18 November 2024
Dr Buyanova is a victim not only of Bastrykin and Judge Fedina, but first and foremost of artificially cultivated ‘public opinion’
by Leonid Nikitinsky
Source: Novaya gazeta
In the footage from the Tushino district court, Nadezhda Fedorovna Buyanova, 68 years of age, smiles at someone through the bullet-proof glass. It’s clear that this smile, far from being a front or a mask, is her normal facial expression. As though there were neither cages nor cells, from which she had been brought, at five in the morning, in a windowless car, as though this truck with bars on the windows isn’t going to be turning on its engine in order to make the return journey to take her back to the pretrial detention centre.
The 5.5-year prison sentence handed out by Judge Olga Fedina is not exactly out of the ordinary in these times. Yet somehow the case is elevated to dramatic, symbolic heights owing to its participants: a smiling paediatrician, a hysterical mother who lied about her deceased husband who it turns out wasn’t in fact her husband, the usual mediocre judge, and to top it all off, Bastrykin, who practically went out of his way to initiate a criminal case for “fake news” about the Russian army.
But Dr Buyanova is a victim not only of Bastrykin and not only of Judge Fedina, but first and foremost of public opinion, “patriotic” Telegram channels that disseminated Akinshina’s hysteria on social networks and exploited sympathy for her to manipulate their audience. Talk show hosts also took on the role of executioners, propelling Buyanova’s story to the level of the Investigative Committee, while before any trial so much as began, they had designated the paediatrician an “enemy” based on her place of birth (Lviv).
This is the public tail that wags the state dog, inciting an elevated degree of hatred to the level of 5-8 years of imprisonment “on the grounds of hatred” under Article 207.3, Part 2, of the Russian Criminal Code.
Meanwhile, there is no evidence of a crime having been committed under Article 207.3. Even if, contrary to the presumption of innocence, we accept Akinshina’s unsubstantiated story to be true, Buyanova did not disseminate “information” in a one-on-one conversation with her (mandatory public disclosure is strikingly absent), Buyanova was merely expressing an opinion, something which her not entirely balanced interlocutor could also have misunderstood.
Such legal clarity entails not a legal, but a moral question: what feelings did Judge Fedina experience when she sent a 68-year-old woman – who clearly posed no danger to society – to a penal colony for five years (this is taking into account the six months she already spent in a pre-trial detention centre)? A judge is, after all, a human being, not a robot…
I fear that the correct answer is this: Judge Fedina felt she had the backing of her colleagues, across the entire law enforcement agency spectrum, and (potentially) a significant portion of the “nation”. And this answer has changed little since the people shouted at Pontius Pilate in the palace square:“Crucify him! Crucify him!…” This backing, amplified by propaganda, placed the judge in a sort of armoured train of “righteousness”, from which the voices of a dozen and a half doctors and human rights activists, who had risked coming to support Buyanova in court, sounded to her like the distant explosions of enemy shells.
The answer to this moral question lies in the realm of sociology, rather than the law, and can be found in the works of modern sociologist Niklas Luhmann. His opponents consider him rather cynical, yet he simply pushed his theory of society to the limit, considering the communities that form it as closed-off, self-referring systems.
“Each system distinguishes itself as separate from the surrounding world… A system will develop an indifference to the world, and adapts not to the world, but rather to itself. The surrounding world is simply ‘everything else’” [translated from the author’s Russian – ed.].
Communities as systems develop their own codes, through which they respond to the challenges of the world around them. For law enforcement agencies that have captured the judiciary, such a code formally remains as the distinction between what is “legal” and “illegal”. Yet, since 2012, a loop of political repression has gradually and informally emerged from this system, in which the same “law enforcement” elements proceed from the code that distinguishes between “patriots and traitors” and “friends and foes”.
Ethical standards apply only within the system. The outside world, that is, “everyone else”, cannot try to understand the system, discuss it, or influence the decisions it makes in relation to itself. From this point of view, Judge Fedina’s conscience is clear: both Dr. Buyanova and those who came to support her are just incidental circumstances, faceless “data.” The transfer of Judge Fedina to the Moscow City Court, which has been reported by the media, indicates that she made no mistake in her judgment.
A petition for Buyanova’s release on the website change.org received less than 5,000 signatures. There would likely be more if people truly believed that they could change anything about her fate.
Perhaps, something could be explained to those who have only heard bits and pieces of this story. Maybe, under such circumstances, it would have been possible to convince someone of the right viewpoint, but right now, there are simply no platforms for such a discussion.
The sentences handed down for opposition to the war (sentences which, according to OVD-Info [designated as a “foreign agent”], already number more than the days of the “Special Military Operation”), fall on well prepared ground that has already been cleared of liberal “weeds”. The Kremlin has consistently taken over the main media and deprived the opposition-minded part of civil society of the means for active engagement. After the eradication of Memorial (also a “foreign agent”], the Moscow Helsinki Group and most of the lesser-known human rights organisations in the country, no structures remain around which opponents of political repression could band together. The Human Rights Council, which while under the chairmanship of Mikhail Fedotov would at least publicly have intervened on Buyanova’s behalf, following the changes in personnel of 2022-2023 considers her sentence a “sanitary measure,” according to the words of its new president Valery Fadeev.
The community of courts and law enforcement agencies can therefore disregard the law to such an extent that no other system will oppose it.The very skeleton of civil society has been destroyed. So long as we can only try to describe what is going on, journalism has been deprived of its human rights component; today a journalist is merely a historian. But who will replace Dr. Buyanova in the children’s clinic? Well, it won’t be Bastrykin.
Translated by Nathalie Wilson and Dominic Reed
