MOSCOW — On February 14, a small group of women in the Russian capital marked Valentine’s Day by holding a demonstration in support of jailed women they consider political prisoners. They also wanted to encourage Yulia Navalnaya, the wife of imprisoned opposition politician Aleksei Navalny.

“I admire those who know that they could face more than just fines but who come to protests anyway,” said a retiree who asked to be identified only as Marina and who regularly attends opposition demonstrations. “When you know what those people are risking, you are ashamed to sit at home and complain in your kitchen.”

But some of those involved in the protest risked more than fines or even jail. A woman who asked to be identified only as Ksenia, who is a member of the SotsFem Alternativa community, told RFE/RL that the leader of a growing online community called Male State (Muzhskoye gosudarstvo) posted personal information on social media on February 13, telling her not to participate in the protest the next day and stressing ominously that this was her “first warning.”

“His followers began sending me all sorts of insults, some even saying it would be good if I died,” Ksenia told RFE/RL.

Other SotsFem Alternativa activists also had their contact information posted on closed Male State forums.

“We got a lot of indecipherable threats…using anonymous accounts,” Ksenia recalled. “It was very unpleasant.”

Feminist artist and activist Darya Serenko was an organizer of the February 14 protest, and her personal data and the physical address of some of her relatives were posted by Male State leader Vladislav Pozdnyakov on his Telegram channel. She received nearly 600 insulting or threatening messages.

Serenko said many of the messages she received from Male State acolytes contained direct threats.

“There were threats like: ‘We will find out your address,’” she said in an interview with the website Mediazona. “‘We are coming for you.’ ‘Look around you.’ ‘We will sit you down on a bottle.’ ‘We are coming to rape you.’ ‘We know where your husband lives.’ ‘We will kill your pets.’”

On February 14, she wrote on Twitter that the intimidation campaign against her had moved to the real world.

“I was followed from early this morning,” she wrote. “I’m talking about a real threat to my life and health. I will file a complaint.”

Women have been threatened for taking part in protests.

Pozdnyakov, 30, refused to speak to RFE/RL for this article, insisting that he would only do so if RFE/RL deleted an earlier article about the origins of Male State. Pozdnyakov created the online community on the VK social-media site in 2016. Its members were openly racist and misogynist, advocating extreme right-wing views, and even calling for morality police.

Members celebrated Adolf Hitler’s birthday and railed against Russian women they felt were destroying the Russian nation through immoral behavior such as homosexuality or consorting with foreigners. Pozdnyakov called the community’s ideology “national-patriarchy.”

Incel Community

Filmmaker Yelena Khazanova has spent two years studying the “incel” phenomenon, beginning her work after a self-professed incel drove a truck onto a sidewalk in Toronto, Canada, and killed 10 people. Incels — the term is a portmanteau of “involuntary celibates” — have been listed as a hate group by the U.S.-based Southern Poverty Law Center, which describes them as “part of the online male supremacist ecosystem.”

“We studied both Russian and English-language sources,” Khazanova told RFE/RL in an interview in July 2020. “For two years we were only working on this topic. Two years ago, when we started, no one in Russia had heard the term ‘incel.’ But during the time that we have been working, the situation has changed a lot.”

Khazanova said the Male State phenomenon is ideologically and psychologically akin to the larger incel phenomenon.

“These are typical conservative convictions that have been given new life by our digital reality,” she said. “Incels believe that women have taken their place in the world, that in reality men should be dominant and that women must obey them. Their worst enemies are feminists, whom they even refuse to acknowledge as women.”

Some social-media accounts of Male State leader Vladislav Pozdnyakov have been blocked.

“Feminists and LGBT are biogarbage,” Pozdnyakov wrote on Telegram after the February 14 protest. “Absolute deformities and degenerates. They are psychologically sick people who have no place among normal people.”

The Male State community gained notoriety for various campaigns purporting to “out” women who supposedly appeared in pornographic clips in the past, threatening to tell their husbands and children and sometimes trying to extort money. Some victims of these campaigns, who asked not to be identified, told RFE/RL they were wrongly targeted for superficial similarities to the women in the videos.

One woman, who works now as a teacher, shared with RFE/RL an audio direct message from one of Postnyakov’s personal social-media accounts in which a voice threatens to send pornographic videos to her students and to post screenshots around her school if she didn’t quit. Her minor son also received Male State messages.

Male State campaigns have also targeted women who posted photographs of themselves with black men or who have mixed-race children. One woman, who was only 16 and who asked that her name not be used, was targeted for such a photograph.

“My goodness,” she told RFE/RL, “I only kissed him once.”

One 28-year-old from Mordovia who asked to be identified only as Anna is married to a man from Ghana and has a 2-year-old daughter.

One woman, who is married to a man from Ghana, received abuse online.

“A lot of the messages contained threats to my life,” she said. “‘We will find you.’ ‘You can’t hide.’ ‘We will cut you up.’ I never thought anyone would actually come and kill me, but the stress affected my health.”

“They wrote that I was a slut and that I am sleeping with a ‘monkey,’” the woman added. “They wished illness and death not only on me but on my child as well.”

Male State memes celebrate “Domestic Violence Day” and attract comments glorifying violence against women.

In July 2020, VK blocked the Male State community, which at the time had about 170,000 members, for calls for violence. Pozdnyakov’s TikTok account was blocked in April 2020. The community, however, continues to exist in various closed forums and Telegram channels.

Several Male State followers spoke with RFE/RL and defended the threats against feminist activists over the Valentine’s Day demonstration.

“The leftists in Russia are always saying we have to have freedom of speech,” said Viktor Volkov, who found out about the campaign against Serenko via Telegram. “Everyone must be free to express their opinions. Well, people expressed their opinions about Darya and her activity.”

Another follower of Pozdnyakov’s, who asked not to be identified, claimed that he knew about and supports the campaign targeting Serenko but did not participate in it.

“There have to be alternative voices in society,” he said. “The leftists have used these tactics for a long time, and it isn’t surprising that opinion-makers like Pozdnyakov have adopted such effective means of fighting.”

“Feminism debases and bestializes women,” the man added. “And the rightist fight against feminism is a fight for a decent future for our women and children.”

Feminist activist Darya Chaban has been in Male State’s sights for several years. She received a torrent of threats when she spoke out in support of the three Khachaturyan sisters, who are being prosecuted for killing their father in 2018 after enduring what they describe as years of sexual and physical abuse. Male State has featured prominently in a coalition of so-called defenders of traditional values — including the Russian Orthodox Church — who have rejected the sisters’ argument of self-defense.

The online abuse grew much worse when Chaban wrote on social media that she did not want to have children. After that post, she received messages saying she “wasn’t worthy of living” or regretting that “there are no concentration camps where they could destroy people like you together with gays and other unworthies.”

“There were threats of death, rape, and beating,” she recounted. “Someone wrote that he would denounce me to the police and that I would be imprisoned for distributing pornography. That’s how they claim to be defending the interests of children and teenagers who might come to my social-media page and find my body-positive images.”

