MOSCOW — Lyubov Sobol, a lawyer for jailed opposition politician Aleksei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), has been handed a one-year suspended sentence and a penalty of either 10 percent of her wages or correctional labor for trespassing.
According to Russian legislation, those handed such a sentence must pay the State Treasury the required amount if they are employed. If they are unemployed, they must work at jobs defined by the Federal Penitentiary Service during the term of their sentence.
The court on April 15 found Sobol guilty of illegally forcing her way into the apartment of Federal Security Service (FSB) officer Konstantin Kudryavtsev in December 2020, hours after Navalny had published a recording of what he said was a phone conversation with Kudryavtsev.
During the 49-minute phone call, in which the anti-corruption campaigner posed as an FSB official conducting an internal review, Kudryavtsev described the details of an operation to poison the Kremlin critic in August.
Investigators say Sobol pushed Kudryavtsev’s mother-in-law, who opened the door, and forcibly entered the apartment.
Sobol rejected the charge, saying she did not push Kudryavtsev’s mother-in-law, but went to the apartment to meet Kudryavtsev to ask him about his conversation with Navalny.
Her team has described the case as political “revenge” for a lawyer not being afraid to ask questions of the alleged assassin.
In her final statement at the trial, Sobol reminded the court that no probe had been launched into Navalny’s poisoning.
“I am sure that my verdict will be guilty. Because it is me on trial, not those who poisoned Navalny, not members of the [ruling] United Russia [party],” Sobol said.
Kudryavtsev was not summoned to the trial to testify, which investigators said was not necessary because he was neither a witness nor a plaintiff in the case.
Navalny was arrested on January 17 upon his return to Russia from Germany, where he received life-saving treatment for the poisoning in Siberia in August.
Navalny has insisted that his poisoning with a Soviet-style chemical nerve agent was ordered directly by Russian President Vladimir Putin. The FSB and the Kremlin have denied any role in the poisoning.
In February, a Moscow court ruled that while in Germany, Navalny had violated the terms of parole from an old embezzlement case that is widely considered as being politically motivated.
Navalny’s 3 1/2-year suspended sentence from the case was converted to a jail term, though the court said he will serve 2 1/2 years in prison given time already served in detention.
The United States and European Union have imposed sanctions on Russia over the Navalny affair and ensuing crackdown on protesters.
Last month, Sobol said she planned to run for parliament’s lower chamber, the State Duma, in September elections
Sobol is currently under house arrest in another case. She and several other associates and supporters of Navalny were charged with violating sanitary regulations during unsanctioned rallies on January 21 to protest Navalny’s incarceration.
MOSCOW — A Moscow court has placed in de facto house arrest four editors of the student magazine Doxa who have been accused of “engaging minors in actions that might be dangerous” over a video related to unsanctioned rallies to protest the incarceration of opposition politician Aleksei Navalny.
The Basmanny district court late on April 14 ordered Armen Aramyan, Vladimir Metyolkin, Natalya Tyshkevich, and Alla Gutnikova not to leave their homes between 11.59 p.m. and midnight for two months, giving them only one minute to be outside each day.
The four were detained for questioning at the Investigative Committee after their homes and the magazine’s offices were searched over the video, which the magazine posted online in January.
Dozens of supporters held single-person protests near the court and organized “a live chain,” to express support for the four editors. Police detained one of the protesters.
As the journalists left the court one by one after the announcement of their pretrial restrictions, supporters cheered and applauded them.
The video for which the journalists were charged questioned teachers’ moves to warn students about possible repercussions they could face for participating in unsanctioned rallies on January 23 and 31 in protest of Navalny’s arrest.
Doxa editors say the video was deleted from the magazine’s website following a demand from Russian media watchdog Roskomnadzor to remove it.
More than 10,000 supporters of Navalny were detained across Russia during and after the January rallies.
Many of the detained men and women were either fined or handed several-day jail terms. At least 90 were charged with criminal offenses and several have been fired by their employers.
Human rights groups have called on Moscow repeatedly to stop targeting journalists because they covered the protests or expressed solidarity with protesters since both are protected under the right to freedom of expression.
“Instead of targeting journalists, the authorities should hold accountable police who attack journalists and interfere with their work,” Human Rights Watch said in a statement on February 3.
Navalny was detained at a Moscow airport on January 17 upon his arrival from Germany, where he was recovering from a poisoning in Siberia in August 2020 that several European laboratories concluded was from a military-grade chemical nerve agent.
Navalny has insisted that his poisoning was ordered directly by President Vladimir Putin, which the Kremlin has denied.
In February, a Moscow court ruled that while in Germany, Navalny had violated the terms of parole from an old embezzlement case that is widely considered as being politically motivated.
Navalny’s 3 1/2-year suspended sentence from that case was converted to a jail term, though the court said he will serve 2 1/2 years in prison, given the amount of time he had been held in detention.
The United States is planning to announce sanctions targeting several Russian officials and entities as early as April 15, according to news reports.
As many as 30 entities are expected to face U.S. sanctions for election interference or a hack into U.S. government and corporate computer networks last year, unidentified sources quoted by Reuters and Bloomberg said.
The sanctions also target about a dozen individuals, including intelligence officials. The action is expected to include the expulsion of as many as 10 Russian officials and diplomats, the reports said.
Neither the targeted entities nor the individuals were named in the Reuters and Bloomberg reports.
President Joe Biden’s administration has been signaling for weeks that it is preparing to make a major response to the cybersecurity breach affecting software made by the company SolarWinds.
U.S. intelligence officials and technology companies have said the intrusion, discovered in December, was likely the work of Russian hackers. Moscow has denied any involvement.
At least nine government agencies, including the Treasury, Justice, and Commerce departments, and 100 private companies were breached.
The sanctions also are aimed at retaliating for alleged interference during the 2020 presidential election. A U.S. intelligence community assessment concluded with a high degree of confidence that President Vladimir Putin and the Russian government authorized and directed an effort to influence the election.
Some of the planned sanctions are aimed at operations blamed for sowing disinformation during the campaign, according to one of the sources quoted by Bloomberg. Others to be targeted include individuals and entities that operate outside Russia at the behest of Moscow.
The White House, the State Department, and the Treasury Department had no immediate comment on the reports.
The measures would come after President Joe Biden warned Russian President Vladimir Putin in a call on April 13 that the U.S. would defend its interests. At the same time Biden floated the idea of a summit between the two leaders.
Biden ordered a review on his first full day in office into election interference, reports of Russian bounties on U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, the SolarWinds attack, and the poisoning of Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny.
The administration announced sanctions against Russian officials over Navalny last month.
Russia has repeatedly rejected accusations that it meddled in the U.S. election, offered to pay bounties for the killing of American troops, or took part in the poisoning of Navalny.
U.S. President Joe Biden and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have agreed that a reduction of Russian troops along the border with Ukraine would help de-escalate tensions in the region, Merkel’s office said in a statement.
“The chancellor and the president agreed it is necessary to demand Russia draw down its latest troop reinforcements in order to de-escalate the situation,” German government spokesman Steffen Seibert said after the two leaders spoke by phone on April 14.
Recent photographs, video, and other data suggest major movements of Russian armed units toward or near Ukraine’s border and into Crimea, fueling concerns that Russia is preparing to send forces into Ukraine.
The call between Biden and Merkel came after NATO ministers met on a videoconference call and discussed the Russian troop buildup, which NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has called the largest massing of Russian troops since the annexation of Crimea in 2014.
Stoltenberg said the NATO members are calling on Russia to “stop its pattern of aggressive provocations.”
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Ukraine has been supplied with equipment and training for some time and the United States would continue such support as needed.
German Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer earlier on April 14 accused Russia of trying to increase tension along the border, and William Burns, director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), told a U.S. Senate committee that the United States and its allies must take the buildup seriously.
Kramp-Karrenbauer told ARD public television that her impression is that Russia “is trying everything to provoke a reaction.”
It is clear that Russia “is just waiting for a move, so to speak, from NATO, to have a pretext to continue its actions,” she added.
Russia has insisted that it sent troops to its western borders for combat drills because of “threats” from the transatlantic alliance NATO.
But Kramp-Karrenbauer also cast doubt that claim, saying if it is a maneuver, “there are international procedures through which one can create transparency and trust.”
Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in March 2014, sending in troops and staging a referendum denounced as illegitimate by at least 100 countries. Moscow also backs separatists in a war against Ukrainian government forces that has killed more than 13,000 people in eastern Ukraine since April 2014.
Burns told the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee that Russia has amassed sufficient military forces and equipment on the border to allow a Russian incursion into the country.
Burns, a former ambassador to Russia, said the buildup “has reached a point that it could provide the basis for limited military incursions [into Ukraine],” noting his experience with Moscow.
“Most of my white hair came from dealing with Putin’s Russia over the years so one thing I’ve learned is not to underestimate the ways in which President [Vladimir] Putin and the Russian leadership can throw [their] weight around,” Burns told the committee.
With tensions rising, U.S. President Joe Biden proposed a summit with Putin, an offer that Russia is still considering.
Prominent investigative journalist Roman Anin believes that the newfound attention paid by Russian authorities to him and his media organization differs from the official line, and that recent raids on his home and office — and his subsequent interrogation — were in response to recent critical coverage of high-profile business and security figures.
Speaking to RFE/RL’s Russian Service on April 13 a day after his visit to the Investigative Committee for questioning relating to a story he wrote five years ago, the editor in chief of Important Stories (Istories) gave his assessment of what he sees as part of the “sad process in Russia of pressure on independent journalism.”
The April 9 seizure of computers and mobile phones from his home and and Istories’ offices by Federal Security Service (FSB) officers, he said, had nothing to do with the recent reopening of the case centered on the piece he wrote in 2016 for Novaya gazeta that explored the connection between the wife of powerful Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin and one of the world’s largest yachts.
That case had already been resolved, and resulted in the newspaper publishing a court-ordered refutation atop the article page that says the report was “untrue and discredited the honor and dignity” of Sechin, a longtime associate of President Vladimir Putin who is considered one of his closest allies. State-owned Rosneft is Russia’s biggest oil company.
Whoever is behind the case, Anin told RFE/RL, had “a task, including gaining access to all my documents, to my sources, to my correspondence, to, perhaps, future publications that we are preparing.”
The FSB took away everything he had touched, and many items that were not his at all, he said, paying special attention to English-language documents and anything related to his time spent abroad. Officers nearly walked away with a picture of him with fellow students at Stanford University in the United States, he said, before opting instead to simply take a photo of it.
“Of course, this was done in order to try to find something else,” Anin said.
His interrogation as a witness at the Investigative Committee three days later, he said, focused on two points: the editorial processes at Novaya gazeta, and queries as to how he managed to gain access to photographs from Sechin’s wife’s Instagram account that were published in the 2016 Novaya gazeta report.
“I said that Olga Sechina, having published these photos on the site, a public site, thereby disseminated them among an unlimited number of people,” Anin said. “And that it is clear that these photos, in fact, were published by her voluntarily.”
“Everything leads to the conclusion that they want to accuse me of publishing Sechina’s Instagram photos illegally and without her permission, which, in my opinion, is just a delusional construction,” he said.
Rosneft chief Igor Sechin attends a session of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in June 2019.
The potential charges under Part 2 of Article 137 of Russia’s Criminal Code are punishable by up to four years in prison, as well as the deprivation of the right to hold certain positions or engage in certain activities for up to five years.
