12 – 17 January 2025
by Anna Karetnikova
Source: Facebook
Two years ago, on a winter morning, I was giving my latest explanation to the competent UFSIN [Federal Penitentiary System Administration] authorities, in the afternoon I was sitting thinking in a car at Remand Centre-1 on Matrosskaya Tishina Street, and in the evening I was already on a train to Minsk. My son wrote: hey—it’s been two years… It feels like yesterday Aisha and I put you on a train and there were all those soldiers…
Two years, it’s strange, time really does feel like it’s stopped. Mostly in this bizarre dream as a whole everything’s just like in real life: there’s good, and there’s bad. It’s good the two of us are here and we’re alive. It’s bad others are in prison and people keep dying. It’s good we have a roof over our head but bad I’m in a city I don’t care for. It’s good that France took us in, but it’s too bad that, due to our ignorance, everything went sideways a few times. It’s good we’re trying to learn the language but bad there aren’t any doctors for us here. It’s good we have friends but bad they’re far away. It’s good that I can work and (timidly hope) I can do some good but bad that I left behind in Moscow not only my near and dear but also prisoners who depended on me.
On the whole, it’s an okay balance, and (in my dreams) I can live. What’s scarier is that there’s no way to wake up from this dream. Even if you could magically translocate to Russia, you’d land in… no, prison’s not even the point, though that’s the most likely eventuality, but in fact you wouldn’t land in the same place you left. That place no longer exists. That reality you always manage to return to from your dream. It’s sped off somewhere along with the globe and you can’t coincide with it anymore. That is, the reality isn’t here and it isn’t there. There’s this strange sensation of timelessness and irreality. As if I got stuck somewhere in time and space.
Oh well. Since fate has given me the opportunity, I need to do something useful. Many don’t have that. 
Source: Facebook, 12 January 2025
From the not too distant past.
…A prisoner, quite young, a first-timer: “Alisa! Alisa! They want to put me on a prophylactic list!”
“They do? What kind?”
“The… oh damn, I don’t remember… something like disposed to thieves’ criminal romanticism! I’m not disposed!”
“Tell me what happened.”
“Well… this guy comes over and says, Which do you prefer, regular people or thieves? I say, Regular people, naturally, what the fuck do I have to do with thieves? I’m charged with drunk driving, and I’m not going to anymore!”
Alisa: “Wrong answer. These days for that, for saying too much, that’s a whole separate charge, extremism. You should have said: ‘With respect, officer, sir, I don’t understand what you mean. Your words are altogether inexplicable to me’”.
Prisoner: “Damn, I didn’t know… What now? I don’t want to go on the list! I’ll say everything the right way now! I’m no crime boss! I’m no thug, I don’t want to be, I don’t like… Can you talk to them?”
Alisa: “Yes. It really is unfair. I’ll speak to them right now. Shall we step out, comrade convoy captain? This really isn’t right—tripping up a first-timer for saying something… Don’t you think we’re taking the ‘extremism’ quota a little too far here?”
“For sure. I overdid it.”
…Striding toward each other energetically across the snow-covered parade ground perpendicular to mine and Dima captain’s trajectory “to have a talk” were our old veterans (why “old”? a little older than me, we have an early pension), leaving two black trails, the librarian and warehouse manager, who had removed their shoulder straps but kept their military comportment and vigor.
“Long live the UIS [Penitentiary System]!” Palych the warehouse manager cheerfully greeted the librarian with the usual watchword.
“Eternal life!” Vasilich the librarian boomed back the traditional response greeting.
Look homeward, angel. (c)
Source: Facebook, 15 January 2025
_______
Got pulled away by my work and neglected to write here. But I need to. I have nothing smart to add to what’s been said about the sentences for Aleksei Navalny’s lawyers. It’s all sickeningly clear. One can only trust that the repressions won’t go unpunished: everything and everyone will be remembered by name. And no one can justify himself by saying he was a cog in the system.
On the other hand, I will speak briefly about one other verdict issued today of a seemingly other sort: the Tajik butcher Dalerdzhon Achilov was given seven years for… fake news about the war. And some kind of “hooliganism”. The denunciation against the butcher, who had already obtained a residency permit, moved his family here, and probably decided, hey, now we can start living!, was written by a neighboring stall owner. Supposedly he muttered something about the SVO [special military operation]. Since no one else from the market brotherhood confirmed this, even the police stepped back… but then Crocus happened and Bastrykin demanded blood. Why was this the blood of the Novosibirsk butcher? Maybe simply because he was a Tajik and close to hand? So today he got seven years. Because whatever he does here, it’s no use … he’ll be smarter in the next life. True, my son got to wondering what this fellow will be like after prison colony. Won’t he regret actually being at the market at that moment and not at Crocus City? Will he make a distinction between the person who wrote the denunciation, the person who stitched up his case, the person who condemned him—well, and everyone else? Fine then, this is a rhetorical question. We shall see.
