“Hi, I’m Married”

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Yana Sakhipova
Facebook
August 13, 2019

Hi, I’m married.

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.

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Victoria Andreyeva
Facebook
August 13, 2019

Today, I was going to the FSB archives and at the entrance I met Yuli Boyarshinov’s friends, who had come for a strange wedding. Boyarshinov has been imprisoned since January 2018 on ridiculous charges. He and other young men were tortured into giving testimony that would incriminate them as a “terrorist group.”

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.

Last Address: No. 333

большой пр. пс 70-72 70–72 Bolshoi Prospect, Petrograd Side, St. Petersburg (Uteman Tenement House, Dmitry Kryzhanovsky and Alexander Starobovsky, architects, 1912–1913). Photo courtesy of Citywalls.ru

The Last Address team in Petersburg will install its 333rd plaque this coming Sunday, August 18, at 2:00 p.m. The descendants of Anna Alarikovna Bruyak will attach a memorial plaque to the house at 70–72 Bolshoi Prospect, Petrograd Side.

Born Anna Rosa Wilhelmina Tavastscherna in 1861, Bruyak was expelled from Leningrad as a “socially dangerous element” on March 26, 1935, and exiled to Orenburg.

Bruyak died in exile on February 5, 1937. She was exonerated by order of the Presidium of the Leningrad City Court on February 5, 1963.

We invite the public to take part in the ceremony.

Source: Petersburg Last Address electronic mailing list. Translated by the Russian Reader

Last Address: August 3, 2019

черняховского-все таблички

Two Last Address plaques will be installed this Saturday, August 3.

At 12:00 p.m at 43 Sixth Line, Vasilyevsky Island, a plaque commemorating Grigory Gnesin will be installed. Writer, musician, performer, and the youngest son in the renowned Gnesin family of musicians, Grigory Gnesin was shot as a “Latvian spy” on February 4, 1938. He was exonerated in 1956.

At 1:00 p.m., Dmitry Dimitrov’s great-grandson will attach a memorial plaque to the wall at 3 Pionerskaya Ulitsa. Dimitrov was a Slavist, Bulgarian studies specialist, and research fellow at the Institute of Language and Thinking of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Sentenced by a so-called twosome [dvoika] of NKVD officers, he was shot on January 18, 1938. He was exonerated in 1957.

We invite you to attend the installation ceremonies. Please take note that these ceremonies will take place on a Saturday.

Translated by the Russian Reader

Last Address: Yevgeny Barthold

barthold-guide Yevgeny Barthold, A Guide to Karelia and the Kola Peninsula (Moscow: OGIZ, 1935)

Jenya Kulakova
Facebook
July 20, 2019

Yevgeny Barthold was an artist and traveler. Author of A Guide to Karelia and the Kola Peninsula, Barthold hiked these places up and down on his own feet and drew them with his own hands.

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A work by Barthold, currently in the collection of the Murmansk Museum

If you dip into the guide, it is obvious how in love he was with northern landscapes, how he wanted to share their beauty with readers and prepare them for their pitfalls and dangers.

When you read the Guide, published in 1935, and look at the pastels he made in the north in 1936-37, you wonder whether Barthold could have imagined that in 1938 he would travel to his beloved north not as a traveler but as a prisoner of the Oneglag camp, where he would work logging trees and building a narrow-gauge railway, and that in 1942 he would die of “cardiac paralysis.”

barthold-1 The Mekhrenga River in Arkhangelsk Region. In 1939, Barthold was transferred to a camp station here.

Barthold’s last address was 75 8th Line, Vasilyevsky Island, Leningrad.

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You can read more about Barthold’s life and death (in Russian) on the Last Address website.

Barthold’s Guide to Karelia and the Kola Peninsula has been digitized and posted online.

Photographs and images courtesy of Jenya Kulakova. Translated by Thomas Campbell

Last Address: Petersburg, June 30, 2019

малмоск 4 This Sunday, June 30, we will install Last Address memorial plaques on two more houses in Petersburg.

At 12:00 p.m., a plaque in memory of Alexander Uglov will be hung on the house at 19 Radishchev Street.

An inspector with the forest aviation trust, Mr. Uglov was arrested on March 11, 1939, and shot on July 8, 1938. He was 43 years old. Mr. Uglov was exonerated in 1958.

At 1:00 p.m., a plaque in memory of Lev Beckerman will be attached to the house at 6 Seventh Soviet Street.

A design engineer, Mr. Beckerman was head of the motor group in the design officer at the Voroshilov Tank Factory. He was shot on May 6, 1937, and exonerated in 1957.

