Marina Dubrova, an English teacher on the Russian Pacific island of Sakhalin, showed a YouTube video to her eighth-grade class last month in which children excitedly sing, in Russian and Ukrainian, about a “world without war.” .
After she passed it, a group of girls stayed behind during recess and questioned the teacher about her opinions.
“Ukraine is a separate country,” Dubrova, 57, told them.
“Not anymore,” one of the girls snapped.
A few days later, the police went looking for the teacher at the school in the port city of Korsakov. In court, she listened to a recording of that conversation, apparently made by one of the students. The judge fined him approximately R$2,000 for “publicly discrediting” Russia’s armed forces. The school fired her for “amoral behavior,” she said.
“It’s as if everyone has sunk into a kind of madness,” Dubrova said in a telephone interview, reflecting on the pro-war climate around her.
Under the direct encouragement of President Vladimir Putin, Russians who support the war against Ukraine begin to turn against the “enemy within”.
The episodes are not yet a mass phenomenon, but they do illustrate the growing paranoia and polarization in Russian society. Citizens are denouncing one another, in a chilling echo of the terror of Josef Stalin, instigated by vicious official rhetoric and enabled by sweeping new laws that criminalize dissent.
There are reports of students who turned in teachers and people who denounced neighbors and even restaurant customers at the next table. In a shopping mall in western Moscow, it was the “no to war” text displayed in a computer workshop and reported by a passerby that caused the store’s owner, Marat Grachev, to be detained by police.
In St. Petersburg, a local news outlet documented the furor over suspected pro-Western sympathies in the public library. All because a library employee confused the image of a Soviet scholar on a poster with that of the American writer Mark Twain.
In western Kaliningrad, authorities sent villagers text messages asking them to give phone numbers and email addresses of “provocateurs” contesting the “special operation” in Ukraine, Russian newspapers reported. They can easily do this through a special account on the Telegram messaging app. A nationalist political party has created a website urging Russians to denounce “plagues” on the elite.
“I am absolutely sure that a cleanup will begin,” Dmitri Kuznetsov, a member of parliament who runs the site, said in an interview, predicting the process would accelerate after the “active phase” of the war ended. Then he clarified: “We don’t want anyone killed, we don’t want people arrested.”
But it is the history of mass political executions and arrests in the Soviet era and the state-encouraged denunciation of fellow citizens that inspire the current climate of deepening repression in Russia.
Putin set the tone in a speech on March 16, declaring that Russian society needed a “self-purification” in which people would “distinguish true patriots from scum and traitors, and simply spit them out like flies that accidentally get into their mouths”.
In Soviet logic, those who chose not to betray their fellow citizens could be considered suspects.
“Under these conditions, fear is setting in people again,” Nikita Petrov, a leading academic, said of the Soviet secret police. “And that fear tells you to report it.”
In March, Putin signed a new law that punishes public statements against what the Kremlin calls a “special military operation” in Ukraine with up to 15 years in prison. It was a tough but necessary move, the Kremlin said, in the face of the West’s “information war” against Russia.
Prosecutors have already used the law against more than 400 people, according to human rights group OVD-Info, including a man who held up a piece of paper with eight asterisks. “No to war” in Russian has eight letters.
“It’s kind of a big joke that we’re living, unfortunately,” said Aleksandra Bayeva, head of the legal department at OVD-Info, about the absurdity of some war-related lawsuits. She said she has seen a marked increase in the frequency with which people report other citizens.
“Repression is not done solely by the hands of state authorities,” she said. “It’s also made by ordinary citizens.”
In most cases, punishments related to war criticism were limited to fines; for the more than 15,000 anti-war protesters arrested since the invasion began on Feb. 24, fines are the most common penalty, but some have been sentenced to up to 30 days in prison, Bayeva said. Some people are being threatened with longer sentences.
In the western town of Penza, another English teacher, Irina Gen, came to class one day and found a big “Z” scrawled on the blackboard. The Russian government has promoted the letter as a symbol of support for the war after it was painted on Russian military vehicles in Ukraine.
Gen told the students it looked like half a swastika.
Later, an eighth grader asked her why Russia was being banned from sporting competitions in Europe.
“I think it’s the right thing to do,” replied Gen. “Until Russia starts behaving in a civilized way, this will continue.”
“But we don’t know all the details,” said one girl, referring to the war.
“That’s right, you don’t know anything,” said Gen, 45.
A recording of this dialogue appeared on a popular Telegram account that often posts inside information about criminal cases. The Federal Security Service, the successor to the Soviet KGB, called her out and warned that her words blaming Russia for the bombing of a maternity hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine, last month were “100% a criminal case”.
Now she is under investigation for causing “serious consequences” under last month’s censorship law, punishable by ten to 15 years in prison.
But others who were targeted by citizen complaints drew more encouraging lessons from the experience. On Sakalina Island, after news channels reported on Dubrova’s case, one of her former students raised the equivalent of R$750 in a day for her, before the teacher told her to stop, that she would get the money herself. . On Friday (8), Dubrova handed over the money to a dog shelter.
In Moscow, Grachev, the computer repair shop’s owner, said he found it remarkable that none of his hundreds of customers had threatened to denounce him for the “no to war” text he prominently displayed on a screen behind the counter for several weeks after the break-in. . After all, he commented, he was forced to double the price of some services because of Western sanctions, which certainly angered some customers. Instead, many thanked him.
The man who appears to have denounced Grachev was a passerby he calls “grandpa” who, he said, twice warned his employees in late March that they were breaking the law. Grachev, 35, said he believed the man thought he was doing his public duty by reporting the store to the police, and likely had no access to information beyond state propaganda.
Grachev was fined 100,000 rubles. A Moscow politician wrote about the case on social media, including Grachev’s bank details for anyone he wanted to help. Grachev said that in less than two hours he received enough money to pay the fine.
He received a total of 250,000 rubles, he said, from about 250 donors, and he intends to donate the surplus to OVD-Info, which has offered him legal aid.
