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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Women have been threatened for taking part in protests.

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

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

Incel Community

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stepan Karagodin was killed on January 21, 1938.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fiendishly Simple

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Just A Line Of Work’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Losing Control

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Just Getting Started’

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

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

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

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

He says he’s just getting started.

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

This post was originally published on Radio Free.