You are making your daughter a monster who hates Russia

In order not to miss the main materials of "Cold", subscribe to our instagram and telegram .

The names and surnames of Kholod's interlocutors have been changed at their request.

"Flush your head with Western propaganda"

On February 2, 47-year-old Lyubov Lapshina from Krasnodar received a message: “Come on without your treacherous “Peace to the world!”. This already smacks of article 207.3 ( an article about “ fakes ” about the Russian army. - Approx. “ Cold ” ) ”. Correspondence was in the chat of the class where her daughter is studying. The message was written by Oksana Dementyeva: until recently, their daughters Ksyusha Lapshina and Vika Dementyeva sat at the same desk, and the women themselves were members of the parent committee. According to Lapshina, they became friends, drank tea and had picnics for the class.

Dementyeva wrote to Lapshina after she disagreed with her idea to give the boys socks with a military theme on February 23. “We [in the parent committee] decided that the girls themselves would choose what to give. Eighth grade - they are already independent! And instead Oksana went with our class teacher to the shopping center and bought khaki socks with a picture of a camouflage net on the packaging,” says Lapshina. - I wrote that against gifts with a military theme. There is already too much war around, at least let the children have a normal childhood.”

The call "Peace to the world!" Lapshina didn’t send it to the parent chat at all: she just put a picture with these words as a status in WhatsApp. Lapshina, according to her, deliberately avoided the topic of war in the parent chat. Only once, in December 2022, separately from everyone else, did she tell her friend from the parent committee that she did not support the war, when she invited her to participate in raising money for the Russian military.

After Dementieva hinted about the criminal article, she again turned to Lapshina: “A woman is an adult! Honey, just read the books! Limit yourself from Instagram and YouTube! <...> Rinse your head from Western propaganda. Ungrateful! The guys are risking their lives for you and your family.”

Dementieva did not stop there and sent voice messages to the chat, in which she demanded that Lapshina leave the parent committee, and said that she was going to talk with the class teacher and the headmaster about the fact that Ksyusha Lapshina did not attend “Conversations about the Important”, and skips the flag-raising ceremony. “You make a monster out of your daughter who hates Russia,” wrote Dementieva.

Ksyusha Lapshina really didn’t attend OBZH classes, where the teacher, in her words, retold stories from Russian television, and skipped “Talk about the Important”. She also defiantly wore a Pacific badge on her clothes, as did some of her other classmates. Her mother says that the class teacher pretended not to notice Ksyusha's absenteeism, and only "sometimes she could scold her, jokingly say:" Oh, you overslept again! But on February 6, Ksyusha was called to the head teacher and demanded to still attend these lessons.

Lapshina does not know for sure, but she suspects that the conversation with the head teacher took place after Dementieva's complaints about her family. A few days after the mothers' conflict, the class teacher seated Ksyusha and Vika, but the girls continued to communicate as if nothing had happened.

“There is no need for us, the Russian people, to threaten!”

This situation upset Lapshina very much, who, from the moment their children went to first grade, always communicated well with the mothers of Ksyusha's classmates and tried to participate in the discussion of school issues.

In total, there are eight mothers in the parent committee chat. Three sided with Dementieva, and one of them reacted sharply to Lapshina's suggestion to return to this conversation in a few years: “What is this, a threat? Lyuba, please do not use this chat for your propaganda. Remain with your opinion, but we, the Russian people, do not need to be threatened!” The rest either ignored the conversation altogether, or wrote words of support to Lapshina in private messages.

“I did not expect that my message about socks would cause such a reaction,” says Lapshina. - Of course, I answered Oksana, but I tried to do it as correctly as possible in order to extinguish this conflict. We have a woman in the chat, whose husband is fighting in Ukraine on the side of the Russian army, I knew that it was hard for her, and I did not want to offend and condemn her.

At some point, Lapshina wrote Dementieva a few questions in private messages. “Can you explain why this is all started? If to protect the Donbass, why did they go to Kyiv? Why didn't they take it in three days, as promised? What can you say about the fact that the entire civilized world has turned away from us, while North Korea, Iran and the underdeveloped countries of Africa have remained friends? Lapshina asked her friend. She did not expect to receive an answer and wrote to Dementieva, simply to have her "doubt the party line." But the next day, Lapshina received an 18-page document from her with answers to these questions.

Here are some of his theses:

• The West wants to dismember Russia, but it will not succeed, because the United States, as a country that builds itself on lies and hatred for others and creates coalitions of puppet governments around itself, has no future.
• Russia has many friends, and the most important of them are the fleet and the army (probably Dementieva quoted the expression "Russia has only two allies - its army and fleet", which is attributed to Alexander III) .
• Russians need to trust Putin and pray for him, not gossip. Russia is not fighting Kiev, because Ukraine is powerless and has no sovereignty - it is controlled by the "Washington regional committee".
• Russia is fighting the US and NATO on "primordially Russian soil."
• The war began due to the fact that 51 NATO countries crawled to the borders of Russia (this statement was sent by Dementieva to Lapshina not in a document, but separately - by voice message; in February 2023, NATO includes 30 countries) .

