The ‘Cultural’ Capital

June 23, 2016

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St Petersburg is fast becoming the capital of anti-regime protest; and retribution …

Sergei Orlov

In Russia, where prominent politicians can be shot to death a stone’s throw from the Kremlin, oppositionists enjoy no guarantees of personal safety – that much is obvious. But while everyone has come to expect any number of repressive regime manoeuvres (and it’s widely appreciated in Russia that there’s a regime – albeit that of Chechnya – behind the murder of Boris Nemtsov), a completely different strategy of dealing with dissenters has begun to emerge in St Petersburg. Civil activists in Russia’s second city are now being bullied and beaten by unidentified thugs with the full collusion of the police, and the torching of private vehicles has become a typical form of retribution against sharply-worded anti-Putin posts.

Victims and commentators alike are seeking an answer to the major question raised by these developments: are the authorities to blame here, as before? Or, quite conversely, is it the anarchic absence of authority?

“Advertising Agents”

On the night of May 31, the car of translator Yulia Chernobrodova was destroyed by fire in St Petersburg. Firefighters were in no doubt that they were dealing with a case of arson, and surveillance cameras picked up the silhouette of a man springing back from the vehicle as it burst into flames. The incident was preceded by a series of disturbing events. First, two “advertising agents” paid a visit to Yulia’s apartment; they gave her no grief on that occasion, but, as luck would have it, their not-in-the-least-suspicious faces were captured by the video surveillance system.

Subsequently, St Petersburg opposition activist Alexander Markov recognised one of the “advertisers” as the man who’d beaten him right on his doorstep back in late March. After the attack on Markov, unknown individuals created a fake page on one of the social networks, and used it to post insults and threats against the oppositionist while also releasing his home address and alluding to the attack, which the victim hadn’t previously mentioned online.

A week after the visit of the fake advertising agents, and just over a month prior to the torching of Yulia Chernobrodova’s car, someone posted a menacing message on the social-media page of her mother-in-law.

“Wandering the expanses of the Internet when I stumbled on Yulia Chernobrodova’s jottings. Normal sorta gal, is Yulia, though she does write all kinds of crap, reposts and such. Anti-regime, anti-government stuff. Well, that’s a popular thing to do nowadays, and that’s okay, that’s fine, as long as you stay within the limits of propriety. But as for those photocollages she’s assembled, well… they’re just sick. My mates saw ’em and clenched their fists so hard their fingers turned white. And you know, they’re fresh out the army. I said to them, steady on lads, don’t get all het up over this, let’s just write to her and that hubby of hers, Mikhail. They’re proper and decent as folk go – they’ll understand and sort this all out. But if summink goes wrong, then sure, knock yourselves out – they live just round the corner from us [Yulia and Mikhail’s full address follows – Ed.]. They’ve gotta come to their senses. Can’t go round always looking over your shoulder, can you now.”

Again, the unknown individuals behind this threat were acting in a highly deliberate and pointed manner: the above message was posted from a fake page featuring a photo of Yulia’s husband, Mikhail, as the profile image. And he’d been photographed right outside his own home – which means, of course, that the couple were being secretly watched. Meanwhile, Yulia’s real surname, which she never used in her social-media communications, was also referenced – these people were willing to expend serious time and effort to get hold of her personal data.

In an interview with Novaya Gazeta,  Yulia Chernobrodova made no attempt to conceal her anxiety: “I don’t understand why they’re targeting me in particular. I don’t write long posts, I don’t belong to any political parties. Yesterday I specifically went online to try and find information on similar cases. I found nothing! If it wasn’t for my elderly parents, we’d be moving away. I wouldn’t be surprised if these methods of dealing with undesirables are being encouraged by the authorities.”

“similar cases”

Yulia was right to start investigating “similar cases.” The exterminators of online dissent have been active in St Petersburg for several months now. February 2016, for instance, saw an attack on Petersburg Observers volunteer Daniel Alexandrov, who suffered a broken nose and concussion as a result. This attack, too, was preceded by a threatening message from a fake account. Once again, the unknown perpetrators proved remarkably familiar with their victim’s biography (they knew his home address and possessed photos of him walking the dog).

On April 19, meanwhile, someone set fire to a car belonging to driver Ruslan Starostin. “Eyewitnesses saw two stocky hooded men fleeing the scene!  It looks like they’d used two Molotov cocktails in plastic bottles – the bottlenecks, which hadn’t been completely consumed by the flames, were found afterwards,” Starostin told Novaya Gazeta. (His oppositionism, by the way, essentially consists of nothing more than online criticism of Vladimir Putin.) The following day, unknown individuals sent the following message to Ruslan’s wife Anastasia: “You were a happy gal till your husband went doolally. […] Are you really prepared to defend the barricades of his vainglory for the sake of his complexes?”