SotsFem Alternativa activist Ksenia stressed that despite the Male State intimidation campaign, the February 14 rally was a success.

“I think that 250 women who stood up in the center of Moscow in a solidarity chain although they knew that they might be beaten with billy clubs is a successful protest,” she told RFE/RL. “They definitely didn’t manage to cancel it.”

She added that activists in Russia are used to being threatened and that feminist events regularly attract ultrarightists who use various means to disrupt the proceedings.

“But that is definitely no reason to stay home,” Ksenia said, “or to stop insisting on the rights of women or to stop fighting for a just world.”

Written by RFE/RL senior correspondent Robert Coalson based on reporting by RFE/RL Russian Service correspondent Karina Merkuryeva. RFE/RL Russian Service correspondent Sergei Khazov-Cassia contributed to this report.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

MOSCOW — Denis Karagodin has spent almost a decade compiling a meticulous record of evidence about the murder of his great-grandfather by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s secret police, running a website that lists, by name, every individual he deems complicit.

The Siberia-based designer has been tipped for prestigious human rights prizes, and leading Western publications have spotlighted his work and the website he runs.

The people he ties to the killing of Stepan Karagodin, a peasant swept up in Stalin’s Great Terror in the 1930s, have passed away. But their relatives are now making sure Karagodin’s accusations don’t go unchallenged.

Karagodin was interrogated this week by police in Tomsk, the city where he lives and where his great-grandfather’s murder took place on January 21, 1938. “Buckle your seatbelts, dear friends!” he wrote on Facebook after his questioning. “They’ve filed a police complaint against me.”

Sergei Mityushov, the son of a deceased local employee of the NKVD secret police force that dispatched millions of Soviet citizens to frigid labor camps and the firing squad, confirmed that he had pressed charges against the amateur researcher for publishing what he says is inaccurate and defamatory information about his father, Aleksei Alekseyevich Mityushov.

Karagodin published a document citing the execution and bearing Mityushov’s signature. But his son told the independent Belarusian news site Belsat that he had visited historical archives, retrieved documents relating to his father, and concluded that “half the facts on [Karagodin’s] website are plucked out of the air.” He didn’t deny his father’s complicity, but said “I don’t like it when people pry into my life without permission.”

It’s unclear what specific charges Karagodin faces, but his work has courted controversy from the outset. The 38-year-old began the research in 2012, publishing on his website each document and every shred of evidence he could find about the case. The result is a detailed account of the fate of his great-grandfather, a Cossack farmer and father of nine who was executed on the trumped-up accusation that he was a Japanese spy.

Stepan Karagodin was killed on January 21, 1938.

Karagodin achieved a breakthrough in November 2016, when he received an envelope in the mail from the archives of the Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor agency to the NKVD and KGB. Inside was an original document in which his great-grandfather’s executioners reported to a Soviet court that its verdict “has been carried out.” The typewritten, stamped document featured the names and signatures of three NKVD agents.

Armed with the evidence, Karagodin announced his investigation complete. He claimed to have established a direct chain of responsibility that included the three executioners, members of the tribunal that rubber-stamped the verdict, local officials in Siberia including Aleksei Mityushov, secret police chief Nikolai Yezhov, and Stalin himself. He even identified the men who allegedly drove the black vans that shuttled the condemned around the city.

After Stalin’s death in 1953, Russia never organized its own version of the Nuremberg trials, the military tribunals in postwar Germany that convicted almost two dozen senior Nazi officers. But Karagodin said he planned to prosecute “the entire criminal conspiracy” that led to his great-grandfather’s death.

“We found out what several generations of my family have wanted to know: the names of the murderers,” Karagodin told RFE/RL at the time. “I began in 2012, and it ended on November 12, 2016.”

Eight days later, he was stunned by a letter of gratitude from the granddaughter of one of the three secret police agents who executed Stepan Karagodin. “Thank you for the enormous work you have done for the sake of these difficult truths,” the woman wrote. “It gives us hope that society will finally come to its senses thanks to people like you.”

But in a country where digging up dark pages of the past is a fraught activity — and where Stalin, who oversaw show trials of his opponents and jailed or executed hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens, is officially neither vilified nor excused — not everyone is happy with Karagodin’s work.

In a December 2019 interview on the radio station Ekho Moskvy, Karagodin said many relatives of people named in his investigation have contacted him to complain. He was defiant.

“What can they criticize me for? That I published official documents from the FSB saying their relatives took part in mass murders?” he said. “How am I guilty?”

He is also a controversial figure among professional historians and long-time researchers of Stalin-era repressions, some of whom say he lacks the training to draw accurate conclusions from the archival documents that come into his possession.

A section on Karagodin’s website titled “Executioners” lists more than 150 names of people he says were tied to his great-grandfather’s murder. A hyperlink with Aleksei Mityushov’s name redirects to a page showing a signed statement listing the date of Stepan Karagodin’s death sentence and the date his execution took place.

Yan Rachinsky of human rights NGO Memorial, which was founded in 1989 to document Soviet-era crimes, says written statements of this sort — known in Russian as vypiski — were often produced years after the crime and offer no proof that those who signed them took part in it.

“Such vypiski were folded into case files two years after the Great Terror, in 1939, when they were simply getting documents in order. And that process was carried out by people who had nothing to do with the executions,” Rachinsky told RFE/RL. “These are standard pieces of paper. I’ve seen hundreds of them.”

Aleksei Mityushov, the man accused of murdering Stepan Karagodin in 1938

“I can’t unequivocally say this person did not take part,” Rachinsky said of Aleksei Mityushov. “But it’s wrong to claim on the basis of this document that he did.” He added that Mityushov, who joined the NKVD in 1932 and would have been 25 years old at the time of Karagodin’s death, was most likely an ordinary clerk doing simple administrative work.

Sergei Mityushov said the “final straw” — the development that prompted him to file charges — was a phone call he alleges was from Karagodin or one of his associates, announcing that researchers had found his father’s grave and posted video and images of it online. (Karagodin, who declined to be interviewed for this article, told RFE/RL he has never communicated with Mityushov.)

In the Belsat interview, Mityushov voiced general criticism about efforts to dig into Russia’s past, citing the Defense Ministry’s TV channel Zvezda, which often broadcasts propagandistic reports about wartime events and the country’s armed forces, as a useful guide for learning about Russian history.

“We must acknowledge that we fell into this historical current,” he said of the Stalin-era repressions, which some Russians justify as a necessary evil. “We need a great deal of time to find out what really happened.”

But Karagodin, Mityushov said, “is staging his own private Nuremberg.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

MOSCOW — German Vasilyenko, an ex-porn actor and reality TV show contestant, was working a run-of-the-mill sales job in early 2020 when he quit for a career on YouTube.

The impetus was a series of messages he got after some tipsy revelry at a party hosted by a YouTuber who streamed the event live on the video-hosting platform.

Vasilyenko was used to guilt-ridden hangovers and regrets about the night before. But suddenly, he was being showered with praise.