…But Aleksandr Glushkin is not a Tajik, and he was working as a school guard, not a butcher in the market. Therefore the denunciation against him was written not by a seller but by the head of the supplementary education department. After discovering on her Vkontakte friend feed someone with something yellow and blue on their avatar, Mrs. Savelieva rushed to take a closer look, discovered a post about Bucha, and ran to the director with her hair streaming behind her. Glushkin is sitting in the remand centre and is threatened with ten years’ imprisonment; his trial started yesterday. His wife and two minor children are at liberty. Because it’s no use… well, you can come up with what’s no use yourself. Say, writing about Bucha, for instance. And having to choose your colors the right way.
What’s the moral from this? Probably something about denunciations again. About unprocessed mistakes. Navalny’s lawyers were diligently cultivated, eavesdropped on, and recorded verbatim. Which is at least explicable from the regime’s standpoint. Everything connected with Aleksei’s name has to be incinerated and erased. But no one cultivated Dalerdzhon or Aleksandr. Ordinary Russian women put them away. One out of personal insult or envy. The other out of servility, out of a desire to be one of “ours” for the majority, that’s how I understand it.
I don’t think that Russian society will ever be able to accept one another and be united. No matter how it all turns out, I doubt this more and more.
I’ll put links to the stories in the comments. I’m not making all this up.
Source: Facebook, 17 January 2025
The thread these days winds so interestingly, truly intriguingly—I can’t help myself, I’m going to write. Konstantin Kotov left (evidently, I should say “fled”) house arrest, and I’m very glad of that. Konstantin had already been in a remand centre, and a penal colony, and he knows there’s nothing good there. I’m also very glad that at least on my feed I see nothing of the old “Oy, he left, now they’re going to put everyone in the remand centre…” Evidently, everyone has finally realized that there is absolutely no connection between these phenomena.
Take pensioner Galina Archagova, who TASS suddenly discovered in a remand centre for some repost about the Legion, in the remand centre in fact for nearly a year. And when they put her there, I don’t think the judge thought to ask, And how, I wonder, is Kostya Kotov behaving there under house arrest? Is he still following it? I suppose they got along without that somehow. They wrote that the old woman was perfectly healthy. True, it’s unclear why despite that she is in either the Matroska [Matrosskaya Tishina prison] hospital or the Butyrka [Butyrskaya prison] psychiatric hospital. Evidently, because of her good health, she got even better and made the judge happy. By the way, if we are to believe the Internet, Judge Lyubov Nikolenko, who pushed for her to be remanded in custody, did the exact same thing to the elderly Nadezhda Buyanova. And even before that, twice, to Sergei Magnitsky. He, too, felt quite fine, in her view, but later, unfortunately, got sick and died.
OK, Konstantin Kotov left, but Lev Shlosberg remained, and just today charges were brought against him in connection with his poor behavior as a foreign agent. As a rule, I try not to give advice or criticize, but sometimes a thought flits by somewhere at the edge of my awareness: if they put Shlosberg in prison, someone is going to say, “Oh, and he did try to find a common language somehow… some would even say he rolled over—but no, they put him in prison anyway.” Yes, but what would people think and say if the politician wasn’t imprisoned?.. Fine, this is not for me. The choice really is always tough and complicated.
Those still not in prison do have a choice. No one asked Ilya Yashin about anything. First they put him in prison without asking him, and then they kicked him out, also without asking him. And then today they went to his parents’ to search and question them, to ask idiotic questions: And where, actually, is Ilya Yashin? Does where he is there, it turns out, correspond poorly to his assigned status as foreign agent?..
Generally speaking, it’s hard to imagine that the repressive apparatus is suffering from sclerosis and has forgotten where it itself misplaced Yashin. It’s easier to assume that this is a practice adopted long ago as a weapon of pressuring the relatives of dissenters, well, and also—not even the stupidity of the repressive bureaucratic machine but its desire to pretend as before to be an at least vaguely legal mechanism. There’s an investigative action called “the search”? That means we’ll pretend we’re looking for someone. We’ll pretend we’re interested in the answers to the questions at these “interrogations”. The court pretends it believes that the elderly Archagova is perfectly healthy and might run away from the investigation. No one has the slightest interest in there being any logic in what is going on. All the documents just have to be in order. Or even just be. I think pretty soon blank pages might even be sewn into files. As long as there’s the essential nomenclature. “Transcript of the investigative action”—aha, there it is. And where’s the “doctor’s note”? It’s there? OK. Let’s add the “verdict”. Into the archive with it.
This is what I was thinking today about the state of Russian justice. And also about lustration.
Source: Facebook, 17 January 2025
Translated by Marian Schwartz
