"Airsoft". Penza terrorism case

On January 23, anti-fascist and programmer Viktor Filinkov disappeared in St. Petersburg. Two days later he was found - the press service of the St. Petersburg courts wrote that he was arrested and pleaded guilty to participating in a terrorist community, whose members “share anarchist ideology.” A day later, members of the Public Monitoring Commission came to see him in the pre-trial detention center; Filinkov told them that he had been tortured . On January 25, St. Petersburg resident Igor Shishkin disappeared - he went for a walk with his dog. The dog returned home not alone, but with the security forces, who conducted a search. The Dzerzhinsky court in St. Petersburg arrested Shishkin on the same charges as Filinkov. Journalists were not allowed into the meeting. Investigative actions in St. Petersburg were authorized by one of the district courts of Penza.

What connects Penza and St. Petersburg ?

On December 11, 2017, OVD-Info published a large report on persecution in connection with the “Maltsev revolution” on November 5. There, in particular, a criminal case about a terrorist community in Penza was mentioned. Then we wrote that there were five people involved in the case and two of them were anarchists. This is not entirely true. There are six accused in this case, and some of them are anti-fascists. One of them, Arman Sagynbaev, lived in St. Petersburg before his arrest. According to Fontanka, in the materials submitted by the investigation to the court on the selection of a preventive measure for Shishkin, there is a protocol of interrogation of Sagynbaev.

On October 17 or 18, the first person involved in the case, Yegor Zorin, was arrested in Penza. Next, Ilya Shakursky and his friend Vasily Kuksov were detained. On October 27, Dmitry Pchelintsev was detained. Then, in early November, Andrei Chernov was detained in Penza, and Sagynbaev was detained in St. Petersburg, who was taken to Penza and placed in an isolation ward. According to investigators, they were all members of the terrorist group “5.11,” which was preparing for the outbreak of unrest in the country. Now there are five people left in the pre-trial detention center, the sixth is under house arrest. The defendants in the case reported psychological pressure, electric shock torture, “hanging upside down” and weapons that FSB officers planted on them.

In airsoft, unlike paintball, there are no ratings, because the players themselves are responsible for following the rules. The player who was hit must acknowledge the hit and immediately put on a clearly visible red bandage, indicating his death (or injury) in the game, and proceed to the place designated as a cemetery (or infirmary). Accordingly, the game is not played for winning, but for fairness and for fun. It is not customary to argue about who died and who did not - those who sort things out among themselves during the game are removed until the end of the game session.

The weapon used is “soft pneumatics” with plastic bullets with a diameter of 6 or less often 8 mm. The bullet flies out under the influence of either compressed air or a gas mixture. Such a weapon is called a “drive”. Most often, the “drive” is powered by an electric motor with a battery, but there are mechanisms that use human muscle power or gas.

“There is no doubt, terrorism is bad,” Kuksov’s lawyer Alexander Fedulov says about the case. - But you punish those who really have something to do with this, not everyone. I also played airsoft before. Just to rest my head. I also have a “drive” at home. You don't need any permission for it. I also shot at targets in the park in the evenings. Well, Vasya went to play war games. I fired twice from the “drive”... During the extension (of the arrest - OVD-Info ), I pushed the speech for 20 minutes, and not a single word was included in the resolution. The investigator reads out the petition: “They were engaged in illegally mastering the skills of survival in the forest and first aid.” Where is the legality of these skills described?! And you understand, the judge sits and nods. “They were going to blow up the offices of United Russia and the post office...” - nonsense.

When Kuksov's wife Elena came home from work on October 19, she realized that Vasily was still not there, although he should have returned earlier. She started calling him on his mobile phone; it was ringing, but her husband didn’t pick up. A few hours later, Elena heard someone trying to open the apartment door with a key. Looking through the peephole, she saw about ten men unfamiliar to her, one of whom was holding her husband by the neck - Vasily could barely stand on his feet. The men said they came from the FSB.

Kuksov’s pants and jacket were torn and stained with blood, his forehead and nose were broken, as if he had been hit on the asphalt. According to Elena, the search was superficial. Then Vasily was asked if he had a car. FSB officers brought Kuksov and his wife to the car and ordered him to open the door. Approaching the car, Kuksov exclaimed that the door lock was broken. To this, one of the FSB officers rudely asked: “What do you want to say?” Security forces searched the car and allegedly found a pistol in it. Kuksov, who had been calm before, began shouting that the weapon had been planted on him.

On the same day, Ilya Shakursky was detained. At first he was suspected of “organizing” the group, but then the article was changed to “participation.” Shakursky organized lectures, park cleanups as part of environmental initiatives, and organized animal protection events. He was quite a prominent figure in the local leftist movement.

His friend says that while still at school, Shakursky once gathered his classmates and went with them to clean the Moksha River. Previously, such an idea had never occurred to anyone, but Ilya did. After some time, members of the Mokshan city administration and police arrived at the school. They organized a special class hour for schoolchildren, during which they told them that Ilya was a Nazi, and his peers needed to stop communicating with him. Shakursky and his friends always laughed at this story.

