In Soviet days, the Kremlin was hard on poets. I think of Anna Akhmatova and Yevgeny Yevtushenko, immediately. Shostakovich set poems of the latter in his Symphony No. 13 (“Babi Yar”). Writing to a student, Shostakovich said,
Morality is the twin sister of conscience. And because Yevtushenko writes about conscience, God grant him all the very best. . . . One should not be deprived of conscience. To lose conscience is to lose everything.
Here is a report from Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty:
A Moscow court on December 28 sentenced poets Artyom Kamardin and Yegor Shtovba to seven and 5 1/2 years in prison on charges of “inciting hatred and calling for anti-state activities” after they publicly recited verses condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Kamardin and Shtovba were not without allies in the courtroom:
Supporters chanted “Shame!” after the court’s ruling was pronounced. Police detained several of them.
Of course.
RFE/RL’s report continues as follows:
Earlier in May, another poet, Nikolai Daineko, who agreed to cooperate with investigators, was handed a four-year prison term on the same charges. The three were arrested in September 2022 after they presented their anti-war poems in public.
Spare a thought for them, perhaps. They and other political prisoners serve as a conscience of Russia.
• Maybe you have seen this news:
BREAKING:
The Putin-ally and member of the United Russia party, Vladimir Egorov, has died at the age of 46 after an accident involving him falling out the window of his third-floor apartment in the city of Tobolsk
The Russian authorities are investigating what caused his death pic.twitter.com/Zx5t8SKvfH
— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) December 28, 2023
Usually Putin allies do not meet with such deaths. It could be that Mr. Egorov “zigged when he should have zagged.” (I borrow this phrase from the late historian Gene Genovese. He was kicked out of the Communist Party, in New York, when he was 20. When I asked why, he shrugged and said, “I zigged when I should have zagged.” They did not kill Genovese, however.)
• A report from RFE/RL is headed “‘Polar Wolf’: The Harsh Prison Where Navalny Was Sent And How His Team Found Him.” The report begins this way:
Known as “Polar Wolf,” the strict-regime prison to which opposition politician Aleksei Navalny has been sent is a place where a water cannon is an instrument of torture.
“In the winter, prisoners would be hastily assembled in the courtyard in light clothing,” said prisoners’ rights activist Olga Romanova, relating the testimony given by a man who was released from Polar Wolf, more formally known as IK-3, in 2018. “They were held in formation and not allowed to clap or rub their hands together. They had to stand for 30 or 40 minutes without moving when it was minus 45 degrees Celsius or colder. If one person moved, the whole group was doused with water.”
Etc.
Another excerpt:
“As soon as you cross the threshold, they let you know that you are in purgatory where you have no rights and there is no one to complain to,” said Ukrainian filmmaker Oleh Sentsov, who spent five years on a terrorism conviction at the IK-8 prison (“Polar Bear”), also in the Yamalo-Nenets region. “Beatings, humiliation, electric shocks, being kept in a cold cell naked or in wet clothes — but that is still not the worst. . . . You can be sealed in the fetal position in an iron box where you can hardly breathe and have to urinate on yourself. . . . They routinely threaten to rape you when they are bullying you.”
(I interviewed, and wrote about, the remarkable Oleh Sentsov in August 2022, here. After his five years as a political prisoner of the Kremlin, he had a brief interval. Then Putin launched his all-out assault. And Sentsov immediately joined up with the Ukrainian army.)
An observation by Tymofiy Mylovanov, the president of the Kyiv School of Economics:
Navalny's forced isolation in a remote penal colony is more than a punishment; it's a tacit admission of fear. Putin's regime, by removing Navalny during the elections, acknowledges the power of Russian opposition to sway public opinion and disturb the facade of total control 1/
— Tymofiy Mylovanov (@Mylovanov) December 26, 2023
• A final report from RFE/RL: “How The Russian State Ramped Up The Suppression Of Dissent In 2023.” Aleksandr Cherkasov, of Memorial, is quoted. One of the things he says is this:
“The scope of the repression turns out to be sufficient: One person is imprisoned and 100 have their hands tied because they already have an administrative offense, and the next violation means prison. It worked in the Soviet Union, and it works now.”
Memorial was the largest civil-society organization in Russia. The Kremlin banned it, along with civil society at large. Memorial is still operating when and where it can, mainly in exile. In 2022, the organization was a co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Putin and his partners have succeeded in re-Sovietizing Russia. I wrote about this last April, here. As in Soviet days, there are Russians resisting, and being imprisoned, tortured, and killed for it. They are among the noblest and bravest people on earth.