Istories specializes in investigative reports and lists among its recent articles an exposé into the wealth of Kirill Shamalov, Putin’s former son-in-law, as well as a report on the FSB surveilling imprisoned opposition leader Aleksei Navalny. Another Istories investigation focused on deputy FSB head Sergei Korolev, and another on Rosneft’s purchase of a stake in Pirelli and Sechin’s role on the Italian tire giant’s board of directors.
“I can only say that any of these investigations could have become a reason to put pressure on the editorial board of Important Stories in the first place, and on me as the editor in chief and author of that text about the yacht,” Anin told RFE/RL.
Rosneft issued a press release on April 12 in which it said that it could not comment on the actions of law enforcement agencies, but alleged that the raid on the offices of Istories “was used by unscrupulous media to denigrate” the oil company and harm Russia.
“A large-scale information war has been launched against Rosneft and its leadership, in which foreign interests are also participants,” the press release said. “The smear campaign is aimed at discrediting the results of Rosneft’s activities, given its budgetary and system-forming role for the Russian economy, as well as its leading position in the global energy industry. Such information attacks are organized to reduce competitiveness and create additional sanctions risks not only for Rosneft, but for the country as a whole.”
Rosneft added that it had already taken a number of legal actions to protect its business reputation and shareholder value, and called on the media to refrain from “biased assessments” and to take “legal responsibility for publishing false information in relation to the company.” The company also said that the judgment by a Moscow court pertaining to the 2016 article published in Novaya gazeta “is exhaustive and confirms the fairness of the position of the plaintiff.”
Rosneft has recently filed several additional lawsuits against media outlets in Russia, including Dozhd TV, Ekho Moskvy, and Novaya gazeta. On April 14, Kommersant reported that Rosneft had filed suit against the newspaper Sobesednik and its journalist Oleg Roldugin.
Roldugin said on his Telegram channel that the case was related to the newspaper’s reporting in March on a Rosneft facility described as “Putin’s personal ski resort.” “Now it is definitely spring. This time Rosneft did not like this publication,” Roldugin wrote on Telegram, providing a link to the story. “Read and distribute before Sechin bans everything.”
As for his case, Anin told RFE/RL that he did not know the authorities’ intentions, but that “the laws in Russia are now formulated in such a way that any independent journalist, in fact, acts on the edge and sometimes even beyond these laws.”
“If they want to close Important Stories, they can do it tomorrow, no matter what excuse they have,” he said.
Written by Michael Scollon based on an interview conducted by Alina Pinchuk of RFE/RL’s Russian Service
MOSCOW — Aleksandr Vorobyov, who worked as an assistant to President Vladimir Putin’s envoy to the Urals region, has been sentenced to 12 1/2 years in prison on a charge of high treason.
The Moscow City Court sentenced Vorobyov on April 14 after a trial that was held behind closed doors due to classified materials in the case.
Vorobyov was detained in July 2019 and fired shortly after the arrest.
His chief, Nikolai Tsukanov, left the post of presidential envoy in the Ural Federal District more than a year after Vorobyov was charged with high treason.
At the time, Tsukanov was a member of Russia’s Security Council, the State Border Commission, and the Presidential Council on Priority Projects. He quit those posts after his aide’s arrest.
Media reports at the time said that investigators had found a Polish passport and a recording device in Vorobyov’s possession at the time of his arrest.
Vorobyov was stripped of the rank of state councilor of the third degree, which corresponds to the military rank of major general, and expelled from the ruling United Russia party.
The affair was the first publicly known case of a government official being arrested on suspicions of treason in post-Soviet Russia.
Since then, the number of cases of alleged high treason in general has increased dramatically in Russia.
One of the latest high-profile high treason cases involves Ivan Safronov, a journalist and an aide to the Russian Roskosmos space agency chief, Dmitry Rogozin.
Safronov was arrested on July 7 and later charged with passing classified material to the Czech Republic. He has denied the charge.
KRASNODAR, Russia — Police in the Russian city of Krasnodar have detained several members of the local team of jailed opposition politician Aleksei Navalny for unclear reasons amid ongoing crackdown on the network of Navalny’s teams across the country.
The coordinator of the team, Anastasia Panchenko, told RFE/RL that traffic police stopped a car transporting her and two colleagues as they were traveling to a location to shoot a documentary.
Police took the activists to the Krasnodar city police department for what they called “a check.” When the activists said they would not go, the officers threatened them with a charge of disobeying a police order.
Panchenko said lawyer Feliks Vertegel is representing their interests at this point.
Activists associated with Navalny have been under pressure since the 44-year-old outspoken Kremlin-critic was incarcerated in February.
The coordinator of Navalny’s team in the North Caucasus region of Daghestan, Eduard Atayev, and his assistant Murad Manapov, were detained on unspecified administrative charges on April 12 and April 13 respectively, after the team was established over the weekend, Navalny’s associate Ruslan Ablyakimov told RFE/RL.
Earlier in February, an initial attempt to set up Navalny’s team in Makhachkala failed after its coordinator-to-be, Ruslan Ablyakimov, was attacked and beaten by unidentified individuals after he arrived in the region from Moscow.
The coordinator of the network of Navalny’s teams across Russia, Leonid Volkov, has said that, despite Navalny’s incarceration, the teams will continue their work to derail the ruling United Russia party’s stranglehold on power in parliamentary elections in September.
Navalny and his supporters have developed a “smart voting” system, which is aimed at undercutting United Russia candidates.
Under the system, voters can enter their address into a special app, which will then give them a list of the candidates deemed most likely to defeat their United Russia rivals regardless of their party affiliation.
Navalny was imprisoned after returning to Russia in January from his recuperation in Germany after he survived a poison attack last August in Siberia. He has accused President Vladimir Putin of ordering his assassination, something the Kremlin denies.
Navalny has complained of back pain and numbness in his hands and legs and has accused prison authorities of withholding adequate medical treatment.
He declared a hunger strike in late March, raising even more concerns about his overall health.
The work of the Russian painter who has dedicated her life to chronicling the changing face of her country’s capital.
Moscow’s bustling Alekseyevskaya subway station on a wet autumn day
The ornate entrance to a Soviet-era apartment near the Kremlin where theater director Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko lived until his death in 1943
Two pensioners pause to chat on Moscow’s famous Arbat Street.
This is the work of Russian artist Alyona Dergilyova, who has spent the past four decades capturing the streets of her native Moscow in exquisitely detailed watercolors.
Dergilyova, 69, began capturing street scenes in Moscow in the 1980s. As the city began developing rapidly in the 2000s, her theme took on historical significance as she watched elegant, time-worn buildings transformed or replaced by generic corporate structures.
But her paintings carry their historic role lightly. Dergilyova is capable of a wide range of artistic techniques but has settled on a naive, almost cartoonish style to capture her beloved home city.
A light snow falls on pedestrians near the Moskva River. The Soviet-era Kotelnicheskaya Embankment Building is in the background.
Dergilyova told RFE/RL she works by finding somewhere discreet on the street to stand, then makes a quick sketch of the scene on an oven-tray-sized sheet of her favorite French art paper.
Heavy snow falls on a pedestrian on Solyanka Street.
With the sketch drawn, the artist then goes back to her central Moscow apartment to begin work in earnest.
Dergilyova says using watercolors is “the most difficult technique because you can’t correct mistakes.” With so much at stake in each stroke she works “only a little at a time,” with each painting taking nearly a month to complete.
A woman touches the brass snout of a dog in the Revolution Square subway station. The dog’s snout is highly polished by the countless commuter hands that have dabbed it for good luck as they go to work each morning.
While sketching her scenes, the painter — whose background is in portraiture — says she also makes quick scribbles of people passing by. “I always do my best to capture exactly those people who walked in a certain place,” Dergilyova says.
A busy day outside the Smolenskaya subway station. The Russian Foreign Ministry building rises in the background.
Dergilyova’s work often includes garish commercial signs that many artists would avoid. But she says “all the ‘ugly’ details of the street make everyday life vivid and uniquely valuable. Bright bags with logos on them mark the period of time we are living through, which is very important to me. I always try to get a living picture.”
A young couple were oblivious to the discreet artist working on Trubnikovsky Lane.
Some of Dergilyova’s recent work is marked by the coronavirus pandemic that has transformed street life around the world.
Commuters at the Elektrozavodskaya subway station
This 2020 painting captures the sudden prevalence of food-delivery workers after the pandemic closed restaurant doors. The painter says the delivery people “truly interest” her for the unexpected flashes of color they bring to the street. “They have colored our life so much.”
Masked pedestrians and two-wheel travellers pass in front of the Estonian Embassy.
The painter says she is less enthused about the presence of expression-obscuring face masks. This is one of only two of her works featuring masks.
Businessmen pass a historic building on Prospekt Mira deep in conversation.
On strolls through her city, Dergilyova keeps an eye on some of the elegant buildings she has painted through the years. Over time, she says, details and accessories on a house might appear and disappear “like jewelry on a woman.”
Locals enjoy a sunny winter day on Gruzinskaya Square.
Some of the scenes captured in Dergilyova’s watercolors are easy to locate and compare on Google Maps.
Stylish young Russians stride in front of an entrance on Kuznetsky Most Street.
The street view of this address shows that the signage and other small details of the scene have changed since it was painted around 2015.
A woman prepares to leash her dogs under a relief of Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin on Pechatnikov Lane.
Dergilyova says her ongoing quest to chronicle Moscow’s overlooked spaces has its roots partly in her childhood, when the country’s communist authorities demolished her family home.
Dergilyova in 1965
In the late 1960s, officials began installing characterless Soviet apartments on the street where Dergilyova played and in 1972 the wreckers came for her home. Today an office building stands in its place.
A tsarist-era building in Zaraysk, south of Moscow
This is one of several paintings Dergilyova made in the town of Zaraysk, near Moscow, through the 1980s and 1990s, which she is now compiling for a book. The artist says that “the vast majority of buildings I painted in Zaraysk no longer exist. They were demolished, burned, or heavily renovated, therefore the book will be the town’s chronicle.”
Dog walkers pass the entrance to the apartment where Russia’s first Nobel Prize-winning author, Ivan Bunin, once lived.
Meanwhile, Dergilyova’s continuous life’s work remains central Moscow, where on literally every walk she finds something new she wants to paint.
A woman wraps up as she leaves the courtyard of a house on Sverchkov Lane.
The artist, who has become a kind of visual historian of her city, says her biggest regret is that “there isn’t enough life to paint everything.”
The work of the Russian painter who has dedicated her life to chronicling the changing face of her country’s capital.
Moscow’s bustling Alekseyevskaya subway station on a wet autumn day
The ornate entrance to a Soviet-era apartment near the Kremlin where theater director Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko lived until his death in 1943
Two pensioners pause to chat on Moscow’s famous Arbat Street.
This is the work of Russian artist Alyona Dergilyova, who has spent the past four decades capturing the streets of her native Moscow in exquisitely detailed watercolors.
Dergilyova, 69, began capturing street scenes in Moscow in the 1980s. As the city began developing rapidly in the 2000s, her theme took on historical significance as she watched elegant, time-worn buildings transformed or replaced by generic corporate structures.
But her paintings carry their historic role lightly. Dergilyova is capable of a wide range of artistic techniques but has settled on a naive, almost cartoonish style to capture her beloved home city.
A light snow falls on pedestrians near the Moskva River. The Soviet-era Kotelnicheskaya Embankment Building is in the background.
Dergilyova told RFE/RL she works by finding somewhere discreet on the street to stand, then makes a quick sketch of the scene on an oven-tray-sized sheet of her favorite French art paper.
Heavy snow falls on a pedestrian on Solyanka Street.