The public is invited to join us at the installation ceremonies.

Yours,
The Last Address Team in Petersburg

Translation and photo by the Russian Reader

Last Address: June 16, 2019

la-two plaques-dosto 27 Two Last Address plaques at 27 Dostoevsky Street in downtown Petersburg, October 10, 2018. Photo by the Russian Reader

This coming Sunday, June 16, at 12 p.m. noon, Last Address will install three new plaques on the residential building at 35 16th Line, Vasilyevsky Island. The plaques commemorate three residents of the house who were shot during the Great Terror.

Mikhail Brandt, the principal of the Moscow District School for Pre-Conscripts, was arrested in 1936 and sentenced to five years of imprisonment for “anti-Soviet propaganda.”

He was serving his sentence in the Solovki prison camp on the Solovetsky Islands when he was taken to Sandarmokh and shot on November 1, 1937. Mr. Brandt was 28 years old.

Viktor Platitsin, the foreman of the steel foundry at the Baltic Shipbuilding Factory, was arrested on August 23, 1937, and shot on January 18, 1938. Mr. Platitsin was 44 years old.

Alexei Aduyevsky, a boatman at the Karakozov Factory, was arrested on March 1, 1938, and shot on April 14, 1938. Mr. Aduyevsky was 35 years old.

Mr. Platitsin and Mr. Aduyevsky were exonerated in the 1950s. Mr. Brandt was exonerated in 1989.

We invite you to take part in the installation ceremony.

Translated by the Russian Reader

My Generation

frenkel-subway trial The defendants in the Petersburg subway bombing trial. Photo by David Frenkel

After a terrific, well-attended solidarity talk in support of the defendants in the Network case, held here in Berlin the other night, I spoke to a lovely young Russian activist.

I said to them that there were, of course, many more instances of wild injustice in Putinist Russia with which an engaged foreign audience could be regaled, such as the ongoing trial of several Central Asians, accused of complicity in the alleged terrorist suicide bombing in the Petersburg subway on April 3, 2017.

Like the Network case, the Petersburg subway bombing case has all the hallmarks of a frame-up. As in the Network case, there have been numerous allegations the defendants have been tortured by investigators.

“But the difference,” the young person interrupted me, “is racism.”

They meant that, since all the defendants hailed from Central Asia, there was no way to mount the successful solidarity campaign that has shown a harsh light on the Network case and garnered it widespread notoriety, especially within Russia.

The young person went on to tell me that a friend of theirs had been attending the subway bombing trial. She had told them it was horrific. The defendants had been assigned state-appointed lawyers who did nothing to defend them. The trial was such a flagrant frame-up the interpreters working it had banded together to try and do anything they could to help the young people, who in all likelihood have been accused of terrible crimes they did not commit.

It goes without saying that all of them will be found guilty and sentenced to long terms in prison.

The case has been covered spottily by Petersburg and Russian media outlets, but I have seen very little outrage or even mild concern about it from my acquaintances on Russophone social media, most of whom live in Petersburg.

Many of these same people are now visibly bent out shape about the goings-on in Israel-Palestine. In the past few days, they have been treating virtual friends like me to generous helpings of unsubstantiated hasbara.

Are they unconcerned about the miscarriage of justice perpetrated on nearly a dozen young Central Asians because they think all Muslims are terrorists and, by definition, guilty of every charge of terrorism laid at their door?

It has been a commonplace of Russian quasi-liberal thinking that Stalinism affected Russians so deeply it infected their collective DNA. The Stalinist bug, so this spurious argument contends, has been passed on to the new generation as well, even though the Soviet Union collapsed almost thirty years ago, before my interlocutor and huge numbers of other terrific young Russian social and political activists I know were born.

Supposedly, several generations must pass before the Stalinist bug will finally be expunged from the national genetic code and Russians can build a more democratic polity in their country.

In reality, there is a great deal of anecdotal evidence pointing to the new generation’s eagerness and readiness to live that way right now.

On the contrary, it is my own age mates, the so-called last Soviet generation, who were born after Stalin died, who seem most afflicted by a kind of cognitive and emotional Stalinism that, often as not, emerges in their thoughts and deeds not as nostalgia or admiration for the real Stalin, but as dogmatic worldview that makes events in, say, Israel more real and important than most events in their own country and cities.

Given recent oddities around the Network trial and the unwonted negative publicity the case has generated for the FSB, I think there is a slight chance the powers that be might have decided to ratchet things down a bit. I could be wrong, but I would not be surprised if, when the trials in Penza and Petersburg resume after a long, unexplained recess, the defendants were indicted on lesser charges and then immediately released on probation, taking into account the long time all of them have spent in remand prisons since their arrests in late 2017 and early 2018.

