Paul
Goble
Staunton, June 3 – Prior to the 1917
revolution, the Bolsheviks often referred to prisonsas “our universities,”
places where activists could grow in their revolutionary beliefs and become
more ready to act on being released. The
Putin regime appears to be following this tsarist tradition, with some it is
sentencing as “extremists” pledging to return as “real revolutionaries.”
This is a problem the Kremlin does
not appear to have anticipated when it began to charge people with “extremist”
crimes involving posts, reposts and likes on the Internet. On the one hand,
there aren’t enough prisons to hold all those who violate these rules. And on
the others, those few who are sentenced for such “crimes” are being radicalized
by the state.
One such Russian, 21-year-old Maksim
Komelitsky who has been sentenced to a strict regime camp for a year after
confessing to reposting photographs that prosecutors said were offensive to
believers tells Radio Liberty that he will return from that experience “a real
revolutionary,” something he was not before (svoboda.org/content/article/27772962.html).
Komelitsky
says he admitted to reposting the picture because he did although he doesn’t
consider what he did a crime. There are
many who do the same, and “there aren’t enough prisons in the country to hold
all those who have reposted it.” As for
the charges, he believes he was singled out because he is a member of PARNAS
and therefore “’the fifth column.’”
“The
present-day wild political system of Russia which is in no way different from
one of the European countries of the 1930s always needs an enemy” so that the
Kremlin can blame it for all of its shortcomings. It doesn’t matter much who – “fascists,
Banderites, Islamists, Americans, or extraterrestrials.” Any will justify
“tightening the screws.”
“Russia
for a long time already has not been a secular and is far from being a
democratic country,” Komelitsky continues. “What is taking place now in Russia
very much reminds one of one of the European nations which in the 1930s also
rose from its knees, talked about patriotism, burned books, and created an
analogue to our ‘Young Guard.’”
As for
the prosecutor’s suggestion that he was “a socially dangerous person” because
of his activism, the Russian activist says that “a procuracy which has Article
282 at its disposal is much more dangerous for society than I.” But it may be
that by its actions, the Russian state is making him more of a threat to
itself.
“After
the camps,” he says, he “plans to continue [his] activity” because “from the
camps [he] will return a real revolutionary, [and] for the state, the only
person more dangerous than a revolutionary is a revolutionary who has been in
prison. That is because one can frighten the first with jail and shut him up,
but that doesn’t work for the second.”
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