Kremlin Spokesman Denies Russia Is Denying the Right to Expression
They really think that the average citizen is deaf, dumb, and blind
A man stood before St. Petersburg’s Kazan Cathedral on Nevsky Prospekt. He held one small sign that read: “To wish for peace is not a crime. I am against war.” He was arrested within 30 minutes. His crime: “Discrediting the Russian military and obstructing their offensive.”
Shortly after the law against discrediting Russia’s military was passed in March 2022, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that the legislation was a response to the “information war that was unleashed against our country.” “It was necessary to pass a law of appropriate severity,” he said (Ordinary Russians Suffer Wrath).
Let’s lend some context to the Kremlin spokesman’s words. Remember how I told you in previous articles that Russians think they are the most religious people in the world and that their form of worship is the best? The Kazan cathedral, seen above, had been turned into the official museum in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) for atheism.
The laws that the Kremlin passed last year and now use to stifle even the most minor expressions of disagreement with the war have been created to “protect Russians.” It is like parents covering their children’s ears when someone uses foul language — “ear muffs.” Once, the car stopped opposite a Drive-In when driving along in traffic as kids. The movie showed the naked breasts of a woman for nearly a minute. My mother yelled, “Kids, don’t look! Jerry (my father), do something!”
“We’re in traffic. What can I do? Kids, don’t look.”
We undoubtedly looked. Most minor expressions have been met with harsh penalties. Children being separated from parents — remember, Russia is a great place to raise a family and stands for traditional values and America’s right believes. A young girl changes prices in a store to show the statistics of war dead and gets sentenced to 15 years.
Russia is protecting the average Russian who pretends to be deaf, dumb, and blind. Russians must be this way lest they end up in prison for merely saying, “I am for peace.”
Last week, a concert in a rock club in St. Petersburg was interrupted when the lights went up, and police swarmed the club. The two musicians were arrested because their lyrics challenged the lies of the war. The concert-goers were forced to sit or lie on the cold floor for well over an hour while the police “figured things out (razobralis)” in Russian. This is a pretty unique word. It purposely sounds harmless and innocuous, but it is a very gentle way of saying “to f*** with people.”
The musicians have always been against Russia’s war and refused to perform concerts in Russian-occupied Crimea. They are supported by a group called “Zov naroda,” a play on the revolutionary movement Vladimir Lenin led famously known as “Zov Lenina.” Zov means the “call,” and “narod” means the people: The Call of the People.
Last month, Artyom Sakharov and some acquaintances organized a peace-themed poetry reading in front of a monument to Russia’s revered poet and playwright Alexander Pushkin in the Siberian city of Barnaul. Sakharov, 18, said he submitted an application to hold a cultural event in early October. “But because at the end of the event, I said the words ‘peace to the world,’ they credited me with organizing a rally and not an arts evening (Ordinary Russians Suffer Wrath).”
The young man was fined 75,000 rubles for two words in Russian: mir miru (peace to the world). Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, is correct, this repression is not limiting freedom of expression. It is gutting and destroying any right Russians formerly had to express even the slightest hint of disagreement.
The longer that these totalitarian laws against self-expression exist, the more damage they will do to the overall intellectual psyche of the Russian nation. The Soviet era crushed the average Russian’s ability to be confident in social interactions. Professionally, and this exists to this day, as I recently wrote in an article about quitting a Moscow-based project, Russians are incapable of making decisions. Working with them is very difficult and often counter-productive to the task. All of this dysfunction is due in part to the crushing of their individuality during Soviet times — and it’s again being reinforced.
Decades more will be lost.
Some, however, as we have seen by the arrests and fines, continue to fight back regardless of what they know will be certain arrest. These Russians are the country’s future. It will be these citizens, the ones slowly moving their hands away from their ears, eyes, and mouths, whose persistence will point out the hypocrisy, absurdity even, of the Kremlin’s repression.
Russia is screwed, but the longer the Kremlin oppresses, the less effective that oppression grows.
Mr. Kean, I enjoy what you write, and I read your writings on "The Lava Lamp". Contline please. You have many insights into the Russian psyche.