Refusal to cooperate with the FSB and pictures with Putin: the story of a couple who asked for refuge in Georgia

A young married couple from the Krasnodar Territory submitted documents for asylum in Georgia. Now they have passed several interviews in the migration service. Young people are sure that in case of returning to Russia, criminal cases and prison imprisonment await them. Why did the journalist of the municipal newspaper and her spouse-loser could get into the field of view of the regional FSB and the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Sofya Rusova sighed.

Refusal to cooperate with the FSB

“I am Kristina Polopep, and I am afraid to return to Russia,” with such words an appeal to the Georgian authorities begins with a request for the refuge of a 32-year-old journalist from Tuapse. Now, together with her husband Denis, they live in the Georgian refugee center. Kristina decided to leave the country spontaneously - after she found out that her publications on the VKontakte social network were checked for “extremism” and “insulting the feelings of believers”.

Christina never wanted to engage in politics, did not join political parties and only allowed herself to have an opinion on a number of issues: about religion, environmental problems and foreign policy of Russia. If she participated in rallies, then mostly environmental, like many residents of Tuapse, who went out to protest against the construction of the Eurochemian terminal.

Back in 2014, Kristina, an FSB officer, called Denis, called Denis and invited him to a conversation. “For about two hours, he asked me about the people with whom I communicate, at the same time asked personal questions: what I believe in, what organizations I visit and why,” she says.

“I am a very curious person, I am actively interested in the religions of the world and communicated at that time with representatives of various faiths-Hinduists (yogis), Muslims, Christians and pagans from our region. Data on people who profess religions different from Orthodoxy, the FSB officer Denis were very interested in. He invited me to cooperate with the FSB on the theme of “sect”. I refused. Denis recorded my data, suggested being in touch and report, “if I suddenly learn something new”. He told me that people in Russia should be believers, while best of all Orthodox, this is a “state and most correct religion”. The FSBshnik asked questions about my political position, to which I replied that I was not interested in politics in principle. ”

Here, as in a famous statement, if you are not interested in politics, she will be interested in you. About a month after the first informal meeting, the FSB representative came to the editorial office of the Chernomorye Today publication, where Christina worked, and tried to make contact with her colleagues.

"Chernomorye today"

In 2012, Kristina Polopep began officially working in the editorial office of the municipal newspaper Chernomorye Today. The editorial policy of the federal media has changed a lot after the start of the military conflict of Russia and Ukraine. This was also affected by a small newspaper in Tuapse. Publicly criticizing the president’s foreign policy on social networks, on city Internet forums and in conversations with friends, Christina caused close attention to herself from the editorial office and came into the view of the Tuapse special services again.

Polopep says:

I was not indifferent to this, since I believed that these actions of Russia are vile and unfair to Ukraine. Moreover, I had friends from Ukraine who wrote to me in social networks about the real state of affairs there, about the presence of Russian troops in the Crimea, in the Donbass, and about the lawlessness they created, while President Putin denied this fact. I published posts on my VKontakte page, where Putin compared with Hitler.

At work in the editorial office of the newspaper Chernomorye today, they knew about Christina's position about hostilities in Ukraine. When she said in direct text that it was annexation, editor Alexei Chamchev replied: “What are you doing here then? Leave the country. " According to Christina, it became psychologically more complicated to work. The publication has many custom -made articles, the purpose of which was to denigrate specific people, as well as publications in which hatred for Ukrainians openly sowed and representatives of the Russian authorities were praised. Christina refused to work on such materials and wrote mainly about daily news, cultural and religious events.

Devastated Tuapse

Christina published articles on the environmental condition of Tuapse on the Prose.ru website and on VKontakte in 2015 - under the pseudonym. The journalist wrote about the work of harmful enterprises, an increase in the number of oncological diseases, an increased level of unemployment and silence of these problems from the administration.

“I asked, at press conferences, rectilinear and harsh questions to district ecologists, who claimed that all indicators are normal. And the chief about this, of course, knew. When I arrived in Tuapse to study, and it was in 2001, the city was still beautiful and blooming. A lot of tourists came here. Gradually, the industrial zone expanded so much that it literally ate all the beauty of these places. Ugly tanks with oil, industrial structures, children, evaporation and chemical dust from factories, oil waste pouring into the river and the sea - all this disfigured and poisoned my beloved city. You can talk about the harm to local residents for a long time. ”

Dismissal from the editorial office

There were no formal reasons to dismiss Kristina in the editorial office, but immediately after the New Year holidays of 2016 she was strongly offered to leave work “of her own free will”.