“Everyone was writing to me saying I’m great, and asking me to set up a channel. I was shocked,” he said in an interview.

Vasilyenko had unwittingly tapped into a murky online subculture called “trash-streaming,” an extreme take on YouTube livestreams that has gained fans and notoriety in Russia.

It has also led to death, injury, and an effort by legislators to curb a practice that has highlighted the state’s limited power to rein in the Internet.

Fiendishly Simple

The idea is fiendishly simple: Invite some friends over, get drunk on whatever is at hand, and broadcast the ensuing debauchery live through a computer webcam or smartphone.

But what sets trash-streams apart are the lewd challenges carried out in exchange for small donations from viewers — sometimes humorous but often harmful dares that earn performers instant credit exchangeable for cash, or the digital equivalent of coins dropped in a busker’s guitar case.

Vasilyenko launched his own channel in January 2020, moving to capitalize on the interest in his persona. When much of Russia went into lockdown in April, he left his job and began streaming full-time, playing video games during the day and inviting friends for alcohol-fueled dares at night. “It was easy money,” he said.

However, there’s a dark side to trash-streams. An activity that overwhelmingly attracts residents of Russia’s hardscrabble provinces offers a social lift and the chance of riches to streamers who make it big — but it also rewards and incentivizes those who are most willing to push the boundaries of what’s considered legal and safe.

“The competition is fierce — you have to do something radical to stand out,” said Konstantin Gabov, a sociologist at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics. “And in Russia, perhaps due to a low quality of life, people are ready to do it, and others are ready to pay for it.”

A spate of recent deaths and violent assaults on air has now prompted a clampdown on trash-streaming. But as Russian lawmakers advance legislation aimed at banning them altogether, experts — and the streamers themselves — are skeptical about their chances of putting the genie back in the bottle.

‘Just A Line Of Work’

The trend of “trash-streaming” — a Russian term that uses English loanwords — gained traction in the mid-2010s as a marginal spin-off from the world of video game broadcasts, which comprise the lion’s share of online livestreams.

On platforms like YouTube and Twitch, a livestreaming site, some gamers sought to push the envelope in a bid for more subscribers. When Twitch began banning users for vulgar acts and comments, thousands in the Russian-speaking world migrated to the relatively unbridled ecosystem of YouTube.

Fast-forward to 2020 and the growing but still marginal milieu of trash-streaming was given a boost by the coronavirus lockdown, which expanded streamers’ base of bored and often lonely viewers seeking a sense of community — however bawdy, boisterous, or base. The appeal came from the hosts’ interaction with viewers, whose messages and challenges they read out live on air.

“Everyone’s stuck at home. And here you can sign on and take part in something real,” said Ekaterina Kolpinets, a lecturer on digital culture also based at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics. “No matter how wild it is, it will find an audience.”

For Vasilyenko, it’s been a win-win deal. He can have fun with friends without venturing out, and viewers pay him for it. The 34-year-old streams as German Yagodka, the name he used as a porn actor and during his stint as a contestant on the TV show Dom 2, Russia’s Big Brother equivalent. On a good day, he says he makes 8,000 rubles on YouTube, half a supermarket cashier’s monthly wage, despite having a mere 4,500 subscribers.

The pioneers of trash-streaming include a Russian gamer called VJ Link, who in 2013 invited a hairdresser to his apartment and kept his livestream rolling when her husband stormed in and assaulted him for allegedly harassing his wife. VJ Link was accused of staging the scene, but he was credited for helping spawn a new genre.

“This is just a line of work. People do it for money,” VJ Link, whose real name is Kirill Zyryanov, told RFE/RL. “And ultimately the masses like it. Where there’s demand, there’s supply.”

Zyryanov has run his YouTube channel for almost a decade, and has 435,000 subscribers. In 2017, he began appearing on trash-streams with Stas Reshetnyak, aka Reeflay, who went to extreme lengths for viewer donations. He roughed up his girlfriend on camera, humiliated his guests, and tattooed one participant’s arm with the name of a paying subscriber. A box in the corner of Reelfay’s screen listed the cost of various obscene stunts.

Reshetnyak eventually introduced Zyryanov to Andrei Burim, a teenager from Belarus streaming under the name Mellstroy and amassing a large following. Burim began inviting Zyryanov to parties at his luxury rented apartment inside Moscow’s Federation Tower, Europe’s second-tallest skyscraper, and Zyryanov would engage in drunken fights with other guests and complete challenges – usually taking home 50 percent of the money his stunt earned, with the rest going to the host.

Last year Zyryanov joined 21-year-old Burim for a two week-long trash-stream from a rented house in St. Petersburg. “It was all-inclusive. We drank every day, there was food, and a nice place to sleep,” he said. Burim paid him $900 for his troubles, but the biggest reward was the exposure he got as a YouTuber, including brand deals and new followers who help finance a lifestyle far removed from that of his working-class parents.

Losing Control

Trash-streaming reached a sort of zenith this past summer, when businessman Aleksandr Timartsev launched a reality show called Sosed.tv. At the height of the pandemic he placed a bunch of strangers in a shabby house with cameras overlooking every nook and cranny, and published a price list online for challenges including “drink a bottle of hard liquor” and “smoke a pack of cigs” – and whatever else viewers wanted if they were ready to pay the price.

The concept never took off, though it continues despite low viewership and reports of sexual harassment and a rape allegation by one participant that was widely reported in September, the first in a series of shocking incidents that would thrust trash-streams into the spotlight and prompt a clampdown by the Russian government.

In October, police launched a criminal investigation after Burim violently assaulted 21-year-old Instagram model Alyona Yefremova during one of his parties at the Federation Tower, a scene he broadcast live to his 700,000 subscribers. In December, Reshetnyak was arrested on charges of causing the death of his girlfriend, Valentina Grigoryeva, whom he locked out in sub-zero temperatures wearing only her underwear. “I swear she doesn’t even have a pulse,” he said to the camera as he carried her dead body back into the house.

All of this — Reshetnyak’s tears as her body lay on a sofa behind him, his conversation with the ambulance crew and the police officers who soon arrived – was streamed live to thousands of viewers on YouTube. The trash streamer faces 15 years in prison if convicted. He denies the charges, but investigators have said Grigoryeva’s heart stopped under the influence of drugs and the searing cold.

Authorities have also begun investigating the case of Valentin Ganichev, a handicapped man who was passed among seven different YouTubers over a period of several years, living in their homes as they humiliated and beat him on camera for viewer donations. In one stream he was buried alive in the back garden of a house in Bryansk, southwest of Moscow. “You’ll be famous!” one tells him as he bawls uncontrollably. https://batenka.ru/unity/thrash-streams/

In October, in a video response to Burim’s arrest, popular YouTuber Yury Khovansky called trash-streamers “a zeitgeist, a spirit of the times, of the fact that we are ready to part with our human dignity for easy money.”