With the sketch drawn, the artist then goes back to her central Moscow apartment to begin work in earnest.
Dergilyova says using watercolors is “the most difficult technique because you can’t correct mistakes.” With so much at stake in each stroke she works “only a little at a time,” with each painting taking nearly a month to complete.
A woman touches the brass snout of a dog in the Revolution Square subway station. The dog’s snout is highly polished by the countless commuter hands that have dabbed it for good luck as they go to work each morning.
While sketching her scenes, the painter — whose background is in portraiture — says she also makes quick scribbles of people passing by. “I always do my best to capture exactly those people who walked in a certain place,” Dergilyova says.
A busy day outside the Smolenskaya subway station. The Russian Foreign Ministry building rises in the background.
Dergilyova’s work often includes garish commercial signs that many artists would avoid. But she says “all the ‘ugly’ details of the street make everyday life vivid and uniquely valuable. Bright bags with logos on them mark the period of time we are living through, which is very important to me. I always try to get a living picture.”
A young couple were oblivious to the discreet artist working on Trubnikovsky Lane.
Some of Dergilyova’s recent work is marked by the coronavirus pandemic that has transformed street life around the world.
Commuters at the Elektrozavodskaya subway station
This 2020 painting captures the sudden prevalence of food-delivery workers after the pandemic closed restaurant doors. The painter says the delivery people “truly interest” her for the unexpected flashes of color they bring to the street. “They have colored our life so much.”
Masked pedestrians and two-wheel travellers pass in front of the Estonian Embassy.
The painter says she is less enthused about the presence of expression-obscuring face masks. This is one of only two of her works featuring masks.
Businessmen pass a historic building on Prospekt Mira deep in conversation.
On strolls through her city, Dergilyova keeps an eye on some of the elegant buildings she has painted through the years. Over time, she says, details and accessories on a house might appear and disappear “like jewelry on a woman.”
Locals enjoy a sunny winter day on Gruzinskaya Square.
Some of the scenes captured in Dergilyova’s watercolors are easy to locate and compare on Google Maps.
Stylish young Russians stride in front of an entrance on Kuznetsky Most Street.
The street view of this address shows that the signage and other small details of the scene have changed since it was painted around 2015.
A woman prepares to leash her dogs under a relief of Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin on Pechatnikov Lane.
Dergilyova says her ongoing quest to chronicle Moscow’s overlooked spaces has its roots partly in her childhood, when the country’s communist authorities demolished her family home.
Dergilyova in 1965
In the late 1960s, officials began installing characterless Soviet apartments on the street where Dergilyova played and in 1972 the wreckers came for her home. Today an office building stands in its place.
A tsarist-era building in Zaraysk, south of Moscow
This is one of several paintings Dergilyova made in the town of Zaraysk, near Moscow, through the 1980s and 1990s, which she is now compiling for a book. The artist says that “the vast majority of buildings I painted in Zaraysk no longer exist. They were demolished, burned, or heavily renovated, therefore the book will be the town’s chronicle.”
Dog walkers pass the entrance to the apartment where Russia’s first Nobel Prize-winning author, Ivan Bunin, once lived.
Meanwhile, Dergilyova’s continuous life’s work remains central Moscow, where on literally every walk she finds something new she wants to paint.
A woman wraps up as she leaves the courtyard of a house on Sverchkov Lane.
The artist, who has become a kind of visual historian of her city, says her biggest regret is that “there isn’t enough life to paint everything.”
KEMEROVO, Russia — Prosecutors in the Siberian city of Kemerovo have asked a court to sentence two Jehovah’s Witnesses to five years in prison each as Russia continues its crackdown on the religious group.
The group said the prosecutor had requested the Zavodskoi district court to hand down the jail terms to 60-year-old Sergei Yavushkin and 46-year-old Aleksandr Bondarchuk. The defendants are expected to give their final statements in the trial on April 16, after which Judge Vera Ulyanyuk will announce her decision.
The case against Yavushkin and Bondarchuk was launched in July 2019. They were charged with organizing the activities of “a banned, extremist group” and placed under house arrest at the time, because of which they lost their jobs.
It was said at the trial, which started almost exactly a year ago, that charges against the defendants were based on materials provided by a person who had actively taken part in the prayers and Bible studies of the religious group and secretly recorded the sessions with the intention of turning over the materials to investigators.
Since the faith was outlawed in Russia, many Jehovah’s Witnesses have been imprisoned in the country and in Russia-annexed Crimea.
The United States has condemned Moscow’s ongoing crackdown on Jehovah’s Witnesses and other peaceful religious minorities.
For decades, the Jehovah’s Witnesses have been viewed with suspicion in Russia, where the dominant Orthodox Church is championed by President Vladimir Putin.
The Christian group is known for door-to-door preaching, close Bible study, rejecting military service, and not celebrating national and religious holidays or birthdays.
According to the group, dozens of Jehovah’s Witnesses have either been convicted of extremism or are being held in pretrial detention.
The Moscow-based Memorial Human Rights Center has recognized dozens of Jehovah’s Witnesses who’ve been charged with or convicted of extremism as political prisoners.
Germany has accused Russia of seeking provocation with its troop buildup in the occupied Crimean Peninsula and along the border with Ukraine, while rejecting Moscow’s claim that it was responding to threats from NATO.
“My impression is that the Russian side is trying everything to provoke a reaction,” German Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer told public broadcaster ARD television on April 14.
“Together with Ukraine, we won’t be drawn into this game,” she said, adding it was clear that Russia “is just waiting for a move, so to speak, from NATO, to have a pretext to continue its actions.”
Recent photographs, video, and other data suggest major movements of Russian armed units toward or near Ukraine’s borders and into Crimea, annexed by Moscow in 2014, fueling concerns that Russia is preparing to send forces into Ukraine.
Ukraine and the West also blame Russia-backed separatists holding parts of the country’s eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk for a recent spike in hostilities, while Moscow has pointed the finger at Kyiv.
Kramp-Karrenbauer also cast doubt on Moscow’s claim that the buildup is in response to “threats” from the transatlantic alliance.
“If it is a maneuver, like the Russian side says, there are international procedures through which one can create transparency and trust,” she said.
Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in March 2014, sending in troops and staging a referendum denounced as illegitimate by at least 100 countries after Moscow-friendly Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was ousted amid a wave of public protests.
Moscow also backs separatists in a war against Ukrainian government forces that has killed more than 13,000 people in eastern Ukraine since April 2014.
With tensions rising, U.S. President Joe Biden on April 13 urged his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, to take measures to de-escalate the situation with Kyiv and proposed a summit between the two leaders in a third country.
In a phone call with Putin, Biden “voiced our concerns over the sudden Russian military buildup” while reaffirming “his goal of building a stable and predictable relationship with Russia consistent with U.S. interests, and proposed a summit meeting in a third country in the coming months to discuss the full range of issues facing the United States and Russia,” a White House statement said.
Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said on April 14 that the Kremlin will consider Biden’s proposal.
“It is early to talk about this meeting in terms of specifics. This is a new proposal and it will be studied. There will be an analysis,” he told reporters.
Such a summit would be the first between Putin and Biden, who took office vowing a tougher stance toward Moscow than the one taken by his predecessor, Donald Trump.
Some analysts have suggested that Russia’s recent actions may be meant to test the new U.S. administration and its commitment to Ukraine.
The Kremlin has rejected Western calls to pull back its troops from the border region, denying they are a threat and adding that military movements within Russia are an internal sovereign issue.
It has also warned that Moscow “will not remain indifferent” to the fate of Russian speakers who live in Ukraine’s east.
Citing a Russian Foreign Ministry source, the RIA Novosti news agency reported that Putin’s foreign policy adviser, Yuri Ushakov, had told the U.S. ambassador in Moscow on April 13 that Moscow would act decisively if the United States undertook any new “unfriendly steps,” such as imposing sanctions.
Speaking to the Vesti FM radio station on April 14, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova accused NATO of “playing games” with Kyiv, inciting politicians there to maintain tensions in eastern Ukraine, according to TASS.
Photo Gallery:
A Journey Into The Trenches And Bomb Shelters As Military Tensions Escalate In Eastern Ukraine
Multiple social-media videos that have appeared, along with analysis of available data, indicate a large Russian military buildup in Crimea and along Russia’s border with Ukraine. There has also been an increase in shelling along the line of control separating Ukrainian forces from Russia-backed fighters in eastern Ukraine.
The previous day, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu claimed that Moscow has deployed troops to its western borders for “combat training exercises” in response to NATO “military activities that threaten Russia.”
But it was not clear to which activities Shoigu was referring, as the Western security alliance has denied making any military moves in the region.
Shoigu didn’t elaborate, but he could have been referencing the DEFENDER-Europe 21 military exercises taking place in Europe and Africa, which began in March and involve almost 30,000 troops from 26 nations.
Nearly 30 Ukrainian soldiers have been reported killed since the start of the year, compared with 50 in all of 2020. Separatists have said more than 20 of their fighters had been killed so far in 2021.
The exercises, which will run into June, are taking place in various countries, including Estonia — which shares a border with Russia — Bulgaria and Romania.
According to Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskiy’s office, Russia has massed more than 40,000 troops both on Ukraine’s eastern border and in the occupied Crimean Peninsula.
Kyiv has so far reacted in a “sober” manner, the German defense minister said in the ARD interview, stressing that NATO allies are “committed to Ukraine, that is very clear.”
On April 13, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba held talks in Brussels with NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who accused Russia of taking “very provocative” actions.
Blinken also affirmed the United States’ “unwavering support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity in the face of Russia’s ongoing aggression.”
At a news conference, Stoltenberg called on Moscow to end “the largest massing of Russian troops since the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014,” saying the movements were “unjustified, unexplained, and deeply concerning.”
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s military said one of its soldiers were killed and three wounded on April 13 when separatists fired 82-millimeter mortar rounds toward Ukrainian positions, as well as grenade launchers, heavy machine guns, and automatic rifles.
Nearly 30 Ukrainian soldiers have been reported killed since the start of the year, compared with 50 in all of 2020, when fighting in the conflict subsided as a new cease-fire deal came into force in July.
Separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk regions have said more than 20 of their fighters had been killed so far in 2021.
A bipartisan U.S. task force has published a road map for a foreign policy and national-security strategy prioritizing the advancement of democracy and the fight against authoritarianism in China, Russia, and elsewhere.
In a report published on April 14, the task force convened last year by Freedom House, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), and the McCain Institute said that “the rise of authoritarianism, coupled with the erosion of democracy, threatens global stability, America’s economic and security alliances, and respect for human dignity.”
“This alarming confluence requires an urgent, bold, generational response,” the task force — comprising leaders, experts, and former policy makers — insisted, saying “increasingly repressive and aggressive China” is using “economic, military, and diplomatic coercion to undermine democratic governance and advance its influence in Asia and beyond.”
Meanwhile, Russia “foments division and insecurity in established and struggling democracies, especially those close to its borders, viewing the spread of democracy as an existential threat,” according to the report.
Both Beijing and Moscow “seek to advance their interests by undermining the rules-based liberal international order that the United States and its allies have superintended for three-quarters of a century, and which constrains their ambitions,” it said.
“We are living through a historically unprecedented rate of technological, economic, demographic, and geopolitical change, and that instability has created space for authoritarians around the world to flourish,” said Freedom House President Michael J. Abramowitz, who urged the U.S. administration to “reverse this frightening trend before it’s too late.”