The reason for the supposedly was a playful artistic photo shoot, for which Kristina and her husband chose the image of satanist metallists and in black leather clothes were photographed against the background of an inverted pentagram. “In a private conversation, the editor told me that the main reason was different: he had long been advised“ from above ”, from the administration of the municipality, to get rid of such a politically unreliable employee,” says Christina.

Krasnodar period

Having moved after dismissal with her husband to Krasnodar, Kristina thought that there would be no problems in a big city with work. At first, she was looking for her in journalism - she went through dozens of interviews and performed various tasks, but all the time she received refusals.

Having decided to “write for yourself”, and to earn a living somehow differently, Kristina got a job as a seller in a chain store of tobacco products. However, soon the owner called the anonym and said that Christina was an “extremist organization”. She was fired.

In February 2018, police officers began to call the relatives of Christina and Denis and demanded that they give them the exact address of the couple.

“On February 14, police officers came to Denis. They called me, my husband called, I arrived. They did not give us the summons, did not explain anything and said that we would have to go with the police to the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in the Krasnodar Territory. The captain of the Ministry of Internal Affairs Denis Polyantsev assured us both that “it's okay”, that he just needed “some information” from us. Polyantsev joked at the same time that I could “be the glory of Nadezhda Tolokonnikova”, referring to my amateur punk rock group “Partisans of the Torn Tower” , which I founded in 2012. According to Polyantsev, “suspicions of extremism” caused her, ”says Christina.

The couple was taken to the department to counteract extremism, where they offered to talk about the posts that Christina posted three years ago on the page that had already been deleted by then. Among other posts there was a demotivator where Putin was compared with Hitler and analogy between the annexation of the fascist Germany of the Sudeten region of Czechoslovakia in 1938 and the accession of Crimea in 2014 in 2014. Questions were asked about posts with criticism of the Russian Orthodox Church - for example, about the demotivator, on which the priest of the Satan rocket.

“For me, these posts and pictures were rather a political satire, a reaction of an indifferent person to what was happening in the country. I did not want to offend anyone. Nevertheless, experts of the Ministry of Internal Affairs considered that I incurred hatred of the president, Russian patriots and Orthodox believers with such pictures. I was demonstrated a weighty folder with the screenshots of my posts of different years and with expert conclusions on them, which they did not give me to read, ”says Christina.

The police officers also aroused suspicions of Christina’s photo with a skull to the cemetery - an amateur photo shoot in the Gothic style, which she also posted on her page on VKontakte. Denis Polyantsev told Christine that experts who studied content decided that this was a real skull of a person. But the album with these photos was signed, and it clearly indicates that this skull is a dummy. More precisely, a piggy bank that was bought for 500 rubles in a souvenir shop in the station market in Tuapse.

According to Kristina, the Intercessor Polyantsev during a conversation with her constantly put pressure, gave facts from her life and the life of relatives, emphasized that he knew everything about them.

“Alas, both I and my husband, we were so bewildered that we went to this meeting without lawyers. We did not realize what was happening from a legal point of view, did not demand the agenda, did not take copies of examinations, nor our testimonies - in general, we had no written evidence of what happened in our hands. However, the police in Russia acts so often, realizing that most people are legally illiterate and are confused in a similar situation. Yes, and we did not have money for a lawyer and the amount that he requested. ”

Almost a month later, the investigator of Polyantsev called Christina and said that the materials about her publications on VKontakte were handed over to Tuapse and she needed to go to the investigator on March 20, 2018, where the agenda will be awarded. The girl realized that if she signed the agenda, she would also be awarded a non -departure and most likely, they would be accused at once by several articles, including “extremism”.

On the day of the next elections of the President of Russia, Christina left. Soon after this, to her husband, Denis Podpop, who continued to work in Krasnodar, Polyantsev called. He said that if Polopep does not reveal the place of his wife’s stay, he will be accused of “hiding the offender”. A few days later Denis also left Russia.

Arriving in Georgia, Christina and Denis submitted documents for the provision of asylum. Now they have already been conducting a second interview with them.