This is a message from the *Movement of Conscientious Objectors in Russia*
Posted: 11th May 2022
We are launching a newsletter for our foreign colleagues to tell stories
of the anti-war movements inside our country. In each letter, we’ll
delve into one of the hot topics regarding the inner resistance to the
ongoing war with Ukraine.
We’re doing it with Google Groups. We have sent you an invitation but
many have not accepted or rejected it, so we’re sending the first issue
in a simple letter. Please check out your spam folders and accept or
reject our invitation. The following issues will be sent to the members
of the Google Group. If you believe you haven’t received an invitation
or some mistake has happened, please contact us through this email.
Protesters against the war
On February 24, at 5 am Russia invaded Ukraine. Waking up in the next
few hours, many Russian citizens were shocked when they found out what
had just happened. Among those who would not welcome such an invasion,
it was a common belief that Putin is merely bluffing by threatening the
West with a full-scale war. It turns out that we were wrong.
By 2022, the mass opposition movement in Russia was pretty much
destroyed, so there were not many influential political forces that
called on the Russians to protest against the invasion, yet some public
figures did that. The same morning, a human rights activist Marina
Litvinovich, who supposedly should have become a Duma deputy in 2021 but
was denied the mandate because of massive fraud, encouraged the citizens
of Moscow to gather at Pushkin square at a given time of the evening.
Litvinovich was soon detained
<https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-detains-opposition-activist-who-called-anti-war-protests-moscow-2022-02-24/>by
the police on her way out of her house. Many regional activists
announced protests at the same time in cities all across Russia.
The protests on the first day of the war seem to have been the most
populous <https://www.bbc.com/russian/media-60517266>. Some estimate
<https://www.wionews.com/world/in-russia-police-arrest-thousands-participating-in-anti-war-protests-threaten-with-legal-repercussions-456259>that
about 2,000 people came out to protest in Moscow, and 1,000 in
St. Petersburg; by our estimates, these numbers are understated. More
than 2,000 people were detained
<https://ovd.news/news/2022/02/24/spiski-zaderzhannyh-v-svyazi-s-akciey-protiv-voyny-s-ukrainoy-24-fevralya-2022-goda>by
the police across the country. These might not look like huge numbers
but they are
<https://meduza.io/feature/2022/03/01/pochemu-v-rossii-net-hotya-by-stotysyachnyh-mitingov-protiv-voyny>to
Russia, a country that has experienced intimidation of protesters and
gradual tightening of protest laws for more than a decade. It is also
important to note that these actions were spontaneous: Litvinovich is an
influential persona only in a limited circle of Muscovites, she had no
access to television or big media outlets, and her appeal spread through
retweets and interpersonal communication.
Since February 24, protests continued every day but eventually, they
became less and less crowded and at some point ended. The percentage of
the detained, however, rose. On March 6, protests announced by the
opposition movement Socialist Alternative and other activists gathered
thousands of people across the country, with 5,000 people being
detained, which is the highest number
<https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/04/14/closed-shops-zs-green-ribbons-russias-post-invasion-reality-a77344>of
detentions in a single day since the collapse of the Soviet Union. In
some police departments, there have been reports of cruelty and
violence, let alone legal violations of protesters’ rights. The most
resonant case has happened in the police department of the Brateyevo
region of Moscow, where several feminist activists who participated in
the protests were beaten
<https://meduza.io/feature/2022/03/08/aleksandra-kaluzhskaya-devushka-kotoraya-zapisala-na-diktofon-kak-politseyskie-izbivayut-ee-v-ovd-brateevo>by
the police. One of the brave young women managed to record the torture
on a tape recorder on her phone. This horrifying audio is remarkable not
only as proof of a crime but also because of the comments
<https://meduza.io/feature/2022/03/07/da-ya-tebe-ugrozhayu-ya-tebe-ugrozhayu-fizicheskoy-raspravoy>that
the policemen make, saying, for example, that ‘Putin told us to beat the
shit out of them [protesters].’
