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MOSCOW – Parishioners have denounced Russian priests for pleading for peace rather than victory in the war against Ukraine. Teachers lost their jobs after children chatted they were against the war. Neighbors who harbored trivial grudges for years have betrayed longtime enemies. Workers insult each other to their superiors or contact the police or the federal security service directly.
Such is the hostile, paranoid atmosphere of Russians at war with Ukraine and with each other. As Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime cracks down on war critics and other political dissidents, citizens monitor each other in an echo of the darkest years of Joseph Stalin’s oppression, leading to investigations, criminal charges, prosecutions and sackings.
Private conversations in restaurants and railroad cars are fair game for eavesdroppers, who call the police to arrest “traitors” and “enemies.” Social media posts and messages – including in private chat groups – become incriminating evidence that can lead to FSB agents knocking on the door.
The effect is chilling: denunciations are strongly encouraged by the state and news of arrests and prosecutions are amplified by propagandistic commentators on federal television and Telegram channels. In March last year, Putin called on the nation to purge itself by spitting out traitors “like mosquitoes.” Since then he has repeatedly issued dire warnings about internal enemies and claims that Russia is fighting for its very survival.
According to the human rights organization OVD-Info, at least 19,718 people have been arrested for their opposition to the war since the start of the invasion. Criminal proceedings were initiated against 584 people and administrative proceedings against 6,839. Many others have been intimidated or harassed by the authorities, lost their jobs or been victims of attacks on their relatives, the organization said. According to the human rights group Memorial, there are currently 558 political prisoners in detention in Russia.
“This wave of denunciations is one of the signs of totalitarianism, when people understand what is good and bad from the President’s point of view, that is, ‘Whoever is against us must be prosecuted,'” said Andrei Kolesnikov. a Moscow-based political analyst with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who, like many Russians, has been labeled a “foreign agent” by authorities.
Kolesnikov describes Putin’s regime as increasingly authoritarian “but with elements of totalitarianism” and predicts difficult years ahead. “I am sure that he will not return to normal,” he said, referring to Putin. “He’s not insane in the medical sense, but he’s insane in the political sense, just like any dictator.”
The flood of denunciations has made public space dangerous. Classrooms are among the riskiest, especially during state-sponsored Monday morning Talks About Important Things classes, when teachers lecture students on the war in Ukraine, Russia’s militaristic view of history, and other state-dictated subjects.
While having lunch with friends at a Moscow restaurant this month, a friend cautiously asked a waiter if the restaurant had cameras. It did.
In an office where no one else was present, another friend almost inaudibly whispered his anti-war opinion, his eyes twitching nervously.
When a former class of language students met with their retired teacher for an annual meeting recently, everyone was tense and cautiously questioned each other’s views before gradually realizing that everyone hated the war, allowing them to speak freely, one said the teacher of relatives Muscovites .
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Police in the sprawling Moscow metro system have been busy investigating reports, aided by the system’s powerful facial recognition system.
Kamilla Murashova, a nurse at a children’s hospice, was arrested on the subway on May 14 after someone photographed a badge with the blue and yellow colors of the Ukrainian flag on her backpack and reported her. Murashova has been accused of discrediting the military.
A 40-year-old sales manager, Yuri Samoylov, was riding the subway on March 17 when a fellow passenger spotted his phone’s wallpaper, a symbol of Ukraine’s military unit Azov, and reported him. According to court documents, Samoilov was convicted of exhibiting extremist material “to an unlimited circle of people”.
In Soviet times, there was a deterrent word for insulting fellow citizens: stuchat, which means “to knock,” conjuring up thoughts of a shrewd citizen knocking on a police officer’s door to file a complaint. The stenographic gesture expressing “Be careful, the walls have ears” was a silent tapping motion.
According to Alexandra Arkhipova, a social anthropologist who is doing a study on the subject, in today’s Russia most accounts seem to come from “patriots” who see themselves as guardians of their motherland – after she herself was denounced last year, she comments on the Netherlands-based independent Russian television channel Dozhd.
Arkhipova and research colleagues have identified more than 5,500 cases of denunciation.
