Vasilli Yakemenko is back. The former head of Rosmolodezh, ex-founder of the short lived Walking Together and former all-father of Nashi is starting a new group, Sincerely Yours. According to Vedomosti, the group will renew a youth base for the Putin’s fourth term. Yakemenko, or at least his sponsors, sincerely believe that Putin ruling until 2024 is inherently a good thing. “According to Yakemenko,” writes Vedomosti, “former Nashi commissars are still loyal to Putin and have faith in course of modernization and innovation Putin’s team declared for the country’s development in 2005. In [Yakemenko's] opinion, the country’s leadership has lost its way and it needs to evolve from control (kontrol) to promoting people’s creativity.” This is downright Surkovian, and no wonder, Yakemenko’s ties of the former grey cardinal are well known. Also, moving beyond kontrol, something I’ve argued defines Putin’s third term, is exactly what Surkov said in London. “The system must change” and it “has to adapt to changing conditions.”

Sincerely Yours won’t be a political organization, says Yakemenko. Rather it will work on “social projects” with names like “Reading,” which will encourage youth to, well, read and discuss books. The first text will be Eric Berne’s 1964 bestseller, Games People Play, which is a psychological treatise on human interaction. Think of it as an Oprah book club for Putin. Several “blocs” will outline other projects: housing, municipalities, education, and propaganda. Membership in Sincerely Yours will prove costly. Monthly dues will average 5000 rubles ($160) a month. Does Yakemenko really think that young people will join such group with such steep dues? Apparently he does. He promises a membership of a million in ten years. And it seems he’s already ahead of the game finance-wise. Yakemenko boasts a budget of 5 million rubles. As for where the cash came from, Yakemenko doesn’t say.

Sincerely Yours comes virtually out of the blue. Sounds like a year after Yakemenko left Rosmolodezh, declared the creation of a new project, the Party of Power, which never materialized because of lack of funding, and a running a restaurant, Eat Pirogi, the youth leader has lost his way too. Hence a Nashi rebound.

The Sincerely Yours announcement follows a meeting Yakemenko organized at Seliger last weekend.. Initially, Yakemenko invited up to 3,000 former Nashists to gather at the camp to discuss the future of Nashi. The meeting and the organization are not without controversy. Most former activists gave their dear leader the cold shoulder. Only 500 showed up. “I don’t understand what Yakemenko wants,” an unidentified Nashist told Izvestiia. “He wants to gather people together and show them something new, perhaps, his own power. But Nashi objectively no longer exists, it split into projects and these were based on agreements with particular Nashi commissars. The majority of members agrees with this and don’t want to go meet with Yakemenko.”

Another former commissar, Artur Omarov, concurred. “I personally don’t want to get together at Seliger. We accepted this decision and I don’t see any meaning in commissars deciding to ‘discuss the movement’s future.’ Our project was created several years ago to support Vladimir Putin’s course. And Putin hasn’t presented us with a new task.”

Sounds like Yakemenko, not Putin, has taken it upon himself to present Putin loyalists with a new mandate. Or has he?

Hence the question whether this is yet another Kremlin project to reenergize youth for Putin. As I said above, though so far Sincerely Yours sounds more Nashi-lite, it recalls Vladisalv Surkov’s attempts to drag in segments of Russian youth into Putin’s coalition. But a Vedomosti source says that Yakemenko’s new pet project is on his initiative and doesn’t have sanction from above. As of now, Surkov’s fingerprints are surprisingly missing.

Without Kremlin approval and the infrastructure and finances that come with it, I predict, as many also are, Yakemenko’s latest attempt get back into politics will amount to sincerely nothing.

Photo: Maksim Shemetov/Itar-Tass

The post Sincerely Yours, Yakemenko appeared first on Sean's Russia Blog.

