Leonid Nikitinsky

28 November 2024

In Udmurtia, a court has sentenced Dmitry Talantov, the former president of the republic’s Bar, to seven years for a few social media posts. He is now 64…

by Leonid Nikitinsky 

Source: Novaya gazeta

Well, what’s there to say about Dmitry Talantov, the former Bar president in the Republic of Udmurtia? Pretty crafty!.. It seems he came out pure as the driven snow and put others in what position? Like it or not, he now should be judged.

But after all, many here in Udmurtia were not only his pupils but also his friends or friends of friends. The republic is small, and so is its legal world. Actually, that’s how it was before 24 February 2022, but afterward those who had previously had a secret grudge against the Bar president could now point a finger directly at him: There he is, the enemy! And even “enemy of the people.” (We wrote in detail about the situation at the Udmurtia Bar in connection with the Talantov case in May.)

A case under the fashionable Article 207.3 of the Russian Criminal Code for antiwar Facebook posts [Facebook’s owner, Meta, has been designated an extremist organisation in Russia] was opened on 23 June 2022, by Major General Andrei Strizhkov, director of the Investigative Committee’s Main Investigative Administration for Moscow. Serving as grounds was a report by criminal investigator S.A. Seregin, dated 14 April 2022, on the results of a review of Talantov’s Facebook page. Conscientious investigator that he is, Seregin immediately googled him and reported that Talantov was at that moment president of the Udmurtia Bar.

The logical assumption was that the scene of the “crime” (on which the case’s competence and jurisdiction depends) was Udmurtia, but indicated as such was “an unestablished location on Russian Federation territory,” and the investigation landed in Moscow. Talantov was immediately transported there from Izhevsk. Transport is an extremely difficult stage in the custody process, especially for someone who is far from young. In December, Talantov will turn 64.

On 12 April 2022, that is, two days before Seregin’s “review of the page,” a note was published on the Voennoe Obozrenie [Military Review] website about “Ukronazi supporter Dmitry Talantov”. Based on this information, we can assume that no one in Udmurtia was willing to open a case against Talantov, and it took the initiators two months to push it through to the Russian Investigative Committee level, which issued the order.

In the capital, the investigators, as has happened before, bungled it. According to the law, conducting intelligence operations and investigative actions against an attorney requires permission from the court (by jurisdiction, the Udmurtia court), and this was not obtained. The procedural leapfrog ended nonetheless in the case slapped together in Moscow being handed over to Izhevsk, but there the defense discovered falsification, apparently, in its key documents.

Criminal investigator Seregin, who had prepared the initial material, had for this purpose done a survey of Talantov’s personal Facebook page twice. In the first instance, in April 2022, the witnesses named were a certain B.V. Tokiev and M.A. Senkin. After digging around on the Internet, the defense established that from 1990 to April 2022, this Tokiev had been serving in internal affairs organs, had published in Petrovka, 38, a newspaper, and in 2002 was, in addition, convicted by the Stavropol Regional Court for falsifying evidence in a criminal case.

It was simpler with Senkin. At the moment of his participation in the survey he was working just as a cook at one of the Moscow Internal Affairs Administrations. Talantov’s wife Olga, also an attorney, went to the capital on business and found this Senkin, but in response to her questions he talked a lot of drivel.

It was no better during the second review of his page in June. Witness Dzyuba not only had been tried for hooliganism, assault, theft, robbery, and illegal weapons possession but had also worked as a psychologist in the same Internal Affairs Administration where Senkin stood at the stove. Witness Kurmangaliev turned out to have an alibi. At the very moment of the Facebook page review he was in the Kuzminsk district court defending his right to sue the Russian Migration Department (OMVD RF) for refusing to give him permission to enter Russia.

The district court in Udmurtia refused to call these “witnesses,” and investigator Seregin, who had come at the defense’s insistence, said he didn’t remember the details. Therefore, we cannot know where and under what circumstances he gleaned the passport information of the good people listed, either. In Udmurtia—the attorneys there tell me—they don’t do such slipshod work.

In general, according to the strict (and for good reason!) demands of the Criminal Procedures Code (CPC), this kind of “evidence” is considered inadmissible—but who in the court is going to bother about that!

