“The Rise of Whistleblowers in Russia’s Crackdown on Critics of the War”

Since Russia invaded Ukraine last February, Anna Korobkova says she spends her days informing her fellow citizens. “Some weeks I write dozens of ‘denunciations’ and some weeks only a few,” she wrote in an email exchange, using the Russian word for denunciation, a term still steeped in a long history of whistleblowers dating back to the Soviet era. dictator Joseph Stalin. In just over a year, she has written 1,013 such materials.

Korobkova is perhaps the most active of the growing number of Russians joining the Kremlin’s crackdown on critics of the war. The people known as “whistleblowers” are a reflection of the radical changes the invasion brought to Russia, seeking to eradicate once-tolerated hints of opposition from neighborhoods, schools, universities and workplaces across the country.

While there are no official statistics, the number of whistleblowers has grown since the start of the war, led increasingly by ideologically motivated enthusiasts like Korobkova, said several people close to the security services, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss issues. which are not public.

Whistleblowers are at the heart of cases that lead to jail time, fines and job losses for whistleblowers, according to lawyers who track the trend, although they account for less than a tenth of prosecutions under tough whistleblower laws. the censorship imposed after the war.

“Unfortunately, people still write too few denunciations,” said Pavel Danilin, a political analyst with close ties to the Kremlin who is a regular guest on state television talk shows. “This is proper and socially acceptable behavior.”

A teacher’s report to her principal about a female student’s drawing of a peace symbol sparked a lawsuit this year that led to the student’s father being jailed. A “denunciation” is at the heart of a criminal investigation that has led to the jailing of a famous poet for “justifying terrorism” with an award-winning play. Bystanders overheard a woman praising Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as a “handsome young man with a good sense of humor” in a restaurant and turned her in. She was fined 40,000 rubles ($519).

Tatyana Chervenko, a Moscow math teacher, says she was fired after a series of whistleblowers by Korobkova to school and government officials, following her appearance on Deutsche Welle, an Internet television channel that Russia has declared “foreign agent”.

“Maybe they wanted to make an example of me to scare other teachers,” she says, noting that she refused to teach special lessons about the war ordered by the Kremlin.

Korobkova credits those reports for leading to five “protocols,” or administrative cases, against her victims, and vowed to continue her efforts. She says she doesn’t know any of them personally and that she hasn’t even seen most of them. But her name and email address appear in legal documents, and some of her targets have contacted her to ask why.

Increase in convictions in wartime cases in Russia

She declined to speak by phone for this article, preferring to comment in writing. While she says she feels “completely safe,” she did not reveal her age or where she lives, saying only that it is a large city, far from the border areas.

“By revealing their enemies, people prove first of all to themselves that these adversaries exist and that they are doing the right thing by supporting the war,” says Alexandra Arkhipova, an anthropologist who has not only studied the whistleblower phenomenon, but has also been a victim of it.

Korobkova wrote seven e-mails to the deans of the universities where Arkhipova teaches, demanding that she be fired for “immoral behavior” and for giving an interview to Internet television, which is banned by the authorities. The administrators limited themselves by demanding that Arkhipova stop speaking to the media.

“At the moment, denunciations are a minor issue, but there are some clear activists,” says Denis Volkov, a sociologist at the independent Levada Center.

“These people don’t want to see those who speak out against the war, they don’t want to hear anything that might shake their picture of the world,” said Alexey Makarov, a historian at Memorial, a rights group that is closed by the Kremlin. Unlike the Stalin era, there is now no large-scale state propaganda campaign to encourage whistleblowers, he says, but “there is approval from above and the system responds positively to whistleblowing”.

Vladimir Putin called on Russians to help root out “scoundrels and traitors”. Shortly after the invasion last year, Putin called the process a “natural and necessary self-detoxification of society.”

According to internet censorship statistics, Russians seem more likely to snoop on websites than other citizens. Complaints about “illegal information,” a published online category that covers what Russian law calls “falsifications” about the invasion, doubled to 133,601 last year, according to the agency. The biggest jump was in March, just after the new rules were imposed.

Recent high-profile cases involving whistleblowers have revealed some rudiments of debate among the elite. Last month, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denounced the practice as “abhorrent.”

Few others have been so outspoken in their criticism of this trend, but there are signs that it is not yet widely accepted.

At the elite state-run Moscow Institute of International Relations, which trains the country’s diplomats, the leadership quickly distanced itself from a Telegram channel that emerged shortly after the war began, in which whistleblowers reported professors deemed insufficiently loyal. But the reports don’t stop, he reports Bloomberg TV Bulgaria.

“There are avengers in university circles who fight for ‘purity,'” says Dmitry Dubrovsky, an academic and human rights activist. “This trend is increasing.”

“Whistleblowing is in my blood,” Korobkova wrote in a series of lengthy emails after Arkhipova asked her about her motivation for reporting a stranger. Korobkova traces her activism to her grandfather, who she says was a soldier and informer for Stalin’s NKVD (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs) secret police during World War II.

She says she spends two days at a time watching media outlets labeled as “foreign agents” on YouTube, and then writing denunciations about those who show up. She often has to write more than one denunciation because officials either ignore them or refuse to take action.

Her denunciations, she says in an email to Arkhipova, “can be compared to the use of submarines to destroy enemy ships – “the number of ships sunk has never been large, but the fear of attack makes the enemy reduce the number of voyages”. According to her, her goal is to leave “foreign agents” in the media unable to attract guests for their shows.