“Listen carefully: Easy money is great, but in the long run it’ll bury you,” Khovansky said in an obscenity-filled monologue viewed by 2.3 million people. “The house always wins.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGe34sqhVds&ab_channel=%D0%AE%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%B9%D0%A5%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0%D0%BD%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B9

The legislation being debated in Russia’s Federation Council, the upper house of parliament, would mandate punishment of up to six years in prison for those who violate a proposed ban on trash-streaming. But experts say the initiative, which comes at a time of increasing state censorship in Russia, is doomed to failure.

Russia sought to ban the Telegram messaging app but after an unsuccessful effort lasting two years, it officially abandoned the idea last June. Gabov and Kolpinets say the ban on trash-streams is likely to suffer a similar fate. They point to the alt-right exodus to Telegram after Twitter banned Donald Trump, or the migration to TikTok after Instagram stopped displaying the numbers of “likes” on posts.

“These days you can’t ban something and expect people to say ‘ok, it’s over.’ They simply move to another platform,” says Kolpinets. Gabov says the legislation will most likely be powerless unless a specific crime is committed.

Vasilyenko says the trash-streaming community is waiting for more details on the law, and especially how lawmakers will define the activity. But he asks, “if a person consents to something, why shouldn’t it be allowed?”

‘Just Getting Started’

In the meantime, fatal accidents keep happening. On January 28, 60-year-old Yury Dushechkin died after drinking a liter and a half of vodka in exchange for viewer donations during a trash-stream in the western city of Smolensk that was watched by some 300 people. Russian media reported that Dushechkin was one of several homeless men who were regularly invited to a channel run by a local entrepreneur and paid with alcohol for completing viewer challenges.

YouTube, which did not respond to a request for comment, has banned Burim and Reshetnyak’s channels and removed various trash-streams from its site. But the streamers find a way to keep working. Burim continues to broadcast his parties, opening new YouTube channels that get blocked as soon as his face appears on air.

Vasilyenko is planning to team up with another St Petersburg-based YouTuber to purchase a bus and drive around the Russian city with friends while they broadcast online everything that happens on-board.

Zyryanov, who continues to attend Burim’s streams, says he will rent a large country house for four months starting in May and stream 24/7 throughout the summer on his channel — a “trash” reality TV show, just like Sosed.tv.

He says he’s just getting started.

“This is a profession. I live off this, and can’t imagine life without it,” he said. “I might disappear from the web for a week. But I will never stop broadcasting.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

NIZHNEVARTOVSK, Russia — “Sign up quickly,” read an announcement that appeared on a closed social-media chat group for university students in this oil-rich Siberian city earlier this month. “11,000 rubles aren’t just lying around on the road. This is a good opportunity to earn references.”

Several students studying at Nizhnevartovsk State University, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, have told RFE/RL they have been offered money and academic benefits in exchange for helping to promote the ruling United Russia party through scripted social-media posts and other activities.

“It isn’t right,” one student said, “because they are influencing assessments. I study on my own, using my abilities, and suddenly someone makes some phone calls and not only do they get money but also good references. It is not fair.”

The revelations come as the government of longtime authoritarian President Vladimir Putin prepares for national elections to the State Duma, the lower chamber of parliament, that must be held by September 19. United Russia, which maintains a stranglehold on all levels of political power, enters the campaign with its popularity rating depressed by the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic, the party’s support for an unpopular pension reform in 2018, and the widespread perception that it is, as opposition leader Aleksei Navalny has branded it, “the party of crooks and thieves.”

During a virtual chat on the social-media site VK among representatives of some 60 university groups on February 8, Kristina Chernopiskaya, the university’s deputy dean of educational work, made the announcement that United Russia was seeking student volunteers.

Interested students were instructed to download an app called Agitator that distributes news about United Russia’s activities around the country. They were told that the app would also distribute texts that students could copy and post on their social-media accounts. After publication, students were told to send a report to Chernopiskaya in order to be remunerated.

The instructions came in the form of a voice message posted under Chernopiskaya’s name to the university chat group. The students who spoke to RFE/RL said they recognized Chernopiskaya’s voice. “There is no doubt that this is a voice message from Kristina Aleksandrovna,” one student said, using Chernopiskaya’s first name and patronymic. “She has sent voice posts in the past and the voice is the same.”

Yekaterina Dolgina, dean of the humanities faculty at the university, denied that any university employee was engaged in promoting United Russia. “It’s all a lie,” Dolgina told RFE/RL. “I do not know where you got this information from.”

Chernopiskaya could not be reached for comment.

In the message attributed by students to Chernopiskaya, students are given further details about how they might participate in the initiative.

“I can give you this loophole,” the message states. “If you don’t want to publish these on your own accounts, you can open a separate account, add a few friends to it, and publish the messages there. But there is nothing to be worried about in them. Just notices of some amendments or new laws. It is all purely informational.”

The post was accompanied by two “examples.” One directed readers to a December 14 report on state Channel One television that was headlined: “During A United Russia Virtual Social Forum, Vladimir Putin Spoke With Volunteers.” The second text described how a United Russia deputy in the regional legislature, Sergei Veliky, was distributing food parcels to doctors at a Nizhnevartovsk COVID-19 hospital. That text appeared widely in local social media in the first half of December.

Students were promised an “analytical reference” for each time they posted one of United Russia’s texts.

“An analytical reference is a sort of thank-you letter for participating in a university project,” one student explained. “Like welcoming first-year students or Science Day or attending various conferences. It gives students an advantage in getting stipend bonuses or when completing a term.”

‘Aggressive Party Promotion’

“For example,” the student added, “if I have problems with my grades, but I have several analytical references, then I take them to the instructor and…they might give me a break. And for these promotional posts, they are promising a heap of references.”

A second post to the same VK chat under Chernopiskaya’s name promises students 11,000 rubles ($150) and three “analytical references” for one day of work at a United Russia call center.

The students who spoke to RFE/RL said they feared that the pressure could increase if not enough students volunteer to assist United Russia. Some said those who refuse could even face expulsion.

“Of course, not everyone is willing, and people are complaining,” one student said. “I’m afraid that people like that could have academic problems. In the group, one girl made a negative comment along the lines of, ‘What has United Russia done for us?’ And, really, students are not really very eager to do this stuff.”

The students also said instructors had been warning students orally not to participate in unsanctioned opposition demonstrations or they might face problems with the university.

“Inside the university, the election campaign is already going full steam,” one student said. “I have never seen a political party before that was promoting itself so aggressively.”

According to Russian law, “the creation or activity of organized structures of political parties” is illegal at any state educational institution.

Chernopiskaya is also a co-founder of the Project Center for Youth Initiatives, which applies for grants from the regional government of the Khanty-Mansi region. Last year, the organization submitted an unsuccessful application for a grant to hold a shooting competition for schoolchildren. According to the application, the project was “aimed at working out a complex approach to working with children and teenagers that is oriented toward patriotic upbringing by means of developing physical fitness and the practice of safe use of weaponry.”

