[I was arrested for a video I published on YouTube, including a
joke about the Crimean bridge. It was probably a poor joke, but hardly
sufficient grounds for arrest. Unfortunately, Leviathan has no sense
of humor. I spent four months in a prison cell.]
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KAGARLITSKY: MY MOST RECENT STAY IN PRISON  
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Boris Kagarlitsky
January 15, 2024
Russian Dissent
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_ I was arrested for a video I published on YouTube, including a joke
about the Crimean bridge. It was probably a poor joke, but hardly
sufficient grounds for arrest. Unfortunately, Leviathan has no sense
of humor. I spent four months in a prison cell. _

Transnational Institute Fellow Boris Kagarlitsky, TNI Institute (CC
BY-NC 2.0 DEED)

 

I was going to the airport to meet my wife, who was returning from
abroad on July 25 last year. But the meeting did not take place. Two
polite young men approached me and, presenting their FSB officer IDs,
informed me that I had been detained: I was accused of justifying
terrorism. Already in the evening of that same day, I was sent under
escort to Syktyvkar, the capital of the Komi Republic, where I was put
in prison.

I was unfamiliar with the Komi Republic, except for the historical
fact that during Stalin’s time a significant part of the GULAG
institutions were located here, about which, of course, I have read
and written extensively. The reason for my arrest was a video I had
published on YouTube 10 months earlier. I talked about current events
on the video, mentioning – without offering any further assessment
– the damaging of the Crimean Bridge by Ukrainian saboteurs. But I
also noted that just on the eve of that attack, congratulatory wishes
from Mostik the cat
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President Putin were spread on Russian social networks; since the cat
was the mascot of the sabotaged bridge, I joked that he had acted as a
provocateur with his congratulations. It was probably a poor joke, but
it can hardly be considered sufficient grounds for arrest, even taking
into account modern Russian laws. Unfortunately, Leviathan has no
sense of humor. I had to spend four and a half months in a prison
cell.

The fact that the arrest took place almost a year after my ill-fated
remarks raises various suspicions regarding the political meaning of
what happened. This was not the first time I had been in prison. I
experienced my first – and longest – imprisonment in 1982, when
the leader of the USSR Leonid Brezhnev was dying. Then, state security
officers grabbed all the oppositionists known to them, including our
group of young socialists, just in case, as a preventive measure. Some
time after Brezhnev’s death, we were released without even being put
on trial.

What was going on in the Moscow corridors of power at the end of July
2023 is not yet completely clear, although there is hope that sooner
or later we will find out (I only found out the real reasons for my
first arrest and release much later, when Mikhail Gorbachev was
running the country and part of the official archives became
available). But it seems that this arrest can be classified as
collateral damage in a struggle for power. Imagine yourself as a ball
on a football field, where two professional teams are playing. They
just kick you, and you can only try to analyze the course of the match
based on your feelings.

Despite all that, the experience gained in the Syktyvkar prison was
quite useful for me as a sociologist. After all, I got the opportunity
for observation, a chance to communicate with people whom I would
never have met under other circumstances.

I must give due credit to the prison administration – they put me in
a cell with good conditions and calm neighbors. One of them also
turned out to be a political prisoner, an assistant to Duma deputy
Oleg Mikhailov, who remains the most prominent oppositionist in the
Komi Republic. True, we did not stay together for long; the prisoners
in the cell were changed often (which gave me the opportunity to get
to know quite a large number of people and hear their life stories).
Some my neighbors accused of murder and extortion turned out to be
very nice and polite in conversation; one vice-mayor of a small
northern city, who started a fight during a local holiday celebration
and inadvertently killed his colleague while performing with him on
stage, was happy to discuss issues of municipal finance, about which
he showed himself to be surprisingly poorly informed. Someday, maybe
quite soon, I will describe all this in thorough detail.

Although I was not the only political prisoner in Syktyvkar, I
happened to be the most famous, and therefore the administration and
prison guards looked at me with obvious curiosity, trying to
understand why I was brought there and what to expect from this
strange case. The trial was stubbornly postponed, although no one
interrogated me; for months, nothing new happened. The criminal case
was supposed to be reviewed by a Moscow military court, but somewhere
along the way the case was lost, and re-surfaced in their office only
at the very end of November. The prosecutor's office stated that the
joke about Mostik the cat was made "in order to destabilize the
activities of government agencies and to press the authorities of the
Russian Federation to terminate the special military operation on the
territory of Ukraine."

While I was behind bars, a solidarity campaign was unfolding outside,
in which many people took part in Russia and around the world.
Moreover, it seems that the Kremlin leadership was especially
impressed by the fact that a significant part of the voices in my
defense were coming from the Global South. In the context of
confrontation with the West, Russian rulers are trying to establish
themselves as fighters against American and European neo-colonialism,
so criticism of them voiced in Brazil, South Africa, or India was
received with vexation. Indian economist Radhika Desai even asked
Vladimir Putin about my fate during the Valdai Forum.

The trial took place on December 12, 2023. The prosecutor's office
demanded I be sent to prison for five and a half years, but the judge
decided otherwise. I was released from the courtroom, having been
sentenced to pay a fine of 600 thousand rubles (the very next day this
amount was collected by subscribers of the Rabkor YouTube channel).
True, paying it off turned out to be not so easy: I had to deposit the
money in person, but I was also included in the “list of extremists
and terrorists” prohibited from conducting any financial
transactions. At the moment I have to seek special permission so that
I can give the state the money that it requires from me. I am
prohibited from teaching, as well as from administering Internet sites
and YouTube channels.

However, they haven’t forbidden me to think and write yet, which is
what I’m doing for now.

_BORIS YULYEVICH KAGARLITSKY
[[link removed]] is a
Russian Marxist [[link removed]] theoretician
[[link removed]] and sociologist
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dissident [[link removed]] in
the Soviet Union [[link removed]]. He is
coordinator of the Transnational Institute
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project and Director of the Institute of Globalization and Social
Movements
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in Moscow [[link removed]]. Kagarlisky hosts
a YouTube [[link removed]] channel Rabkor,
associated with his online newspaper of the same name and with
IGSO. _

_Translation by Dan Erdman. Russian Dissent is a reader-supported
publication. To receive new posts and support my work,
consider becoming a free or paid subscriber
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* Boris Kagarlitsky
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* Russia
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* Political Prisoners
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* Soviet Gulags
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