At the trial to extend the preventive measure on December 14, Shakursky, for some reason, sat in the hall, and not in the cage, together with Sagynbaev and Pchelintsev. Perhaps the investigator did not want Shakursky to communicate with other defendants. They had a general meeting. Shakursky looked very depressed and sat with his hood pulled over his head. His mother was next to him, she hugged him all the time. She asked her son something , he answered in monosyllables. The longest thing he said to his mother was about the New Year: “Mom, be sure to decorate the Christmas tree.”

According to Fedulov, Shakursky confessed. In general , everyone confessed, except Kuksov, who refused to answer questions, using Article 51 of the Constitution. Some time ago, Shakursky and Pchelintsev were friends, trained and played sports together, played airsoft. But they haven't seen each other for the past few months.

Dmitry Pchelintsev to his wife :

…it’s mean to treat people like that. You are suspected and accused of something , but have not yet been proven - you are not guilty. So why am I in such filthy conditions, THAT THIS doubles the punishment for what I essentially didn’t do.

Angelina Pchelintseva to her husband:

I don’t care about birthdays, New Year, other holidays and all the difficulties that happen to me. Only you are important. If I could, I would be by your side and get through it all. But I know that at a minimum you are against it, and at a maximum it is impossible. I will do everything in my power to help you, but just don’t worry about me, believe me, I can handle it.

Before his arrest, Pchelintsev worked as a shooting instructor. He received his specialty while undergoing military service at the training center of the Penza Artillery Engineering Institute. On October 27, Pchelintsev left the house early in the morning to meet his grandmother. His wife Angelina was still sleeping when her husband returned to the apartment already in handcuffs and with FSB officers. According to her, during the search, law enforcement officers turned the apartment upside down, eventually confiscating personal phones and other electronic media, as well as registered weapons - two hunting rifles and two traumatic pistols. Then we went to the car - Pchelintsev’s car was broken, he recently had difficulty driving it to the house. The alarm didn't work. As Pchelintseva says, FSB officers went to search the car and at a time when no one saw them, they found two grenades under the back seat. Pchelintsev said: “The car doesn’t have an alarm, you guys are great,” implying that the grenades were planted on him.

On the same day, Angelina received a call and was summoned to the FSB - allegedly her husband wanted her to be present at his interrogation. Arriving at the FSB, Pchelintseva realized that there was no interrogation. She was met by two secret service officers. According to the girl, during the conversation, one of them, meaningfully playing with an awl in his hand, began to threaten her with life imprisonment for her husband. The FSB officer said that “you just need to shoot someone in the leg” so that Pchelintsev would stop refusing to testify under Article 51 of the Constitution.

“The most moronic thing is a terrorist organization that has not committed a single terrorist act and did not plan,” says Pchelintseva. “That is, in court you can’t even say that they planned to do this on such and such a date.” This cannot be said because they did not plan anything at all. All they did was learn how to provide medical care in the field, how to survive in the forest, is that illegal?

A few days later in the pre-trial detention center, Pchelintsev announced that he was going to admit guilt. This shocked his relatives, who were confident of Dmitry’s innocence. To pay for the lawyer’s work, the relatives took out a bank loan - lawyer Alexei Agafonov asked for 150 thousand rubles in advance. But, according to Dmitry’s relatives, despite this money, he did not really listen to the needs of his client. Agafonov regularly came to the pre-trial detention center and showed Pchelintsev where to sign the papers brought by the investigator. As Pchelintsev said in letters, the lawyer could, having agreed to meet with Dmitry before the investigator arrived on Monday, come together with the FSB officer on Tuesday. In response to Pchelintsev’s bewilderment, Agafonov replied: “Well, I’ve come.”

Dmitry Pchelintsev to his wife:

Not fair. Not fair. Wrong. Pointless. All the paths of my life led only to one thing. You, grandmother, sister, parents, there are a lot of people who know that I am a good person. But why then doesn’t everything that happens to me give a damn? I don’t care about a whole safe person with his joys and troubles, thoughts and experiences. What will this bring to me and all my loved ones besides injury? It doesn't even make me angry, it upsets me like nothing. This is not an accident, not a coincidence. It's just someone's unfair will. The most meaningless Saturday. At least I stood in the shower. I shaved my beard. I don't want to be like who they think I am. What am I wrong about, Angelin?

Angelina Pchelintseva to her husband:

I believe you, as do your whole family, your friends. Everyone is very worried about you and understands what is happening. This is obvious to us. For the first month I tried to understand why it was possible to treat a person THIS way, but later I stopped looking for meaning. This is a merciless steamroller that doesn’t care who it crushes.

Once Agafonov met with Pchelintseva and asked if her husband suffered from “fantasies.” Angelina replied that the situation was probably not very suitable for fantasies. It turned out that Dmitry told his lawyer that FSB officers came to see him every day and took him to other cells for “interrogations.” According to the lawyer, this simply cannot happen in a pre-trial detention center - such things are prohibited there.

