28 – 30 April 2026
by Anna Karetnikova
Source: Facebook
28 April 2026
My birthday, which is today, has always been for me a kind of gateway from spring to summer. You tear a page from the calendar, and the long-awaited warmth gets the green light: its time has come. But nothing is coming now. The weather is a mess, and the metaphorical spring has been cancelled too. Meanwhile I’m stuck in an endless Groundhog Day with no exit in sight and nothing to do but work, keep the faith, and think constantly.
I think about the people who stayed in Russia: how are you doing there? You, who decided to stay there despite it all, and to preserve whatever you can preserve.
I think about those who have left, who fled. How are you managing? How do you fight for your life after having been abruptly cast out by the country you called home?
I think about Ukraine, and every new strike makes my world go dark.
I think about the political prisoners; I think about those who are thinking about them, who are writing them letters and supporting them around the clock. I’m thinking of all the other prisoners and the Federal Penitentiary Service staff, with whom I’ve spent most of my life. How are you doing? Have you signed the contract? Are you headed to Ukraine to kill and to die? Or did you wait for your prized freedom or early retirement, or, maybe you quit altogether after seeing the elderly women who fill the prisons these days, the terrifying enemies of the state…
I think about everything left undone on this day. About what could have been changed in the past, about all the mistakes that were made, about the important things left for ‘later’. Later never came. But I’m reserving my right to hope — I don’t even know what for anymore — and I continue working. Thanks to everyone who’s close to me, even if you’re far away! Things will get brighter.
Source: Facebook
30 April 2026
Today’s post will be a short one. It will be one of those ‘I have to speak up’ posts, or a personal note of sorts. It won’t get me any likes, praise, or popularity. I don’t like Ruslan Kutaev’s ‘cancellation’ after his ‘forced’ apology. It’s reminiscent of the video clips from the security forces where a person is forced, under threat of violence (in our case, public censure), to say something on camera that they don’t believe. They go to prison in the end anyway — or, in our case, they get ‘cancelled’. It’s too late to change anything (he doesn’t know this yet) but the rules of the game say that he has to lie. (He doesn’t make this decision himself, of course.)
And yes, I truly hope that no one suspects that I approve of ‘honor killings’ or persecution of people with a different orientation from my own. And no, I don’t think we need to sound every alarm for something like this. We certainly owe our respect and praise to those who do this. But what’s happening is one person has been held responsible for voicing what many people raised in a certain tradition believe — that really is the case. Well, they’ll hunker down and keep quiet in the future, living just as they always have.
On the plus side, these people have been informed that such beliefs are bad and are incompatible with, for example, European values. But I think that in an ideal world some kind of dialogue would have emerged from this incident that would have made it possible — with great difficulty and through pain — to reconcile the contradictions that are so clearly present. But a forced apology of this kind doesn’t encourage dialogue.
Source: Facebook
30 April 2026
There’s a link below to an episode of ‘Chelovek imeet Pravo’ (One Has the Right) where I describe how, remarkably, the FSIN ended up ranking third in a survey of customer-oriented services in Russia. And much, much more.
Source: Facebook
Translated by Nina dePalma
