Old story or new — you decide: Daniil Klyuka was arrested and sentenced to 20 years in prison after being denounced over caricatures drawn in pencil in a newspaper.

on September 11, 2026

It reads like a note from the distant 1930s.

A rural art teacher used to draw moustaches, horns and beards on local officials in the newspaper Zavety Ilyicha, sometimes writing “devil” across their foreheads.

He had even been forced to subscribe to the newspaper — colleagues would literally block his way in the school corridor and demand money.

In other words, he was expected to pay out of his own pocket for a publication that, to borrow Bulgakov’s language, was class-alien to him.

Almost like Heart of a Dog: ideology you despise is not merely imposed on you — you are also made to pay for it.

The teacher’s name was Daniil Klyuka.

According to him, his colleagues usually used the newspaper to put under their shoes. He actually read it and, in his spare time, drew in it.

If a representative of the authorities appeared on a page, he might add a moustache, horns, or write “devil” across the person’s forehead.

But one day the newspaper was left behind at school.

His colleagues found it.

And took it where it was supposed to go.

Klyuka was summoned for a conversation. He was called a “Nazi” and a “fascist,” told that he had “filth in his head,” and then dismissed.

He thought that would be the end of it.

It was not.

The NKVD was informed about his political views. The defaced newspapers were handed over, along with the claim that the teacher had allegedly shown an interest in explosives.

He was placed under surveillance.

Some time later, the school director called and asked him to come in — supposedly to sort out some paperwork.

Klyuka came.

He managed to walk about a hundred metres from the school.

And then — the usual routine.

Face down in the snow. A bag over his head. An unknown basement.

About what happened there, he later wrote only:

“I will not talk about what happened there. I will omit the details.”

A few days later, investigators found transfers on his phone to his brother in Luhansk. Klyuka said he had sent the money for charity.

But he says they demanded that he admit something else: that the money had been intended for the Ukrainian Azov unit — for weapons and military equipment.

He did not admit guilt.

The court sentenced the art teacher to 20 years in prison.

And this is where we have to stop.

Because however much this story resembles the 1930s, this is not the 1930s.

And there was no NKVD here.

There was the FSB.

This happened in modern Russia.

The names of the agencies change. Smartphones appear, cryptocurrency appears, new criminal statutes and new formulations of accusations appear.

But the structure itself looks frighteningly familiar: a colleague’s denunciation, a political characterisation of the person, surveillance, detention, a bag over the head, a basement, demands for the “right” testimony — and then an enormous prison sentence.

And perhaps the most frightening thing here is not even the state itself.

It is what people have become.

Those who, by the very nature of their profession, are supposed to teach children dignity, justice and decency proved capable of handing over their own colleague to a system from which he emerged only as an accused man — and was later sentenced to 20 years.

Even to me, someone who knows modern Russia well, it sometimes seems that the country has not merely fallen back into the 1930s.

Perhaps it never truly left them.

Forgive me, but I no longer want to develop this subject any further.

Every letter in this story speaks more eloquently than any comparison could.

And I would like to end it with a drawing by Daniil Klyuka himself.

Perhaps he is not the most talented artist. But one thing is absolutely clear: he was born in the wrong time and in the wrong place.