On this occasion, too, the blackmailers were playing a winning game: “I had a massive bust-up with the missus,” Starostin recalls, “and put an end to all my criticism of the government.” As he takes care to stress, however, he resolved to “hold fire” only out of concern for his wife: “They know they’re not about to scare me, so they act like proper rats and get to you through your loved ones!”

“If you don’t shut down your social media accounts, we’re going to shut your gob for you”

The ‘rats,’ meanwhile, were only stepping up their efforts, and soon began deploying yet more brazen threats. Here’s the missive they sent to one opposition-minded Petersburger: “You’re on our list, Posedlov Serega. On the list of folk who either need to be put on the right path – or else eliminated. You think you’re cool. You think you can keep blethering away, pandering to the Yanks and the Khokhols [an ethnic slur for Ukranians], that you can carry on expressing your contempt for our leader Putin V.V. and calling his deeds and actions into doubt. You’re not worthy of being a Russian in Holy Rus. Either get the hell out of our country or shut your damn piehole. Think of your family, your loved ones. They’re going to suffer as well – and all because of you. If you don’t shut down your social media accounts, we’re going to shut your gob for you. So think hard. Patriots of Russia.”

Patriots of Russia

Since Petersburg police have almost demonstratively neglected to respond to these threats and acts of violence (not a single perpetrator has been unmasked), Internet users have attempted to carry out independent investigations and draw conclusions of their own. “There are no ‘Patriots of Russia,’” writes user Natalia. “This has all been written by an educated individual trying to mimic pleb-speak. The writing is structured and logical, the mistakes clearly deliberate. Unlettered people don’t make mistakes like that. I’m speaking as a philologist here. I think this is the handiwork of the special services. Which is why there’s been no response from the regime.” Tatyana from Ekaterinburg concurs with this opinion: “These hoodlums aren’t afraid of anything – they can sense the system’s on their side. The bastards hide behind their screen names and avatars – there’s no catching them. I personally haven’t mastered the mechanisms of online search and exposure, unlike the people who tracked me down without even breaking sweat. That’s why I closed my page.”

Not only did the targeted Petersburgers all receive minatory messages, but they also found their personal data – passport and bank-card numbers included – on a website with the address http://whoiswhos.me/. When oppositionist Duma deputy Dmitry Gudkov demanded that Roskomnadzor shut it down, he was told that “there is no such site, because the link doesn’t work.” Undeterred, Gudkov contacted the communications watchdog a second time while also getting in touch with the St Petersburg prosecutor’s office. But even as Gudkov waged battle with the officials, http://whoiswhos.me/ promptly sprang back to life and reprised its inquisitorial struggle against the “fifth column.” Gudkov, incidentally, is convinced that this latest stage in the quashing of the opposition “isn’t a Petersburg affair but a federal one” (though the attacks, it must be said, have thus far been confined to St Petersburg).

From judges’ mallets to baseball bats

The current repressions in St Petersburg represent an extension of domestic law-enforcement practices. The educated and protected Patriots of Russia don’t limit their attacks to activists; when they wreak violence against people simply inclined to criticise the regime, they’re following in the footsteps of the investigators and judges who calculatingly dispatched the innocent to jail during the Bolotnaya Square case. The Kremlin has clearly learned that in order to sow fear among the maximum number of dissenters, you need to punish them haphazardly and arbitrarily, using anything from judges’ mallets to baseball bats.

It is obvious, too, why Petersburg has become the proving ground for this strategy. Such brazen lawlessness cannot be unleashed in Moscow – it would testify all too forcefully to the weakness of the Kremlin itself. Unleashing it too far from Moscow, on the other hand, has no doubt been deemed ill-advised; the oppositionists could wrongly interpret provincial violence as a mere manifestation of regional despotism – which might not put the frighteners on them to a sufficient degree.

The second city, on the other hand, has proved an ideal arena for the presentation of this “new violence.” And the tactics are effective: Yulia and her family are virtually ready to leave the country, Ruslan has decided not to criticise the government online, Tatiana from Ekaterinburg has shut down her page, while society at large stands transfixed in anticipation of new victims. And there will be new victims – it’s a question of when, not if. But torched cars may not be the worst of any future atrocities.