This week’s Russia Magazine! column, “The Kids Aren’t Alright,”

“Who has the youth has the future!” Martin Luther declared. As object-subjects of modern states, youth serve as the key to reproducing of the means of reproduction. They perpetuate the nation and its institutions. Adults, therefore, seek, to play on Marx, to create youth after their own image. Yet, Russian youth defy capture. According to a recent study by Olga Kryshtanovskaya, Russian youth remain unmoored, disorientated, and incapable of finding their footing in present day Russia. Twenty years after the collapse of communism, “they have no established sense of Russian society and their place in it.” When young Russians look across the political landscape and peer at its various parties, movements, and personalities, they feel a profound sense of alienation. “This is one of the signs that the Russian political system finds itself in crisis,” says Pavel Salin, the director of the Center of Political Research.

Or is it? They certainly threaten the stability of Putin’s political corporatism. But they speak directly to the other side of Putinism: neoliberalism. And their experience with an economic structure that requires an unmoored, apathetic, cynical, and individuated citizenry places them on par with destabilized educated young people the world over. Like their Western counterparts, the respondents in Kryshtanovskaya survey are urban, educated, “middle class,” and politically liberal yet socially and economically adrift. The system doesn’t represent them, and they don’t have or desire a collective social identity to represent themselves.

If there is one word that characterizes the neoliberal experience of Russian youth it’s paradox. Kryshtanovskaya’s report is suffused with it suggesting a cohort split between pathos and reason, present doom and future salvation, and heralds of the nation and its discontents. Statements like “many working youth consider themselves unemployed;” “parties in the present Russian political system don’t correspond to their ideological labels;” young people talking of social calamity but don’t see “a national catastrophe as a serious danger;” and they are politically apathetic but speak of a “revolutionary apocalypse” suggests a non-place in Russia’s current conjecture. Russian youth inhabit the crevices of a paradoxical present.

The post Putin’s Unmoored Youth appeared first on Sean's Russia Blog.

What is really weird is what the FSB found in Fogle’s possession:

Ryan Fogle, a third secretary at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, was carrying special technical equipment, disguises, written instructions and a large sum of money when he was detained overnight, the FSB said in a statement Tuesday. Fogle was handed over to U.S. embassy officials, the FSB said.

Bad wigs, cheap sunglasses, and primitive cell phone aside, those “written instructions” sure do read like one of those Nigerian scam emails.

Image: Russia Today

The post US Spy or Nigerian Scam Artist? appeared first on Sean's Russia Blog.

Is this hyperbole? Here are the facts. The U.S. has 760 prisoners per 100,000 citizens. That’s not just many more than in most other developed countries but seven to 10 times as many. Japan has 63 per 100,000, Germany has 90, France has 96, South Korea has 97, and Britain–with a rate among the highest–has 153. Even developing countries that are well known for their crime problems have a third of U.S. numbers. Mexico has 208 prisoners per 100,000 citizens, and Brazil has 242. As Robertson pointed out on his TV show, The 700 Club, “We here in America make up 5% of the world’s population but we make up 25% of the [world's] jailed prisoners.”

It is no hyperbole to say that the US prison industrial complex is unacceptable, especially for a country that purports itself the world’s preeminent democracy. But it is hyperbole because placing the US next to Stalinism (and Nazism for that matter) is inherently hyperbolic. The rhetorical move is supposed to provoke an emotional reaction not stimulate critical awareness. And as much as American liberals would like to think that the numbers of bodies ensnared in the US prison industrial complex is as bad, if not worse, than Stalinist Russia, the situation is far more complicated.

Here I don’t mean the quality of the Stalinist system No one is claiming that the US system is worse than Stalin’s forced labor camps. I only mean the quantity of humans in both systems.

The Stalinist penal system was a complex network of punishments and detentions: prisons, noncustodial forced labor, corrective labor camps, forced labor detention (katorga) special settlements, and corrective labor colonies. I won’t go into the meanings and various differences between these. Though experts make clear distinctions between these various units, to the popular mind, they all fall under the general name of gulag. The numbers of people, which also included children, in this penal machine at any given period remains partial. Up 20 percent of the gulag population was released every year, new inmates went in, corpses went out, some even managed to escape. But exactly how many people under Stalin’s correctional supervision is unknown.

