The last twelve months or so in the post-Soviet sphere have been, among other things, the year of the Molotov Cocktail. Who can forget those clips, amidst the outbreak of war last February, of Ukrainian women calmly packaging up bottles with petrol, rags and grated polystyrene, as though at a local sewing bee? Or of the boxes of Molotov cocktails loaded up for different areas, as if they were cases of Beaujolais Nouveau? In the recent protests in Tbilisi, Molotov cocktails also featured prominently, in battles between protesters and police.
But less well known is the resurgence Molotov’s DIY incendiary bomb has enjoyed in Russia of late. They have been used, in the main, to attack military registration and enlistment offices and associated buildings – to stymie the recruiting process, destroy military files, or simply vent the uncontrollable anger some citizens feel about the direction in which the Kremlin has wrenched their country.
These people feel they are expressing a wider hostility to Putin’s war
Since February 24th 2022 there have been at least 93 documented, war-related arson-attacks in Russia. They have taken place right across the country, from Krasnodar to Krasnoyarsk, from Buryatia to Bashkortostan, from Rostov to Chelyabinsk. There is a similar spread regarding the age of the culprits. In Leningrad region one (failed) attack was carried out in late February this year by a 16-year high school student, while in Podolsk, Moscow Region, two pensioners in their 70s have been arrested.
Though in Mordovia enough damage was done to halt recruitment altogether and in Udmurtia an entire reserve room was burned down, in most cases damage has been minimal, and fires quickly extinguished. Nonetheless, many of the attacks, originally prosecuted as ‘arson’, ‘hooliganism’ or ‘deliberate destruction or damage to property’ have, since last autumn, officially been upgraded to ‘terrorism’, and carry sentences of up to 15 years.
One of the first cases after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine last year was that of Kirill Butylin. On 28th February, the day after his 21st birthday and less than a week after the start of Putin’s invasion, Butylin painted the gates of Lukhovitsy military enlistment office near Moscow a Ukrainian yellow and blue and hurled Molotov cocktails at the building. About a week later he published an online manifesto, claiming that ‘the goal was to destroy the archives with the personal files of conscripts… This should prevent mobilisation in the district. I hope not to see my classmates in captivity or lists of the dead.’
The manifesto also included a furious call to arms against the government:
Let those mother***ers know their own people hate them and will extinguish them. They will soon begin to burn the earth under their feet, hell awaits them at home.
First charged with vandalism, Butylin later saw his crime upgraded to ‘arson’ and then ‘terrorism.’ On the 15th March, two weeks ago, he received a prison-sentence of 13 years, the first three years to be spent in ‘the harshest conditions, in prison, and the next ten in a strict regime colony’.
Another case, better publicised, was that of Bogdan Ziza, a 27 year-old graffiti artist from Crimea’s Evpatoria, who on May 16th 2022, just like Butylin, flung blue and yellow paint at a city administration building and a Molotov cocktail at it. He did this, claimed FSB investigator Vitaly Vlasov, ‘to intimidate the population of Russia’ and to influence the authorities to stop the ‘special military operation’. But in his own online manifesto Ziza was more explicit:
There is a terrible war that Putin unleashed, and the entire state propaganda machine is trying its best to convince people that this is normal… But now it is very important to go outside and express your protest. So that those who are against this war, those who sit at home and are afraid to express their opinion, see that they are not alone, that there are many of us.
Ziza has become something of a cult figure in Crimea, with stickers, key-rings and posters featuring him. He made a public apology for his attack on the government building in May 2022, but later claimed – believably – that this was beaten out of him by FSB officers. He now stands accused of three charges: ‘justification of terrorism’, ‘attempt to commit a terrorist act’ and ‘vandalism motivated by political hostility.’
Not all the attacks, it would appear, have been so high-minded. A small number of those accused claim to have received payment for their actions, though whether this has come from the Ukrainian SBU or homegrown anti-Putinist organisations is, according to the Mediazone website, in considerable doubt. Yet these cases remain a mere handful; far more representative seem to be characters like Alexei Nuriev and Roman Nasryev, members of the Chelyabinsk rock band ‘Room 32’, who set fire to a city administration building and are now being tried for ‘terrorist attack’ and ‘undertaking training for the purpose of carrying out terrorist activities’. Or Sverdlovsk region’s Aleksei Rozhkov, a 24 year-old electrical store worker, who explained his fire-bombing of the city’s military and registration office thus: ‘People the same age [as me] are dying in Ukraine like cannon fodder, and nobody cares about it.’
Meanwhile, there is Igor Pascar, an anti-war activist from Krasnodar who, having painted his face in the Ukrainian colours and thrown a Molotov cocktail at a local FSB-office, was, he claims, subsequently tortured with beatings, electric shocks and attempted anal rape. His protest, he said in court, ‘was supposed to show all the opponents of this monstrous war that they are not alone, that not everyone here is zombified by propaganda’. He now faces 10 to 15 years in prison.
What do these cases prove? Not all of them are necessarily evidence of support for Ukraine, sometimes merely an unwillingness to die or lose family members in Putin’s invasion of the country. Nor is it actual proof of widespread unrest: Russia is a country of 144 million inhabitants. What it does bear out, however, is the notable number of Russian citizens across age groups willing to protest, ‘not zombified’, in Pascar’s words, and that these people feel they are expressing a wider hostility to Putin’s war. As the anti-Putin organisation ‘Black Bridge’ put it after last September’s mobilisation:
Those who wanted to leave and could, the last of them, are now buying tickets. But one must understand that most Russians do not have the money to flee. Yes, or passports. But the components of the ‘cocktails’ are very cheap and available. And those who have no other choice fight fiercely to the end.
‘A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government’, the environmentalist Edward Abbey wrote in 1989. It seems that in 2023 Russia – not for the first time in its history – some of its most patriotic and useful citizens are now safely rotting in jail.
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