Jaws won't unclench

A new case is being opened against Nikita Uvarov, who was preparing to be released in March. Prison won't let you go

A new criminal case is being opened against Nikita Uvarov, the main defendant in the case of Kan anarchist schoolchildren. As his mother Anna Uvarova told Novaya on February 17, she received a call from Krasnoyarsk pre-trial detention center-1 - Nikita is now there, transferred from IK-31 - and was told that a case was being opened about relations (connections) with an extremist organization. Neither an article of the Criminal Code, nor any specifics. They asked where lawyer Vladimir Vasin was (he defends Nikita) - “let him join in the case.” But Vasin is now on a business trip, not in Krasnoyarsk, his phone is not available.

At first, a lawyer by appointment spoke to Anna from the pre-trial detention center, but he, says Uvarova, was probably elderly, and she could not fully understand his speech (“Nikita could be heard in the background, they didn’t let me talk to him”), then the investigator took the phone and told her to notify the lawyer by agreement (Vasin).

Anna and Nikita signed up for a date and show back in January for February 19th. At the beginning of February, Nikita was placed in a punishment cell for 15 days, he managed to write to his mother that he would be released on the 18th, so the date should remain valid. On Monday, February 16, Anna called IK-31. They said: no, it won’t work. “And they have everything planned there until the end of the month. I called another number, they don’t give information over the phone, only by email. I wrote, I’m waiting.” And then the next day - a stunning call from the pre-trial detention center.

The fact that the term could be added upon expiration, as happens with other prisoners recognized by Memorial* as political (for posting leaflets in their support, 14-year-old Kane schoolchildren, in particular, were detained in the summer of 2020), it was clear, the tactics were known. Nikita Uvarov’s five-year term, according to FSIN documents, ended on March 19.

Now, probably, the guy - however, he is already 20 years old, grew up and came of age in prison - will not get out.

What was the reason for placing her son in a punishment cell, Anna does not know, but both herself and Nikita’s recently released comrades assumed that the system needed this in order to assign him administrative supervision upon leaving the colony for not three, but eight years (as a “malicious violator of the regime”). The Sovetsky District Court of Krasnoyarsk scheduled the hearing of the case on supervision for February 24. However, the “multi-move” of the operatives turned out to be more serious.

There is nothing to comment. Except, perhaps, for one thing - inspired by this, probably unintentional, combination of dates.

Nikita’s first sentence—five years—was pronounced on February 10, 2022, two weeks before the start of the SVO. Then they talked and wrote a lot about the Kan case, and countless respectable citizens, who learned to write and speak and have not stopped talking since then, talked all day and continued for some time: they didn’t give enough, they’ll count a day in a pre-trial detention center as two, he won’t mind at all, he’ll be released on parole before the end of the year... Got out?

No credits, no parole. Nikita refused to ask the president for a pardon. Although many people wrote to him about this, I will name only two names: Alexander Sokurov, Yuri Shevchuk. Nikita - according to the lawyer who came to see him then in the children's colony - read and listened to these letters and requests to him, he blushed - this is his peculiarity. And then he said no.

Efrosinia Kersnovskaya in 1943, when she was sentenced to death, and then, having been given a sheet of “good paper” and a pencil, was asked to write a request for pardon, she wrote with this pencil: “I can’t demand justice, I don’t want to ask for mercy.”

In general, a lot of people wrote to Nikita. The ice will melt, they wrote to him. Probably in every third or fourth letter: the night is darkest before the dawn. They wrote: you will leave much earlier.

When Nikita read this for the hundredth, 244th time - what was he thinking about?

Some saw him as a political fighter. For some, the main thing in his story was his tender age. For some, the most important thing was that this boy did not betray anyone and did not give up.

The sentence of the schoolboy Uvarov, which preceded the SVO, entered Russian history (among its other meanings) - as a preface. He discovered different levels and horizons of life here, humanity and cruelty, compassion and ruthlessness, than before. This was a landmark verdict, a milestone not only for Nikita and Anna, but for the country.

Then - on the 10th, and the 11th, and then another week and a half of 2022 - Russia, however, discussed not the Cana history, but the Kazan figure skater Kamila Valieva, the same age as the Cana guys, and her positive doping test at the Beijing Olympics, a “grand scandal” - that’s what they called it. The country called Russia’s humiliation not five years for the teenager Uvarov, but the uncertainty that arose around the sports career of the teenager Valieva.

And then the Northern War began, and the fate of peoples overshadowed the fate of the specific Nikita Uvarov.

Now they are also discussing figure skating, although much less so.

* Recognized as a “foreign agent” and liquidated.