Here’s the population of some of these institutions between 1935 and 1940:

According to the straight numbers, the Stalinist system did not exceed the US’ six million during the years of the Great Terror. In 1938, there were 2.7 million people in the “gulag.” But this doesn’t include everyone under Stalinist “correctional supervision.” Therefore it doesn’t take account of prisons and released gulag prisoners who were forced to carry “Form A” which detailed their past crime, prison term, the deprivation of civil rights up to five years, and restricted where they could settle. There were roughly 2 million people released from the gulag between 1934 and 1940 which etches the Stalinist number closer to the United States.

Things change in 1953, the height of the Stalinist gulag. Here are the numbers:

This means an estimated 7.4 million people were under Stalinist correctional supervision 1953, exceeding Zakaria’s and Gopnik’s 6 million for the United States. Again the numbers are probably higher since these numbers don’t include everyone in the Stalinist penal system.

Things get even more complicated when you consider the gulag population per 100,000 citizens.  According to Eugenia Belova and Paul Gregory, the Soviet institutionalized population in 1953 was 2,621,000 or 1,558 per 100.000. When you include special settlements, the numbers jump to 4,301,000 or 2,605 per 100,000. This puts the 760 per 100,000 in the United States into perspective.

The numbers in the United States should produce outcry. No argument there. But caution is required when Stalinist Russia is thrown into the mix, that is, if you want to go beyond rhetoric and emotion.

Other Sources:

Eugenia Belova and Paul Gregory, “Political Economic of Crime and Punishment Under Stalin,” Public Choice, 140, 2009.
Steven A. Barnes, Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society, Princeton, 2011.

The post US Prison Industrial Complex Versus the Stalinist Gulag appeared first on Sean's Russia Blog.

This week’s Russia Magazine! column, “Victory’s Essential, but Unwanted Guest,”

Victory Day is Russia’s most sacred holiday. The day marks Russia’s most traumatic moment in its turbulent twentieth century. The war supplants all previous traumas: WWI, the Revolution, the Civil War, and the Great Terror. In many respects it even absorbs the Soviet Union’s collapse, if only because victory over the Nazis makes the whole Soviet experiment worth it. Indeed, Victory Day has such resonance that it provides Russians one of the few means to reconcile their Soviet past with their post-Soviet present. And in an increasingly divided Russia, it is one of the few days of genuine national unity.

As Lev Gudkov put it in his 2005 essay, “The Fetters of Victory,”

All [Soviet] components of the positive collective unity of the idea of “us” are eroding. After their devaluation has brought to the fore a range of complexes of hurt self-esteem and inferiority, Victory now stands out as a stone pillar in the desert, the vestige of a weathered rock. All the most important interpretations of the present are concentrated around Victory; it provides them with their standards of evaluation and their rhetorical means of expression.

A stone pillar for sure, except for one essential capstone in that victory: Stalin.

Stalin has yet to find his place in contemporary Russian memory of Victory. He is a figure that is evoked at the same time he’s repudiated. In both instances—total embrace and total rejection—Stalin is fetishized as savior or destroyer, angel or demon, neither of which is any less violent. The difference is in who he smites with his sword, not how he wields it. The tension between these two figures makes Stalin eternally split. Thus, he was the leader of the nation during the war. Yet displaying his image is taboo. The system he created facilitated victory with all its attending scars and burns. But to give Stalin credit verges on blasphemy. Stalin embodied the unity of the Soviet people. Yet their victory is not his. On the day to commemorate Russia’s greatest tragedy and triumph, Stalin remains the guest you have to invite, but one you pray doesn’t show.

Image: © RIA Novosti. Bolot Bochkarev

The post Stalin as Victory’s Unwanted Guest appeared first on Sean's Russia Blog.

May 6 is the first anniversary of the Bolotnaya protests that erupted in violence. Twenty-eight people and possibly more await prosecution. Bolotnaya has also served as the impetus to link Left Front leader Sergei Udaltsov to a wider conspiracy where he, Leonid Razvozzhaev (who confessed then retracted it claiming it was given under torture), and Konstantin Lebedev (who has confessed and is cooperating with the Investigative Committee) of planning a coup financed with Georgian (i.e. American) money. I discussed the significance of Bolotnaya on the Power Vertical podcast on Friday. There I stressed that what Bolotnaya represents is Putin adopting Stalin’s ominous maxim made in reference to the 1928 Shakhty Trial: “We have internal enemies. We have external enemies.”

