The Economist - USA (2021-11-13)

28 The Economist November 13th 2021
BriefingRussian repression

O

n october 14th Twins  Garden,  in

Moscow,  was  among  the  first  Russian

restaurants ever to be recognised with Mi­

chelin stars. In celebration it treated guests

from the beau mondeto magnums of Boll­

inger  alongside  its  signature  “sea  urchins

with  citrus  and  shisoleaves”  and  innova­

tive  “3d-printed  bean  ‘squid’  with  aspara­

gus and black caviar”. From its rooftop ter­

race  overlooking  Pushkin  Square  guests

could  marvel  at  Moscow’s  beautifully  lit

skyline.  Below  them  pedestrians  strolled

along  recently  repaved  streets  lined  with

cafés  and  boutique  shops,  or  rushed  to

catch the new production of “Tosca” at the

Bolshoi. Delivery bikes sped back and forth

attending  to  the  needs  of  those  staying  at

home—or stuck in their offices.

The  diners  might  also  have  made  out,

less  than  a  kilometre  away,  the  building

housing Memorial, Russia’s oldest human­

rights organisation, which was at the time

being stormed by masked thugs. Dozens of

them,  accompanied  by  state  tv crews,

crashed  into  a  screening  of  “Mr  Jones”,  a

film by Agnieszka Holland, a Polish direc­

tor,  about  the  famine  Stalin  inflicted  on

Ukraine  in  the  early  1930s.  The  thugs

jumped  onto  the  stage  and  pumped  their

fists in the air, shouting “shame”, “fascists”

and something about Goebbels. When the

police  arrived,  they  used  a  pair  of  hand­

cuffs  to  lock  the  building’s  doors  closed,

sealing  the  staff  inside  until  the  small

hours of the morning. 

In  1987,  when  Memorial  was  set  up  to

document  Stalinist  repressions,  the  state

was  holding  about  200  prisoners  of  con­

science.  Today,  according  to  Memorial’s

count, Russia has at least 410 political pris­

oners. On the day the Michelin stars were

awarded, Vyacheslav Egorov, an activist in­

volved in protests against a landfill site in a

historic town near Moscow, was sentenced

to 15 months in prison. A few days earlier,

Sergei Zuev, the rector of the Moscow

School  of  Social  and  Economic  Sciences

(known as Shaninka), one of the country’s

leading independent universities, was tak­

en  to  a  prison  cell  from  his  hospital  bed;

the university faces closure. After being re­

leased  and  undergoing  cardiac  treatment

he was jailed again on November 9th. 

On October 27th Gleb Maryasov, a liber­

tarian  activist,  was  sent  to  a  penal  colony

for ten months for blocking roads during a

protest  in  January.  On  October  29th,  the

day on which the victims of Stalin’s repres­

sion are commemorated, four Crimean Ta­

tars  were  sentenced  to  12­17  years  in  jail.

Hardly a day goes by without someone be­

ing  fined,  sent  to  jail,  officially  deemed

“undesirable” or declared a “foreign agent”,

as  Memorial  has  been—a  distinction

which requires targeted organisations and

individuals  to  preface  every  public  utter­

ance,  in  capital  letters,  with  these  exact

words in Russian:

THIS  MESSAGE  (MATERIAL)  IS  CREATED

AND/OR  DISSEMINATED  BY  A  FOREIGN

MASS  MEDIA  PERFORMING  THE  FUNC­

TIONS OF A FOREIGN AGENT AND (OR) RUS­

SIAN  LEGAL  ENTITY  PERFORMING  THE

FUNCTION OF FOREIGN AGENT.

The increasing number of political pris­

oners—there  are  eight  times  as  many  as

there were six years ago, according to Me­

morial—is  not  a  return  to  Soviet  form,  as

the  high  life  which  surrounds  the  repres­

sion  bears  witness.  But  the  people  of

late­1930s Berlin would find the mixture of

the two quite familiar. 

MOSCOW

Vladimir Putin has shifted from autocracy to dictatorship

Manacled in Moscow

A 15-minute film, “How Putin is silencing his

opponents”, is available to readers at

economist.com/russia-film. A longer

version, “Fearless: The Women Fighting

Putin”, a co-production of The Economist

and Hardcash Productions for itv, is

available to readers in Britain at itv.com