Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
[KavkazUzel] Those detained at the monument to victims of political repression in Stavropol while laying flowers in memory of Navalny said that dozens of people were taken to police stations. Security forces demanded that the detainees provide access to a telephone and sign warnings about the inadmissibility of participating in mass rallies. As the "Caucasian Knot" wrote, the Federal Penitentiary Service for the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug reported on February 16 that convict Alexei Navalny died in the colony after his condition sharply worsened. Conditions in the colony led to the death of Navalny, noted some social network users in southern Russia; some doubted that the causes of death were natural.
Commentators expressed condolences to the politician's family. In Tbilisi, Batumi and Yerevan on the evening of February 16, activists paid tribute to the memory of Alexei Navalny. In Krasnodar, activists laid flowers at the memorial to victims of fascism; city resident Andrei Vyazov was arrested for 14 days for displaying a banner from Navalny’s presidential campaign. At least seven people were detained in Taganrog, one of them was fined for disobeying the police.
Continued from Page 5
Today, residents of Stavropol laid flowers at the monument to victims of political repression in memory of Alexei Navalny. Security forces detained everyone who approached the monument with flowers, activists said.
In particular, the head of the Stavropol branch of the Yabloko party, Vitaly Zubenko, was detained at the monument. He came to the monument at about 16.00 Moscow time, except for the police, there was no one there. “I came up and put flowers, and after that, under the pretext of establishing my identity, they took me to the police department on Balakhonov Street, although I showed them my documents,” Zubenko told the “Caucasian Knot” correspondent.
According to the interlocutor, when he was brought to the department, there were already 16 people there who had been brought in for the same reason. “And after that they brought me more. Probably about 20-25 people were with me,” he noted. As a police officer at the department explained to him, “they received information that someone was going to organize unauthorized events in Stavropol, and therefore they took those who came to the monument to the police department.”
The police began asking Zubenko why he came to the monument. He refused to give an explanation. “Although they forced younger, inexperienced people to give explanations. Then they issued a warning about the inadmissibility of breaking the law, they also tried to take a photo of me against the background of the ruler, but I refused,” he said.
Zubenko spent about an hour at the police station. “Because there was a kind of queue of these people (detained),” he clarified. According to him, these were mostly young and middle-aged people.
When Zubenko returned to the monument to the victims of political repression, where he had left the car, he saw that the flowers he had laid on the monument had disappeared. “I walked around the monument - and they were all dumped there. I moved them back to their place. I consider this a fact of vandalism,” the interlocutor was indignant.
“The death of Navalny is a warning about the beginning of outright repressions against political prisoners. And this includes Vladimir Kara-Murza, and Ilya Yashin, and many others. We now have more political prisoners than we had under Brezhnev. Therefore, I think, that we must pay attention to the fact that not only Alexei Navalny died, but others may also die. It is not for nothing that people bring flowers in different cities of Russia to monuments to the victims of political repression, erected in memory of the repressions of the Soviet period. It turns out that repression ", who were there then, are returning. And here a person died in prison, this is unacceptable, and this is a specific parallel with how people died in the Gulag," Zubenko said.
Another Stavropol resident, taken to the police station on Balakhonov Street, Alina, told the "Caucasian Knot" correspondent that when she and her friends came to the monument to lay flowers, about 10 police officers approached the four of them.
“There was no one there except us. We walked up with flowers, laid them down - and just turned around when police officers approached us, there were many of them, at least ten. They said that we were participating in an unauthorized rally and should go into the car ", she said.
At the department they were seated in a large hall, where at first one employee began asking them where they worked, what they did, how they found out about the monument, and why they came there. “He asked about banned public pages on Telegram. Navalny, they say, is a terrorist, and I’m wondering if you have terrorist public pages on your phone. They didn’t look at my phone, but after us people came, and one of the men, I heard it myself “They definitely asked for his phone number,” Alina said.
According to her, when they were brought into the hall, there were already 3-4 people with whom they were finishing the conversation, and after their arrival, about five more people came. “And that employee said that if you count us, 25 people were delivered,” the girl explained.