While I caution against any comparison between Putin and Stalin, the existence of the internal/external enemy duumvirate is clearly apparent. In fact, Forbes.ru‘s Aleksandr Morozov put it at the center of his article, “Cold War-2013: What Grew Out of the 2012 Protests.” Morozov makes some interesting observations about the state of things a year after Bolotnaya.

Namely:

As I alluded on the podcast, the internal/external enemy is the guiding principle of Putin and Investigative Committee chief Aleksandr Bastrykin’s effort to discredit the opposition. Interestingly, however, there are indications the circle of internal-external enemies might be expanding to include Medvedev’s circle.

This last point was the subject of a recent Novaya gazeta article that connected the criminal investigation against Aleksey Beltyukov, Senior Vice President of the Skolkovo Fund, and the payment of $750,000 to Just Russia Duma deputy and street oppositionist Ilya Ponomarev to Dmitry Medvedev (who is the face of Skolkovo) and Vladislav Surkov (who supervises Skolkovo). Essentially, paying Ponomarev an enormous amount of money for ten lectures and scientific research is an “indirect but quite transparent hint” that Medevdev and Surkov are funding the street opposition.

In a similar vein, Morozov notes an effort to connect Medvedev’s “liberalism” and “foreign agents.” This is a further indication that the tandem is dead (did anyone think it was still alive?) and that Medvedev is a “delinquent member of the family” without “the means to win forgiveness.” Hence, the campaign to discredit him and his circle. In one of the stranger facts, a Yandex search for “Dvorkovich is a British agent,” i.e. Arkady Dvorkovich, Medevdev’s right-hand man and silovik mandarin Igor Sechin’s arch-nemesis, unearths 120,000 links. Even weirder is that this claim is attributed to American freakazok-in-chief, Lyndon LaRouche. Yes, that is how kooky the smear campaign has gotten. The message however muddled is clear: Medvedev is not one of “us.”

The extension of the umbrella of Otherness goes further. Morozov explains there is an effort to dehumanize oppositionists of all stripes. “The enemy must lose human features and be turned into “nonhumans”, beasts, insects, ‘livestock,’ and ‘larva,’” he writes. This effort to dehumanize the enemy is harrowing for anyone who knows Soviet history. Things haven’t gotten to an Andrei Vyshinsky level of dehumanization, though. Vyshinsky was a maestro of bestial adjectives. During the show trials of the 1936-38, the Soviet state prosecutor cast the defendants as rabid dogs, venomous snakes, swine, among others, who “sold themselves to enemy intelligence services.” This is why the “foreign agent” label for Russian NGOs stirs so much controversy, ire, disgust, and foreboding.

Morozov, however, has a larger characterization of the state of things beyond of the friend-enemy distinction. True to his article’s title, Morozov sees the situation between the authorities and the opposition as a “cold civil war.” And, in his opinion, this only gives Putin the advantage.

It gives [Putin] the possibility to mobilize the “People’s Front,” a new form of political and electoral support. A year after the inauguration, the features of the new regime are clearly replacing the conception of rule through the “dominant party.” If Putin ruled in his first and second terms relying on the electoral and ideological pseudo-competition between United Russia and other parties respecting the norms of “illiberal democracy,” then there will now be another system.

In order for the People’s Front to work it’s necessary to permanently keep non-party “forms of the enemy” alive. The People’s Front isn’t facing off against local party structures, but against a global plutocracy with a fifth column inside the country.

Those who protested a year ago against electoral violations and spoke for institutional reforms think that political inclusion is better than exclusion. But it will be hard to adapt them if you consider them “enemies of the state” and not loyal citizens. But it’s necessary to look at reality in the eyes. There is a “front” and there are “the people.”