In its annual report released in March, Freedom House said that the coronavirus pandemic, economic uncertainty, and conflicts across the world contributed to the decline of global freedom in 2020. The Washington-based human rights watchdog said that the number of countries designated “not free” was at its highest level in 15 years.
In its inaugural report, the Task Force on U.S. Strategy to Support Democracy and Counter Authoritarianism recommended seven “interrelated strategies” to reverse “the rising tide against freedom” that would include making democracy and countering authoritarianism a priority for U.S. diplomatic engagement by “galvanizing an international coalition to push back against authoritarian threats and reinforce democratic governance.”
“The United States and its democratic partners should make clear that authoritarian governments in China, Russia, and elsewhere seek to divide and undermine democracies while denying their own citizens’ fundamental rights,” the task force said.
Viewing democracy as “a threat to their authoritarian model,” China and Russia “seek to prop up like-minded autocrats in other countries, especially those facing popular pushback.”
The report called on the United States and its partners to “dramatically increase investment in the pillars of open, accountable, inclusive, democratic society: free and fair elections; independent media; and a vibrant, active civil society.”
That would include investing in “a large-scale Enterprise Fund for Independent Media to promote free expression and quality journalism internationally.”
The United States should also develop a strategy to counter intentional disinformation, state-sponsored propaganda, unintended misinformation, online hate, and harassment whose “rampant spread” is interfering with basic democratic processes.
“State actors like Russia and China have been using disinformation globally for years as part of a broader malign influence strategy to sow chaos, amplify internal divisions, discredit critics, and decrease trust in the democratic process,” according to the report.
For instance, the Russian government uses traditional outlets such as the state-owned multilingual news services RT and Sputnik, as well as social media, to “exploit divisions” in Europe — especially the Balkans — and in Africa, Latin America, and the Asia- Pacific region.
The task force called the fight against corruption and kleptocracy a “fundamental pillar” of the U.S. national security strategy.
Foreign aid and security assistance should be distributed in ways that help reduce corruption and promote private investment in countries showing progress in countering corruption, which “harms effective governance, undermines economic growth, and weakens the rule of law.”
The report noted that corruption in Russia “plays an increasingly large role in regime stability,” with President Vladimir Putin being able to consolidate his power by allowing key political elites to benefit from graft. The Kremlin also uses corruption to “undermine democracy in Europe and counter U.S. influence in the world.”
Washington should also negotiate economic agreements that set high standards for governance and democracy, as well as use development finance and U.S. leadership in multilateral development banks to “boost inclusive growth and a sustainable recovery; incentivize democratic governance; and avoid debt traps, while demonstrating that democracy can deliver,” the report concluded.
MINSK — Yuras Zyankovich, a Belarusian lawyer who also has U.S. citizenship, has been detained in Moscow and transferred to a detention center in Minsk amid an ongoing crackdown on dissent in Belarus following a disputed presidential election last year.
Zyankovich’s wife, Alena Dzenisavets, told RFE/RL on April 13 that Russian security officers “abducted” her husband from the Nordic Rooms Hotel in Moscow on April 11 and brought him to the Belarusian capital.
“I learned about that only yesterday. I talked to a manager of the hotel. According to him, the hotel’s personnel saw how men in civilian clothes took Yuras away, saying that he was suspected of terrorism. They showed their documents saying that they are from security organs,” Dzenisavets said, adding that Zyankovich is currently in the detention center for the Belarusian Committee of State Security (KGB) in Minsk.
Yuras Zyankovich, who used to be a regional leader of the opposition Belarusian Popular Front (BNF) party and once sought to be its presidential candidate, has been living in the United States since 2007.
He is a graduate of Fordham University’s School of Law in New York and is permanently based in Houston, Texas. Zyankovich frequently visits Belarus and actively takes part in the country’s political life.
On April 12, the day of Zyankovich’s detention in Moscow, a noted Belarusian political analyst, Alyaksandr Fyaduta, went incommunicado in the Russian capital, where he works as a media consultant.
Moscow police said at the time that they had started looking for him after his relatives raised concerns about his whereabouts.
On April 13, the Belarusian KGB said that Fyaduta is in custody in Minsk.
The KGB statement said that Fyaduta and BNF chairman Ryhor Kastusyou were being held on unspecified charges, adding that detailed information on the cases will be provided later.
Alyaksandr Lukashenka, who has ruled the country since 1994, was declared the landslide winner in the August election, which was widely viewed as rigged in his favor.
Thousands of citizens took to the streets for months to protest the results, saying Lukashenka’s challenger, Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya, actually won the election.
Tsikhanouskaya left Belarus for Lithuania after the election for security reasons, while Lukashenka has directed a brutal postelection crackdown in which almost 30,000 have been detained, hundreds beaten, several killed, and journalists targeted.
Many other senior opposition figures have also left or were forced to leave Belarus, fearing for their safety, while several of those who haven’t left have been detained by security officials.
Moscow police have searched the offices and homes of editors of the student magazine Doxa over a January video related to unsanctioned rallies to protest the incarceration of opposition politician Aleksei Navalny.
The magazine said on Telegram that the searches were conducted on April 14 in the magazine’s offices and the homes of Doxa editors Armen Aramyan, Vladimir Metyolkin, Natalya Tyshkevich and Alla Gutnikova.
Police told Leonid Solovyov, a lawyer for the Agora human rights group, that they plan to take Aramyan to the Investigative Committee for questioning.
Tyshkevich was informed that she is suspected of “violating the law on engaging minors in actions that might be dangerous.”
According to Doxa, the searches were conducted over a video that the magazine deleted at the request of the Roskomnadzor media watchdog request in January.
The video was about students being warned about the possible repercussions they face for participating in unsanctioned rallies held on January 23 and January 31 against the arrest of Kremlin critic Navalny.
More than 10,000 supporters of Navalny were detained across Russia during and after the January rallies. Many of the detained were either fined or handed several-day jail terms. At least 90 were charged with criminal offenses; several have been fired by their employers.
Human rights groups have called on Moscow repeatedly to stop targeting journalists because they are covering the protests or expressing solidarity with protesters, since both are protected under the right to freedom of expression.
“Instead of targeting journalists, the authorities should hold accountable police who attack journalists and interfere with their work,” Human Rights Watch said in a statement on February 3.
Navalny was detained at a Moscow airport on January 17 upon his arrival from Germany, where he was recovering from a poisoning in Siberia in August 2020 that several European laboratories concluded was from a military-grade chemical nerve agent.
Navalny has insisted that his poisoning was ordered directly by President Vladimir Putin, which the Kremlin has denied.
In February, a Moscow court ruled that, while in Germany, Navalny had violated the terms of parole from an old embezzlement case that is widely considered as being politically motivated. Navalny’s 3 1/2-year suspended sentence from the case was converted to a jail term, though the court said he will serve 2 1/2 years in prison given the amount of time he had been held in detention.
The winter months are especially harsh for the homeless in Russia’s northern city of St. Petersburg, especially for those suffering serious medical problems.
“Recuperating from many illnesses in the winter and on the streets is impossible. After release from the hospital, they end up back on the streets in conditions that aren’t conducive to recovery,” said Sergei Iyevkov, the founder and direct of Charity Hospital, which has more than 100 volunteers — including dozens of doctors — delivering health care to the homeless.
Irina Safonova attends to a patient who injured his leg in an accident at a construction site.
An estimated 50,000 people in St. Petersburg, Russia’s second-largest city, are believed to lack a permanent home. Beyond the daily struggle to find food and shelter, those in need of medical attention face further hurdles. Many lack health insurance or even basic identification documents. Without those, only emergency wards and the city’s sole specialized hospital for infectious diseases will treat them. Discrimination and hostility on the part of some health-care workers also dissuades many of the homeless from seeking hospital treatment, experts say. And even if they are treated for an illness, many of them never fully recover.
A homeless man is taken by volunteers for a medical examination.
“For example, a person gets frostbite on his leg, has it amputated, and is discharged. He may then suffer acute pain, get infections or a fever. Getting to a health center is not always possible. Plus, they need to find a place to sleep. In most cases, they end up in the emergency ward again. It’s a vicious circle,” Iyevkov told Current Time, the Russian-language network led by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA.
Charity Hospital and other NGOs — including the Bus of Mercy, which is run by the Russian Orthodox Church — are providing the much-needed help the homeless aren’t getting elsewhere. Much of the medical care Charity Hospital is dispensing is done inside vans, including the Bus of Mercy and the Night Bus, run by another NGO, Nochlezhka.
“In reality, what’s the alternative to our work? These people are quietly dying on the streets or elsewhere without any care. Our goal is to give them hope. They are recovering. Many will be healthy again,” said Irina Safonova, a surgeon who volunteers with Charity Hospital — Blagotvoritelnaya Bolnitsa in Russian.
“It’s impossible not to see what’s going on in the streets,” she said. “The problem is that few think about it. Even some of my friends and family don’t know about my work here; for many, it doesn’t make sense. Unfortunately, even in the medical field, hardly anyone knows about our work either.”
“These people are quietly dying on the streets or elsewhere without any care. Our goal is to give them hope,” said one volunteer doctor.
Ivan Grigoryevich turned up at an emergency ward with the hope of having his frostbitten toes amputated. However, only a wound on his head was re-bandaged; his feet were ignored.
“They didn’t even look at them and just waved me away,” he recounted at a homeless shelter in St. Petersburg that is run by the Order of Malta.
Like several homeless people who spoke to Current Time, he gave only his first name and patronymic, not his last name.
Doctors bandage a victim of frostbite.
After he was turned back a second time, Ivan returned with a volunteer from the Charity Hospital. This time, the amputation was performed.
In the same shelter with Ivan was Andrei, who said the volunteers from Charity Hospital tended to his wounds after he suffered a fall at a worksite in St. Petersburg just before New Year’s Eve. His said he was wary about going to a hospital because he was working on the site “illegally.”
Ivan Grigoryevich went to an emergency ward for his frostbitten toes, but was only given cursory treatment. “They didn’t even look at them and just waved me away,” he said.
“The other workers took me to the gate and I waited for the ambulance. I’m from the Urals, from Perm. The people from the Night Bus helped get me into this shelter,” said Ivan, who has no plans to return to his hometown 1,500 kilometers east of St. Petersburg. “What would I do there? I can’t sit in my mother’s lap!”
He’s not the only undocumented construction worker who has been helped by the volunteers of Charity Hospital.
“Two years ago, I fell eight floors at a construction site,” said 46-year-old Nikolai Mikhailovich. “I don’t know how I survived. I was in and out of hospitals for two years. Fractures of the chest, arms, legs. Now I have [metal] plates everywhere. My wife died; my daughter kicked me out. I have a criminal record and was in prison in the ’90s, and she’s a [police] investigator. She did it to save her career.”
“It was like being born again,” Viktor Aleksandrovich said after two eye surgeries.
Worsening cataracts had left Viktor Aleksandrovich nearly blind in both eyes. His plight was brought to the attention of Anna Matveyeva, an ophthalmologist and Charity Hospital volunteer, who took him to a hospital with which the charity has an agreement to perform surgical procedures.
“She picked me up in her car, took me for an examination. Then, two operations were performed in the medical center,” Viktor told Current Time. “I could see again. The light and the sky. I [had] a new life. It was like being born again. I was so happy. Before the operation, I couldn’t see where I was walking [and] got around by touch. I knew my way around the shelter and knew how to get to the toilet. Now, I’m happy.”
Volunteer doctors tend to the homeless on the Night Bus.
For many of those volunteering at Charity Hospital, the experience has not only opened their eyes to the plight of the homeless but given them a deeper understanding of the scope of the problem.
