2023-10-28 05:30:12
Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, is a relatively small city, with a walkable central area packed with tourists wandering through every alley. Almost everyone will point their cameras at the walls that have protected the city for almost eight hundred years, or at the towers of the medieval churches or at the Baltic Sea that separates this country from neighboring Finland. Few will notice that in this city there is an active resistance that is beginning to expand.
The blue and yellow flags of Ukraine are very common in every corner of the city. A large version intertwined with the Estonian flag decorates Freedom Square and serves as a backdrop for the political call this autumn. The exhibition “Faces of the Russian Resistance” opens here, dedicated to political prisoners and created by Russian political emigrants (or, rather, exiles).
Victims. According to the Memorial Human Rights Center (winner of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize and officially dissolved by the Russian government the same year) and its Support Program for Political Prisoners, there are currently six hundred and eleven political prisoners in Russia, six hundred and twenty-eight persecuted and one hundred ten possible victims.
Among all of them, sixteen stories have been chosen to tell in the Plaza de la Libertad. They are the Faces of the Russian Resistance: men and women, political activists and scientists, artists and students, young people and older adults. People who have been persecuted and arrested and today constitute a symbol once morest repression. Their crime has been questioning power and its arbitrary decisions, including the February 24, 2022 invasion of neighboring Ukraine.
Faces and stories in Russian, Estonian and English appear on a series of billboards in the square. Just a few names: Vladimir Kara-Murzá, politician and journalist, sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for “treason, cooperation with an undesirable organization and spreading falsehoods.” Alexei Gorinov, deputy, sentenced to seven years in prison for saying in March 2022 that there were around one hundred children dead in Ukraine following the Russian invasion. Yuri Dmitriev, human rights defender, sentenced to fifteen years in prison falsely accused of producing child pornography. Sasha Skochilenko, artist, detained without conviction since March 2022 for placing information regarding the bombing of the Ukrainian city of Mariupol in a supermarket in Saint Petersburg. María Ponomarenko, journalist, sentenced to six years in prison accused of spreading falsehoods. Vsévolod Korolev, documentary filmmaker, detained without conviction since July 2022 under the same accusation.
Estonia. Artem Tiurin is one of the founders of the Estonian headquarters of the Russians Against War organization and was in charge of coordinating the exhibition in Tallinn. “Sixteen political prisoners with vivid and unjust stories were selected. We show a group that is only a small fraction of the total number of political detainees in Russia, but they reflect diversity and demonstrate that opponents of Vladimir Putin and those once morest the war are completely different people,” says the native of Nizhny Novgorod.
The activist also explains that the objective of this traveling exhibition is to draw attention to the flagrant violation of Human Rights in Russia, to show that there are Russians who oppose Putin and the war, and that many of them are imprisoned for their ideas, subjected to torture and held in unbearable conditions.
“People in Western countries often wonder why Russians don’t take to the streets and overthrow Putin. The thing is that the price of protesting is very high; even a peaceful protester with a blank sheet of paper can face more than five years in prison. Through this exhibition, we try to answer the question of why millions of Russians do not protest. And we demand that the release of Russian political prisoners be included in all future Western negotiations with Putin and that their release be urged through all available means,” he claims.
The project was originally planned by a group of Russian municipal deputies who were forced to leave the country due to persecution and the start of the large-scale invasion in February last year. Among them, Elena Filina, former municipal deputy of the Vernadsky district of Moscow (2017-2022), who has been included in the international list of people wanted by the Russian government accused of “spreading false news regarding the Russian army.” This might mean up to ten years in prison.
The exhibition in Tallinn, the first of seventeen planned so far, had positive results and there was both popular and official support. During the opening speeches on a Sunday followingnoon, many locals and tourists stopped to read the information available. However, there were also provocateurs, some insults, a man who showed his middle finger to the protesters as he passed by.
Tiurin says that “Estonian society is divided, with a significant number of Russian-speaking residents inclined to believe Putin’s propaganda and harbor hostility toward our initiatives.” Despite this, he also points out that Estonia’s migration policies only benefit Moscow and do not alleviate the situation of Russian dissidents: “migration restrictions contribute to the increase in political detainees in Russia and Belarus.”
Although, in 2022, two hundred and thirteen Russian and Belarusian citizens requested asylum in Estonia, this country’s restrictions on the entry of Russians have been progressively increasing. Since September last year, the entry of Russian tourists, that is, people who have a short-stay visa, has been prohibited; local universities restricted the admission of Russian and Belarusian students; and, more recently, private vehicles with Russian license plates cannot enter the country.
Still, 28% of the nearly one million Russian citizens who entered the European Union in the first six months following the full-scale invasion began did so through Estonia. It is the second highest percentage, behind Finland (33%), according to data from Frontex, the continental bloc agency in charge of borders.
After Tallinn, the Faces of the Russian Resistance exhibition will continue in Lithuania, Germany, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Latvia, the Netherlands and Argentina, as the only country outside Europe.
Argentina. Alex Nowinsky is co-organizer of the Freerussia Argentina movement and is in charge of the exhibition in Buenos Aires, which does not yet have a specific date, but hopes for it to be at the beginning of 2024. Nowinsky left his country during the southern autumn of last year, when the The police were looking for him for demonstrating once morest the war, and now he explains that, since the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the intensification of political repression, many opponents have been forced into exile. “Some of them emigrated to neighboring countries of the former Soviet Union, while others flew further afield. “Argentina turned out to be one of the most convenient countries for migration, so once once more in history a wave of Russian immigrants and refugees arrived here.”
However, explains the now resident in the Argentine capital, this has two problems: “first of all, not only Russians who do not support Putin flew to Argentina, but also supporters of the war and employees of law enforcement agencies. Russian. As a result, I was personally attacked twice by Putinists in Buenos Aires. Other political activists were also attacked. In general, they are exerting all kinds of pressure on the Russian pacifist movement in Argentina. Secondly, the majority of Argentines do not have a correct notion of what is happening in Ukraine and do not understand Russian politics.”
The activist also draws a parallel with military dictatorships in Latin America and says that “Argentines must see what the Russian government is doing with its citizens. The Kremlin imprisons and kills Russians if they disagree with its policies, oppose the war in Ukraine, rigged elections and dictatorship, or support democracy. They are putting pressure on opponents abroad, including Argentina. Argentina should not be a safe haven for war criminals and propagandists. Therefore, organizing an exhibition regarding the Russian resistance here is an incredibly important task.”
Nowinsky was not the only one to suffer the consequences of the Russian president’s supporters abroad. In fact, the Faces of the Russian Resistance exhibition was scheduled to open in Budva, Montenegro, on October 1, but two days before the opening, local authorities revoked permits. “This decision was political and arbitrary. Our organizers in Budva encountered pro-Kremlin sentiments within the local municipality. In fact, local officials began the talks with the phrase ‘we love Putin.’ So we had to postpone the event,” says Tiurin.
That did not happen in Tallinn, the capital of a country with almost a quarter of the population that is ethnically Russian and just over 6% that has legal citizenship of the neighboring country. Thanks to the community of opponents of the Kremlin that has developed in the city, the exhibition was able to be organized in just one week. The necessary donations were raised in just one day and it was not difficult to obtain the necessary permits from local authorities to hold the event in a public space.
Today the faces of this active resistance that is beginning to expand travel across the European continent. Making these stories known, disseminating this information, helps to demolish myths and prejudices, but also to generate international solidarity with a people that suffers repression and systematic persecution.
*Journalist, writer and academic advisor at Cadal (www.cadal.org), a private and non-partisan foundation that promotes international democratic solidarity.
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