This employee asked all those delivered about their place of work and wrote down the answers. “And our passport data was copied 3-4 times by different employees over the entire period, and they even took photographs of our documents. Then they all took pictures of us against the background of this ruler, a height meter for criminals. They said that until we take a picture, they won’t let us out,” - Alina noted.
The girl and her friends also signed a document stating that they had a conversation and that if they were caught again for participating in the rally, they would face administrative liability. They also took an explanatory note about what they were doing at the monument, also signed.
“When I learned about the death of Navalny, I cried. And I felt that I needed to somehow express my grief, so I bought flowers and came to the monument to the victims of political repression. This is not a protest, there was just some kind of internal need. Very sad. Navalny was a thread of hope for a positive future, and now it has broken... It’s so hard! This is also punishable,” Alina concluded.
A resident of Stavropol, Anna, who came to the monument with her husband and sister, was taken to the police station on Lermontov Street.
“With us, there were already four people there, and after us about 10 more were brought in. But in general, when we were taken there, I heard a conversation from one open office. There, new employees arrived and arrived while we were there, for about two hours. And in one office one asked the other when, they say, this will end, and so 200 people have already been detained. As I understand it, he meant - in general, in different departments. Such a busy day, they say, but in general they have day off, it was just a conversation between them, and I heard,” she told the “Caucasian Knot” correspondent.
“We arrived at about 2 p.m. My sister and I went to lay flowers, but my husband didn’t even come up to the memorial, he stood at a distance. But in the end, he was detained too. My sister laid flowers, and immediately employees, about six to eight people, came up to us, one introduced himself and showed his ID, asked for our documents. We didn’t have them, and they said that we needed to go to the department, prove our identity. We told them that we didn’t do anything illegal, we tried to leave, but they blocked our way. They said "that there was a rally taking place on the territory, although there were only the three of us there - they and we just laid flowers. We told them that we were not going to stay, we didn’t have posters, but in the end they took us to the police station anyway," she said Anna.
At the police station on Lermontov Street, several employees with different functions communicated with them, the girl noted.
"There were several employees there. The first one asked questions about why we came there. He asked us to show our Telegrams to see if there were extremist channels there. We showed it, and in general - while I was there, everyone showed it, not just us, but in my presence no extremist channels were found on anyone. This first employee wrote down full names, addresses, contact numbers. After that, another employee talked to us. He said that rallies were planned in the city, recommended not to participate in them and avoid crowded places, handed us a warning against signature about the inadmissibility of participation in illegal rallies. The third employee collected explanations from everyone - they say, I confirm that I was at such and such a memorial on such and such a date, laid flowers, and am not a member of prohibited public groups. This employee is still I wrote down the place of work - the name of the organization and phone number. After that, a man came with a large journal and once again collected our personal data, passport data, and wrote them down in this journal. Then they took us to take a photo in front of the growth board. And after that they took fingerprints. To all the objections, they said that this was necessary according to the regulations and that we could not refuse,” said Anna.
“I’m not a particularly politically active person, I don’t go to rallies, but recent events have upset both me and my friends. Such a difficult month, February is the anniversary of someone’s murder (on February 27, 2015, in the center of Moscow, he was shot four times in the back politician Boris Nemtsov was killed, says the Caucasian Knot report “ Chechen trace in the murder of Nemtsov ”), now Navalny’s death. It’s sad that people who defend their beliefs die, and we thought it was important to show in such a harmless way, by laying flowers “that there are those who care, those for whom this was not just another, unremarkable day, those who also worry and sympathize with the repressed and their relatives,” the interlocutor concluded.
In August 2020, Alexey Navalny fell into a coma after being poisoned at Omsk airport. Consciousness returned to him in Berlin, where Navalny was taken for treatment. Navalny said that Russian authorities were behind the attempt on his life. In January 2021, Alexei Navalny, who flew from Berlin to Moscow, was detained at Sheremetyevo Airport.
The rallies in support of Navalny, which took place in January 2021 throughout Russia, were recognized by political scientists as the largest in recent decades. Since March 31, 2021, Navalny has been on a hunger strike in the colony, demanding that a visiting doctor be allowed to see him. After mass protests and concessions from the Federal Penitentiary Service, the oppositionist stopped his hunger strike.
|