The resilience and dignity displayed by the homeless as they struggle with the daily challenge to survive has left a deep impression on Matveyeva.
“Every time I come across a display of courage or compassion in a person in such a situation, I feel admiration,” she said.
Written by RFE/RL senior correspondent Tony Wesolowsky based on reporting by Current Time photographer Artyom Leshko
VOLOGDA, Russia — Savely Narizhny is a 15-year-old former high school student in the northwestern Russian city of Vologda. On the evening of January 23, he was stopped in the center of the city after attending an unsanctioned mass demonstration in support of opposition leader Aleksei Navalny, who at the time was jailed and facing serious criminal charges. Narizhny wasn’t detained, but police confiscated his telephone. Three days later, police came for him at home.
Narizhny admits that he wrote graffiti calling longtime authoritarian President Vladimir Putin a “thief” on the wall of the regional administration headquarters. A short time later, prosecutors categorized the act as “an action committed by a group of people and motivated by political, ideological, race-based, nationalist, or religious hatred or enmity.” If convicted, he could face up to three years in prison.
After the criminal charges were filed, Narizhny was called into the administration of his school. Officials pressured him into withdrawing from the school.
“They told me, ‘we don’t need criminals’ and so on,” Narizhny told RFE/RL. “‘It will be better for you to withdraw of your own volition.’”
Now he attends classes at night school while awaiting trial.
During the wave of protests in support of Navalny and against Putin’s government in January and February, Russian officials and state-controlled media — noting the relative youthfulness of the movement — regularly accused the opposition of luring minors
“It’s absolutely unacceptable to thrust minors forward,” Putin said. “After all, that’s what terrorists do.”
Leading state television moderator Dmitry Kiselyov railed against the opposition on his prime-time show, accusing them of “pulling children into politics like political pedophiles.” Opposition supporters, however, were quick to create a video that overlaid Kiselyov’s tirade with a montage of photographs of small children attending events organized by the ruling United Russia party.
In the weeks since the demonstrations, local officials across the country have cracked down on young people — not just minors — who participated in the demonstrations. Many have found themselves facing expulsion from their educational institutions, serious criminal charges, or — as in Narizhny’s case — both.
Also caught up in the post-protest crackdown in Vologda was 17-year-old Ilya Yelshin. A self-confessed bad student at the Spassky Middle School, Yelshin spent most of his time cultivating his quirky YouTube channel featuring videos of him, for instance, watching a single clip by Russian rapper Morgenshtern for more than six hours or strolling around in temperatures of -20 degrees Celsius wearing just a t-shirt and jeans.
‘Getting Upset’
In January, however, as Navalny was preparing to return from Germany where he’d spent weeks recuperating from an August nerve-agent poisoning that he says was carried out by Federal Security Service (FSB) operatives at the behest of Putin and the government was threatening to arrest him if he appeared in Russia, Yelshin began including political content on his channel, including surveying other youths about whether they supported Navalny or Putin.
On January 23, he published a YouTube livestream from the Navalny demonstration in Vologda.
Pro-Navalny demonstrators march in Vologda on January 23.
“I started getting upset about what was happening in Russia at that moment. And things are still bad, as a matter of fact,” he told RFE/RL. “The protests started, and I began looking into things. Russia’s problems, Putin….”
Although teachers had lectured students before the protest about the “danger” of participating in such activities, nothing happened to Yelshin during the demonstration. The next day, however, two plainclothes police showed up at his house and warned him that he was the target of a criminal investigation. Shortly thereafter, he was summoned to the regional prosecutor’s office.
“Don’t you understand that you are putting your life in danger by getting involved in this?” the prosecutor asked him, according to an audio recording that Yelshin made surreptitiously and posted on social media. “You are being used. You don’t even understand how they are using you.”
“And have you thought about how you are being used?” Yelshin retorted.
Navalny’s supporters called for another major protest on January 31. Shortly before that date, Yelshin posted a video in which he said: “If you want to go, go. But think carefully many times before you decide not to go.”
According to Yelshin’s lawyer, Sergei Tikhonov, the director of Yelshin’s school telephoned the police to report that video and soon his real troubles began.
Spassky Middle School Director Lyudmila Guseva declined to be interviewed for this article.
Vologda politician Yevgeny Domozhirov, who is a member of the Central Council of Navalny’s Party of Progress, posted an image of the police report of Guseva’s call dated January 29.
He accuses Guseva of hypocrisy for warning students not to get involved in politics while, at the same time, welcoming the United Russia party into her school.
“It is enough to go onto the school’s webpage and to see there the constant reposts from the party of crooks and thieves and photographs of their events at the school,” Domozhirov wrote, using the dismissive moniker that Navalny coined to refer to United Russia, in a blog post that featured numerous links to such posts from the Spassky school’s social media pages.
‘It Will Only Get Worse’
Yelshin was detained at the January 31 demonstration. Police treated him as an “organizer” of the protest because of the video that Guseva had flagged for them. In the end, he was fined 20,000 rubles ($260) on that count and 10,000 rubles ($130) for participating in a second unsanctioned demonstration. In addition, his parents were fined 100 rubles ($1.30) for “failing to fulfill their parental obligations.”
Within days, Yelshin — like Narizhny — was summoned to the school administration and pressured to withdraw.
“‘Ilyusha, of course we aren’t forcing you to do anything, but it would be better if you withdrew,’” Yelshin said he was told. “They told me: ‘You know yourself that it will only get worse.’”
Since he left school, Yelshin said, he has more time to work on his YouTube channel. Among other things, he posted a video about how he was “driven out of school.”
“Now I am no longer a student,” he said. “I don’t study anywhere. In short, I’m a bum.”
Student Vera Inozemtseva was expelled from university for attending a pro-Navalny protest in Astrakhan on January 23.
In the southern Russian city of Astrakhan, 22-year-old Vera Inozemtseva and two other students were expelled from Astrakhan State University for attending the Navalny protest in that city on January 23. She said that after the demonstration she was “abducted” by plainclothes police officers who took her telephone and used it to post incriminating messages on her social media accounts.
“I was taken from room to room,” she said of her time at a police station that evening, “and finally I was brought to a room and an officer from Center E came in.” Center E is the Interior Ministry department responsible for combating extremism, which has been widely criticized for cracking down on peaceful political dissent.
“I tried to find out what was the legal grounds for this conversation and where my telephone was, but the officer didn’t answer my questions and just asked me why I don’t like Putin,” she added. She said she was returned home by three masked men in an unmarked car. One of them asked her, “You are going to behave now, right?”
“I answered that I would complain to the prosecutor’s office,” she said. As soon as the masked men let her go, two uniformed police officers walked up to her and ordered her to go with them.
‘I Don’t Want To Quit’
“I thought that maybe I had gone out of my mind or that I was in the middle of a nightmare,” she said. In the end, she was fined 10,000 rubles for participating in the demonstration.
She filed her complaint with prosecutors on January 24, but the Investigative Committee declined to open an investigation.
“We are appealing that refusal,” she said.
In March, a local court rejected Inozemtseva’s appeal against her expulsion from the university.
“Now we are preparing another appeal,” Inozemtseva, who was working on a master’s degree in political science before being kicked out, told RFE/RL. “I am ready to go to the Supreme Court and to the European Court of Human Rights.”
“But I want to win my case against the university here in Russia and not at the European court,” she added. “And I want to see the people who abducted me on January 23 punished.”
“I don’t want to quit,” she concluded, falling into thought. “Quit what? You can’t even call it activism. I just do what I do. But if I stop doing that, I will become just another indifferent person. And although Russia does not love me, I cannot be indifferent to it.”
Written by RFE/RL senior correspondent Robert Coalson based on reporting from Vologda by RFE/RL Russian Service North.Realities correspondent Kirill Kruglikov.. RFE/RL Russian Service correspondent Darya Yegorova contributed from Astrakhan.
Jailed Russian opposition politician Aleksei Navalny says he has filed a lawsuit against the administration of Correctional Colony No. 2, where he is incarcerated, for not allowing him to read the Koran.
Navalny wrote on Instagram on April 13 that the holy book for Muslims, the Koran, and all of the other books he brought with him to the penitentiary in early March had been withheld, as the guards said that they needed three months to check all his books — including the Koran — for extremism.
“The problem is that they have not given me my Koran. When they incarcerated me, I made a list of tasks to improve myself while in prison. One of such points was to study deeply and understand the Koran and the Prophet’s followers…. I understood that my development as a Christian also requires the study of the Koran,” Navalny wrote.
Navalny’s statement comes on the first day of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, during which practicing Muslims abstain from eating, drinking, smoking, and sex from dawn to sunset.
Some 10 percent of Russia’s population of more than 144 million are Muslims or from an Islamic cultural background.
Navalny was arrested in January on his arrival from Germany, where he was treated for a poisoning in Siberia with what was defined by European labs as a nerve agent in August 2020. Navalny accused President Vladimir Putin of ordering the poisoning, which Kremlin has denied.
In February, a Moscow court ruled that while in Germany, Navalny had violated the terms of parole from an old embezzlement case that is widely considered to be politically motivated.
His 3 1/2-year suspended sentence from the case was converted into a prison term, though the court said he will serve just over 2 1/2 years in prison given time he had been held in detention.
Navalny has complained recently of back pain and numbness in his hands and legs and has accused the authorities of withholding adequate medical treatment.
The 44-year-old politician has lost 13 kilograms since his imprisonment and continues a hunger strike aimed at forcing prison officials to allow him to be treated by his own doctor.
PETUSHKI, Russia — Anastasia Vasilyeva, the personal doctor of jailed Russian opposition politician Aleksei Navalny, has been fined over her attempt to see the ailing Kremlin critic last week at the prison he is being held in outside of Moscow.
The Petushki district court in the Vladimir region late on April 12 ordered Vasilyeva, who is the chairwoman of the Alliance of Doctors union, to pay 180,000 rubles ($2,320), for what the court described as the “organization of a mass gathering near a penitentiary that led to obstacles for transport operations.”
Vasilyeva’s lawyer, Mikhail Arsenyev, said the court ruling will be appealed.
Vasilyeva and several others were detained by police on April 6 after they arrived at the Correctional Colony No. 2 in the town of Pokrov, some 100 kilometers from Moscow, demanding that the penitentiary’s administration allow Navalny access to an independent physician to examine him amid concerns over his health condition.
Navalny has complained of back pain and numbness in his hands and legs and accused the authorities of withholding adequate medical treatment.
Prison authorities have said they were monitoring Navalny’s health, which they evaluated as “satisfactory.”
Vasilyeva and most of the Navalny supporters were released after several hours, but on April 8, the Pertushki district court found four of the detained supporters of Navalny guilty of illegally gathering near a penitentiary and sentenced them to several days in jail.
In February, a Moscow court ruled that while in Germany, Navalny had violated the terms of parole from an old embezzlement case that is widely considered as being politically motivated. Navalny’s 3 1/2 year suspended sentence from the case was converted to a jail term, though the court said he will serve 2 1/2 years in prison given time he had been held in detention.
The 44-year-old politician has lost 13 kilograms since his imprisonment and continues a hunger strike aimed at forcing prison officials to allow him to be treated by his own doctor.
The U.S. State Department has called for the release of an RFE/RL freelance correspondent arrested in Ukraine’s Russia-annexed Crimea region and joined human rights groups in expressing concern over his treatment and a televised “confession” he gave.