Nizhevartovsk, a city of about 250,000 over 3,000 kilometers east of Moscow, made headlines earlier this month when it was reported that a group of riot police demonstrated to schoolchildren how to detain protesters during a riot. In a video posted to social media, students pelted officers with balls as they huddled behind riot shields. The February 16 event came in the wake of a series of mass demonstrations across the country during which the authorities detained — often brutally — more than 11,000 people.

In 2018, a journalist in Nizhnevartovsk was fired after she complained on social media about a kindergarten program in which 4- and 5-year-old children sang a song expressing fealty to Putin. Called Uncle Vova, We Are With You — Vova is a diminutive of Vladimir — the song contains lyrics such as: “While there should be peace on Earth, if the commander in chief calls us to the final battle, Uncle Vova, we are with you!”

Written by Robert Coalson based on reporting from Nizhnevartovsk by Nadezhda Trubitsyna of the Siberia Desk of RFE/RL’s Russian Service

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

When Russians took to the streets three times in recent weeks to protest the jailing of Kremlin opponent Aleksei Navalny, police violently dispersed the crowds and detained more than 11,000 people. But the latest nationwide demonstration, on February 14, provoked hardly any clashes or arrests.

That was one of the goals of the Valentine’s Day gatherings, which saw residents of numerous cities brave subzero temperatures to hold flashlights in the courtyards of their apartment buildings, silently expressing opposition to President Vladimir Putin’s government while showing solidarity with Navalny and other activists swept up in the crackdown.

Absent were the chants — “Putin is a thief!” and “Down with the tsar!” — that echoed through town squares at rallies across Russia on January 23 and 31 and in Moscow and St. Petersburg on February 2. Police mostly stayed away despite advance warnings that formed part of a concerted state effort to keep people from taking part.

Thousands posted selfies online, boosting the hashtag #любовьсильнеестраха (#LoveIsStrongerThanFear) to the top of the Russian-language segments of Twitter and Instagram.

But the diffuse nature of the flashlight protest, and the difficulty of gauging how many joined them, provoked mixed responses as to what impact they could have in a country where many of the key opposition activists are under house arrest or in jail, with many wondering whether such demonstrations can maintain momentum in the months before parliamentary elections in which Navalny’s allies hope to challenge the ruling United Russia party.

Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, seized on the lack of reliable turnout figures to suggest the low-key demonstrations had little impact. “Yes, some people walked around with flashlights,” he told reporters on February 15. “Wonderful.”

“It wasn’t a failure, but you can’t exactly call it a success either,” Abbas Gallyamov, a former Kremlin speechwriter and now political analyst, told RFE/RL. “It seems not that many people came out.”

Ivan Zhdanov, the director of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, suggested on February 15 that based on the thousands of social-media posts, tens of thousands of people had come out. Vladislav Inozemtsev, an economist and political analyst who is a critic of Putin, said that if just a few residents from thousands of apartment buildings came out, the total numbers may have been similar to the 100,000 estimated at protests on January 23 and 31.

‘No OMON, No Fear’

The opposition has had a tough time in recent weeks. Following a particularly violent crackdown on the recent protests, and Navalny’s sentencing to more than 2 1/2 years in prison on February 2, activists issued a controversial statement calling for a halt to street rallies until the spring and urging supporters to dig in for a protracted political campaign that would culminate with the September elections to the State Duma, the lower house of parliament.

So it came as a surprise to some when Leonid Volkov, who runs Navalny’s network of campaign offices across Russia, announced the flashlight demonstrations as an alternative show of anger against the state. “Let’s have social-media feeds filled with thousands of shining hearts from dozens of Russian cities,” Volkov wrote on Facebook on February 9. “No OMON [riot police], no fear.”

The unorthodox protest was initiated by Navalny’s team as a way of circumventing the authorities’ readiness to deploy violence and overcoming the fear it instilled. It was also a way of keeping up momentum in the face of the authorities’ campaign to break it through force, through TV propaganda, and by organizing counter-rallies featuring participants professing their ostensible respect and admiration for Putin.

Inozemtsev said that the Valentine’s Day initiative had greater symbolic appeal than large street protests and that it reached more people because it took place in neighborhoods across cities, including on their outskirts, not just in the center.

“The number of people who saw what was taking place was immeasurably greater than the number that directly observed the protests on recent weekends,” he wrote on Facebook. “In other words, as a symbolic act the initiative turned out to be very successful.”

Many participants voiced the same sentiment, revealing hopes that despite its more understated nature, the series of flashlight demonstrations would send a message that would resonate across the country and recruit even more activists to the protest cause.

“I went out alone. It was predictable, I expected nothing else,” Yekaterina Khramtsova, an activist in the Urals city of Chelyabinsk, wrote on Twitter. “And if just one person walked past or looked out of their window and paused to think, then all this wasn’t in vain.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

It was with “pain in my heart,” rector Konstantin Markelov said on January 29, that he announced the expulsion of three Astrakhan State University students for attending opposition protests.

But “the law is the law,” he said in an open letter posted to social media. “Think a hundred times when they urge you to join unsanctioned demonstrations.”

The university in southern Russia prompted an uproar with its decision, a case still rare in Russia despite an increasingly harsh crackdown on dissent following nationwide rallies in support of jailed opposition politician Aleksei Navalny on January 23.

Now two of the students — Vera Inozemtseva and Aleksandr Mochalov — are suing the university and demanding their reinstatement. “I see my expulsion as a case of political repression,” Inozemtseva told RFE/RL in an interview.

She and her legal team will argue that the decision violates the school’s own charter as well as their right to freedom of assembly under the Russian Constitution.

“They can’t properly justify the decision aside from issuing abstract statements,” said Yaroslav Pavlyukov, the lawyer representing the students. “They say the rules of their code of conduct have been violated. What rules? They don’t say.”

Target Demographic

The fallout from the protests in late January and early February has convulsed Russia’s student community, a target demographic in the Kremlin’s campaign to rein in political activism among young people and shift their allegiance away from the opposition and toward the state.

Thousands took part in the recent protests, and millions watched pro-Navalny videos uploaded by students to the TikTok video app, with many of the clips filmed in school classrooms or university corridors.

The clampdown was swift. In Siberia, lecturer Aleksei Alekseyev was fired from the Novosibirsk Energy And Technology College for a social-media post encouraging people to attend a January 23 demonstration as a “good excuse to meet and discuss the fate of the country.”

In the Volga River city of Samara, the state university redacted its Code of Ethics to ban participation in anti-government rallies by both students and teachers, a move that is expected to serve as an example for other schools going forward.

Students also say they’ve been pressured or even deceived into taking part in pro-Kremlin parades that, according to news outlet Meduza, have been recorded and posted online under instructions passed down from President Vladimir Putin’s administration.

Nevertheless, the incident in Astrakhan has turned heads.

“We know that students are often threatened with expulsion for joining protests, but actual expulsion happens very rarely,” Pavlyukov said. “We need to prove this is illegal and unjust.”