“Good luck and prudence to you, Lyuba! You will be ashamed of yourself when Russia wins and becomes just, strong and big again! You will see that many countries that now serve “Satan” will join us,” wrote Dementieva. She ended her address with the poem “I am Russian! Thank God!" Sergei Kargashin.

What is this poem anyway?

I am Russian! Thank God!

I am the field. Grandma's Cross.

I am from the huts of the Ryazan region.

I am blue. Supporting forest.

I am Russian! Up to the neck.

Forever and ever. Through.

I am a white feather swan.

I am a warrior of the fallen bone.

Whatever sorrows fall,

I wheeze in spite of all troubles:

I am Russian! Thank God!

I am Russian. I'm so lucky!..

Let the blades of time spin

I can't be taken away from me.

Russia is like a fortress over the abyss

It has stood and will stand!

"I'm not involved in this madhouse"

Conflicts over war don't just happen in PTA chats. Tatyana Sharipova, 50, from Korolyov, had to leave the chat room of her residential complex, in which she used to discuss domestic issues with her neighbors. With the start of the war, some, according to Sharipova, began to “openly zigger”, and one of them began to collect funds in the chat for “underpants, uniforms and trench candles” for Russian soldiers. “He made money transfers, sent reports and photos of checks to chat, sent videos with thanks from the front,” says Sharipova. Her neighbors silently participated in these gatherings, but did not comment on them in any way.

When a neighbor announced the next meeting in the chat in early autumn, Sharipova could not stand it. “I suggested that they create a separate group for these fees, and also gave figures on how much of the Russian budget is allocated to the army and, for comparison, how much is spent on education and healthcare. She wrote that many of the soldiers are mercenaries, so let them support themselves,” she says.

Sharipova says that some of the chat participants - military personnel and those who actively participated in the training camp - reacted aggressively to her message. The neighbor who organized these gatherings began to bully and ask her what she had against the war and the gatherings. “But I don’t get into skirmishes with morons,” says Tatyana. - I wrote that they are trying in vain to charge me with “discrediting” the army, since they themselves discredit it with their exactions. After that, I left the chat.

Sharipova does not care that she is now out of touch with the news of the complex. It is more important for her to realize that she "is not even indirectly involved in this madhouse."

A similar story happened with 31-year-old Ivan Astakhov from Mytishchi. In the first months of the war, he pasted anti-war posters in the entrance of his house with the inscription "On February 24, Putin and his army attacked Ukraine, he must be stopped." At the same time, his neighbors sent photos of children lined up in the shape of the letter Z, and excerpts from Gazmanov's song "Forward, Russia!" in the chat of tenants in whatsapp. According to Astakhov, "informal communication was always welcomed" there.

“[After these pictures] I couldn’t keep silent,” Astakhov says. - And he suggested dropping photos of people killed by our army in Ukraine into the chat. Thus, I wanted to let them know that not everyone agrees with this war and they will not be able to just share this abomination and joyfully clap their hands. A few minutes after sending this message, the administrator removed Astakhov from the chat, but he managed to read that one of the neighbors asked how he knew that the photos of dead people were not fake. Astakhov's wife remained in the chat and told her husband that after his removal, a big dispute ensued there: the neighbors spoke out both for the war and against it, and many subsequently left the chat altogether.

“I asked the administrator why he allows zigging people to speak out, and deletes those who disagree,” says Ivan. “They answered me: “You will discuss this at home in the kitchen,” and the conversation ended there.” Now Astakhov learns the news of his house from a telegram chat, where there are three times fewer people and where previously only the work of the management company and questions about garbage collection near the house were discussed.

However, a few months after the start of the war, this topic was raised there as well. At the end of September last year, the same girl who sent Gazmanov's songs to WhatsApp offered to raise money to help mobilized neighbors. But soon she left the chat, as no one supported her.

25-year-old Eva Cherkudinova from Moscow says that shortly before the New Year, a girl wrote to the residents’ chat room asking her neighbors not to throw away cans of peas, corn and beans. “The news came that our guys were sitting in the trenches, in the dark. There is a lot of wax, but there are not enough jars to make something like candles. Now everyone will have cooking, please save the jars, and in the first days of January I will come and pick them up, ”she wrote and sent a video of how her relatives make these candles.

Some residents reacted sharply to her request - they wrote that the military could not lack tin cans, since dry rations were filled with them, and suggested that the collected cans could be used by Ukrainians against Russian soldiers. Allegedly, it is easy to build “mini-bombs” from them.