“Troubled by reports that Russian occupation authorities in Crimea tortured @RFERL freelance journalist [Vladyslav] Yesypenko to coerce his confession. We call for his release, and for Russia to cease its reprisals against independent voices in Crimea,” spokesman Ned Price tweeted on April 13.
Yesypenko’s lawyer on April 6 said his client testified during a closed-door court hearing that he was tortured with electric shocks, beaten, and threatened with death unless he “confessed” to spying on behalf of Ukraine.
Lawyer Aleksei Ladin said after the hearing that the torture lasted two days after Yesypenko’s arrest on March 10 on what the defense calls false charges against the journalist, who has Ukrainian and Russian dual nationality.
RFE/RL President Jamie Fly at the time said that the broadcaster is “outraged” to learn what Yesypenko said during his testimony, saying the journalist “must be set free now, and allowed to rejoin his family in Ukraine immediately.”
Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) has said Yesypenko, a freelance contributor to Crimea.Realities, a regional news outlet of RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service, was suspected of collecting information for Ukrainian intelligence, and claimed that an object “looking like an explosive device” was found in his automobile during his apprehension.
The journalist was charged with “making firearms,” which is punishable by up to six years in prison.
Ladin said that a televised interview broadcast on March 18, in which Yesypenko “confessed” to spying for Ukraine, was staged. The lawyer quoted his client as saying he was given a written text to read aloud and then answered questions that people in charge of his detainment asked.
According to Ladin, Yesypenko also said at the trial that he has serious problems with his kidneys and needs medicine for the ailment.
RFE/RL President Fly has questioned the circumstances under which Yesypenko made his confession, saying it appeared “to be forced and made without access to legal counsel.”
“The Russian authorities have similarly smeared RFE/RL Ukrainian Service contributors with false charges in the past. Vladyslav is a freelance contributor with RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service, not a spy, and he should be released,” he said.
Ukraine’s Foreign Intelligence Service has described the arrest as “a convenient attempt to distract the attention of the population away from the numerous internal problems of the peninsula” around the seventh anniversary of its forcible annexation, which was marked on March 18.
The U.S. State Department has called Yesypenko’s arrest “another attempt to repress those who speak the truth about Russia’s aggression in Ukraine.”
Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in March 2014, sending in troops and staging a referendum denounced as illegitimate by at least 100 countries after Moscow-friendly Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was ousted amid a wave of public protests.
Rights groups say that since then, Russia has moved aggressively to prosecute Ukrainian activists and anyone who questions the annexation.
Moscow also backs separatists in a war against Ukrainian government forces that has killed more than 13,000 people in eastern Ukraine since April 2014.
India is expected to grant emergency use authorization for Russia’s Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccine, giving the nation of 1.3 billion people a third shot as it faces vaccine shortages and an intensifying second wave of the virus.
The Drug Controller General of India (DCGI) will approve Sputnik V by April 13, after the drug regulator’s expert committee recommended the vaccine, The Times of India reported.
The Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), which is responsible for marketing the vaccine abroad, said on April 12 that DCGI had approved the use of Sputnik V. However, there was no immediate statement from the drug regulator.
“India is the most populated country to register the Russian vaccine. Total population of 60 countries where Sputnik V is approved for use is 3 billion people or about 40 percent of the global population,” RDIF said in a statement.
Sputnik V would be India’s third approved vaccine, after the AstraZeneca shot and the domestically developed Covaxin produced by the firm Bharat Biotech.
Indian pharmaceutical firm Dr. Reddy’s, which is marketing the vaccine in India, is RDIF’s local partner.
The Russian sovereign wealth fund said it had agreements with five Indian pharmaceutical companies to produce more than 850 million doses a year for the population in India and global distribution.
India is the world’s largest producer of vaccines, making the strategic partnership between RDIF and India’s pharmaceutical industry key to expanding availability of the Sputnik V shot.
Sputnik V, developed by Moscow’s Gamaleya Institute, overcame international skepticism in February after peer-reviewed results published in the medical journal The Lancet showed it to be safe and 91.6 percent effective against COVID-19. Sputnik V is a vector vaccine based on the human adenovirus, which causes the common cold.
India is being hit by a record number of new COVID-19 infections and daily deaths, surpassing Brazil as the country with the second-most reported infections since the pandemic began.
It has added 168,912 cases and 904 deaths in the past 24 hours. Since the pandemic began authorities have confirmed 13.5 million infections and 170,179 deaths linked to the virus, although real numbers are believed to be much higher.
Meanwhile, India’s drive to vaccinate its population is running into supply issues, with just 94 million shots provided so far and stocks reportedly running low in some states, including Maharashtra state, home to financial capital Mumbai.
The CEO of the Serum Institute of India, the world’s biggest vaccine maker by volume, has warned that production capacity is “very stressed.”
Countries around the world are relying on Serum for supplies of the AstraZeneca vaccine. But last month, India began limiting exports to prioritize domestic needs.
With reporting by The Times of India, Hindustan Times, and Reuters.
MAKHACHKALA, Russia — The coordinator of a team of Daghestani activists associated with imprisoned Russian opposition politician Aleksei Navalny went incommunicado in the North Caucasus region on April 12, a day after he announced the inception of the group.
Local activists in Daghestan’s capital, Makhachkala, on April 12, raised concerns about the whereabouts of Eduard Atayev, whose telephone had been switched off since April 11 when he officially announced Navalny’s team in the city.
Atayev’s assistant, Murad Manapov, told RFE/RL that after Atayev announced that Navalny’s team started operating in Makhachkala, he left the city for his native village of Endirei near the regional capital “to have a rest.”
“I asked him to message me when he gets there, which he did not. I thought then that he just forgot to do so, but in the morning it turned out that his phone was switched off,” Manapov said.
Manapov said Atayev was expected to join his team in the morning and his “disappearance” is strange. He added that activists were looking for Atayev’s relatives in order to turn to police for help to locate him.
Hours after Manapov talked to RFE/RL, he also “went missing,” according to his associates.
Earlier in February, an initial attempt to set up Navalny’s team in Makhachkala failed after its coordinator-to-be, Ruslan Ablyakimov, who arrived in the region from Moscow, was attacked and beaten by unidentified individuals.
The coordinator of the network of Navalny’s teams across Russia, Leonid Volkov, has said that despite Navalny’s incarceration in February the teams will continue their work to derail the ruling United Russia party’s stranglehold on power in parliamentary elections in September.
Navalny and his supporters have developed a “smart voting” system, which is aimed at undercutting United Russia candidates.
Under the system, voters can enter their address into a special app, which will then give them a list of the candidates deemed most likely to defeat their United Russia rivals regardless of their party affiliation.
Navalny was imprisoned after returning to Russia in January from his recuperation in Germany after his exposure to a nerve agent last August in Siberia. He has accused President Vladimir Putin of ordering his assassination, something the Kremlin denies.
Navalny has complained of back pain and numbness in his hands and legs and accused the authorities of withholding adequate medical treatment.
Navalny declared a hunger strike in late March, raising even more concerns about his overall health.
A Chechen refugee deported from France to Russia now faces potential torture or even death after being handed over to Chechnya’s security services, Amnesty International said on April 11.
The French branch of the rights group said in an emergency appeal that they were extremely concerned about the fate of Magomed Gadaev, who was deported from France to Moscow on April 9.
The 37-year-old was subsequently handed over by Russian security agents to authorities of the North Caucasus region of Chechnya, Novaya Gazeta newspaper reported.
Under strongman Ramzan Kadyrov, Chechnya’s security services are notorious for carrying human rights abuses against political opponents.
“Due to the persecution he has suffered in the past and his role as a witness in proceedings against cases of torture committed by the Chechen authorities, Magomed Gadaev is in danger of being tortured again and, possibly, even killed,” Amnesty saidin an appeal for action to French President Emmanuel Macron.
Gadaev is on the board of the Paris-based Chechen diaspora organization Bart Marsho and a member of the Assembly of Chechens in Europe, an organization representing the interests of the diaspora.
He lived in France for around a decade after fleeing Chechnya, where he served prison time on charges of having ties with separatists and was tortured. While in France, he spoke out about torture in his homeland and became a witness in cases related to torture and abductions committed by Chechen security forces.
Amnesty said France violated its international commitments and ignored the decisions of administrative courts when they allowed Gadaev to be deported.
Britain and the United States “firmly oppose Russia’s campaign to destabilize Ukraine” and call on Russia to de-escalate the situation, British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab has said.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken “& I agreed Russia must immediately de-escalate the situation & live up to the international commitments that it signed up to at @OSCE,” the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Raab said on Twitter.
Major movements of Russian armed forces toward or near Ukraine’s borders and into Russian-occupied Crimea have been captured in photographs, video, and other data, fueling concerns that Moscow may be preparing to send forces into eastern Ukraine.
The Kremlin has rejected Western calls to pull back its troops, denying they are a threat while adding that military movements within Russia are a sovereign, internal issue.
The statement by Raab comes a day after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy briefed Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on the situation.
After their talks in Istanbul, Erdogan called recent developments “worrying” and said he hoped the conflict would be resolved peacefully through dialogue and in line with Ukraine’s territorial integrity.
“We believe that the current crisis can be solved with peaceful and diplomatic means on the basis of the integrity of Ukraine and international law,” Erdogan said.
During their meeting, the presidents also discussed expanding defense cooperation between their countries. Zelenskiy said the stepped-up cooperation would apply especially to weaponry and the construction of fighter jets.
Zelenskiy, who visited Ukrainians troops in the Donbas region on April 8, said Kyiv and Ankara shared the same view on threats in the Black Sea region and the response to those threats.
Washington has called Moscow’s military buildup “destabilizing,” and the White House has expressed concern about the recent troop movements.
U.S. Secretary of State Blinken consulted the German and French foreign ministers on April 9 about the need for Russia to cease its military buildup on the occupied Crimean Peninsula and near Ukraine’s eastern borders.
Russia annexed Crimea in March 2014, sending in troops and staging a referendum denounced as illegitimate by at least 100 countries.
Since then, overwhelming evidence suggests Russia has continued to lend diplomatic and military aid to armed separatists fighting in the Donbas region.
The conflict has killed more than 13,000 people and displaced more than 1 million since April 2014.
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan called for an end to what he described as “worrying” developments in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region after meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on April 10.
The meeting, which lasted more than three hours in Istanbul, was part of a previously scheduled visit but coincided with increased tensions between Kyiv and Moscow over the long-running conflict in eastern Ukraine.
Erdogan expressed his concern about the current fraught situation at a news conference alongside Zelenskiy, adding that he hoped the conflict would be resolved peacefully through dialogue and in line with Ukraine’s territorial integrity.
Zelenskiy said Kyiv and Ankara share the same view on threats in the Black Sea region and the response to those threats.
Zelenskiy, who visited troops in the Donbas region two days ago, said he had briefed Erdogan on the situation in detail.
Major movements of Russian armed forces toward or near Ukraine’s borders and into Ukraine’s Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula have been captured in photographs, video, and other data, fueling concerns that Moscow may be preparing to send forces into eastern Ukraine.
The Kremlin has rejected Western calls to pull back its troops, denying they are a threat while adding that military movements within Russia are an internal sovereign issue.
Washington has called Moscow’s military buildup “destabilizing,” and the White House has expressed concern about the recent troop movements.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken consulted the German and French foreign ministers on April 9 about the need for Russia to cease its military buildup in the occupied Crimean Peninsula and near Ukraine’s eastern borders.
Russia seized Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in March 2014, sending in troops and staging a referendum denounced as illegitimate by at least 100 countries.
