Reach out to your people.
* * *
In May 2012, while we were sitting in a Moscow women’s jail under investigation for our crime, psychiatry suddenly rose on the horizon. I have to admit, I was scared to death and started to panic. As someone who had spent her youth studying the antipsychiatry movement, I was well aware of punitive psychiatry’s horrors. I think you’ve read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or seen the movie. So we underwent a forensic psychiatric examination in the Kashchenko psychiatric hospital, a facility that in the Soviet era was heavily involved in the political abuses of psychiatry. I was trying to appear as normal as I could possibly be. I found out that my doctor was honestly sympathetic to me and to our cause. He smiled warmly when I answered a question about priorities by naming freedom, sister/brotherhood, and equality.
However, all three of us were found to be suffering from a “mixed-personality disorder.” What are the symptoms? “Proactive approach to life,” “a drive for self-fulfillment,” “stubbornly defending their opinion,” “inclination to oppositional behavior,” “propensity for protest reactions.” All this was written in our psychiatric report. I actually didn’t mind the description at all. They defined it as an abnormal condition, but I think these are just characteristics of a human being who is still alive.
The report used language very similar to the criteria used in the Soviet era when diagnosing dissenters. Punitive psychiatry was widely used in the USSR as an ideological weapon of control and repression. A Soviet citizen had to be unquestioning and submissive. Those who said anything against the oppression or showed any independence were regarded as suspicious troublemakers, a threat to everyday life.
all power to the imagination
Here is what I heard in one Russian classroom:
KIDS: We’re for justice.
PRINCIPAL: And what exactly is justice?
KIDS: It’s what we don’t have right now.
We have to learn how to be kids again, to use our imagination and start to think of alternatives that we’re able to create with our own hands, think of possible futures that we could establish by restructuring our own lives, behavior, thinking, consumption of products, ideas, political concepts, news, social networks.
Too often we don’t believe that another world is possible. This is what may be called the “there is no alternative” (TINA) disease, and it’s a pure crisis of the imagination. “There is no alternative” was Margaret Thatcher’s favorite slogan. In her case, it mostly meant the economy. Writing about Thatcher’s TINA in the Nation (April 12, 2013), Laura Flanders said it meant that “globalized capitalism, so called free-markets and free trade were the best ways to build wealth, distribute services and grow a society’s economy. Deregulation’s good, if not God.”
The TINA disease is global. As activists we’re so used to hearing this standard response from our fellow Russians: yes, our government is corrupt, courts exist only to protect the elites, the police do not work and only take bribes, Putin is a thief, but there is no alternative.
Official statistics claim that the overwhelming majority of Russians (80 percent) support Putin. Nah, they don’t. A little investigation reveals that there are many citizens who are perfectly aware of how corrupt and greedy Putin is, how he’s stripping Russians of their money and rights and monopolizing resources within the small group of his cronies. We’re aware that we’re living in a plutocracy, an oligarchy—for sure not a democracy. But here the TINA syndrome comes in. “But who will rule Russia, if not Putin?” is what I hear. “You!” is what I say. I can guarantee that you have more dignity, love of your country, and respect for your fellow citizens than Putin has. That’s one hundred percent true. We can run things differently. There are enough good-hearted and smart people in our country to run our affairs better than Putin does.
The same is applicable to the United States. “The politics of inevitability is a self-induced intellectual coma,” says Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. “So long as there was a contest between communist and capitalist systems, and so long as the memory of fascism and Nazism was alive, Americans had to pay some attention to history and preserve the concepts that allowed them to imagine alternative futures. Yet once we accepted the politics of inevitability, we assumed that history was no longer relevant. If everything in the past is governed by a known tendency, then there is no need to learn the details.”
TINA helps elites, it does not help us. We choose to fight for our dreams, we choose not to be powerless.
Deeds
alternative: another law enforcement system is possible
It’s a mistake to put political activists in prison. It only makes them stronger and more convinced of their beliefs. If you consider becoming a president or an MP, please remember this lesson and don’t try to silence activists by putting them in jail. It’s simply not practical. They’ll find a way to communicate from courtrooms and prison cells. They’ll find a way to gain more power from their prison experience than they lose.
* * *
Putin and his team made a mistake when they locked us up. They had it coming. Now it won’t be so easy for them to get us off their backs.
Authorities call Pussy Riot’s performances controversial and offensive. All Pussy Riot’s videos are labeled “extremist,” and access to them has been prohibited in Russia by a court decision, and I can see why: we put their power in question.
But I believe it’s my basic human right to kick my government’s ass. And I put my whole self into everything I do.
* * *
When the authorities are so pissed at you that they have to lock you up, wear it as a badge of honor. Prison cannot make you weaker or break you unless you allow it to happen. When they steal your freedom, the power still resides in your decisions and your will. Nothing could be worse for those who locked you up than when you stand up proudly for your values even when you’re behind bars. It’s a cruel game: their goal is to publicly annihilate your spirit, but you look for sneaky ways to grow your courage and develop yourself instead of shrinking and dying (which is what is expected in this situation).
