Worldview: “You cannot hide anywhere”: A historian in exile on the brutality of Russian society

Vladimir Putin: Violence permeates every facet of life in Russia. A high percentage of Russian males serve time in prison. Photograph: Mikhail Metzel/AFP via Getty Images, Sergei Medvedev, a historian of post-Soviet Russia, took the wrenching decision to leave his country. “I faced a moral dilemma of either standing up and protesting and being sent to prison, or just leaving,” Medvedev said in an interview with The Irish Times.

Violence permeates every facet of life in Russia, Medvedev says. A high percentage of Russian males serve time in prison. In the past 30 years, “Prison culture merged with police culture. Basically, there is no difference between policemen and prisoners. They share the same code of conduct. The nation is prey, and they are predators.

Men are often raped in Russian police stations with objects including guns, bottles and broom handles, to humiliate them. The lawyer for Artyom Kamardin said the poet was raped with a dumbbell. Kamardin’s crime, for which he was sentenced to seven years in prison, was to have read a poem against the war in Ukraine.

The sledgehammer which Yevgeni Prigozhin’s Wagner militia used as an instrument of execution inspired similar enthusiasm. Wagner posted a video of a sledgehammer smashing the head of a deserter in November 2022. “That prompted a sledgehammer craze,” Medvedev says. “Russians gave each other little gold sledgehammers as gifts for new year’s and birthdays.”has led to widespread calls for restoration of the death penalty. Russia ended capital punishment to join the Council of Europe in 1996.

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