Since then, overwhelming evidence suggests Russia has continued to lend diplomatic and military aid to armed separatists fighting in the Donbas region.
The conflict has killed more than 13,000 people and displaced more than 1 million since April 2014.
Members of the German Bundestag have described the treatment of Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny as “targeted torture” and demanded the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture review the conditions of his detention.
The letter, posted on Facebook on April 10, called Navalny’s treatment “incompatible” with the European Convention for the Prevention of Torture, saying Russia is a party to the convention as a member of the Council of Europe.
The letter is signed by Manuel Sarrazin, with Germany’s Green Party, and a bipartisan group of 11 other members of the Bundestag, the lower house in Germany’s parliament. It was made available on Sarrazin’s Facebook page in German and Russian.
“Notwithstanding the arbitrariness and illegality of the judgments pronounced against you, we demand a review of your conditions of detention by the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture,” the politicians said.
The lawmakers said they believe the legal process against him was not carried out under the standards of rule of law and consider the judgment politically motivated and arbitrary with the goal of silencing him.
They said they were following reports about his imprisonment and health condition with great concern and expressed their “full solidarity” with him.
Navalny was imprisoned after returning to Russia in January from his recuperation in Germany after his exposure to a nerve agent last August in Siberia. He has accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of ordering security agents to assassinate him, something the Kremlin denies.
Navalny was treated in Germany after the poisoning, and Sarrazin said that he had the impression that Navalny’s treatment was meant to reverse his partial recovery.
Navalny has complained of back pain and numbness in his hands and legs and accused the authorities of withholding adequate medical treatment.
Navalny declared a hunger strike last week, raising even more concerns about his overall health.
Attorneys for Navalny, 44, said after visiting him on April 8 that he was suffering from two herniated disks in his back and a third bulging disk, and said he is losing about 1 kilogram a day.
VORKUTA, Russia — In May 1931, a group of 39 prisoners toiling in the Soviet Union’s expanding network of forced labor camps set off north from the town of Ukhta to explore the vast coal basin in the Russian Arctic.
Joined by a team of geologists and camp guards, the men traveled for weeks through barely navigable waters and icy tundra into the frigid, inhospitable region that would test the limits of the lauded Soviet conquest of the Far North.
They were soon joined by more prisoners, hundreds of whom died from sickness, hypothermia, and starvation. But by the spring of 1932, they founded Rudnik, a small coal-mining settlement 100 miles north of the Arctic Circle that would soon grow into the city of Vorkuta.
It had been a barren, forbidding terrain known only to indigenous Nenets reindeer herders; within a decade, it hosted one of the deadliest Gulag camps in the Soviet Union, and after Stalin’s death in 1953, a burgeoning metropolis that would be upheld as a symbol of Soviet power.
Central Vorkuta as it looks today.
But close to a century after its founding, a city whose population approached 250,000 in the late 1980s now has fewer than 60,000 residents and is shrinking faster than any other in Russia. The communist slogans that adorn its buildings, promising a bright future, endure as symbols of the chasm between the utopian vision of the U.S.S.R. and its capacity to turn that vision into reality.
‘Widespread Abandonment’
“We all had an understanding in high school that we’d graduate and leave this place,” says Anastasia Sadvary, a 33-year-old legal consultant who was born in Rudnik and now divides her time between Vorkuta and Syktyvkar, the capital of the surrounding Komi Region, some 900 kilometers further south. “Now most of my friends have left, and I’m an exception to the rule.”
Anastasia Sadvary
At its peak, Vorkuta was the geographical hub of a sprawling network of 13 coal mines that encircled the city like the hour indicators of an enormous clock, spawning vibrant settlements complete with schools, kindergartens, stores, medical clinics and cultural centers.
Today, only four of the 13 coal mines remain, and many of the settlements have become ghost towns along the highway connecting their once-thriving communities with the city.
A cargo train transports coal from the Vorgashorskaya mine, one of just four remaining around Vorkuta.
In the untrammeled capitalism that replaced the planned Soviet economy, the coal business struggled, the rate of deadly accidents grew, and the mines closed one by one, leaving behind derelict villages whose inhabitants moved to Vorkuta or, if they could, to Russia’s warmer regions. The latest mine shuttered in 2016 after a methane gas leak triggered explosions that claimed 36 lives.
“What we see now, 30 years after the Soviet collapse, is the drawn-out death of Vorkuta,” said Alan Barenberg, a historian at Texas Tech University and author of Gulag Town, Company Town: Forced Labor And Its Legacy In Vorkuta. “It’s no longer an ideological imperative to prove to the world that maintaining a coal-mining city of 250,000 people in the Arctic is a triumph of Soviet ingenuity — so you see the widespread abandonment of settlements and mines, with more surely to come.”
“More Coal For The Motherland!” is the communist-era slogan emblazoned atop the headquarters of the Vorkutaugol mining company in central Vorkuta.
Life in Vorkuta isn’t for the faint-hearted, with average temperatures of -5 degrees Celsius and winters that last up to 10 months. No roads connect the city to the rest of Russia, meaning it’s reachable year-round only via rail or, from April to October, by flights that are frequently delayed due to blizzards and strong winds.
Vorkuta now has the dubious honor of offering the cheapest housing of any Russian city, with three-room apartments frequently going for as little as $1,000. And the exorbitant cost of utilities like water and electricity means it’s sometimes more cost-effective to give your apartment away for free than wait months or years for a buyer.
The abandoned prisoner-built settlement of Rudnik is today only reachable from Vorkuta via a rickety wooden bridge that’s missing most of its wooden planks.
The situation is far worse in the coal-mining settlements around Vorkuta. Inside their deserted five-story housing blocks, apartment doors swivel on creaky hinges as if beckoning visitors to explore the possessions left strewn across the floor by owners who chose a swift departure over the protracted ordeal of gambling on the moribund housing market.
‘Every Man For Himself’
Outside the entrances to these apartment blocks, chalk lettering redolent of wartime signs by air-raid survivors denotes stairwells that still have at least one inhabitant, for whose benefit that entire stairwell’s central heating system is kept on.
According to official figures, there are 15,500 empty apartments in Vorkuta and surrounding settlements, a third of which are connected to the grid at an annual cost of 570 million rubles ($7.4 million) to the state budget.
Igor Krutko, one of the few remaining residents in the village of Komsomolsky.
“The Soviet Union valued such places,” says Igor Krutko, a 57-year-old living in Komsomolsky, a village 22 kilometers from Vorkuta that once had 20,000 inhabitants and now has a mere 200, with a tiny grocery shop as their only means of sustenance in a place left for the elements to slowly devour. “Today we have Wild West capitalism — every man for himself.”
In 1993, during the traumatic years after the Soviet collapse when rampant wage arrears drove depopulation from remote areas like Vorkuta, President Boris Yeltsin signed legislation that guaranteed free resettlement for retired long-time residents of the Far North.
A street in Komsomolsky, a coal-mining village that once had 20,000 inhabitants and now has just 200.
But the program has all but ground to a halt. Approximately 15,000 people in Vorkuta are eligible for resettlement, but only around 250 families across the whole of the vast Komi Region are moved each year.
“They’re holding us hostage,” says Vladimir Zharuk, a 60-year-old ex-miner with thick forearms and boundless energy who moved from his native Ukraine in the 1970s and now lives in Vorgashor village, beside a still-operative coal mine that was Europe’s largest when it opened in 1975.
Vladimir Zharuk at his apartment in Vorgashor village.
Zharuk, who collects a monthly pension of 25,000 rubles ($325), has been on the list for relocation since 1997, and says he is somewhere around spot 6,000 — which, by his calculations, means he’d need to wait another 120 years for his turn if the glacial pace of resettlement continues. Faced with the realistic prospect of never leaving Vorgashor, he devotes his energy to aiding other stranded retirees as part of a civic organization he calls Hostages of the Far North.
‘It Makes My Heart Bleed’
In the meantime, he has watched the village around him gradually turn to ruin, with the only community center closed two years ago despite protests from remaining residents. “Vorgashor will fight to the bitter end,” he says. “But it makes my heart bleed to see what’s taking place.”
To understand why Krutko and Zharuk decided to settle in Vorkuta in the first place, one must understand what the city once represented. After Stalin’s death, thousands of ex-prisoners of the crumbling Gulag system left, and amid a scramble to replace the workforce at the mines, authorities in Vorkuta lured recruits with salaries that were often five times the Soviet average, and generous bonuses that provided for free summer vacations in Crimea and a comfortable early retirement.
A playroom inside Vorgashor’s former House of Culture, which closed two years ago amid protests from locals.
Driven by an influx of workers attracted by these packages, Vorkuta soon became a showpiece Soviet city. It boasted grand neoclassical buildings whose foundations were sunk meters into the ground to prevent them from collapsing into the thawing permafrost, and panel housing blocks that sprang up like mushrooms, sometimes taking as few as 16 days to complete and displaying bold slogans like “More Coal For The Motherland!” and “Glory to the Conquerors of the Arctic!”
Possessions left strewn inside the living room of an abandoned apartment in Komsomolsky that is still connected to the central heating system.
For a tiny fraction of their monthly salary, miners like Zharuk and Krutko could purchase tickets on one of six daily flights to Moscow, spending two days at a time wandering the streets of the grand Soviet capital before making it back to Vorkuta for the Monday shift.
“Vorkuta was a unique city. So many interesting and intelligent people congregated here,” said Mikhail Tverskoi, an 88-year-old former mining engineer who at the age of 36 left a cramped communal apartment in St. Petersburg and accepted an offer to work in Vorkuta — with the three-bedroom apartment and all the privileges that came with the position.
Watching a technical rehearsal in the main auditorium of the Miners’ Palace of Culture in Vorkuta.
More than half a century later, it’s not all doom and gloom. Vorkuta may be a shadow of its former self, but it retains a combative, feisty energy and a city center that even during the polar darkness in December is filled with young mothers pushing ski-equipped strollers that glide across the snow faster than the children trudging to and from school in hats and gloves.
A dance class inside the Miners’ Palace of Culture, which was built in 1961 to showcase Vorkuta’s growing status as a model Soviet city in the Arctic.
Inside the spectacular Miners’ Palace of Culture, built in 1961, ballet and dance classes take place each evening and volleyball matches are played in the top-floor sports hall.
A trickle of labor migrants from Central Asia in recent years has slightly offset the exodus from Vorkuta, and amid the coronavirus pandemic, a small number of former residents has returned after losing jobs in other cities.
‘No Coal, No City’
Russia has sought ways to develop the Arctic, a task that will become easier as global warming accelerates. But an estimated 1 million people have left its Arctic zone since the Soviet collapse, and depopulation is cited as a major obstacle to the plans. A land giveaway program launched in Russia’s Far East will be expanded to the Arctic this summer — but even in more fertile climes it has hardly proved a hit.
“I’m absolutely convinced this city will survive. It will shrink further, but it will survive,” said Tverskoi. He hopes Vorkuta will escape the fate of other Soviet single-industry towns by tapping anew its abundant natural resources. But he warns: “If there’s no coal, there’s no city.”
On a recent visit to Rudnik, the abandoned prisoner-built settlement that gave rise to Vorkuta and is now only accessible via a rickety bridge missing most of its wooden planks, Sadvary, the legal consultant, pointed out the probable location of her childhood home — a wooden barracks that her family heated with coal brought home by her father from the mines.
Wooden crosses outside the city indicate the burial places of 42 prisoners killed during an uprising at a Vorkuta forced labor camp in 1953.