“I wrote that this was stupidity and asked why we were discussing the needs of the “great” army in the house chat,” says Cherkudinova. - In response, they offered me not to live in Russia. They said that my words sound “ernily” and that I offended many by this.

One of the neighbors offered to send screenshots of the correspondence “where necessary” in order to stop criticism. Then Cherkudinova joked that instead of the barriers for which the chat was going, the neighbors would receive denunciations. “The conversation eventually ended with the administrator creating a poll on whether it is acceptable to discuss third-party questions in the chat at home, and deleting all correspondence along with the poll before the announcement of its results,” says Cherkudinova. “Nothing like that has been mentioned in the chat since.”

In February 2023, OVD-Info was aware of 139 defendants in criminal cases under the “fake” article and 49 defendants in criminal cases under the “discredit” article. By the end of last year, there were 180 cases under the “fake” article, according to the Prosecutor General’s Office. The number of administrative cases initiated under the “discredit” article, according to Mediazona , exceeds five thousand. Many defendants in these cases were prosecuted for posting anti-war posts on social media, some for posting in public chat rooms.

“Declaring a position in such a chat is now almost the same as going to a picket”

Lawyer and analyst at OVD-Info, Daria Korolenko, says it is difficult to assess the likelihood that a person who expressed an anti-war position in such a chat will be held accountable. “But we do know that out of 2,032 “defamation” decisions involving social media, 395 cases are for Telegram messages, 114 for WhatsApp messages, and 116 for Viber messages. That is, a significant part of these cases were brought against people who wrote about their anti-war position in chat rooms, ”says Korolenko. As a rule, people are harassed for messages sent to chats with a larger audience, where it is easier for employees of the counter-extremism department to reach. But human rights activists often come across references to parental and neighborly chats in court decisions in cases of “fake” and “discredit”.

For example, in May last year, the court found a resident of Tula Matveev (his name is not specified) guilty of an administrative violation. He called the symbolism Z and V "shameful" in the parent's WhatsApp chat. And in the Krasnogorsk city court of the Moscow region, the case of Kuznetsov (his name is also not indicated) was heard , who left a comment about the call for blood collection - probably by the Russian military - in a chat at home in the same messenger. The message found signs of humiliation of the Russian military and "discredit" of the armed forces.

“The percentage of denunciations, according to our observations, increased after the start of the war, because people heard a lot about the new laws,” says Korolenko. “People know that it is now possible to attract critics of the authorities, and they are increasingly calling the police. Moreover, the state is making a lot of efforts to divide society into those who support the war and those who are against it, and push them head-on, which affects the number of denunciations.”

However, similar conflicts in the chats of classes and houses happened even before the war. Just after the start of hostilities, the differences escalated. Psychologist Tatyana Orlova says that such conflicts often arise from nothing, simply because the current situation has emotionally affected so many people and divided society.

“Before the war, everyone had about the same idea of ​​what country we live in, what we like, what we don’t like. There were people with different views, but with common basic ideas about life, Orlova explains. - This picture of reality fell apart with the beginning of the war, which in one way or another touched each of us: people had to look for explanations for what was happening. Many have joined the socially acceptable picture of reality that propaganda has built for them. People who think differently are on the other side. This split is becoming more tangible every day and is found, including in such chats.

Orlova says that people who want to help others see reality behind the veil of propaganda need to engage in dialogue with them, but do it carefully. “First you need to weigh the degree of danger. It is important to understand that declaring one's position in such a chat is now almost the same as going to an anti-war picket, Orlova believes. - Despite this, I would still suggest that these conversations be conducted, but be prepared for the consequences. Also, I would advise not to consider people with the opposite attitude towards the war as impenetrable fools, to treat them with respect, try to make arguments that they share, and adhere to the basic principles of non-conflicting conversation.

What are the basic principles?

One of the creators of guide , psychologist Natasha Markovich, gives the following general principles of confidential conversation: the “Bridge” anti-propaganda

• Treat people with respect, even if their principles are very different from yours.
• Keep track of your condition. If the “bridge” is not being built, and emotions are running high, take a break. Do not start a conversation with those who are aggressive towards you.
• If you want to be heard, listen to the interlocutor and agree with him. This will create trust between you.
• Let your interlocutor make a mistake, but he does it out of good intentions. Most likely, he also wants peace, he is simply mistaken under the influence of propaganda.
• In dealing with people, try to rely on values ​​that they understand. For supporters of the war, as a rule, this is peace, homeland, spirituality, family.
• Changing your point of view is difficult, long, unpleasant. Do not rush, the interlocutor will need a lot of time for this. Move forward in small steps.

Also remember that you won't be able to convince everyone - and that's okay.

Orlova also advises transferring conversations to personal correspondence, and not to conduct them in general chats. People, as a rule, find it more difficult to share their feelings and fears in public, while in private communication it is easier to achieve openness from them.