My prison time gave me the unbelievably sweet and paradoxical feeling of being a winner and a loser at the same time. We’re in prison, but thanks to the court process we’re taking part in branding the government as a mob of shortsighted, greedy, petty oligarchs and ex-KGB agents who are afraid of three women in bright dresses and funny hats.
“Here, in prison, I have acquired something very important—a sense of profound hatred for the modern state system and a class society,” antifascist and anarchist Dmitry Buchenkov, a PhD in political science and a boxing coach, writes in a letter as he sits in prison, where he ended up because of an absurd politically motivated criminal case stemming from the 2012 protests in Russia. “It’s very important for a revolutionary. I had this sense before, but understood it logically. Now it’s a deep emotional distress. I want to thank the investigation committee and all case officers for my final emergence as a revolutionary. I was lacking this small detail—the prison, where I had a chance to meet absolutely different people who make up the Russian society, from junkies to businessmen. Nobody can make so many observations and political conclusions in such a brief period of time.”
Dmitry Buchenkov ended up in prison because he was accused of participating in an illegal rally in Moscow on May 6, 2012. Dmitry was not in Moscow on that day, so he couldn’t possibly have participated in any rally. But cops don’t care—they seriously don’t like the guy and want him locked up because he’s a smart and effective community organizer.
* * *
On the first day after our release in December 2013, we decided to found Zona Prava (Zone of Rights). A brilliant Russian lawyer, Pavel Chikov, who defended us while we were in a camp, is the head of Zona Prava.
The mission of our prison reform initiative is to overhaul the current law enforcement system, a vicious system that grinds peop
le down and spits out coffins, to offer an alternative to a broken system. The acquittal rate in modern Russia is less than 1 percent. What does that mean practically? It means that once you find yourself in a police station, it’s almost impossible to get out of there. Even those who work within the system are not happy about that. I know policemen for whom dignity and self-respect are important. We have ex-interrogators and ex-prosecutors working with us on protecting prisoners’ rights.
People die in police custody every day. There are thousands of deaths in prison annually, half of them from tuberculosis, which given the current state of medicine should be impossible to die from, and from HIV, which is no longer necessarily a death sentence on the outside. We are reeducating prison camp staff and police officers, using the carrot and the stick to teach them to see detainees and convicts as human beings. We help prisoners draft complaints, petitions, and lawsuits. We are involved in proceedings against prison wardens in the Russian courts and the European Court of Human Rights to help severely ill convicts obtain parole. Our doctors visit penal colonies and carry out independent exams of cancer patients and the HIV-infected.
In the year after Pussy Riot’s release, Zona Prava was working on a few dozen cases across Russia, and more than ten are cases in the European Court of Human Rights.
We have started work in prison camps, and we’re confident that if we can help convicts find legal ways to protest their enslavement, we can do a lot more for the many Russian citizens who want to express their dissatisfaction with the Putinist political system. We have compiled a book of complaints and suggestions, but so far citizens have no access to this book.
Most prisoners are locked up because of the war on drugs. Even possession of weed can lead to a prison sentence of up to eight years. The next biggest group of prisoners after those sentenced for drugs comprises the victims of domestic abuse, women who were beaten by their husbands or other family members, sometimes for decades, and who couldn’t take it anymore. What could they do? I have a lot of acquaintances in that situation who would go to the police, and the police would tell them, “Hey, you haven’t been killed yet! Come back once you’re dead.” Seriously. This is typical. It’s almost like they get special instructions on how to answer when someone comes in with domestic abuse complaints.
We cannot change Russia’s law enforcement system in a moment without the government’s support. And our government, of course, is doing everything it can to prevent reform of prisons and law enforcement. What we can do is to provide information, lawyers, and the safety margin afforded by public monitoring. We can help people imagine a different way of doing things, for the benefit of all.
alternative: a different media is possible
At the end of 2013, Putin was deeply displeased with revolutionary events in Ukraine. His logic was clear: if radical shifts can happen in a country that is our closest neighbor, his power in Russia is not as stable as he’d like it to be. It was a question of honor for Putin to provoke chaos in Ukraine and make sure that nobody in Russia saw a Ukrainian revolution as a positive example of changing elites through the people’s power. Thus, Putin took three steps: (1) the annexation of Crimea, (2) a secret war in East Ukraine, and (3) an open media war against Ukraine and everybody in Russia who dared to say anything critical of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Just when you think it can’t get any worse, your president sends troops to a neighboring country and—wow!—says that there are no troops, though we have witnesses, we have photographic evidence. It’s gaslighting at the next level.
Those who live in the United States had an unfortunate chance to feel the impact of the Russian media wars in 2016, during the presidential elections. But we Russians have lived with this reality for a while, since the beginning of Putin’s first term as the president in 2000.