In 2006, she married a local man in a ceremony that culminated with raucous festivities at Vorkuta’s Ural Restaurant, once a popular venue for revelers.
Today, her childhood home is gone, and her wedding venue is a hollowed-out wreck.
Rudnik, the mining settlement that was established by Gulag prisoners in 1932 and gave rise to the city of Vorkuta, is now a haven for Airsoft enthusiasts.
“I look at all this and see our future,” she said, gazing at the six-story buildings that have become a haven for Airsoft enthusiasts. “This city only exists for the extraction of natural resources. Once they’re gone, the city will go. And they’ll have the perfect setting for movies about the zombie apocalypse.”
VORKUTA, Russia — In May 1931, a group of 39 prisoners toiling in the Soviet Union’s expanding network of forced labor camps set off north from the town of Ukhta to explore the vast coal basin in the Russian Arctic.
Joined by a team of geologists and camp guards, the men traveled for weeks through barely navigable waters and icy tundra into the frigid, inhospitable region that would test the limits of the lauded Soviet conquest of the Far North.
They were soon joined by more prisoners, hundreds of whom died from sickness, hypothermia, and starvation. But by the spring of 1932, they founded Rudnik, a small coal-mining settlement 100 miles north of the Arctic Circle that would soon grow into the city of Vorkuta.
It had been a barren, forbidding terrain known only to indigenous Nenets reindeer herders; within a decade, it hosted one of the deadliest Gulag camps in the Soviet Union, and after Stalin’s death in 1953, a burgeoning metropolis that would be upheld as a symbol of Soviet power.
Central Vorkuta as it looks today.
But close to a century after its founding, a city whose population approached 250,000 in the late 1980s now has fewer than 60,000 residents and is shrinking faster than any other in Russia. The communist slogans that adorn its buildings, promising a bright future, endure as symbols of the chasm between the utopian vision of the U.S.S.R. and its capacity to turn that vision into reality.
‘Widespread Abandonment’
“We all had an understanding in high school that we’d graduate and leave this place,” says Anastasia Sadvary, a 33-year-old legal consultant who was born in Rudnik and now divides her time between Vorkuta and Syktyvkar, the capital of the surrounding Komi Region, some 900 kilometers further south. “Now most of my friends have left, and I’m an exception to the rule.”
Anastasia Sadvary
At its peak, Vorkuta was the geographical hub of a sprawling network of 13 coal mines that encircled the city like the hour indicators of an enormous clock, spawning vibrant settlements complete with schools, kindergartens, stores, medical clinics and cultural centers.
Today, only four of the 13 coal mines remain, and many of the settlements have become ghost towns along the highway connecting their once-thriving communities with the city.
A cargo train transports coal from the Vorgashorskaya mine, one of just four remaining around Vorkuta.
In the untrammeled capitalism that replaced the planned Soviet economy, the coal business struggled, the rate of deadly accidents grew, and the mines closed one by one, leaving behind derelict villages whose inhabitants moved to Vorkuta or, if they could, to Russia’s warmer regions. The latest mine shuttered in 2016 after a methane gas leak triggered explosions that claimed 36 lives.
“What we see now, 30 years after the Soviet collapse, is the drawn-out death of Vorkuta,” said Alan Barenberg, a historian at Texas Tech University and author of Gulag Town, Company Town: Forced Labor And Its Legacy In Vorkuta. “It’s no longer an ideological imperative to prove to the world that maintaining a coal-mining city of 250,000 people in the Arctic is a triumph of Soviet ingenuity — so you see the widespread abandonment of settlements and mines, with more surely to come.”
“More Coal For The Motherland!” is the communist-era slogan emblazoned atop the headquarters of the Vorkutaugol mining company in central Vorkuta.
Life in Vorkuta isn’t for the faint-hearted, with average temperatures of -5 degrees Celsius and winters that last up to 10 months. No roads connect the city to the rest of Russia, meaning it’s reachable year-round only via rail or, from April to October, by flights that are frequently delayed due to blizzards and strong winds.
Vorkuta now has the dubious honor of offering the cheapest housing of any Russian city, with three-room apartments frequently going for as little as $1,000. And the exorbitant cost of utilities like water and electricity means it’s sometimes more cost-effective to give your apartment away for free than wait months or years for a buyer.
The abandoned prisoner-built settlement of Rudnik is today only reachable from Vorkuta via a rickety wooden bridge that’s missing most of its wooden planks.
The situation is far worse in the coal-mining settlements around Vorkuta. Inside their deserted five-story housing blocks, apartment doors swivel on creaky hinges as if beckoning visitors to explore the possessions left strewn across the floor by owners who chose a swift departure over the protracted ordeal of gambling on the moribund housing market.
‘Every Man For Himself’
Outside the entrances to these apartment blocks, chalk lettering redolent of wartime signs by air-raid survivors denotes stairwells that still have at least one inhabitant, for whose benefit that entire stairwell’s central heating system is kept on.
According to official figures, there are 15,500 empty apartments in Vorkuta and surrounding settlements, a third of which are connected to the grid at an annual cost of 570 million rubles ($7.4 million) to the state budget.
Igor Krutko, one of the few remaining residents in the village of Komsomolsky.
“The Soviet Union valued such places,” says Igor Krutko, a 57-year-old living in Komsomolsky, a village 22 kilometers from Vorkuta that once had 20,000 inhabitants and now has a mere 200, with a tiny grocery shop as their only means of sustenance in a place left for the elements to slowly devour. “Today we have Wild West capitalism — every man for himself.”
In 1993, during the traumatic years after the Soviet collapse when rampant wage arrears drove depopulation from remote areas like Vorkuta, President Boris Yeltsin signed legislation that guaranteed free resettlement for retired long-time residents of the Far North.
A street in Komsomolsky, a coal-mining village that once had 20,000 inhabitants and now has just 200.
But the program has all but ground to a halt. Approximately 15,000 people in Vorkuta are eligible for resettlement, but only around 250 families across the whole of the vast Komi Region are moved each year.
“They’re holding us hostage,” says Vladimir Zharuk, a 60-year-old ex-miner with thick forearms and boundless energy who moved from his native Ukraine in the 1970s and now lives in Vorgashor village, beside a still-operative coal mine that was Europe’s largest when it opened in 1975.
Vladimir Zharuk at his apartment in Vorgashor village.
Zharuk, who collects a monthly pension of 25,000 rubles ($325), has been on the list for relocation since 1997, and says he is somewhere around spot 6,000 — which, by his calculations, means he’d need to wait another 120 years for his turn if the glacial pace of resettlement continues. Faced with the realistic prospect of never leaving Vorgashor, he devotes his energy to aiding other stranded retirees as part of a civic organization he calls Hostages of the Far North.
‘It Makes My Heart Bleed’
In the meantime, he has watched the village around him gradually turn to ruin, with the only community center closed two years ago despite protests from remaining residents. “Vorgashor will fight to the bitter end,” he says. “But it makes my heart bleed to see what’s taking place.”
To understand why Krutko and Zharuk decided to settle in Vorkuta in the first place, one must understand what the city once represented. After Stalin’s death, thousands of ex-prisoners of the crumbling Gulag system left, and amid a scramble to replace the workforce at the mines, authorities in Vorkuta lured recruits with salaries that were often five times the Soviet average, and generous bonuses that provided for free summer vacations in Crimea and a comfortable early retirement.
A playroom inside Vorgashor’s former House of Culture, which closed two years ago amid protests from locals.
Driven by an influx of workers attracted by these packages, Vorkuta soon became a showpiece Soviet city. It boasted grand neoclassical buildings whose foundations were sunk meters into the ground to prevent them from collapsing into the thawing permafrost, and panel housing blocks that sprang up like mushrooms, sometimes taking as few as 16 days to complete and displaying bold slogans like “More Coal For The Motherland!” and “Glory to the Conquerors of the Arctic!”
Possessions left strewn inside the living room of an abandoned apartment in Komsomolsky that is still connected to the central heating system.
For a tiny fraction of their monthly salary, miners like Zharuk and Krutko could purchase tickets on one of six daily flights to Moscow, spending two days at a time wandering the streets of the grand Soviet capital before making it back to Vorkuta for the Monday shift.
“Vorkuta was a unique city. So many interesting and intelligent people congregated here,” said Mikhail Tverskoi, an 88-year-old former mining engineer who at the age of 36 left a cramped communal apartment in St. Petersburg and accepted an offer to work in Vorkuta — with the three-bedroom apartment and all the privileges that came with the position.
Watching a technical rehearsal in the main auditorium of the Miners’ Palace of Culture in Vorkuta.
More than half a century later, it’s not all doom and gloom. Vorkuta may be a shadow of its former self, but it retains a combative, feisty energy and a city center that even during the polar darkness in December is filled with young mothers pushing ski-equipped strollers that glide across the snow faster than the children trudging to and from school in hats and gloves.
A dance class inside the Miners’ Palace of Culture, which was built in 1961 to showcase Vorkuta’s growing status as a model Soviet city in the Arctic.
Inside the spectacular Miners’ Palace of Culture, built in 1961, ballet and dance classes take place each evening and volleyball matches are played in the top-floor sports hall.
A trickle of labor migrants from Central Asia in recent years has slightly offset the exodus from Vorkuta, and amid the coronavirus pandemic, a small number of former residents has returned after losing jobs in other cities.
‘No Coal, No City’
Russia has sought ways to develop the Arctic, a task that will become easier as global warming accelerates. But an estimated 1 million people have left its Arctic zone since the Soviet collapse, and depopulation is cited as a major obstacle to the plans. A land giveaway program launched in Russia’s Far East will be expanded to the Arctic this summer — but even in more fertile climes it has hardly proved a hit.
“I’m absolutely convinced this city will survive. It will shrink further, but it will survive,” said Tverskoi. He hopes Vorkuta will escape the fate of other Soviet single-industry towns by tapping anew its abundant natural resources. But he warns: “If there’s no coal, there’s no city.”
On a recent visit to Rudnik, the abandoned prisoner-built settlement that gave rise to Vorkuta and is now only accessible via a rickety bridge missing most of its wooden planks, Sadvary, the legal consultant, pointed out the probable location of her childhood home — a wooden barracks that her family heated with coal brought home by her father from the mines.
Wooden crosses outside the city indicate the burial places of 42 prisoners killed during an uprising at a Vorkuta forced labor camp in 1953.
In 2006, she married a local man in a ceremony that culminated with raucous festivities at Vorkuta’s Ural Restaurant, once a popular venue for revelers.
Today, her childhood home is gone, and her wedding venue is a hollowed-out wreck.
Rudnik, the mining settlement that was established by Gulag prisoners in 1932 and gave rise to the city of Vorkuta, is now a haven for Airsoft enthusiasts.
“I look at all this and see our future,” she said, gazing at the six-story buildings that have become a haven for Airsoft enthusiasts. “This city only exists for the extraction of natural resources. Once they’re gone, the city will go. And they’ll have the perfect setting for movies about the zombie apocalypse.”
With a new Cold War heating up between the U.S. and Russia and China, Witness for Peace Southwest, Addicted to War and CodePink organized a Truth Commission on the original Cold War on March 21st, which brought together the testimony of historians, activists and others who lived through the period.
Following a hearing three years ago, the Zoom event was hosted by Frank Dorrel, publisher of the popular anti-war text Addicted to War, and Rachel Bruhnke, a high school Spanish teacher and member of Witness for Peace Southwest. In her opening remarks, Bruhnke emphasized that the Cold War should rank as one of three great crimes in U.S. history, the first two being the genocide of the native Americans, and enslavement of African-Americans.