Of the three expelled students, 22-year-old Inozemtseva is the only seasoned opposition activist. She worked in Navalny’s regional political campaign in 2017, ahead of his attempt to challenge Putin in the 2018 presidential election, from which he was barred due to criminal convictions on charges he says were fabricated. She has also joined multiple protests in the past, including a series of rallies in March 2017 that prompted the Kremlin to launch a similar preemptive campaign in Russia’s schools.

Inozemtseva says that on January 23, as she was on her way home from the protest in Astrakhan, she was abducted by masked men in civilian clothing who confiscated her belongings. She says she later discovered that calls for anti-government rallies were posted to her social-media accounts while her phone was in police custody.

Since her expulsion she has publicly campaigned for the resignation of Markelov, the Astrakhan State University rector, and has gained support from Yabloko, an opposition party that has petitioned the Education Ministry to strip Markelov of his position, citing evidence dug up by Dissernet, an anti-plagiarism group, that large parts of his doctorate thesis were taken from other academic articles.

“A person who built his so-called academic career on a fake dissertation cannot be a guarantor of the rights and freedoms of his university’s students,” Yabloko said in a statement.

Inozemtseva said that if her lawsuit is successful, her victory in Astrakhan’s courts will be instructive to other students who find themselves expelled or pressured to renounce opposition views in the future.

“It will give them a guarantee that no student can be thrown out for their political views,” she told RFE/RL.

But the scale of the recent anti-government protests, which most estimates say brought out some 100,000 people on two consecutive weekends, has fueled a fraught and tense climate ahead of parliamentary elections expected in September, and a sense among activists that the authorities will tolerate no dissent.

“Since the case has a political undertone, I don’t know how it will play in our courts,” Pavlyukov said. “But in any case, we have to try.”

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After two weeks of police beatings, thousands of arrests, and a wave of criminal prosecutions whose reach is only just becoming apparent, allies of imprisoned Kremlin foe Aleksei Navalny have called an end to the anti-government protests they incited over the course of three consecutive weeks.

“If we continue to go out each week, we’ll continue to get thousands arrested and hundreds beaten,” Leonid Volkov, a top Navalny aide, told supporters in a YouTube video announcing the decision. “That’s not what we want, and that’s not what Aleksei asks of us.”

The protests ended the day Navalny was sentenced to over 2 1/2 years in prison on February 2, and Volkov said his allies would continue to fight for his release — prioritizing “foreign policy methods,” including pressuring Western leaders to impose sanctions, while not shirking from street rallies down the line.

“We won’t run out of reasons, and we won’t run out of demands,” he said.

Anger Over Decision

But the statement, which came as hundreds of protesters languish in squalid jails awaiting trial, immediately prompted indignation. Navalny supporters took to social media to voice their anger over what some perceived as capitulation.

“These guys had no revolutionary ambitions after all,” Artur Moskvin, a self-professed activist of over 30 years, wrote on Facebook. “I was always ready to be a simple foot soldier. But not the type of foot soldier whom brilliant generals send to clear a minefield at the price of our corpses.”

Navalny, charged with defaming a World War II veteran, attends a court hearing in Moscow on February 5.

“I understand the decision of Navalny’s team,” tweeted Russian journalist Oleg Kozyrev. But, he added, “people are seething over the arrests, the beatings, and the detention camps. They’re emotional, and they got an answer based on logic — not one based on emotion.”

Rallies for Navalny’s release swept Russia on January 23 and 31, with smaller demonstrations erupting in Moscow and St Petersburg the night of Navalny’s sentencing. The authorities cracked down, often using violence to disperse the largely peaceful crowds and arresting over 11,000 people.

Unnamed sources close to the Kremlin told Reuters on February 4 that authorities believe they can easily ride out further nationwide rallies and are ready to use yet more force against demonstrators if necessary.

“This is just a warm-up,” one source told the news agency.

In an interview with RFE/RL, Ruslan Shaveddinov, a project manager for the Anti-Corruption Foundation and one of its few employees not behind bars or under house arrest, said that Navalny’s team acknowledged the disappointment among some supporters but argued that many had misconstrued Volkov’s words.

“People should watch the video instead of paying attention to the headlines,” he said. “We’re not stopping our work for a second. We’ll be working every day to get Navalny out.”

Push For Sanctions

Shaveddinov confirmed that Navalny’s team would urge Western leaders to impose further sanctions on Russian officials close to President Vladimir Putin and those seen as complicit in state corruption or human rights violations.

The Anti-Corruption Foundation e-mailed a letter to several top U.S. officials in January listing 35 individuals whom they’d like to see sanctioned, including billionaire businessmen Roman Abramovich, Alisher Usmanov, and Oleg Deripaska.

In the meantime, Russian lawmakers are preparing to debate legislation that would make it a crime to call for sanctions against Russian citizens.

Political analyst Abbas Gallyamov told RFE/RL the decision to put protests on hold is strategically sound but risks angering those who braved bitter cold and police batons to make their voices heard.

“If they upped the tempo now, people would quickly burn out emotionally,” he said. “But public discontent is not going anywhere, and it will only grow, so we can expect more unrest in the summer.”

Shaveddinov said Navalny, who was back in court on February 5 charged with defaming a World War II veteran who promoted a dubious national plebiscite on extending Putin’s rule last July, had endorsed Volkov’s message in comments passed on by his lawyer. The work of his team would continue in his absence.

“The first task is to help people behind bars. We need to get them all out,” Shaveddinov said. “We’ll also continue our anti-corruption investigations, and we’ll continue what Aleksei Navalny asked us to do: preparing for the crucially important fall elections.”

The parliamentary vote expected in September has long been a target for the embattled opposition, which hopes to seize on Putin’s falling approval rating and widespread grumbling over falling real wages to break the political stranglehold of the ruling United Russia party. Ahead of that election, Shavedinnov insists, more demonstrations are inevitable.

“There’s no magic button that can start and stop protests,” he said. “People come out not because they’re called on by Volkov or Navalny. They come out because they see injustice, they see what’s happening in our country. Reasons to protest won’t go away — the authorities’ actions made sure of that.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Just two days before Moscow was roiled by the biggest anti-government protests since the Soviet collapse, Vladimir Putin went public with the target of his blame:

Hillary Clinton.

“She set the tone for some opposition activists, gave them a signal, they heard this signal and started working actively,” Putin said on December 8, 2011, speaking about the then-U.S. secretary of state.

“We are all grown-ups here. We all understand the organizers are acting according to a well-known scenario and in their own mercenary political interests,” Putin, who was prime minister at the time, told supporters without providing evidence to back the claims. “Pouring foreign money into electoral processes is particularly unacceptable.”

Fast forward nearly a decade.

Russia is now roiled again by some of the biggest nationwide protests in years, possibly since 2011-12. And while the demonstrations nearly a decade ago were mainly in big cities, the protests over the past two weekends — prompted by the jailing of opposition activist and anti-corruption crusader Aleksei Navalny — are wider in scope, reaching more than 140 cities and towns across the country’s 11 time zones.

And after a Moscow judge on February 2 ordered Navalny imprisoned for more than 2 1/2 years, protesters again took to the streets of the Russian capital, in some cases enduring brutal bludgeoning at the hands of riot police.

