), rupression.com, and openDemocracyRussia.
Organize solidarity events where you live to raise money and publicize the plight of the tortured Penza and Petersburg antifascists. Go to the website It’s Going Down to find printable posters and flyers you can download. You can also read more about the case there.
If you have the time and means to design, produce, and sell solidarity merchandise, please write to rupression@protonmail.com.
Write letters and postcards to the prisoners. Letters and postcards must be written in Russian or translated into Russian. You can find the addresses of the prisoners here.
Design a solidarity postcard that can be printed and used by others to send messages of support to the prisoners. Send your ideas to rupression@protonmail.com.
Write letters of support to the prisoners’ loved ones via rupression@protonmail.com.
Translate the articles and information at rupression.com and this website into languages other than Russian and English, and publish your translations on social media and your own websites and blogs.
If you know someone famous, ask them to record a solidarity video, write an op-ed piece for a mainstream newspaper or write letters to the prisoners.
If you know someone who is a print, internet, TV or radio journalist, encourage them to write an article or broadcast a report about the case. Write to rupression@protonmail.com or the email listed on this website, and we will be happy to arrange interviews and provide additional information.
It is extremely important this case break into the mainstream media both in Russia and abroad. Despite their apparent brashness, the FSB and their ilk do not like publicity. The more publicity the case receives, the safer our comrades will be in remand prison from violence at the hands of prison stooges and torture at the hands of the FSB, and the more likely the Russian authorities will be to drop the case altogether or release the defendants for time served if the case ever does go to trial.
Why? Because the case is a complete frame-up, based on testimony obtained under torture and mental duress. When the complaints filed by the accused reach the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg and are examined by actual judges, the Russian government will again be forced to pay heavy fines for its cruel mockery of justice.
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If you have not been following the Penza-Petersburg “terrorism” case and other recent cases involving frame-ups, torture, and violent intimidation by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) and other branches of the Russian security state, read and share the articles the Russian Reader has posted on these subjects.
Yuri Dmitriev. Photo by Igor Podgorny/TASS. Courtesy of the Moscow Times
“Stalinist prison sentences. Crimean Tatars: 7, 8, 12, 12, 18, 19 years. Network Case: 6, 9, 10, 13, 14, 16, 18 years. Coming soon to a location near you!” Photo by Yevgenia Litvinova
“Alternative” excavations at Sandarmokh. Photo by Irina Tumakova. Courtesy of 
The Russian Reader 