There is no chance this will happen in the subway bombing trial for the simple reason that almost no one in Petersburg can be bothered to go to bat for a group of non-Russian Muslims or even bat an eye when they are tortured and framed exactly like their non-Muslim contemporaries. {TRR}

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The Russian Reader is a website that covers grassroots politics, social movements, the economy, and independent culture in Russia and the Russian-speaking world.

All the work on the website is done for free.

Unless otherwise noted, everything published on the Russian Reader can be reproduced elsewhere so long as the Russian Reader is indicated clearly as the source, and a link back to the original blog entry is included in the republication. In fact, you are encouraged to post these articles on social media and share them wherever you like.

Growing numbers of readers are the only way I know whether the Russian Reader is accomplishing its mission: to make news and views from the other Russias more accessible to the outside world.

You can also help the Russian Reader by donating money by pressing the buttons marked “Donate” and “Buy me a coffee,” on the left side of this page, or by clicking on the advertisements that appear occasionally on this site.

Mercy

clean

I’m really surprised by people who think it’s an important development that Lev Ponomaryov, the veteran Russian human rights activist who was sentenced to 25 days in jail the other day for, essentially, no particular reason, had his sentence reduced to 16 days in jail.

This is not a meaningful distinction. He shouldn’t have been detained, hauled into a kangaroo court, and jailed in the first place.

Don’t let the Putinist vampires fool you with their little acts of “mercy.” They don’t mean well—ever. And if push comes to shove, God forbid, the judges amongst them will hand out death sentence after death sentence just like in the 1930s. And the FSB will carry out the executions as happily as their esteemed predecessors in the NKVD did in the 1930s.

It’s hard for any society to learn anything from its past and arrange things in the present so the past doesn’t repeat itself, so to speak, but Russian society has every chance of showing us, in the very near future, that it has learned nothing from its past.

The Putin regime has spent the last twenty years doing absolutely nothing but priming the populace for a wholesale bloodbath against the Motherland’s numerous enemies. Let’s keep hoping it has just been “kidding” all this time. {TRR}

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Svetlana Alexievich’s Dead Ends

DSCN2329 Repeated endlessly by the Russophone liberal intelligentsia over the past three decades, claims that Russians are genetically programmed Stalinists and thus inevitably suspectible to Putin’s nonexistent charms and his neo-authoritarianism are false and pernicious cognitive dead ends that have done untold amounts of damage to the country’s grassroots democratic movements. Photo by the Russian Reader

With all due respect to the writer Svetlana Alexievich and her imaginary addressee, the late Anna Politkovskaya, Ms. Alexievich’s letter to Politkovskaya, published two days ago in the Washington Post, is the kind of reckless Russian liberal intelligentsia nonsense that saps people of the will to resist in the first place.

It also happens to be wildly wrong in the sweeping claims it makes, both objectively and subjectively.

“Now it is Putin who talks to them; he’s learned from our mistakes. But it’s not about Putin alone; he’s just saying what the people want to hear. I would say that there’s a little bit of Putin in every Russian. I’m talking about the collective Putin: We thought that it was the Soviet power that was the problem, but it was all about the people.

“The Soviet way of thinking lives on in our minds and our genes. How quickly has the Stalinist machine set to work again. With what skill and enthusiasm everyone is once again denouncing each other, catching spies, beating people up for being different . . . Stalin has risen! Throughout Russia they are building monuments to Stalin, putting up Stalin’s portraits, opening museums in Stalin’s memory.”

Really? Throughout Russia? I would imagine these portraits, monuments, and museums (?) number in the dozens, if that many.

Meanwhile, I have it on impeccable authority that Last Address and the hundreds of ordinary extraordinary Petersburgers who have joined them have erected nearly three hundred plaques commemorating the victims of Stalin’s Great Terror over the last few years.

In fact, there are are three such plaques at the entrance to my building. I see people stopping, looking at them, reading them, and taking snapshots of them all the time.

It is an insult to everyone who has been involved in Last Address and the other myriad acts of resistance great and small over the last twenty years, including, of course, Politkovskaya herself, to claim “there’s a little bit of Putin in every Russian.”

In fact, there are millions of Russians who do not have even a teensy bit of Putin in them, whatever that would mean. If you don’t believe me, take a few or several or ten dozen dips into this website and its predecessor over their eleven-year, nearly two thousand-post run.