Any attempt to provide real information about what was going on in Russia’s war with Ukraine in 2014 (not promoting a pro-Russian or pro-Ukrainian position but just honest reporting) put the person who made it available in jeopardy. Journalists and editors were fired and threatened, and investors and advertising partners of media outlets who dared to provide real news were intimidated and convinced to stop working with traitors.
Troll factories had a lot of work too. There are giant government-paid networks of people whose one role in life is to seed distorted information on the internet. They’re paid to “dislike” any video on YouTube that questions the power of Putin and his apparatus. Grown-up people are getting Russian taxpayers’ money to “dislike,” say, Pussy Riot’s music video. Are you serious?
DoS (denial-of-service) attacks on websites that post anything critical of the government are another popular tool. DoS attacks bring down a website for a period of time, which is extremely annoying when you’re a media agency and your duty is to provide news to the people ASAP. And here’s another tool: courts and the government can block sites they don’t like for all Russian users.
The year after our release was a tough one for the media; pieces of it were collapsing one after another under government pressure. In 2014, the Russian government’s own media propaganda turned incredibly reckless. It was fake news par excellence. We had a unique chance to see how bad lies from the TV screens can be.
That’s why we created an independent media outlet in 2014. (As you’ve probably noticed, we’re not looking for easy ways to live a life.) It’s called MediaZona.
The key point is our media offers an alternative information source that is completely free of censorship.
Citizens who are aware of what’s going on aren’t easily fooled. Our role is to be a trustworthy news service. We don’t publish columns or op-eds because we believe that our readers should come to their own conclusions. We trust our audience. It’s up to them to decide what side they’re on.
It’s rewarding to see how big media resources—controlled by the Kremlin—refer to MediaZona’s articles in their materials. Even those who are literally working for the Kremlin know that you can trust MediaZona. We’re deadly serious about fact-checking. It’s difficult to gain the trust of your audience, and you can ruin it with just one fake news story.
When we started, we mostly covered law enforcement issues: politics in Russia moved from Parliament to courtrooms and prisons, places where you eventually end up if you’re politically engaged. We provide online reports from the courts, and we expose the absurdity, brutality, and injustice that dominate the modern Russian law enforcement system. Sometimes it’s hysterically funny; sometimes it makes you cry. We publish stories of prisoners and ex-prisoners, giving voice to those the state prefers to stay silent.
MediaZona has existed for more than three years. We’ve been expanding, and now we’re covering a broader spectrum of issues, making an encyclopedia of Russian life. Our main question is, What does a life in real Russia look like?
We’re not interested in an official propaganda TV picture of Putin hugging kids or being sentimentally moved by bucolic church bells. We collect information on protests held outside big cities that usually remain unseen: strikes by miners or truck drivers, hunger strikes in prisons, rallies organized by angry schoolteachers. We talk to prosecutors, judges, policemen, prison wardens, those who work in the system right now as well as former officials. They give us leaks on how everything really works: the five steps of fabricating a criminal case, how to torture a prisoner without leaving any evidence, the top ten ways to take a bribe, etc.
* * *
“Well. Are you ready to burn some police cars?” That was the first thing Sergey Smirnov said to me when we met for the first time at a gathering of leftist activists in 2008. Now he’s an editor-in-chief of MediaZona. I’ll let him tell you more about MediaZona:
For a few years, we watched what was happening, and after a while—from my point of view—the most important events (for example, the case of [Putin critic Alexei] Navalny) went to the courts. Politics, real politics—it moved from the city squares to the courts. One case after another. And a h
uge number of new restrictive legislative measures have been introduced. It became obvious that court practices were the new form of communication between those in power and those in the opposition. And there was a moment when everyone knew exactly what was happening. But when everyone knows what’s happening, one question remains—what do you do next? One possible reaction is to do nothing.
We decided to cover it. We never had any illusions as to how interesting any of this would be for people. We never thought everyone would suddenly want to read about how policemen are killing people, or about how another two dozen people have been put behind bars for many years. . . . Of course, this isn’t the most popular kind of information, but it’s important.
Maybe this is a strange idea, but our mission is constantly changing. We have a lot of goals. One of them is to attract attention to court cases, courts, and to problems in this system. We do online broadcasting from courts, to show how the courts actually function.
I have another pretty strange idea about our mission, actually. I’ve written a couple of articles about the nineteenth century, and here’s what I think. If in ten, or fifteen, or twenty years, our website could help a researcher understand this time period, we would be very happy. They could read our live online broadcasting archives from courtrooms to understand what really happened here, to get an idea of what kind of epoch this was.
Of course, we can only offer a small part of the picture. But capturing the current moment, what’s happening right now—that’s important. I’m convinced we can’t even tell what is and what isn’t important right now, and we don’t know what will be important ten to fifteen years from now for someone studying Russia. In this context, I would like it if researchers would study some parts of our coverage. It’s a strange thought. It’s about understanding society.
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