Who’s to blame for all of this? In the Kremlin’s eyes: The United States. Again.

“Gross U.S. interference in the internal affairs of Russia is a proven fact, as is the ‘promotion’ of fakes and calls for unauthorized actions by Internet platforms controlled by Washington,” the Foreign Ministry said in a post to Facebook on February 1, assigning specific blame to the new U.S. secretary of state, Antony Blinken. No evidence was provided for any aspects of the claim.

On the one hand, it’s a reversion to the mean, political observers said: the Kremlin sees foreign meddling in popular unrest, despite substantial evidence it is in fact powered by Russians’ dislike of endemic government corruption, stagnating wages, economic troubles, as well as fatigue with Kremlin foreign policy — and Putin.

On the other hand, the comments — from the Foreign Ministry and Kremlin — could signal a darker turn for government policy: a xenophobic pulling-up-the-drawbridge; the growing primacy of security agencies like the Federal Security Service (FSB) in domestic policy making; and a wider effort to purge domestic opposition by portraying it as a tool in the hands of foreigners out to destroy Russia.

In 2011, the protests were seen by the government merely as a political crisis, said Konstantin Gaaze, a sociologist at the Moscow School for Social and Economic Sciences. Now, he said, the protests are seen as a revolt engineered by the CIA.

WATCH: No Food, No Lawyer, Threats, And Humiliation: Russians Detained During Navalny Protests Recount Mistreatment

“It’s the same rhetoric as in 2011, but darker, and with much more nuance, in terms of them thinking there is a ‘Fifth Column,’” Gaaze said.

“The difference is now the thinking is: ‘there are CIA spies inside Russia; Navalny and his team are in the country, all of them are CIA agents; Russians don’t have real reason to be unhappy but so they are under CIA control,’” he added.

The first round of protests on January 23 was sparked by Navalny’s arrest upon returning to Moscow from Germany, where he was treated for a nerve-agent poisoning he blames on Putin. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov pointed to U.S. statements which called for authorities to allow Russians to protest peacefully.

Such statements “indirectly constitute absolute interference in our internal affairs,” he said, and are “direct support for the violation of the law of the Russian Federation, support for unauthorized actions.”

The Foreign Ministry, which has offered no evidence to bolster its accusations, homed in on a routine U.S. Embassy announcement cautioning U.S. citizens about the potential for unrest.

“They had to behave in [the] traditional way: to accuse the USA in the igniting of protests,” Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior scholar at the Carnegie Moscow Center, said in an e-mail. “This is a traditional Ukraine-like scenario. A ‘Nuland-inspired-Maidan’ mantra.”

That’s a reference to Victoria Nuland, then the assistant U.S. secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, who travelled to Kyiv late in 2013 and handed out cookies and bread to demonstrators at the Maidan protests roiling the Ukrainian capital.

She became a major target for Kremlin messaging that baselessly accused Washington of engineering the protests, which ultimately pushed pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych from power in February 2014.

Kolesnikov said the Kremlin overlooks the fact that Russians protesting may have their own straightforward motivations that have nothing to do with alleged foreign interference.

“But now, like in case of Khabarovsk, there were no signs of foreign intervention,” he said, referring to protests held in the Far Eastern city since June 2020 over the sacking and arrest of a popular local governor.

Foreign Agents

Putin has been accusing the United States and other Western countries of trying to undermine Russia since his first term, in 2000-04. As far back as 2011, when his decision to return to the presidency the following year was a catalyst of the protests, the Kremlin signaled that “forces from without” would be considered a threat and a priority for targeting.

Back in the Kremlin 2012, Putin signed Russia’s first “foreign-agent” law, targeting organizations that receive funding from abroad and are deemed by the government to be involved in political activity.

Since then, it has been gradually expanded to include media outlets as well as individual bloggers and journalists, including several RFE/RL news divisions within Russia. There are scores of entities and individuals now listed on the Justice Ministry’s official registry.

WATCH: What’s Next For Navalny And Russia’s Beleaguered Opposition?

An overlapping measure adopted in 2015 known as the “undesirable organizations” law calls for banning any foreign or international organization that is deemed by authorities to have undermined Russia’s security or constitutional order.

Navalny started gaining wide national attention during the 2011-12 protests, and since then Russian state media have gone out their way to try to discredit his investigations. His Anti-Corruption Foundation, known as FBK, was officially labeled as a foreign agent in 2019, and later was shut down.

“The simple psychological trick that the Russian authorities are using against the FBK is that the organization is working in the interests of foreign powers,” said Maksim Trudolyubov, the editor at large of the newspaper Vedomosti and a fellow at the Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute in Washington. “Russia’s state-run channels are losing influence to social media, but television is still able to get the Kremlin’s message out and sow enough doubt for the mass audiences to trust an outspoken Kremlin critic.”

Now And Then

In 2011-2012, Gaaze said, the protests were more isolated and limited: “a bunch of guys in their 30s living in big cities, Moscow and St. Petersburg, freelancers, IT people, they were stricken by the global economic crisis.”

“It was a middle-class riot,” he said. “It was a big deal for Moscow, the Kremlin, St. Petersburg, but it wasn’t a big deal for the country.”

Today, however, “these are the first nationwide, anti-Putin protests in the history of Russia,” he said. “Protests aren’t limited to special megapolises, now not limited to a certain class. It happened in Samara, Ufa, it happened in places where there aren’t [normally] protests.”

But now, instead of merely sowing doubt, the message has hardened into outright accusations of treachery. And the Kremlin’s rhetoric has escalated to exaggerate an imaginary foreign threat, Gaaze said, because it is the security services like the FSB that are driving policy making.

“The guys from the FSB: they’re deciding how we are going to deal with this CIA black-op,” he said.

Key to that is discrediting Navalny by trying to paint him as a foreign agent, and the wider protests as a foreign-engineered plot.

“For them, Navalny and the people who have marched in recent weeks are nothing less than enemies of the state and a tool for foreign meddling and interference,” Tatiana Stanovaya, a political researcher and founder of R. Politik, a Russia-focused think tank, said in a post to Twitter.

Just days before the February 2 court hearing, a grainy black-and-white secret surveillance camera video circulated on the state TV channel Rossia-1, on the TV channel formerly known as Russia Today, and other outlets. It purported to show a Navalny lawyer meeting with a diplomat from the British Embassy in Moscow.

Margarita Simonyan, the head of Russia Today, which has rebranded itself as RT, has called for Navalny to be prosecuted for treason. After the judge’s order to send Navalny to prison, she praised the move.

It was a proper reaction, she said, to “what Western secret services and the so-called civilized world are trying to do to Russia” — overthrow the Putin government. She provided no evidence to back up the charge.

Analysts say one motive of such remarks could be to instill patriotic sentiment in the police and security officers confronting and thwarting protesters, assuring them that they are protecting Russia from foreigners.