And if we accept Morozov’s diagnosis of the current conjecture, the internal-external enemy matrix will be around for a long time. In fact, it seems to be a basis of Putin’s domestic rule. If true, this places the opposition in a complicit position in Putin’s master plan. Yes, most want a seat at the table. They aren’t revolutionaries. But if that seat is continually denied, or the pressure keeps increasing, as it undoubtedly will, more and more of them will radicalize, giving Putin the perpetual flow of “enemies of the state” he requires.

The post The Cold Civil War appeared first on Sean's Russia Blog.

This bodes poorly for Russian politicians across the political spectrum. But it’s particularly bad for United Russia. Forty-four percent of respondents consider ER’s Duma deputies the wealthiest, and not due to their entrepreneurial skills, but because “administrative resources are available to United Russia for the possibility of quick enrichment.” More telling, however, is that after a mere two years, Aleksei Navalny’s slogan casting United Russia as a “party of crooks and thieves” is now embraced by a majority of polled Russians.

Putin may take Navalny down “legally.” But the damage is already done. So much for ER’s “re-branding.”

Image: Slon.ru

The post The Party of Crooks and Thieves appeared first on Sean's Russia Blog.

This week’s Russia! Magazine column, “Surveying Putin 2.0“:

In his seminal essay on hegemony, State and Civil Society, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci summed up the post-WWI revolutionary convulsions with the following:

“In Russia the state was everything and civil society was primordial and gelatinous: in the West there was a proper relation between the state and civil society, and when the state trembled the sturdy section of civil society was at once revealed. The state was only an outer ditch, behind which was a powerful system of fortress and earthworks.”

I was reminded of this passage as I tried to mentally sum up Putin’s first year of his third presidential term. The Russian state is once again suffering from tremors, the climax of which—Putin’s formal return to the presidency and the Bolotnaya “riots,”—will be a year ago next week. And though it’s a stretch to apply Gramsci’s analysis of the Russia of 1917 to the Russia of 2012-13, how Putin has dealt with this newly diagnosed epilepsy suggests the calculation of hegemony has moved demonstratively toward force. At the moment, the Russian state may not be “everything” or its civil society “primordial and gelatinous,” but they are both increasingly farther away from what Gramsci calls a “proper relation.” This turn to force—and to be clear, by force I mean Putin’s reliance on coercive measures rather than soft, inclusive power—is making the ground under Russia’s body politic fragment.

The post Fragmenting Putinism appeared first on Sean's Russia Blog.

Arch Getty’s comment, “Putin in History,” was included in today’s Johnson’s Russia List. I asked him if I could repost it here. He kindly agreed. Full disclosure, Professor Getty was my dissertation advisor and mentor at UCLA.

Putin and Russian History
By J. Arch Getty

An occupational hazard of being a Russian historian is that people often ask “What about Putin?” “What’s going to happen in Russia?” Historians are generally allergic to making predictions, and predicting Russia has a very poor track record; almost nobody predicted the sudden fall of the USSR.  But because we are at least somewhat the products of the past, that past may tell us something about the future. So where does Putin come from?

In the short-term, Putin’s perception of society is easy to trace to KGB culture in the Brezhnev era: disruptive or unorthodox events were seen as misguided, incomprehensible, or even mentally unbalanced challenges to order. In short, because Soviet society is perfect, protests must originate with foreign enemies, outside agitators or mental illness, so protestors should be ridiculed and punished. This explains Putin’s ludicrous but characteristic reaction that the 2011-2012 winter Bolotnaia election protestors were dupes responding to Hillary Clinton’s “signal,” his offensive mocking of their white ribbons as condoms, and his reflex to punish demonstration leaders.

But there are historically deeper Russian sources for Putin’s myopic vision and actions. For example, in 1825, following the defeat of Napoleon, noble Russian army officers returned from Paris with subversive French Revolutionary ideas about human rights, elections, constitutions, and the rule of law. In December of that year, they staged a demonstration and abortive coup attempt aimed at overthrowing the Russian monarchy. The “Decembrist Revolt” was quickly put down by royal power deployed by the new tsar, Nicholas I.