The issue lies elsewhere.

The case materials do not allow a conclusion as to whether it was opened with a preconceived goal. For example, in connection with Talantov’s taking up of the defense of the journalist Ivan Safronov after the forced departure from Russia of ‘foreign agent’ and attorney Ivan Pavlov. Or was it the result of random monitoring by the investigations services of Facebook pages (which had already been blocked at the moment Talantov’s posts were discovered)? In any event, from the very first operational and investigative actions, it was clear who Talantov was and that his defense would also be experienced.

How can anyone put together a case like this so lackadaisically? That means the investigators themselves understand that all these charges under Article 207.3 are total nonsense, so they simply don’t give a damn about the CPC—this will just have to do, the court will lap it up…

Under the article on “discreditation”, Talantov was accused of four incidents, qualified under Article 207.3, Part 2 (5-10 years), Paragraph d: “for motives of political, ideological, racial, ethnic, or religious hatred or hostility…”—and Paragraph a: “by a person using his official position”.  By way of official position, they pointed to possible influence on Udmurt attorneys, who Talantov apparently commands through Facebook.

To be sure, they added separately Article 282 of the Russian Criminal Code: “Actions aimed at inciting hatred or enmity… on the basis of gender, race, ethnicity, language, origin, or attitude toward religion, as well as belonging to any social group” (under Part 2, this is also up to 6 years). Indicated by way of a targeted hated group were “supporters of President V.V. Putin among attorneys who support the Special Military Operation [SVO]”. Altogether on this basis, the prosecutor, whose wife worked as Talantov’s secretary, asked for 12 years’ incarceration for Talantov.

At the trial, which the defense managed to get held outside Izhevsk, on the territory of the dacha where Talantov wrote his ill-fated posts, defense witnesses talked about how the former president helped everyone and how he loved children and dogs. All this will come in handy for a review of the guilty verdict sooner or later, but this information is superfluous for the verdict to be issued. In Udmurtia, everyone knows everything about Talantov as is. He is famous at the national level, too, and he remains a very colorful figure in the local legal crowd. Of course, I would like to call it a “community,” but it isn’t one anymore. Immediately after the case was opened, the Bar’s vice-presidents, who retained their posts and whom Talantov himself had put in these positions, let him go down the tubes.

How could Talantov have laid himself open like that and done what he would have warned anyone else against? This is a psychological question, now, not a legal one. He explains from his cage that he hadn’t slept and was on edge, but Olga thinks that he simply hadn’t adjusted to the new times and had overestimated himself as a man of the law and victor in so many trials. In his final statement he spoke, as if not from his cage but from the defense’s place in front of it, in high style “about hate and love”. As if good and evil had not changed places and these words meant something:

FROM DMITRY TALANTOV’S FINAL STATEMENT AT HIS TRIAL

“The prosecutor has asked  for 12 years  for me, considering my hatred… In Russia, people don’t live that long, especially in prison and especially with my health… Actually, sometimes I think that today it’s not so terrible to die, today it’s terrible to live…

I have been in prison for two and a half years… For these last two in a shitty medieval cell where the only amenity of civilization is a toilet and a sink where the water runs constantly. There are holes in the wall over the door where a loudspeaker was installed. It keeps broadcasting the same points of the internal regulations for isolation, read, evidently, by an actor in an ecstatic voice. I was able to get my—well, what shall we call them, guards—to turn off the loudspeaker. Sometimes mercy beats in their stern hearts… They turned off the loudspeaker, but a steel door leads to the corridor, what we call the gully. If you come close and put your ear to it you can hear what the loudspeakers are saying in neighboring cells. At nine o’clock, the program “Soloviev Live” comes on. Never would I have believed that every evening for five minutes I would listen closely to Soloviev… The thing is, though, I’m waiting for the words about peace coming. Those words are never there, never…”

In contrast to the prosecution, Judge Denis Metelyagin slashed the sentence almost in half—to seven. This is probably the maximum he could do for Talantov for the verdict to hold, and there, on appeals, they might lower it another six months or a year. No one here wishes anyone evil. Does that mean it spawns itself? But no, that never happens…

Translated by Marian Schwartz