You will not see and hear what Russia is “really like,” but experience a few or several or ten dozen ways in which Russia is definitely NOT “Putin’s Russia.” You will read and hear the words and the stories of rank-and-file Russians who, remarkably if you believe Ms. Alexievich’s boilerplate, music to certain western ears, are nothing like Putin at all.

When will any of the wiseguys who dictate our opinions about everything from “Putin’s Russia” to the latest Star Wars movies tell us about those other Russians and other Russias? {TRR}

Last Address: Vladimir Nagly

DSCN1867 “Here lived Vladimir Naumovich Nagly, theater director. Born 1903. Arrested 21 October 1938. Died 6 October 1940 in a prison camp in Kolyma. Exonerated in 1956.” Last Address memorial plaque at 38 Kolomenskaya Street in Petersburg’s Central District. Photo by the Russian Reader

Last Address
26 February 2016

House No. 38 on Kolomenskaya Street in St. Petersburg was erected in 1880 during the heyday of historicism in architecture. The building’s architect, Alexander Ivanov, was inspired by the French and Italian Renaissance.

The Tver Charitable Society was housed in the building in the early twentieth century. It provided social support and financial assistance to needy people from Tver who lived in St. Petersburg.

Vladimir Naumovich Nagly lived in the building in the 1930s.

Vladimir Nagly was born in 1903 in Petersburg to the family of a watchmaker. He was a supporter of the October Revolution, joining the the Red Army in 1919, and the Bolshevik Party in 1921. However, he devoted all of his short life to the theater.

In his indictment, dated 26 July 1939, Vladimir Nagly, former director of the Theater of Comedy and Satire (1930–1933), former director of the First Five-Year Plan Park of Culture and Rest (summer 1931), former director of the Central Park of Culture and Rest (summer 1932), former director of the Philarmonic (1932), former deputy director of the Pushkin Academic Drama Theater (1933–1936), former deputy director of Lenfilm Studios (1936–1938) and, at the time of his arrest on 20 October 1938, director of the Theater of Drama and Comedy (now the Theater on Liteiny), was identified as a “guerillla” in a group that was, allegedly, planning to murder Andrei Zhdanov, who at the time was First Secretary of the Leningrad Regional Party Committee and the Municipal Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks).

“It was agreed to invite ZHDANOV to view the pictures during the October Days. This time SMIRNOV [director of Lenfilm] had positioned the guerillas in advance: NAGLY was in a narrow corridor that lead from Smirnov’s office to the screening room. […] The plan was that, after the shooting, the lights would be shut off, panic would ensue in the dark, and [the conspirators] would escape.”

The main point in the indictments ends with praise for the NKVD officers who prevented the “terrorist attack.”

“Turning off the lights after the shooting was envisaged [in all the alleged plans to murder Zhdanov]. On this occasion, however, NKVD officers set up heightened surveillance […] and NAGLY was asked to withdraw from the positions they had taken up. When ZHDANOV arrived at the factory [i.e., Lenfilm] for the film screening, he went through the main entrance. NKVD officers had been positioned from there to the screening room. So, in this case [the conspirators] were unable to commit the heinous deed.”

Vladimir Nagly, who was thirty-six years old, was sentenced to eight years in the camps for involvement in a “right-wing counterrevolutionary Trotskyist-Zinovievist organization.” Although he suffered from a stomach ulcer and had undergone a ten-month-long investigation, prison doctors concluded he was fit for manual labor and the long, gruelling transport to the camps. In his memoirs, Georgy Zzhonov, who would go on to become a famous actor of screen and stage, accidentally recognized Nagly during his own transport to the camps in Kolyma. He described Nagly as “unhealthy.”

Nagly’s death certificate, dated 6 October 1940, and drawn up by officials at the Sevvostlag, listed the cause of death: “He froze to death on the way [to the camp]. There are no other indications.”

The regime admitted the case was a complete frame-up only in 1956, when Nagly was posthumously exonerated.

Vladimir Nagly’s son Mikhail (1926–2012), who was himself a well-known theater director, recalled that, before his father was arrested, the actors Nikolay Cherkasov, Vasili Merkuryev, Yuri Lavrov, and Yekaterina Karchagina-Alexandrovskaya were frequent guests in their spacious flat, and that his father had taken him to a see a rehearsal by the world-famous avant-garde theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold. The family avoided talking about Vladimir Nagly’s plight, and his relatives only recently learned the circumstances of his criminal case and his death.

A plaque in memory of Vladimir Nagly was mounted on the building at 38 Kolomenskaya Street on 28 February 2016.

Thanks to Jenya Kulakova of Last Address for the information about Vladimir Nagly. Translated by the Russian Reader