In March, new censorship laws were implemented. Russians can now go to
jail for up to five years
<https://reports.ovdinfo.org/no-to-war-en#4>for publicly condemning the
‘special operation’ or disseminating ‘deliberately false’ information
about it. This fact has greatly contributed to the end of mass anti-war
protests. However, it did not stop many Russians from protesting against
the war on their own, by picketing. It is a long-time tradition in the
opposition movement in Russia to mock the absurdity of charges against
protesters. While during the 2019 Moscow protests, for example, several
citizens were accused
<https://novayagazeta.ru/news/2019/09/03/154928-sk-prekratil-ugolovnoe-delo-protiv-chetveryh-figurantov-dela-o-massovyh-besporyadkah>of
harming the policemen by throwing plastic cups and bottles, in 2022
there are cases of other sorts: many people were detained for holding up
empty pieces of paper instead of anti-war posters.
Indeed, it appears as though many people are turning picketing into
provocative performances with the purpose to test whether such an action
would be considered illegal by the police. The officials of a country
that claims to have conquered Nazism ban
<https://meduza.io/short/2022/03/31/ostanovite-fashizm-teper-zapreschennyy-lozung-v-rossii-kak-i-mnogie-drugie-vot-ih-nepolnyy-spisok>the
most harmless slogans: ‘Fascism will not pass’, ‘No to fascism’, ‘No to
Nazism
<https://twitter.com/omsk_ogo/status/1517092418893537280?s=20&t=P3HqcQPCCMBkeoF8k7qGAw>’,
and ‘I am pro-peace’. The same applies to the most popular slogan, ‘No
to war’ (? ???), which was chanted by protesters, and even posters
in which the two words, constituting the Russian phrase for ‘No to war’,
are replaced by rows of asterisks, a taunting remark on the fact that
the government bans the use of the word ‘war’ because it is officially
called a ‘special military operation.’ A viral video
<https://t.me/istories_media/988>shows a policeman lazily erasing ‘No to
war’, written in the snow on a statue’s pedestal, with his foot. A
person who wrote it was fined for ‘granite inscription by removing the
snow cover’ but the fine was later canceled
<https://t.me/NetFreedomsProject/490>.
Other objects that people tried to test on illegalness were
<https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/04/14/closed-shops-zs-green-ribbons-russias-post-invasion-reality-a77344>a
copy of Leo Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’, a meat package from a Russian
brand ????, whose name has the Russian word for ‘peace’ (?) in it,
and a bank card from a Russian state-organized payment system ?.
Several administrative cases were later dismissed; for example, a person
who held a quote
<https://novayagazeta.eu/articles/2022/05/04/v-peterburge-prekratili-administrativnoe-delo-o-diskreditatsii-armii-rf-za-plakat-voina-mir-svoboda-rabstvo-neznanie-sila-khvatit-iskazhenii-news?utm_source=tg.me&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=sud-v-peterburge-prekratil-proizvodstvo>from
Orwell’s ‘1984’ was released without charges. A quote from Putin’s
anti-war speech spoken in 2021, however, cost
<https://www.ekhokavkaza.com/a/v-peterburge-sud-priznal-tsitatu-putina-na-plakate-diskreditatsiey-armii/31794777.html>one
citizen of St. Petersburg 30 thousand rubles.
Then, some cases are so absurd that one can only wonder what happens in
the heads of the police when they write it down. A citizen of
Yekaterinburg was arrested
<https://www.ekhokavkaza.com/a/v-peterburge-sud-priznal-tsitatu-putina-na-plakate-diskreditatsiey-armii/31794777.html>for
signaling in support of the protesters as he drove through the city. In
other cities, people were fined for ‘expressing silent support
<https://meduza.io/news/2022/03/16/zhitelya-tomska-oshtrafovali-na-45-tysyach-rubley-za-molchalivuyu-podderzhku-antivoennogo-piketa>’
to the protests, standing nearby, or ‘holding invisible
<https://twitter.com/taty40050803/status/1517526242857209856>anti-war
posters’— yes, these are real excerpts from police protocols.
