Whatever you do, don’t say “Crimea is Ukraine”

Russians are up in arms about Eurovision – “we were robbed.” But nobody’s saying much about Andrei Bubeyev. Who he?

Andrei Bubeyev, a mechanical engineer from Tver, was recently sentenced to two years and three months in a prison colony for sharing on Vkontakte an article by the radical political activist Boris Stomakhin, titled “Crimea is Ukraine.”

It was revealed during the trial that Bubeyev hadn’t even read the article he shared with his 12 (yes, twelve) friends on the social network. He simply agreed with the headline. Nevertheless, Bubeyev, a father to two young children, was accused of inciting extremism and calling for the violation of the territorial integrity of Russia. No mention was made of Russia violating the territorial integrity of Ukraine. But Ukraine did win Eurovision, which for some reason people think means that both sides are somehow even …

I digress. It goes without saying that the Tver engineer is not an extremist. Both judge and prosecutor were only too well aware of this fact. So what was the point?

The usual theory is that exercises of this sort serve to put the frighteners on others, to dissuade them from similar acts of their own. Some random social-media user who’s reposted an incorrect, “extremist” article is picked out of the crowd and promptly hauled off to jail or placed under house arrest: a monstrous version of Russian roulette for all those who take undue liberties on the Internet. In all likelihood, you won’t be directly affected, but that could have been you, behind bars – a good idea, therefore, to reacquaint yourself with that old habit of self-censorship.

Although there is certainly some truth to this theory, it’s not an entirely legitimate explanation, because for the frighteners to work, you have to frighten a lot of horses, which didn’t happen, as demonstrated even by a cursory scan of the list of media outlets that have actually covered the Bubeyev story.

On the federal level, it’s been written about by the “usual suspects” – that is, the remaining handful of independent (or, as they’ve been dubbed by their opponents, “liberal”) media, whose total audience does not, according to calculations by the Levada Centre, exceed 10-15% of the population. The coverage in Tver itself has been even more scant: of two dozen regional online outlets indexed by Yandex.News, just two sites have made reference to the fact of the trial – and terse, laconic reference at that. The rest remained silent – as did the federal TV channels.

Keeping mum about the possibility of terrifying reprisals for a careless online post – or even a careless click of the mouse – is a strange way indeed of intimidating the masses.

Perhaps, then, this could be a means of simply reining in the members of the liberal intelligentsia who read precisely the publications that have devoted coverage to the trial? Well, yes and no. The majority of these people have long since decided what they think; and they’ve long since understood the nature of the regime.

So here’s a more likely (and more prosaic) hypothesis: it isn’t strictly necessary to seek out evidence of the Kremlin’s handiwork in the Bubeyev affair, and in similar cases – or, indeed, in any of the injustices plaguing Russia today.

Rather, the Bubeyev case is the byproduct of the very nature of the law enforcement agencies in Putin’s Russia, and of the so-called “quota system” used to judge the performance of the FSB, the police, and their many confederates. Every region – Tver, Chechnya, and the rest – is given a set of targets whereby a certain number of extremism-related cases must be launched every year. Which, clearly enough, presents the counter-extremism authorities in Tver with a far tougher challenge than the one facing their colleagues in the Caucasus. Where oh where are they going to find extremists in the Valdai Hills? Look far and wide, look high and low, but, try as you might, you’re just not going to unearth any ISIS zealots at the source of the Volga. So instead, you select some keywords from the Federal List of Extremist Materials, bung them into a social-media search, see who’s been sharing what, and pick someone out from the crowd.

Why is Andrei Bubeyev now looking at two years in prison? Rather than any malevolent designs on the part of Vladimir Putin, it’s the indolence and hollow-hearted obtuseness of the local regime forces that must be blamed. To make such an assertion is not, of course, to exonerate Putin. Firstly, he failed to save Bubeyev from jail (let’s not forget that the president can still issue a pardon), and, secondly, he and his team have spent the last sixteen years constructing a system wherein this life-wrecking, formalistic approach has become the stock-in-trade of the security forces, while state-media journalists have learned to turn a blind eye; and nobody takes any notice of the “liberal” media.

Ultimately, it’s all the same – who cares – as far as the system is concerned. But it’s not all the same to Bubeyev’s wife and two children.