Troubling Signs

Troubling reports are reaching us about a new escalation against political activists and, more broadly, people with an active civic position. It seems that for the authorities, simply sending a person to prison for many years is no longer enough — a sentence can now be extended even while that person is already behind bars.

Dmitry Lyamin’s story began with an anti-war protest. In March 2022, he attempted to set fire to a window of the military enlistment office in Shuya. The window frame was scorched, and no one was injured. The case was initially classified as property damage, but was later reclassified as a terrorist act. In 2023, Lyamin was sentenced to 8 years in prison, the first 3 of them in a prison facility. He was only 30 years old when he was arrested.

Yes, setting fire to a military enlistment office is an unlawful act. But here we encounter an almost grotesque reversal of concepts. Russian law itself lists acts that intimidate the population as one of the defining elements of a terrorist act.

So the question arises: who, in this story, is actually intimidating the population?

It is not a scorched window frame that makes society afraid. Fear is created by enormous prison terms, show trials, and the possibility of receiving yet another sentence even for a conversation on a subject that, under Russian law, lies in a dangerous legal grey zone.

The result is a terrifying inversion: a person is tried for “terrorism”, while the principal instrument for intimidating the population becomes the sentence itself — 22 years for a scorched window frame and candid conversations with prisoners who may well have been acting as planted provocateurs.

It was precisely those conversations in prison that became the basis for the second criminal case.

According to the prosecution, Lyamin spoke with another prisoner and encouraged him to join organizations banned in Russia. Lyamin described the circumstances differently: according to him, the prisoners themselves approached him and spoke about wanting to join those groups.

And here an obvious question arises: who actually initiated those conversations, and why were they being recorded?

We cannot state as a proven fact that this was a pre-arranged provocation. But the grounds for such suspicion are obvious: a person is already in a penal colony; other prisoners approach him and initiate conversations on subjects that are exceptionally dangerous for him; those conversations are recorded; and the recordings then become the basis for a new criminal prosecution.

Initially, Lyamin was charged with incitement to terrorist activity; later, a charge of high treason was added. On 16 September 2026, the court sentenced him to a further 17 years in prison. Taking the first sentence into account, the final term amounted to 22 years. The prosecutor had requested life imprisonment.

And here an almost absurd question arises.

Vladimir Putin is now 73 years old. Lyamin was only 30 when this story began — a story that may now take away a huge part of his adult life.

If the current political system continues to remain so closely tied to one person, it still has a limit that cannot be abolished by laws, constitutional amendments, or the power of the state apparatus: basic physiological reality. No person can remain in power forever.

And here it is worth remembering that very prosecutor who demanded life imprisonment for Lyamin. He will most likely live to see the moment when the current system of lies collapses and power changes hands. History may then unfold with almost mocking irony: the person who today demands life imprisonment for someone else may himself one day stand trial and answer for his participation in repression.

Whether Putin will live to see the end of the sentences being handed down in his name today is a question of physiology. Prosecutors, investigators and judges who now serve this system are, for the most part, considerably younger. They may very well live to see the day when they themselves are put on trial.

They may then have to explain why years of imprisonment were demanded over a scorched window frame, why prison conversations were turned into high treason, and why that same prosecutor considered it normal to demand a life sentence for a young man.

Perhaps one day he himself will have to feel especially sharply the meaning of the word “life sentence”, which today is used so casually in relation to someone else’s life.

Not retaliation and not revenge, but a genuine trial — with evidence, a defence, independent judges and individual responsibility.

Justice, not revenge.

At this point, Lyamin’s story ceases to be only the story of one man. Behind prosecutors, investigators and judges stands an apparatus that has existed far longer than any individual ruler.

The names changed — NKVD, KGB, then FSB — as did leaders, state symbols and political slogans, but the tradition of the security apparatus survived one era after another.

And this is perhaps the right moment to alter the familiar Russian word siloviki — literally, “men of force”.

Not siloviki, but “slaboviki” — “men of weakness”.

Because it is the weak person who is afraid to give someone else a choice. He fears a political rival, a free press, an independent court, honest elections — everything whose outcome cannot be determined in advance from an office. A strong person can allow another person to choose and accept the consequences. A weak person seeks to eliminate the possibility of choice itself, because he fears the consequences for himself, his power and his circle.

And such “men of weakness” never disappeared.

They merely waited for the right moment and for a weak government to which they could once again offer the familiar set of tools: discrediting political opponents, searching for internal enemies, criminal prosecutions, removing competitors from politics, destroying their reputations and, during the darkest periods of Russian history, physically eliminating them.

Gradually, the security apparatus stops being an instrument of the state and begins imposing its own logic upon the state.

First, it becomes necessary to fight “enemies”.

Then the political rival becomes the enemy.

Then the journalist.

Then the activist.

Then the person who wrote the wrong thing.

And eventually, as in Lyamin’s case, even a conversation between one prisoner and another becomes a threat to the state.

This is how freedom and choice are pushed out gradually, almost imperceptibly to those who convince themselves each time that the latest restriction concerns someone else.

And here the history of modern Russia echoes its own past.

For all their severe problems, the 1990s gave Russia a period of far greater political and social freedom. That freedom was essential for the country’s survival: it created space for the market economy, private initiative and cooperation with the world’s leading economies.

In a sense, this resembled the New Economic Policy — after yet another profound crisis, the system was forced to loosen its grip so that the country could survive.

Then everything began moving along the familiar track again.

Once the authorities decided that immediate survival was no longer at stake, freedom again ceased to be viewed as a necessary condition for the country’s development and began to be seen as a threat to control.

And then the “men of weakness” once again offered what they knew best.

Fighting opponents instead of political competition.

A criminal case instead of debate.

Fear instead of choice.

And the “men of weakness” once again did their work.

The old principle sounds almost unchanged:

“You die today, and I’ll die tomorrow.”

That is precisely why the eventual break with this tradition must be not only political and legal, but symbolic as well.

It will not be enough simply to rename the agency once again, change the acronym on the façade and announce that everything is starting afresh.

The building on Lubyanka must be demolished and a memorial created in its place.

Not demolished secretly or in an act of revenge, but by a decision of a future free Russia — as a symbol of a final break with a system that for almost a century connected this place with political persecution, fear and repression.

There should be no new building for a new security service with a new sign in its place.

It should remain a place of remembrance.

And still, one very much wants to live to see that time.

A time when it will be possible to come not to yet another courthouse where more years are added to someone’s sentence, but to a memorial to those who did not live to see freedom. To lay flowers for political prisoners and activists who died in the struggle for freedom and human dignity.

And to see, on the site of the Lubyanka building, a memorial: the ruined building split by a bolt of lightning, and a human figure holding that lightning in their hand and seemingly driving it deeper and deeper into the structure.

The lightning symbolizes retribution that is both divine and man-made — justice, human judgment and the truth that eventually catches up with those who spent decades building a system of fear and lawlessness.

The ruined Lubyanka in this image is a symbol of the end of the repressive tradition, while the memorial in its place preserves the memory of those whom this system tried to deprive of freedom, a voice and a future.

Allow us, at least, to dream of this.

Source: Telegram channel “Politzek–Info”: https://t.me/politzekinfo