17 January 2025
by Anna Karetnikova
Source: Facebook
17 January 2025
I got distracted by work and neglected to write here. But it is necessary. I will not add anything wise to what was said by Aleksei Navalny’s lawyers regarding the prison terms: everything is so sickeningly clear. One can only believe that the repression will not go unpunished: everything and everyone will be remembered by name. And nobody will be excused for being a cog in the system.
But I will briefly tell you more about a sentence handed down today, seemingly of a different type: Tajik butcher Dalerdzhon Achilov was given seven years for… fakes news about the war. And some kind of “hooliganism.” Of the butcher, who has already received a residence permit, already moved his family and decided, probably: oh, now we will live!.. – his market stall neighbour wrote a denunciation. Well, that he’s been muttering something to himself under his breath about the Special Military Operation. Given that nobody else from those working at the market confirmed this, even the police pulled back… but then the Crocus attack happened and Bastrykin demanded blood. Why was it the blood of a Novosibirsk butcher? – maybe just because he turned out to be Tajik and turned up within arm’s reach? Well here, today he received seven years. Because there’s nothing to be done about it… in the next life we’ll be smarter. My son, true, wondered: how will this guy come out of prison? Won’t he regret that he really ended up in the market at that moment, and not in Crocus City? Will he differentiate between those who wrote the denunciation, who trumped up the case, who judged – well, and all the rest? Well, okay, this is a rhetorical question. Everything remains to be seen.
…But Aleksandr Glushkin is not Tajik, and he worked not as a butcher at a market, but as a security guard at a school. Therefore it was not a saleswoman who wrote his denunciation, but the head of the department of further education. Having found on his Friends Page on VK someone with something yellow and blue in their avatar, Ms. Savalyeva hastened to look, and, finding a post about Bucha, rushed back to the director. Glushkin has now been remanded in custody and is facing ten years of imprisonment; the trial began yesterday. On the outside – his wife and two underage children. Because he shouldn’t have… You decide what. Write about Bucha, for example. And the colours you choose must be the right ones.
What is the moral of all this? Probably it’s about denunciations again. About mistakes made. Navalny’s lawyers have been worked on very diligently, listened to, had notes taken on them. And this is at least understandable from the point of view of the authorities: everything connected with Alekse’s name must be scorched and wiped out. But nobody worked over Dalerdzhon and Aleksandr. They’ve been put behind bars by ordinary Russian women. One – out of personal resentment or envy. The other – out of loyalty, out of the desire to be on the side of the majority, as I understand it.
It doesn’t seem to me that people in Russia will ever be able to accept one another and be united. No matter how things turn out, I doubt it more and more.
I’ll put links to the stories in the comments; I’m not making all this up. 
[Links added to text – ed]
Source: Facebook, 17 January 2025
17 January 2025
It is so interesting how the spindle twists the yarn so captivatingly these days – I simply cannot hold back, and so I shall continue to write. Konstantin Kotov has escaped from under house arrest (perhaps I should say ‘ran away’), and I am exceedingly happy about it. Konstantin has already been in a remand prison, he has been in a penal colony, and he knows that there’s nothing good at all in such places. I am also very glad that, at least on my feed, I no longer see outdated posts like: ‘oh, he escaped, now they’ll remand everyone in custody…’ It seems that, finally, everyone has understood that these are completely unrelated phenomena.
Here we have, for example, the pensioner Galina Archagova, who, discovered all of a sudden by TASS held on remand for some kind of repost about the Free Russia Legion, has in fact been there for nearly a year. And when she was imprisoned there, I doubt the judge made such an enquiry as ‘I wonder how Kostya Kotov is faring under house arrest? Is he complying with all the rules? I think they probably did without that. It was written that the lady is perfectly healthy. However, it’s unclear as to why she has been, then, in both Matrosskaya Tishina hospital and the psychiatric hospital in Butyrka. Apparently, it’s due to her excellent health, so it could improve even further and please the judge. By the way, Judge Liubov Nikolenko, who authorised remanding her in custody, did exactly the same with the elderly Nadezhda Buyanova, if you believe the Internet. And before that, twice, to Sergei Magnitsky as well. He too felt perfectly fine in her opinion, but then, alas, he fell ill and died.
Okay, so Konstantin Kotov left, but Lev Shlosberg stayed, and just earlier today he was charged in connection with misconduct concerning disclosure of his status as a foreign agent. I’m not generally one to offer advice or to criticise, but sometimes, somewhere in the back of my mind, a thought occurs: if Shlosberg is jailed, someone will say: ‘well, he tried to find some kind of common ground…’, someone will even say, ‘he gave in’, – but no, they jailed him regardless. Yes, but what would people think and say if he WASN’T jailed? Oh well, never mind, it’s not my concern. The choice is always truly difficult and challenging.
Well, those who haven’t yet been imprisoned still have a choice. Now, no one asked Ilya Yashin anything: first, without asking, he was imprisoned, and then, also without asking, he was deported. And then, also today, they arrived at his parents’ house with a search warrant and a round of questioning just to ask idiotic questions: Where is Ilya Yashin really? Why, as it turns out, does he also not properly conform to the assigned foreign agent status?
It’s hard to imagine that the repressive apparatus has developed amnesia and forgotten where they put Yashin. It is easier to assume that this is a long-standing practice of putting pressure on the relatives of dissenters, well, that, and also – it’s not even the stupidity of the repressive bureaucratic machine, but its desire to still pretend to at least be some kind of legal mechanism. There’s an investigative procedure entitled ‘search’? Then we pretend that we’re looking for someone. We pretend that we are interested in the answers to the questions asked in such ‘interrogations’. The court pretends to believe that elderly Archagova is completely healthy and can escape from the investigative authorities. No one really cares what is actually going on, whether there’s any logic in what’s happening. All that matters is that all the paperwork is in order. Or at least that it simply exists. It seems to me that soon it will even be possible to attach empty papers to the case files. But the necessary nomenclature must be there. ‘Protocol of investigative procedure,’ yep, that’s there. And where’s the paper with ‘Medical certificate?’. It’s there? Okay. Let’s add the paper ‘Verdict’. Now it can be filed in the archive.
Here’s what I thought today about the state of Russian justice. And yes, and about lustration.
Source: Facebook, 17 January 2025
Translated by Alyssa Rider and Annabel Pedgley