From the official side, tsar Nicholas I (like Putin) could not understand what was happening. Nicholas was so perplexed that while harshly punishing the Decembrists, he (unlike Putin) had jailhouse conversations with several of them in order to understand their motivations. But like Putin, Nicholas’ world view prevented him from seeing that society was changing. He responded with the official slogan “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality,” a conservative statement that, by the way, Putin could embrace. Instead of understanding the changes around them, both rulers quickly deployed punitive state power against the ringleaders. Since society was basically sound as it was, one could nip change in the bud simply by decapitating it, right?

It seemed that nothing came of the 1825 revolt. Disappointed observers ridiculed the dilettante noble demonstrators for being unable to transform their opposition into a real revolution: They had no mass support. They were poor planners and organizers. Some of them even overslept or got lost that day and missed the action altogether. In the long run, however, seeds had been planted. The poor, marginalized and imprisoned Decembrists of 1825 would inspire later generations of Russian reformers and revolutionaries of all stripes who gradually attracted broader social support and who eventually brought down the monarchy in 1917. Reformers and revolutionaries would later glorify the memory of the hapless Decembrists as forerunners who planted the seeds of change but could not live to see their flowering.

Today’s protesters are also ridiculed and belittled, especially by leftists both in Russia and the west, for not becoming more. But in the long view (which we historians are trained to take) change in Russia has always come very slowly, and one wonders if in a future Russia people will not look back at the Bolotnaia and even Pussy Riot demonstrators as the beginnings of something big, something that took a while to mature. Even if we scoff at their lost potential, let us also not forget that these recent demonstrations for democracy were unprecedented in their scale. They dwarf the Soviet dissident movement of the 1970s and 1980s which, as it turned out, planted much smaller seeds.

Both Nicholas I and Putin represent an old Russian tradition whereby the monarchy doggedly refused to understand or compromise with change. Nicholas’ unbending obsolete vision and inflexibility would do much to radicalize later Russian reformers. Like him, his great-grandson Nicholas II would also be inherently unable to understand the forces for social change around him, and he and the monarchy were eventually swept away by the 1917 revolutions. Nicholas I, Nicholas II, Brezhnev and Putin just didn’t get it. They were constitutionally unable to understand society and how it changes.

They all had silent majorities behind them at one point. Today, some 65% of the population supports Putin, compared with 1% for demonstration leader Navalny.  But the long clocks of change were and are ticking, even if few notice at the time.  Today it seems that Putin has an unchallenged upper hand and has never been stronger. On the other hand, the Bolotnaia protesters, Pussy Riot women, and possibly leaders like Navalny seem to be fading into obscurity, oblivion and prison. But in the future, the historical results of today’s impotent protests and Putin’s reaction to them could look very different.

It is possible that Russian strongman monarchy is built into Russian political culture. But it is just as possible that its days are numbered. Polling support for Putin is inversely proportional to educational levels, which are broadly rising. These protesters may mark something big, something ultimately decisive. Putin’s clock is ticking, but he has inherited the deafness of all Russian monarchs. And even if he could hear the ticks he wouldn’t know what to do about them.

J. Arch Getty is Professor of History at UCLA. He is the author of several books on Russian history, including Practicing Stalinism: Boyars, Bolsheviks and the Persistence of Tradition, (Yale University Press, 2013) will be published in July.

The post Putin and Russian History appeared first on Sean's Russia Blog.

Pussy Riot member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova was denied parole on Friday. No surprise. This is not to say that the court session was without drama. In fact, it appears that Judge Lidiia Yakovleva of the Zubovo-Polyansky District Court in Mordovia suffered from a bout of schizophrenia. The court ran eerily by-the-book until, well, it didn’t.

From the beginning, Masha Gessen described the court proceedings as running “well and even very well.”

At first, it seemed to me that I was on a taping of “Court Hour,” joked Irina Khrunova [Tolokonnikova’s lawyer] . . . ‘The bailiffs please hand me the documents,’ doesn’t happen in real life. In real life who presents the documents hands them [to the judge].” Judge Yakoleva conducted herself as if this was a show trial, in the educative-demonstrative sense, not in the other meaning. Like a judge on television, except that, perhaps, in America.

