Russia’s Internet police: for that special individual attention
A blogger in one of Russia’s regions outside Moscow and St. Petersburg says he woke up recently to learn that he’d been labeled an extremist, says Ilya Shepelin in an article for Batenka.ru.
Shepelin tells the story of his friend, Vasily, who collects on his blog photographs with various absurd inscriptions, like “I’m smart and I’m a singer,” “Nastya is a man!” “The ladies are far from goats!” and so on. He’s collected more than 3,000 pictures, and two of these recently landed him in trouble with the law.
Shepelin says a police officer named Markov from the Center Against Extremism woke Vasily with a phone call to say that the authorities wanted to speak to him. When he came in for questioning, Vasily (who’s both a blogger and a deputy in the local youth parliament) learned that he’d been called in because of images he shared on VKontakte, Russia’s most popular social network.
Apparently Markov went through Vasily’s vast online photo archive and selected the two images he found that featured swastikas. The first was a picture of swastika drawn on a wall with the caption, “Adolf, wake up! The cops have gone f’ing nuts.” In the photo with the second swastika, the caption reads, “Nazis suck my pussy.” For publishing these photographs, Vasily was charged with illegally displaying in public “Nazi paraphernalia or symbols.”
“All alone! All by myself! I scrolled through every last photo on this old computer!” Markov told Vasily, explaining how he found the swastika photos. “I found your page [on VKontakte] and thought it looked curious. I scrolled and scrolled through all 3,000 photos! [...] Now tell me, why on Earth do you upload so many photos, eh?”
Vasily asked Markov if he studies other Internet users so intently.
“C’mon now. I take this interest in everyone,” Markov reportedly answered. “I’m conducting another five cases just like this.”
Before the interrogation got underway, Markov chatted with Vasily about the swastikas and “orange scourge” in Ukraine today. When it was his turn to speak, Vasily told the authorities that he only collects low-brow works of art, but this excuse wasn’t enough to spare him a fine of 1,000 rubles (about $20).
“Ah it’s just as I thought—you’re a decent guy!” the police officer said kindly to Vasily after his hearing, never dropping his smile. “Just don’t take this the wrong way. I’m a decent guy, too! But sometimes I’ve got to take action against people like you.”