For example, a St. Petersburg mother, identified in police documents as EP Kalacheva, believed she was protecting her child from “moral harm” when she reported posters near a play area depicting Ukrainian apartments used by Russian forces destroyed, saying, “And children?” As a result, a third-year university student was charged with discrediting the military.
Arkhipova said she and several university colleagues were all reported from an email address identified as belonging to Anna Vasilyevna Korobkova — so she emailed the address. The person, who identified himself as Korobkova, claimed to be the granddaughter of a Soviet-era KGB informant who spent most of his time drafting denunciations. She said she followed in his footsteps.
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Korobkova did not offer proof of identity when contacted by the Washington Post via email, making it impossible to verify her story.
The author of the email said he was a 37-year-old single woman living in a large Russian city who began writing mass denunciations against Russian opposition figures last year. From the start of the war to May 23, she said she had sent 1,046 reports to the FSB about opposition figures who had commented on independent media blocked in Russia – about two denunciations a day.
“In each interview I look for signs of crime – voluntary surrender and dissemination of false information about the activities of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation,” she said. “If a prisoner of war says, for example, that he surrendered voluntarily, then I write two denunciations against him – to the FSB and to the military prosecutor’s office. She boasted that her denunciation in January led to the dissolution of Russia’s oldest human rights group, the Moscow Helsinki Group.
“In general, the targets of my denunciations were scientists, teachers, doctors, human rights activists, lawyers, journalists and ordinary people,” the email author said. “I get tremendous moral satisfaction when a person is prosecuted for my denunciation: fired from work, fined, etc.”
Putting someone in jail “would make me very happy,” she wrote, adding, “I also consider it a success if someone leaves Russia after my denunciation.”
Arkhipova said Korobkova put a lot of effort into writing multiple responses to her questions and saw her goal as discouraging analysts from speaking to independent media about the war. “You can find that type of person anywhere,” Arkhipova said. “They feel they are responsible for moral boundaries. You feel like you’re doing the right thing. They help Putin, they help their government.”
A teacher from the Moscow region, Tatyana Chervenko, who has two children, was also denounced by Korobkova last summer after speaking out against the war in an interview with Deutsche Welle.
“The denunciation said I was involved in classroom propaganda. She made up facts. She does not know me. She made up the entire report,” Chervenko said.
The school administration initially dismissed the report. But Korobkova wrote a second report to Putin’s child rights commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, who was indicted by the International Criminal Court along with Putin for kidnapping Ukrainian children.
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After that, the school board sent teachers and administrators to oversee the lessons, especially the “talking about important things.” They called the police to the school. Parents close to the school’s management wrote complaints calling for her dismissal. When she was released in December, Chervenko said all she felt was relief. She didn’t even try to find another job.
She did not contact Korobkova. “I don’t want to feed these demons. I can see she was so proud that I got fired. That was her goal,” she said. “But what won me over was the response from the authorities. After all, who is she? Nobody knows who she is. And yet she filed a complaint against me and they responded by firing me.”
As in the Soviet era, some denunciations appear to hide a grudge or material motive. The prominent Russian political scientist Ekaterina Schulmann, who now lives in Berlin and has more than a million YouTube followers, was scathingly denounced by neighbors in a report to Moscow’s mayor after she left the country in April last year and was declared a “foreigner”. was an agent.”
They described Schulmann and her family as longtime “subversive” elements “acting in the interests of their Western henchmen whose aim is to divide our society”. But the crux of the complaint was actually a 15-year-old property dispute.
“This is not political denunciation, but an old economic conflict in which people try to seize the moment as they see it, so far without much success,” Schulmann said.
There are dozens of ads in schools — teachers reporting children, children reporting teachers, principals reporting children or teachers — that undermine education and sow division, fear and distrust in school staffrooms, said Daniil Ken, director of the Alliance of Teachers. a small independent teachers’ association that left Russia because of the war.
“It’s very difficult to live together because, like any other group, everyone in a school knows what everyone else is thinking,” Ken said.
The state’s use of spies and the many arbitrary arrests served as effective tools of social control, Arkhipova said.
“You can be arrested at any time, but you never know if you will be arrested or not. They target multiple teachers in multiple locations just to tell each teacher, “Shut up,” she said. “And it’s about scaring everyone.”
Natalia Abbakumova from Riga, Latvia contributed to this report
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