At first, Angelina did not receive letters from her husband, although later he told her that he wrote to her almost every day. Then she found a thick envelope in the mailbox, stuffed to capacity with all her husband's letters for the month. Then it turned out that Dmitry had been complaining about Agafonov almost from the very beginning. According to Angelina, the fact that his own lawyer did not believe him literally “finished off” her husband. At the same time, he was sitting in solitary confinement, in maximum isolation from everyone, and the lawyer was generally the only person he could trust.

“Given the relationship between law enforcement agencies and the courts in our city, they will be convicted with the minimum amount of evidence,” says lawyer Fedulov. — Because this is the first such case in the region, and everyone is interested, such a stick: can you imagine, the terrorists were caught. Those who ran through the forest with wooden sticks and pine branches. Vasya told me: “I know, Sash, what I was afraid of - that someone would actually see that I was running through the forests playing war games. I would have sunk into the ground out of shame.” A change in the constitutional system on the territory of something ... On the territory of the village of “Shalusheiki,” perhaps, they could change the system with their “drives”?

One day Pchelintseva received a letter from Dmitry on a piece of paper torn unevenly from a notebook. At the beginning it said something about the husband reading books of 800 pages and that he loves his wife. But these inscriptions were crossed out, and at the end, in very uneven handwriting, Dmitry wrote: “Don’t write to me, don’t bring me anything, go as far as possible, don’t ask about me, it’s all over with me.” In the same letter, Pchelintsev reported that he was being injected with “tranquilizers” and given pills - and this was “worse than death.” The wife thought that Dmitry was not himself, and wrote him a response:

“I took the piece of paper and with trembling hands wrote that everything would be fine. I realized that although not much time had passed for us, it was much more for him. Then his father told Agafonov to take as much as he saw fit from the already paid advance and return the rest. And we found a new lawyer."

After Pchelintsev was charged on December 1, Angelina and Dmitry were able to see each other and talk. Dmitry said he asked to meet his wife “to say goodbye.” According to Pchelintsev, he was tortured every day - they hung him upside down, connected the current to different parts of his body. He was afraid that he might be killed by faking suicide. He said that the body might not be able to withstand the torture: “I’m afraid that my heart won’t stand it and I won’t get out of here alive. This is hell." Pchelintsev asked his wife to tell the investigator that he was saying goodbye to her, then perhaps they wouldn’t come to him that day. According to Angelina, she was determined in advance that she would not cry in front of the FSB agents, so she held on and tried to cheer up her husband. She persuaded him not to despair and to wait until the new lawyer came up with something .

After the husband was taken away, the investigator asked Angelina what they were talking about. Pchelintseva replied: “Stop killing Dima.”

Dmitry Pchelintsev to his wife:

I wouldn't mind colonizing Mars. Better yet , something even further away. So that if something happens, these earthlings will not be able to quickly reach us. I probably don’t need anything in the next program. No Cheetos, no Snickers. So don't go yet. I'll write if anything happens. Overall, I'm holding out. I’m figuring out how we’ll live.

Angelina Pchelintseva to her husband:

I will make an agreement with Elon Musk, we will fly away from here and never return to this planet. Let's wait while they build the ship, okay?

Arman Sagynbaev, who was arrested later than the majority of the defendants, has serious health problems and requires constant medical care. When the preventive measure was extended in mid-December, he said that he was constantly vomiting and feeling sick.

Zorin is Shakursky’s classmate; they studied together at Penza State University to become physics teachers. Zorin was detained first, and he was the first to testify. According to relatives of other defendants, he gave “the wildest” testimony. Zorin celebrated the New Year almost free - he was released from pre-trial detention center under house arrest.

According to investigators, the group “5.11” was created allegedly with the aim of preparing a revolutionary coup and overthrowing the government through terrorist activities. In addition to it, other similar groups allegedly operated on Russian territory, which were all part of a single organization with similar goals and methods. Investigators believe that the participants of “5.11” used conspiracy methods, and clear roles were distributed between them. The group allegedly included, for example, a sapper and a signalman. In this context, according to investigators, airsoft games were preparation for terror.

At the same time, at the moment , there is no noticeable procedural or factual connection between the cases initiated in the wake of the “Maltsev revolution” and the Penza terrorism case, except for the numbers 5 and 11 in the name of the “terrorist community.”

Dmitry Pchelintsev to his wife:

The light is on 24 hours a day. If they don’t release him as innocent, they will release him because he has developed Alzheimer’s. The humidity is such that they will let you go because of tuberculosis, and it is so dirty that they will let you go because of hepatitis. And I smoke so much that they will let me go because of cancer. And you give me so much chocolate that they will release it due to diabetes. Just kidding of course. Nobody will let me go.

* The material uses correspondence between Dmitry and Angelina Pchelintsev, as well as a drawing from Dmitry’s letter to his wife

*The text has been corrected: the editors of OVD-Info cannot state with certainty that all those accused in the described criminal case identify themselves as “anti-fascists.”

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