Russian Dissent: Boris Kagarlitsky is finally released after serving 3 1/2 months for telling a joke
Posted by Der on January 15, 2024, 9:13 pm
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 to 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.
Good news. It seems like an over-reaction from the Russian authorities, though he's not being entirely honest presenting it as them not being able to take a joke, or that he made no 'further assessment' of the Kerch bridge attack. Here's the offending Telegram post according to the Moscow Times ( https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2023/07/26/russian-anti-war-sociologist-charged-with-justifying-terrorism-a81969 - I haven't been able to find the video Kagarlitsky refers to):
THIS MESSAGE (MATERIAL) WAS CREATED AND (OR) DISSEMINATED BY A FOREIGN MASS MEDIA OUTLET PERFORMING THE FUNCTIONS OF A FOREIGN AGENT AND (OR) A RUSSIAN LEGAL ENTITY PERFORMING THE FUNCTIONS OF A FOREIGN AGENT.
The Russian state new-speak has been enriched with a new term. We already have "cotton", "negative growth", "goodwill gesture", "regrouping"... Now we have "incident". It's when an explosion destroys a critical strategic object - the most expensive and most guarded bridge on the planet.
From a military point of view, the meaning of what happened is more or less clear. There will be supply problems. And not only in Crimea. Someone will solve these problems. However, it is not excluded that by the time they find a solution, there will be new troubles, even more serious.
But apart from military strategy, there is also economics and politics.
From the moment of its inauguration, the Crimean bridge was not only a strategic but also a symbolic object, the main achievement of the Putin era and material proof that in our country, even against the background of total theft and inefficiency, it is still possible to achieve practical results if you invest 400-500 percent of the technologically necessary funds.
Now the bridge is out of service and a commission is already being set up to study the causes and consequences of the "incident". I have no doubt that interested people are right now preparing estimates of the funds to be allocated for restoration work, and potential contractors are already preparing suitcases with money to be taken to the appropriate offices in order to get a valuable order.
The only question is not to make a mistake with the office. After all, the location of these offices and their inhabitants may change in the near future. And more than once.
*****
I don't know if that translation is 100% - RT said: 'He had been in pre-trial detention since October 2022, having been accused of “publicly justifying terrorism” over a video about the Ukrainian attack on the Crimean Bridge, in which he stated that it was “understandable” that Kiev would want to destroy the structure.' - https://www.rt.com/russia/588928-russian-sociologist-justifying-terrorism-released/
So maybe he uses that word in the video. But even then you can portray something as 'understandable' without necessarily seeking to justify it, and the prosecution's interpretation seem tenuous to say the least:
'Prosecutors have insisted that Kagarlitsky “discredited the state authorities,” stating that a psychological and linguistic examination of his video had found that it contained an “acknowledgement of the ideology of carrying out an explosion in order to discredit government authorities.”'
If they have evidence that he's an actual paid-up 'foreign agent', then produce it and try him on that basis. Otherwise it's bogus and they should apologise & compensate for the distress. IMHO of course...
If they didn't get him for this they'd have got him for something else. He's an embarassment and before this he's been a thorn in the side of previous leaders. As he points out himself.
He's dead against the SMO. Amazing that he hasn't called it a "war" and been locked up for that, like some others. He was hoping that this war, for want of a better word, would mean the overthrow of the state/Putin with the possibility of the arrival of socialism (of the authoritarian not libertarian, alas, variety) but the masses have let him down. As they do so often. To us all.
He's easily the best writer over at Russian Dissent (set up by Matt Taibbi "to provide a forum for Russian writers who can't be critical at home, and to help Americans see the range of attitudes inside Russia") though I don't agree with everything he says. I admire his courage, though. Unrelenting.
This incident rather reminds me of the Czech writer Milan Kundera in his book, The Joke, set in Stalin's time. But maybe Kagarlitsky wants us to make the comparison.
Everybody could do with some time inside. Help them see how the other half lives and get to meet people they wouldn't ordinarily meet. Like Craig Murray before him, Boris seems to have made the most of his time.
Re: Russian Dissent: Boris Kagarlitsky is finally released after serving 3 1/2 months for telling a joke
No worries. Don't imagine I would agree with him on much but he doesn't deserve jail for having the Wrong Ideas.
I liked The Joke when I read it a while back. Very wry. Preferred it to Unbearable Lightness which he was most famous for.
You could be right about the unexpected benefits of prison - I've not had the pleasure... Sounds like Kagarlitsky had a better time of it than Lira though, revealing in itself...