“The security services aren’t just breaking up protests anymore; they’re on the front line, resisting a revolution sponsored by foreign enemies whose aim is to destroy Russia,” Aleksandr Baunov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center, said in an article published after Navalny’s return to Russia.

Denis Volkov, deputy director of the Levada Center, an independent polling agency, said that for many Russians, there’s a persistent belief that the West had interfered in politics in Ukraine, and more recently, in Belarus. But less so in Russia.

Trying to delegitimize genuine opposition by trying to tie it to foreign forces isn’t as widely effective anymore, he said.

“It’s working to a limited extent, but mainly for the older generation who are watching TV,” Volkov said. “When people can look around them, they can see the reasons for the public dissatisfaction” — and that blunts any Kremlin accusation about foreign meddling,” he said.

“The Kremlin is using it too often, it already doesn’t work anymore,” Volkov said.

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MOSCOW — In late January, as Russia was being rocked by a wave of protests sparked by the January 17 arrest of opposition leader Aleksei Navalny, the country’s education minister addressed the upper chamber of parliament, the Federation Council.

“How are children supposed to achieve the goals that have been set for them? What can influence their world view and at what moment of their lives?” Sergei Kravtsov asked lawmakers on January 27. “What can be done to prevent the possibility of anyone exercising a destructive influence on children?”

His questions came in the context of comments by state officials and reports by Kremlin-controlled media outlets that appeared aimed, despite a lack of evidence, at portraying Navalny and other protest organizers as being bent on luring minors into the streets to oppose the government.

As part of the answer, Kravtsov announced a program called Navigators of Childhood, which aims to create a new position in Russian schools called “adviser to the school director for upbringing [‘vospitaniye’ in Russian] –and work with student organizations.” The term “vospitaniye” denotes the process of raising and educating children with proper behavior for integration into adult society.

Some observers, however, see the initiative as an effort to keep school-aged Russians away from anti-government protests. Officials have been warning minors to steer clear of street demonstrations since 2017, when teenagers were among the tens of thousands who demonstrated after Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation released a viral video expose of lavish homes allegedly owned or used by then-Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev.

Opposite Effect?

Political analyst Konstantin Kalachyov said that if the aim was to prevent teenagers from attending rallies, it could backfire. He suggested that the authorities should avoid any effort to introduce “political commissars” — a term for the functionaries who sought to ensure Communist Party loyalty and discipline in the army and the workplace in the Soviet era — into Russia’s schools.

“If some sort of political commissars or ‘upbringers’ appear in schools and start explaining to children the danger of participating in protests, it will only stimulate their interest in such things,” Kalachyov told RFE/RL.

Konstantin Kalachyov

The Navigators of Childhood initiative will roll out nationally in 2022, but is already being implemented in 10 test regions, from Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea to the Pacific island of Sakhalin. One of the locations is the city of Sevastopol in Crimea, the Ukrainian Black Sea peninsula that was seized by Russia in 2014.

The project is being managed by the Russian Movement of Schoolchildren (RDSh), which — despite its grassroots name — was created on the order of President Vladimir Putin in 2015 as part of his youth initiative aimed at “the formation of the personality on the basis of the prevailing values of Russian society.”

The RDSh is headed by 33-year-old Irina Pleshcheva, who formerly worked for the pro-Putin All-Russia Popular Front (ONF), the Moscow region administration, and the pro-Putin Nashi youth movement.

In comments to RFE/RL, Pleshcheva said that the plan for school advisers was not a response to the protests that swept Russia after the jailing of Navalny, who was arrested upon arrival from Germany, where he had been treated for an nerve-agent poisoning in Siberia in August that he blames on Putin.

“This project is already six months old,” she said. “We began it last year. You might recall that the State Duma (the lower parliament chamber) last May held discussions on the project of patriotic education and these positions were announced then.”

Protesters rally for Navalny’s release in Perm on January 23.

She said the purpose of the initiative was to improve communications with children and to convey their concerns to the authorities. “I know that, besides education, our children get very little out of school,” Pleshcheva said. “They do not have any other opportunities, including the opportunity to interact normally with one another outside of social media. On top of this, we now have the pandemic, which has imposed many restrictions. Teachers say they simply don’t have time for the children.”

She told RFE/RL the new counselors will develop extracurricular activities together with schoolchildren, giving as examples computer gaming, civic volunteer programs, and monitoring school-meal programs.

“In general, schoolchildren are not very interested in politics,” she said. “If you look at TikTok, even during the last few weeks, when children were provoked into going to protests, you see that children there are more interested in the latest dances or memes or who is in love with whom. During puberty, children are interested in other things besides politics.”

‘They Need To Be Integrated’

“We are not talking about political education, but about communicating with children,” Pleshcheva added. “The point of that communication is to be able to answer questions that interest them.”

Pleshcheva told the newspaper Kommersant that the new counselors “will have to know the language and memes of children, to watch the same livestreams and films that they watch, to listen to the music that they listen to, to be active in social media, and to understand video and computer games.”

According to Kommersant, she said that particular attention would be paid to children who had been detained at unsanctioned demonstrations so that “they wouldn’t feel that we are angry with them or that they are abandoned.”

“They need to be integrated into RDSh projects,” she added.

The RDSh plans to offer a salary supplement of 15,000 rubles ($200) per month to the new counselors, who will be recruited from current teachers and people about to graduate from pedagogical institutes. Those selected will pass through a 106-hour training program. The expectation is that some 2,500 counselors will pass through the program the first year and begin working in some of the country’s more than 40,000 schools.

Analyst Kalachyov predicted that the new initiative would likely share the fate of Nashi, a Kremlin-backed youth group that was prominent a decade ago but no longer exists. “It ended long ago and many of its activists are now opposition-minded,” he said. “They were disappointed with the future that was depicted for them but was never realized. Their expectations were raised, and they were disenchanted.”

Child psychologist Svetlana Kachmar was also skeptical. “I see that this project is being run by people who used to be in Nashi,” she told RFE/RL. “But as soon as that organization was no longer propped up or given financing, it disappeared from our daily life. Society didn’t accept it.”

School Psychologists Cut

“I am sure that the new workers will not be sufficiently trained to speak with children about politics,” Kachmar said. “And our children are not so stupid that they won’t see when they are being pressured or notice when some information is being foisted off on them.”

Kachmar added that schools have recently cut the number of psychologists, speech therapists, and other such professionals in Russian schools. “We should ask the Education Ministry why they cut from the schools all forms of this kind of support but now they are trying to cover their tracks and introduce these new positions,” she said. “We must demand the return of real specialists.”

Vsevolod Lukhovitsky, head of the professional organization Teacher, said the project would likely fail because too few people would be willing to take on the work for 15,000 rubles a month. “I think our bureaucrats will forget about this in a few months,” he said.

According to a survey conducted during the mass anti-Putin demonstrations on January 31, less than 2 percent of the participants were under the age of 18. Sixty-six percent of participants were aged 18-35.

Written by Robert Coalson based on reporting from Moscow by Lyubov Chizhova of RFE/RL’s Russian Service

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