Up to a point, he concedes, the tactic may succeed in scaring off potential protesters. “But people,” he said, “get tired of fear.”
In fact, argues journalist Svetova, the eruptions of the past month show that many thousands of Russians have already gotten past fear. “Even people who would have nothing to do with Other Russia support” Osipova, she said. “Nobody’s intimidated, and nobody’s afraid.”
(Will Englund/THE WASHINGTON POST) - Sergei Fomchenkov zips up his six-year-old daughter, Katrina's, jacket as they prepare to go back outside in Smolensk, Moscow. Since her mother's arrest, she spends half her time with him and half with his sister in Smolensk.
‘They were dishonest’
Osipova lived with her daughter, Katrina — born in 2005 and named after the American hurricane — in a white cement-block house halfway up a steep hill on the right bank of the Dnieper River. Her husband, wary of the police, had left for Moscow in 2009.
Investigators claimed to have found heroin while searching her house, which they did after three witnesses, all from Kremlin-related youth groups, allegedly saw her dealing drugs on the street.
One of them, Olga Kazakova, says she was summoned by a Young Guard leader and asked to act as a witness for a sting the police were setting up — a typical Russian practice. Investigators from the anti-extremism unit drove her to Osipova’s neighborhood, where at 9 p.m. one night, she says, she saw the transaction take place — from a distance of 200 to 300 yards, along a winding, dark, steep street. Cellphone records place Kazakova in another part of the city at that hour. But to this day she insists she saw the deal go down.
At the time, Kazakova thought this was a straightforward case about drugs, and she thought she was doing her duty as a citizen. But now she understands that it was about politics and that Osipova was ensnared as a way of getting at her husband.
“I feel very offended,” said the former Young Guard member. “They were dishonest. If I had known in advance that it was designed to put her husband in prison, I would hardly have taken part in this operation.”
Osipova’s conviction is under appeal, and Russian law prohibits prosecutors and investigators from making public comments.
Mushrooming support
Although Smolensk, like most of Russia’s smaller cities, doesn’t have many local news organizations, the Internet has started to pay attention to Osipova’s case. A Web site champions her cause. YouTube videos, some of them obscene, call for her release. Dozens of well-known figures, including the anti-corruption crusader Alexei Navalny, have lined up to back her.
“Guys, wake up,” Yevgenia Chirikova, who organized an effort to save the Khimki Forest near Moscow, wrote in her blog after visiting Smolensk. Invoking the Soviet gulag, or system of prison camps, she added: “The archipelago is not somewhere in the distant past, it is quite near. It is in the callousness of prosecutors and judges, it is in our indifference. Who will be next?”
In Moscow on Tuesday, five people were detained after a series of one-person demonstrations were held at subway stations in support of Osipova, the Interfax news agency reported. Russian law permits one person to demonstrate without obtaining a permit beforehand.
Osipova is in ill health. Svetova calls her a political prisoner. By all accounts, she is angry rather than demoralized.
The authorities threatened to take Katrina away from Fomchenkov but backed down in the face of negative publicity. The 6-year-old now spends half her time in Moscow with her father and half with his sister in Smolensk.
“They are ready to go to jail for their ideas,” Mikhail Yefimkin, a 25-year-old reporter who has written about the case for a weekly supplement, said of Osipova and her husband. “It’s worth admiring.”
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