EXPLAINING THE STRUGGLE FOR HUMAN RIGHTS IN RUSSIA |
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Hello and welcome back to the Digest. |
Apologies for skipping last week without a warning, I fell ill for some time but I am OK now. FYI, next week we will skip an issue as I will be on vacation. Today we’re discussing underage political prisoners. |
In solidarity, Dan Storyev |
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Trigger warning:
This is a newsletter about Russian repressions. Sometimes it will be hard to read. |
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Every year on June 1 we mark World Children’s Day, also known as Defence of Children Day. Unfortunately, in Putin’s Russia there is a distinct need to defend children from the state — in schools, on the streets and in prisons. |
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For years, the Kremlin has tried to impose its propaganda on children, through tweaking school curriculums or creating children’s organisations. After the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine the Kremlin instituted the “Important Conversations”, mandatory patriotic education classes often led by veterans of the Ukraine war. |
Regardless, children of all ages still protested the war — like Masha Moskaleva, who was taken from her father after drawing an anti-war doodle in arts class.
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Masha Moskaleva with her father, Alexei, the day after his release from the colony where he was serving a sentence for “repeated discreditation of the army”, Tula region, 16 October 2024 / Photo: OVD-Info |
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I wrote in further detail about the Kremlin’s propaganda and children’s protest in issue #24, and we have an in-depth explainer of Masha’s story on our website.
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Today I would like to focus on three underage political prisoners who are currently in jail for protesting the war, and tell you a little bit about each of them. |
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Lyubov is a native of Chita, a Far Eastern city near the Chinese border. An antifascist and an anarchist, she was born 2006. In 2022, she and her 19-year-old friend Alexander Snezhkov graffitied “death to the regime” on a garage door. As they were finishing the graffiti they were approached by a group of plainclothes police. |
Accused of creating the anti-regime graffiti and administering an anti-war Telegram channel the duo was sentenced for vandalism and calls for terrorism. Lyubov was sentenced to 3.5 years and Alexander to almost 6. |
In March of this year, Lyubov was transferred to prison. Novaya Gazeta spoke to her support group which said that “she is not discouraged, even on such a journey she sees the light side of things. <...> She read a lot, talked with fellow prisoners, recited her poems to them from memory, many liked them. According to her parents, one of the guards talked a lot with Lyubov, read about her on the Internet, asked her to read her poems and even cried when she read them.”
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Kirill was born in 2006 in Nizhny Novgorod, an old city in the European part of Russia. He had a modest Telegram channel of 26 subscribers, where he posted a video in 2023 in which he was discussing the war with his friend Egor Starshinov. The video somehow made its way to the principal of Kirill’s school. |
The principal reported his pupil to the authorities and the two friends ended up in court. They were sentenced to 2 years and 6 months each, for “disseminating fake information about the military”. But this was not enough for the prosecution. Recently, their prosecutor wrote: "I believe that the punishment assigned to Smirnov K. and Starshinov E. is unfair, due to its excessive leniency, and cannot ensure the goal of their correction while warning about the commission of new crimes and the restoration of social justice.”
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Since the start of 2023, coverage of the Russian economy has consistently invoked a wartime ‘boom’ driven by war spending. This ‘boom’ is the lens through which the country’s resilience under sanctions is explained, a means of justifying the impressive figures the Kremlin touts as proof of successes. Yet quality of services and life is visibly worse for most Russians in wartime. Years of underspending, underinvestment, and a failure to reform institutions can’t be undone by blood money for families who’ve lost their loved ones at the front.
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I covered Egor in the past in issue #36, you can read more about him there. |
Egor was 17 when a court sentenced him to 6 years of jail for setting two military recruitment centers on fire. Egor has long opposed the Kremlin’s authoritarianism. A native of St. Petersburg, he was a bright student who participated in many extracurriculars like a local karate club. | |
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Egor became a part of the phenomenon of protest arson which struck military recruitment centers all across Russia. The protesters would aim to destroy draft records and express their dissatisfaction with the war. To date no people have been harmed during the arson protests as the protesters explicitly avoided harming people. Regardless, the Kremlin deemed them terrorism, and this is exactly what Egor got accused of, to the outcry from his parents and society at large. In court, Egor opened his final statement with “I am not asking for absolution here. I only need justification from my soul and my conscience is my judge.”
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They sentenced him to prison despite Egor having a serious autoimmune disease. While in prison he has been repeatedly harassed by his cellmates and officers for his anti-war stance. We even had to run a public pressure campaign to demand Egor’s move into a different cell, as his previous cellmates shaved his head and threatened him with violence. The campaign, which saw thousands of people writing letters to the prison administration, was successful in ensuring his transfer.
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These cases are depressing and there are many more I have not mentioned so as not to be repetitive. The motives are remarkably similar — the young person does not support the Kremlin’s war and the Kremlin wants to bend young people and minors to its will. The one ray of hope these cases offer is that no matter the terror and brutality unleashed by the regime, the people — even children — are still finding the courage to stand up against it.
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