A Russian student has been sentenced to 2.5 years in prison for reposting “extremist” images on social media as part of his research thesis. Alexander Kruze, 23 is a law student in the Voronezh  Institute of Economy and Law and had been writing an academic dissertation entitled “Extremism in the contemporary context: international aspects of counteraction” focusing on various types of radicalization in Russia.

As a part of his research Kruze created four fake accounts on Vkontakte —Russia’s version of Facebook — and posted “extremist-like” images in order to attract the attention of extremist-minded people so that he could study what motivates their ideologies. The first image was anti-Communist, second called on regime change in Russia, another one contained anti-Semitic material and the fourth condemned illegal immigration. Kruze commented: “I re-published texts and images on purpose to provoke a discussion. I pretended to be a Russophobe, a racist or a Ukrainian nationalist”.

Despite the fact that the material was a part of his research thesis, the investigator did not state so in any of the official documents.  Kruze even said that the case officer rewrote some of his paperwork where academic research was mentioned.

The investigator also kept stressing that if Kruze declines to help the investigation he will “put pressure on him”, and subsequently the police began visiting Kruze almost daily. At the end of July a criminal case was opened against Kruze under Acticle 282 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation: “The incitement of hatred or enmity, as well as the humiliation of human dignity”. On December 28 Kruze was convicted and sentenced.

Unsurprisingly all images Kruze posted are still available in the Internet and none of them have been ‘black-listed’. One of the images was even used online by a news publication back in 2015, however the publication in question did not receive any warnings as a result.

Internet Freedom has been one of the most topical issues in Russia over the past year as record numbers of people were jailed for as little as reposting something on social media.  There is reason to believe that this is a result of increased control of the FSB over the Russian internet.

According to the Agora human rights report, 43 people in Russia were sentenced to prison for social media posts in 2017. Overall there have been 115,000 recorded cases of censorship. The report also states that on average almost 244 pages were blocked every day, every 6 days users were threatened and every 8 hours legal prosecutions were carried out.