Only a week has passed since the vote on Putin’s amendments, and there is no doubt about the purpose of the whole spectacle. It turns out that it was not only intended to perpetuate the power of the «national leader,» but also to take the «witch hunt» already taking place in the country to a fundamentally new level, which many associate with Stalin’s 1937.
On July 3, the prosecutor demanded 6 years in prison for Pskov journalist Svetlana Prokopyeva for her words about the cruelty of the state as the cause of the explosion at the FSB building in Arkhangelsk. The case caused a huge outcry, and a few days later the court sentenced her to a fine of 500,000 rubles, declaring her guilty of a criminal offense for these words.
On July 4, Chechen blogger and critic of Ramzan Kadyrov, Maminhan Umarov, also known as Anzon Viennese, was killed in Vienna. This was the second murder of opposition Chechen bloggers in Europe and the third assassination attempt in the past year.
On July 7, the prosecutor demanded 15 years in prison for historian Yuri Dmitriev, the head of the Karelian «Memorial» organization, which investigates Stalinist repression. He is accused of a range of crimes, from weapons possession to the production of pornography.
On the same day, journalist Ivan Safronov, who had previously exposed the Kremlin’s secret arms shipments to the Sisi regime, causing an international scandal, was arrested. He is now accused of treason and working for the Czech secret service. It is worth noting that in 2007, Ivan Safronov’s father also mysteriously «fell out of a window» and died after investigating secret Russian arms shipments to the Middle East.
On July 7, opposition journalist Taisiya Bekbulatova was detained for questioning.
On July 8, it was announced that there would be massive layoffs of teachers at the Higher School of Economics, which has a reputation for having a concentration of opposition sentiment. It is expected that «unreliable» teachers will be affected.
Today, July 9:
- Searches were conducted at the homes of Sergei Prostakov, the editor-in-chief of MBH Media, Tatyana Usmanova, the coordinator of Open Russia, Olga Gorelik, another coordinator of Open Russia, and Yulia Galyamina, a municipal deputy.
- Rosfinmonitoring added opposition journalist Arkady Babchenko, who left Russia several years ago, to its list of extremists and terrorists.
- The governor of the Khabarovsk region, Sergei Furgal, one of the few governors who managed to win the elections as a candidate of United Russia and who did not deliver the desired results for the Kremlin in the recent referendum (about 40% of the region’s population voted against), was arrested.
What can be said about all this? Of course, we are not talking about hundreds of thousands or millions of oppressed people like in the 1930s under Stalin. But that is not necessary today. The telegram channel «Stalingulag» wrote correctly: «Recently it has become common to scoff at any analogy with 1937, claiming that only the exalted intelligentsia sees the ghost of Stalin in everything during their Facebook conversations, and in reality it is not so simple, and there is no need to exaggerate. Just look at the media agenda, which consists entirely of «arrested, criminal case opened, arrested, searched, sentenced, imprisoned. This is exactly what neo-Stalinism should look like, given the information technology. Fear permeates society regardless of position or profession.
Well, at least the Muslims of Russia are no longer alone as victims of the regime’s repressive policies. Now all of us «unreliable» people are in the same boat…