According to Gessen, the whole thing was surreal. The court’s press secretary brought journalists extra chairs. The court staff was polite and proper as opposed to the usual provincial rudeness. All of this had a “mystical effect,” wrote Gessen, “at some point the court’s participants, and the spectators behind them started to suddenly believe they were in a real court where decisions aren’t predetermined.” During testimony period, Gessen described a scene where the defense lawyers and prisoner representatives discoursed without interruption. “It was as if [the judge] disappeared.”

Then Judge Yakovleva’s other personality suddenly kicked in.

Then something strange happened although no one could avoid noticing it was all strange from the beginning. Yakovleva declared a break so she could familiarize herself with the documents Khrunova presented. What was strange about this was that no one asked her for a break. Was she taking courtesy to a new level?

After ten minutes the judge came back a different person. She didn’t hide her impatience and began to shout at the court participants. Her hands trembled. She gave the floor to the prosecutor, who testified against parole, but didn’t give it to anyone after. She announced that the court would retire to render a decision. At first, Khrunova, after quickly saying something the fleeing judge about having another statement, stood speechless. Cameras snapped pictures from tripods and spectators whispered to each other. “What is this?” They led Tolokonnikova away, and then Khrunova started shouting about fifteen years and about procedure.

Voina tweeted this last bit: “This is the first time I’ve seen this in fifteen years of practice,” Khrunova about the fleeing judge who refused the defense the last word.”

“ВИЖУ ТАКОЕ ПЕРВЫЙ РАЗ ЗА 15 ЛЕТ ПРАКТИКИ” – адвокат Хрунова про убежавшую судью, отказавшую в последнем слове осужденной.

— группа война (@gruppa_voina) April 26, 2013

Later Khurnova told reporters that the judge’s action was a “serious violation of the Criminal Procedure Code because the verdict can be considered illegal.”

Tolokonnikova had prepared a statement to read before the court, but the judge, who suddenly left, refused to hear it. Tolokonnikova was ultimately denied parole because she hadn’t sufficiently “repented.”

Below is Tolokonnikova’s unread statement. Russian Reader provided the English translation:

Has the convict started down the road to rehabilitation?” This is the question asked when a request for parole is reviewed. I would also like us to ask the following question today: What is this “road to rehabilitation”?

I am absolutely convinced that the only correct road is one on which a person is honest with others and with herself. I have stayed on this road and will not stray from it wherever life takes me. I insisted on this road while I was still on the outside, and I didn’t retreat from it in the Moscow pretrial detention facility. Nothing, not even the camps of Mordovia, where the Soviet-era authorities liked to send political prisoners, can teach me to betray the principle of honesty.

So I have not admitted and will not admit the guilt imputed to me by the Khamovniki district court’s verdict, which was illegal and rendered with an indecent number of procedural violations. At the moment, I am in the process of appealing this verdict in the higher courts. By coercing me into admitting guilt for the sake of parole, the correctional system is pushing me to incriminate myself, and, therefore, to lie. Is the ability to lie a sign that a person has started down the road to rehabilitation?

It states in my sentence that I am a feminist and, therefore, must feel hatred towards religion. Yes, after a year and two months in prison, I am still a feminist, and I am still opposed to the people in charge of the state, but then as now there is no hatred in me. The dozens of women prisoners with whom I attend the Orthodox Church at Penal Colony No. 14 cannot see this hatred, either.

What else do I do in the colony? I work: soon after I arrived at Penal Colony No. 14, they put me behind a sewing machine, and now I am a sewing machine operator. Some believe that making political-art actions is easy, that it requires no deliberation or preparation. Based on my years of experience in actionism, I can say that carrying out an action and thinking through the artistic end-product is laborious and often exhausting work. So I know how to work and I love to work. I’m no stranger to the Protestant work ethic. Physically, I don’t find it hard to be a seamstress. And that is what I am. I do everything required of me. But, of course, I cannot help thinking about things while I’m at the sewing machine (including the road to rehabilitation) and, therefore, asking myself questions. For example: why can convicts not be given a choice as to the socially useful work they perform while serving their sentences? [Why can they not chose work] in keeping with their education and interests? Since I have experience teaching in the philosophy department at Moscow State University, I would gladly and enthusiastically put together educational programs and lectures using the books in the library and books sent to me. And by the way, I would unquestioningly do such work for more than the eight hours [a day] stipulated by the Russian Federation Labor Code; I would do this work during all the time left over from scheduled prison activities. Instead, I sew police pants, which of course is also useful, but in this work I’m obviously not as productive as I could be were I conducting educational programs.

