They came to the intensive care unit for Dmitri Kolker, a sick physicist. They came for Ivan Fedotov, a hockey star, as he left practice with a film crew in tow. They came for Vladimir Mau, a rector of the state university, the week he was reelected to Gazprom’s board.
The message of these high-profile detentions: Almost everyone is now punishable in Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia.
The spate of arrests across the country in recent days has hinted that the Kremlin plans to tighten the noose on Russian society even further. It appears to be a manifestation of President Putin’s statement in the early weeks of his war in Ukraine that Russia should purge itself of pro-Western ‘scum and traitors’, and it causes an undeniable chill.
“Every day feels like it could be the last,” Leonid Gozman, 71, a commentator who continues to speak out against Mr Putin and the war, said in a telephone interview from Moscow, acknowledging fears he too could be arrested. .
None of the targets of the recent crackdown were an outspoken Kremlin critic; many of Putin’s loudest opponents who chose to stay in Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, such as politicians Ilya Yashin and Vladimir Kara-Murza, were already in prison. But each of the recent repression targets represented an outward-looking Russia that Mr Putin increasingly describes as an existential threat. And the way they were taken into custody seemed meant to make waves.
Physicist Kolker went to hospital in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk last week for treatment for a late-stage cancer so weak he could not eat. The next day, agents from the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the successor to the KGB, charged him with treason and took him to a Moscow prison. He died in custody over the weekend.
“The FSB killed my father,” his son Maksim, 21, wrote on social media across capitals alongside an image of the three-line telegram the authorities had sent to notify the family of the death. “They didn’t even let our family say goodbye.”
Maksim Kolker, following in his father’s footsteps as a physicist in Novosibirsk, said Dmitri Kolker was known for hiring students to work in his lab, persuading some budding Russian scientists not to seek work abroad.
Now, he said in a telephone interview, the family must return Mr. Kolker’s body from Moscow at their own expense.
Understanding the war between Russia and Ukraine better
It was unclear why the FSB targeted Dmitri Kolker, 54, a specialist in quantum optics. State media reported that he was jailed on suspicion of passing secrets abroad. But critics of the Kremlin say it is part of a wider campaign by the FSB to tackle freedom of thought in academia. Another Novosibirsk physicist who was also arrested last week on suspicion of treason, Anatoly Maslov, remains in custody.
The arrests came at the same time as the arrest on charges of fraud of Mr Mau, a prominent Russian economist who heads a sprawling state university, the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration.
Mr Mau, 62, was in no way a public critic of the Kremlin. He had joined more than 300 senior academic officials in signing an open letter in March calling Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a “necessary decision,” and was re-elected to the board of Gazprom, the Russian energy giant, last week. But he also had a reputation as what scholars of Russian politics call a “systemic liberal,” one who worked within Mr Putin’s system to push it in a more open and pro-Western direction.
His ties to the Kremlin weren’t enough, it turned out, to save Mr Mau from a fraud case that had already entangled the rector of another leading university and which critics said was intended to settle remaining disagreements in Russian academia. to work.
“A great enemy of the government and the stability of the government are people of knowledge,” said Gozman, who worked with Mau in the 1990s as a government adviser. “Truth is an enemy here.”
Ekaterina Schulmann, a political scientist who taught at Mr Mau’s academy until April, called the institution “the educational center for most of the country’s civic bureaucracy” and described his arrest as Russia’s highest criminal prosecution since 2016. It indicated, she said. , that ideological purity became an increasingly important priority for the Russian authorities, especially in education.
“In education, it is important that a person actively professes and shares the values that he needs to implant in the minds of his students,” said Ms Schulmann, now a fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin. “Ambiguous loyalty should not be allowed here.”
Mr Putin has said so himself. In the March speech, in which he ranted against the traitors in central Russia, he called on those who physically live in Russia but live in the West “in their minds, in their servile consciousness”.
He also increasingly claims that truly patriotic Russians should be committed to living and working in Russia. He told an economic conference in St. Petersburg last month that “true, solid success and a sense of dignity and self-esteem only come when you tie your future and the future of your children to your motherland.”
In that context, the news that Mr. Fedotov, the goalkeeper of the Russian national hockey team with silver medal at the Beijing Olympics in February, signed a contract with the Philadelphia Flyers in May, was probably seen as a challenge.
Mr. Fedotov, 25, one of the rising stars of the hockey world, was planning to leave for the United States this month, according to Russian media reports.
Instead, on Friday, as he left a practice session in St. Petersburg, he was stopped by a group of men, some in masks and camouflage, and taken away in a van, according to a television reporter who was filming a special report about him and saw the incident.
Mr. Fedotov’s alleged crime, according to Russian news agencies: evasion from military service. Russian men under 27 must serve for one year, although sports stars can usually avoid conscription. On Monday, state news agency RIA Novosti reported that Fedotov had been taken to an undisclosed Russian Navy training base.
The extended detention was widely seen as punishment for choosing to play in the United States rather than stay in Russia. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they put him on a submarine and send him out to sea,” RIA Novosti quoted a Soviet sports veteran as saying. “After that, he’s not going anywhere.”
For Mr Gozman, the liberal commentator still in Moscow, a thread running through the recent arrests has been their seemingly needless brutality. In Mr Putin’s system, he said, such behavior is rewarded rather than censored by the state.
“The system is built in such a way that excessive brutality by an official is rarely punished,” said Mr Gozman. “But excessive softness can be. So any official is trying to show great toughness.”