15 April 2025
by Aleksandr Podrabinek
Source: A Word for the Defence
Verdict on Freedom of Speech
On 15 April, the Nagatinskoi district court in Moscow sentenced four journalists to prison for their professional work. Antonina Favorskaya (Kravtsova), Artem Kriger, Konstantin Gabov, and Sergei Karelin were given five and a half years of incarceration each by Russia’s corrupt system of justice. None of the four admitted guilt. Lawyers for the defendants demanded an acquittal. The hearings were held behind closed doors, and neither journalists nor friends of the defendants were allowed into the courtroom.
The employee of the prosecutor’s office who presented the indictment came to the court accompanied by two policemen holding machine-guns atilt. Entrance to the courtroom was guarded by court bailiffs in combat uniform, black masks, bulletproof vests, and guns at their side. The convoy led the defendants in handcuffs, sometimes accompanied by German shepherd service dogs. In this way, the Russian regime was trying to create an impression of the special danger posed by the defendants—four journalists whose sole weapons were the computer, camera, and videocam. In this way, the Russian regime yet again, loudly and unambiguously, declared itself to be a despotic regime that despises democratic values and human rights.
The four journalists, who have been writing, photographing, and talking about events in the country, were charged with organizing an extremist group. Had they been working for state media, nothing would have happened to them. But because they posted their materials on FBK [Anti-Corruption Foundation] Internet resources, then by order of Russian ‘justice’ they were extremist.
What does today’s Russian regime understand by extremism? Well, this, for instance: A.Yu. Kravtsova and A.P. Kriger “joined the extremist FBK group (‘the Navalny Team’), agreeing to shoot, edit, and prepare video reels aimed at discrediting the current regime and the domestic and foreign policy it conducts in the country, with their subsequent posting by unidentified individuals on the Internet on the video hosting channels YouTube, Navalny LIVE, Aleksei Navalny, Popular Politics, and also the Navalny Team channel on Telegram.
The idea that discrediting the current regime and criticizing its domestic and foreign policy is extremism runs like a thread through the indictment, hearings, and verdict. The prosecutors and court seem not to have noticed Art. 29 of the Russian Constitution guaranteeing everyone freedom of thought and speech. They consider criticism of the regime a crime. This is not a matter of a constitutional ban on propaganda or agitation that gives rise to social, racial, ethnic, or religious hatred and hostility, or propaganda of social, racial, ethnic, religious, or linguistic superiority. No, it is all primitively simple. In and of itself, criticism of the regime, its discreditation, is a crime. In essence, the regime is not even trying to furnish political repressions with legal norms. Today, what is understood by extremism is any expressed discontent with the regime, and tomorrow it will be like North Korea here, where people are imprisoned for grinning during a speech by the nation’s leader.
Clearly attesting to the fact that we are on this ruinous path are two other episodes from this case. As stated in the indictment, ‘after the death on 16 February 2024 of A.A. Navalny, the leader and director of the extremist group, A.Yu. Kravtsova (Antonina Favorskaya – Ed.), by order of I.Yu. Zhdanov, leader of the extremist group, for the purpose of discrediting the current regime and encouraging protest moods in the country, arrived along with L.I. Navalnaya, A.A. Navalny’s mother, in Yamalo-Nenetsky Autonomous Okrug, where during the period 20-22 February 2024, she shot a video of L.I. Navalnaya’. This is not even a matter of ‘discrediting the regime’ but merely of accompanying the mother of the murdered man on her trip to the oppositionist’s prison camp. Now that’s extremism!
In another episode, Antonina Favorskaya is accused because, ‘in the course of rendering assistance to L.I. Navalnaya in organizing the funeral of A.A. Navalny, acting intentionally… for the purpose of discrediting the current regime during the period 1-10 March 2024, she filmed the preparations for A.A. Navalny’s funeral as well as the funeral procession along its route’. A funeral video as a variety of extremism! For these ‘crimes’, Favorskaya was given 5.5 years in prison.
Laws in Russia have long since become not a means for regulating relations between citizens and the state but a police baton ready at any moment to come crashing down on the head of anyone discontented with government policy. This kind of attitude toward the law is characteristic of totalitarian states and personalist dictatorships. The fight with free speech is their generic characteristic. In the public space, a despotic regime in the person of dictators, leaders of the nation, a military junta, or an all-powerful politburo has to look irreproachable, absolutely positive, without the slightest flaw. Called upon to carry out this state task is the loyal press. An independent press that criticizes the regime, and especially exposes the crimes of the powerful of this world under this kind of state order, becomes unnecessary and harmful. There’s nothing new in this. This is how it was in the socialist Soviet Union and in National Socialist Germany. This is how it remains today in Communist China and totalitarian North Korea, in fundamentalist Iran and socialist Cuba. The Russian regime, which suppresses free speech in the country and imprisons honest and brave journalists, has already led the country to a place of honor in the ranks of these despotic regimes. Apparently, it’s determined to fight for primacy there.
Translated by Marian Schwartz