In Cancer Ward, Solzhenitsyn describes how a prison camp detective stops one convict from teaching another convict Latin. Unfortunately, the overall attitude to education hasn’t changed much since then.

I often fantasize: what if the correctional system made its priority not the production of police pants or production quotas, but the education, training, and rehabilitation of convicts, as required by the Correctional Code? Then, in order to get parole, you would not have to sew 16 hours a day in the industrial section of the colony, trying to achieve 150% output, but successfully pass several exams after broadening your horizons and knowledge of the world, and getting a general humanities education, which nurtures the ability to adequately assess contemporary reality. I would very much like to see this state of affairs in the colony.

Why not establish courses on contemporary art in the colony?

Would that work were not a debt, but activity that was spiritual and useful in a poetic sense. Would that the organizational constraints and inertia of the old system were overcome, and values like individuality could be instilled in the workplace. The prison camp is the face of the country, and if we managed to get beyond the old conservative and totally unifying categories even in the prison camp, then throughout Russia we would see the growth of intellectual, high-tech manufacturing, something we would all like to see in order to break out of the natural resources trap. Then something like Silicon Valley could be born in Russia, a haven for risky and talented people. All this would be possible if the panic experienced in Russia at the state level towards human experimentation and creativity would give way to an attentive and respectful attitude towards the individual’s creative and critical potential. Tolerance towards others and respect for diversity provide an environment conducive to the development and productive use of the talent inherent in citizens (even if these citizens are convicts). Repressive conservation and rigidity in the legal, correctional, and other state systems of the Russian Federation, laws on registration [of one's residence] and promotion of homosexuality lead to stagnation and a “brain drain.”

However, I am convinced that this senseless reaction in which we now forced to live is temporary. It is mortal, and this mortality is immediate. I am also certain that all of us—including the prisoners of Bolotnaya Square, my brave comrade in arms Maria Alyokhina, and Alexei Navalny—have the strength, commitment, and tenacity to survive this reaction and emerge victorious.

I am truly grateful to the people I have encountered in my life behind barbed wire. Thanks to some of them, I will never call my time in prison time lost. During the year and two months of my imprisonment, I have not had a single conflict, either in the pretrial detention facility or in prison. Not a single one. In my opinion, this shows that I am perfectly safe for any society. And also the fact that people do not buy into state media propaganda and are not willing to hate me just because a federal channel said that I’m a bad person. Lying does not always lead to victory.

Recently, I got a letter containing a parable that has become important to me. What happens to things different in nature when they are placed in boiling water? Brittle things, like eggs, become hard. Hard things, like carrots, become soft. Coffee dissolves and permeates everything. The point of the parable was this: be like coffee. In prison, I am like that coffee.

I want the people who have put me and dozens of other political activists behind bars to understand one simple thing: there are no insurmountable obstacles for a person whose values consist, first, of her principles and, second, of work and creativity based on these principles. If you strongly believe in something, this faith will help you survive and remain a human being anywhere.

I will surely use my experience in Mordovia in my future work and, although this will not happen until completion of my sentence, I will implement it in projects that will be stronger and politically larger in scale than everything that has happened to me before.

Despite the fact that imprisonment is a quite daunting experience, as a result of having it we political prisoners only become stronger, braver, and more tenacious. And so I ask the last question for today: what, then, is the point of keeping us here?

Photo: Maxim Shipenkov/EPA

The post Nadezhda Tolokonnikova’s Unread Statement appeared first on Sean's Russia Blog.