Some actions, however, look less like quirky performances and more like
gestures of despair. A young Muscovite was sentenced
<https://meduza.io/news/2022/03/28/v-moskve-uchastnitsu-antivoennogo-mitinga-prigovorili-k-dvum-godam-kolonii-po-delu-o-broshennoy-butylke-s-kokteylem-molotova-sudya-po-video-ona-ni-v-kogo-ne-popala>to
two years of prison for throwing a bottle of Molotov cocktail which did
not cause any harm, a philosopher from Moscow faces
<https://twitter.com/SotaVision/status/1521402568475389953>life
imprisonment after he set fire to an OMON van using Molotov at the
center of the city, and two men are prosecuted
<https://novayagazeta.eu/articles/2022/05/04/sledstvie-obvinilo-dvoikh-muzhchin-v-podgotovke-k-teraktu-v-moskve-oni-planirovali-sovershit-suitsid-v-znak-protesta-protiv-voiny-news?utm_source=tg.me&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=sud-v-moskve-na-mesyats-prodlil-arest-dvum>for
an attempt of setting fire to such a van during the protests of March 6.
In Krasnodar, a young man was detained
<https://t.me/bazabazon/11263?single>for pulling out a couch in the
middle of a city square, setting it on fire, and writing ‘EVIL’ on the
asphalt. He explained that he’d done it because of his girlfriend, who
is from Mariupol, a besieged Ukrainian city— he hasn’t been able to get
through to her since the beginning of the invasion.
Some go even further and harm themselves in a symbolic act of outrage at
a bloody war. In another horrifying performance from St. Petersburg, a
young activist put a rope around her neck and handcuffed
<https://news.doxajournal.ru/novosti/peterburzhskaya-aktivistka-prikovala-sebya-k-zaboru-u-stancii-metro-vasileostrovskaya/>herself
to a fence on a crowded street. Just a couple of days ago, a
Yekaterinburg activist came out to a picket with an anti-war poster,
having, quite literally, sewn <https://t.me/sotavision/39968?single>her
own mouth shut beforehand. She was allegedly forcibly sent to a
psychiatric ward.—-
Even though mass protests and picketing are illegal in Russia, many
courageous people fight through oppression and censorship to express
their dissent in the ongoing war with Ukraine. Among the coordinators
and volunteers of our Movement, some have been to protests, and have
been detained and fined. This list of cases is just the tip of the
iceberg, the underside of which is not fully visible even to any single
Russian. In upcoming newsletters, we’ll tell more about how television
celebrities, university professors and school teachers, seniors and
young, feminist activists, culture workers, and businesspeople protest
against the war with Ukraine. And, of course, the topic of urban
activism of ordinary people is not exhausted at all.
Please spread this newsletter to the anti-war and anti-militarist
organizations you trust. We would be happy if our newsletter helped you
write about anti-war movements in Russia, however, please do not refer
to us as the source of information publicly, we would rather you use
phrases like ‘human rights activists’ or ‘pacifists’. We are concerned
about our safety and do not seek publicity. You can follow our news on
Facebook <https://www.facebook.com/stoparmy/>or Telegram
<http://t.me/stoparmy>.
P. S. As we write this text on May 7—9, activists of a youth democratic
movement Vesna (?), journalists of an independent Internet outlet
SOTA, and many other people, including ordinary citizens, are being
detained in major Russian cities. Supposedly, this wave of detentions
and new criminal cases is connected to the plans for new anti-war
performances on May 9, Russian Victory Day, which is used in pro-war
propaganda by the Russian authorities. We stand with the detained and
prosecuted for expressing an anti-war position. Their stories will be
told in more detail in the next letter.
Peace,
The Movement of Conscientious Objectors