A few days ago we reported on a somewhat racy party (the theme of the evening was “almost naked”) in an exclusive club in Moscow, the Mutabor. The organizer, influencer Anastasia Ivleyeva, had conceived it as a challenge to the dark state bigotry that Vladimir Putin is forcing on Russia. Traditional values, militaristic nationalism and home, home, home. Well, it ended badly. Regime propagandist Vladimir Solovyov ultimately described the revelers as “bastards” who dared to “mock the commander-in-chief who raises his glass to victory”; that Ekaterina Mizulina, the Putin MP and priestess of Russian-style political correctness, has called for exemplary fines and a government boycott for the participants, people in the entertainment industry who are too careless to understand that this is not the right time for Jokes, because there is a war – sorry, a special operation (you can't say war, you risk 15 years in prison).
And said and done: The tax office quickly opened an investigation against Ivleyeva, and who knows whether it will be enough for her to publicly apologize and promise to donate the proceeds from the party tickets to charity. All the other Russian showbiz personalities present at Mutabor did the same: first they talked about a wonderful evening, then they humiliated themselves in videos with apologies and assurances that they understood their stupid mistake.
We agree on the very stupid thing: you have to be stupid not to have understood that Russia is no longer a normal country and that the war that Putin started in Ukraine without a time limit is also a pretext to shut people up and punish them these costumes. Home, home, home and that's it. Not even Artyom Kamardyn and Egor Shtovba, two young poets who had publicly read anti-war poems, understood this: they were sentenced to seven and five and a half years in prison, respectively, for “incitement to hatred.”
What was left to say on the political level was Ekaterina Duntsova, the journalist who plans to challenge Putin in the March 15 presidential election. Her candidacy as an independent has already been rejected under formal pretexts, various threats have already been made, but she is not giving in: she wants to found her own party “to represent the tens of millions of Russians who demand peace, democracy and freedom.” ” .Aleksei Navalny had already tried and ended up in Siberia. She is unlikely to get better, but let's hope.