“All of Russia is our Federal Penitentiary Service.” Mikhail Edelstein on how the country is turning into total chaos
On Sunday, September 25, several young people held “anti-mobilization” readings near the monument to Mayakovsky on Triumfalnaya Square in Moscow. Activist Artem Kamardin read his poem “Kill me, militia” on them. The next day, five members of the Grom special forces of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, threatening to cut out the door of the Bulgarian one, broke into the apartment where Kamardin lived, threw everyone present on the floor, staged a pogrom in the house, and Kamardin himself was raised to apologize on camera.
This story attracted attention when Kamardin said that during the raid, the security forces raped him with a dumbbell bar. his girlfriend Alexandra Popova confirmed that she had heard Artyom screaming from another room and that she had been shown a recording of the scene of his rape. In addition, she said that the security forces threatened with gang rape, groped, kicked and mocked in every possible way. Kamardin’s neighbor was also beaten Alexander Menyukov.
Genuine personal rage
As a result, against the participants in the readings at Mayakovka (except for Artem Kamardin, this Nikolai Daineko and Egor Shtovba) opened a criminal case under Article 282 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation for “inciting anxiety, hostility and humiliation” against “members of the volunteer armed forces formed”, the so-called DPR and LPR. On Wednesday, September 28, the court was sent to a pre-trial detention center for two months.
A video with apologies from all three appeared on the hacked tg-channel “112”. On them, a beaten and almost losing consciousness Kamardin, kneeling in the area of the destroyed apartment, promises never to sing a rhyme about a militia again, and his comrades ask for forgiveness from “the mothers and women of those soldiers who are now defending our homeland, and all the inhabitants of the LPR and DPR “.
It is clear that everything happened – a demonstration action, part of a general campaign to intimidate activists. Perhaps, almost simultaneously in the police department, Lyublino was beaten Daria Ivanovaarrested for distributing anti-war leaflets. And yet, in all this atrocity with dumbbells and other bullying, with a destroyed apartment, with recording and leaking repentant videos, there is not just courage from permissiveness, but genuine personal rage.
The performance at Triumfalnaya Kamardin ended with the scanning of “Glory to Kievan Rus! Novorossia – suck! This slogan of Ukraine took place back in 2014, somewhere in the workplace and became famous among the pro-Ukrainian participants in the Russian marches and right-wing football fans. It is characteristic that it was this slogan, and not those that sounded in response to calls for desertion and non-execution of criminal orders, that caused special anger among the special forces.
When one of the participants in the raid “recognizes” Kamardin, the fricative “r” is clearly visible in the phrase “This is he, he, I tell you” in the video. It protects a lot.
“Russian People’s Republic”
Donbass came to Russia, as Chechnya came before. It was not the “DNR” and “LNR” that became part of Russia – the Russian Federation turned into the RNR, the Russian People’s Republic, it includes not only without laws, but also without any intelligible concepts. “My Russia is now al-Qaeda, Hezbollah,” she wrote after the start of the war in Ukraine Vera Polozkova. The idea is correct, but the examples are too far away – rather “Ichkeria, LPR.”
Other people understood this, the journalist who died in the spring of 2022 Andrey Babitsky. Babitsky, we must give him his due, had an amazing flair for brutal scumbags, in whom he stubbornly saw romantics and passionaries. In 1993, he fell in love with the Barkashovites, along with the defense of the White House, then Basayev and Khattab, then Zakharchenko and Khodakovsky.
In the second half of the 2010s, he fell in love with Putin and began to devote enthusiastic columns to him. This caused bewilderment and ridicule, meanwhile Babitsky turned out to be right. Boring St. Petersburg KGB officer, tired of yachts and palaces, turned into a motorola with an atomic bomb. It’s just that few people noticed it then.
First of all, the widespread practice is now widespread in “Greater Russia”, especially in the first places reserved for this: the Fsinov zones, the Donetsk cellars, the Chechen zindans and the filtration points. “All Russia – our FSIN, as Chekhov’s characters would say about this. The country is developing in conditions of total lawlessness with a complete absence of internal and external constraints. It is this state that is found in Russian officials when the word “sovereignty” that has appeared to them is pronounced. And at the forefront of this movement are all these special forces with dumbbells at the ready, veterans of the Donbass and Chechnya, who sensed something close and dear on the shore.
In one old poem Dmitry Bykov the line is:
You can make a hole in my side
You can squeeze me out like a sponge
You can burn me, grind me into flour,
Turn me into a meat grinder
Drive vzashey from any house,
Trample, distort shamelessly –
But it won’t be any worse,
Than the consciousness that it is possible.
People who are now fleeing to Georgia, Kazakhstan, Europe, Israel are fleeing – often, probably, they themselves just do not realize – not from mobilization, but also from this feeling that if you are alive and well, it is only because you are from Putin to the gopnik, who was noted in the Donbass, and now hunts in the Thunder detachment.
Mikhail Edelstein for “Like this”
The opinion of the author may not coincide with the opinion of the editors.