‘Total distrust’: The rise of the Russian informers

Two weeks after the start of the invasion, Russia's president Vladimir Putin told the Russian people that "a natural and necessary self-cleansing of society will only strengthen our country". Photo / Getty Images

Teachers, neighbours and even family members are turning to Soviet-style denunciations in wartime Russia.

Varya Galkina, a smart and studious 10-year-old, began getting into trouble with her schoolteachers in Moscow last September, a few weeks into the new academic year.

First, they noticed she was regularly skipping the new Russian patriotism classes that had just been added to the national curriculum. Then they spotted that she had set a pro-Ukraine symbol as her profile picture on WhatsApp.

Varya was a star pupil, so her mother, mathematician Elena Jolicoeur, thought little of the fuss — until one morning in October, when she received a sudden call from school: her daughter had been detained by the police.

Elena, reeling, jumped in her car and raced to find her daughter. The detention of a child seemed like nonsense. “It was as if I’d entered some sort of alternate reality,” Elena recalled. “Like we’d gone mad, in our corner of the world.”

But the patriotic indignation that led Varya’s teachers to denounce her to the police was no aberration. Cases of denunciation have proliferated in Russia since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

People across the country have been reported to authorities for expressing dissenting views in private or in closed settings. Teachers have reported pupils; students have informed on professors and fellow classmates; neighbours, colleagues and even family members have filed complaints.

Although still unusual enough to warrant local media coverage, informing is rapidly becoming commonplace, fuelled by calls from the Kremlin and propaganda outlets to hunt for “domestic traitors” and “saboteurs” of Russia’s war effort.

Two weeks after the start of the invasion, Russia’s president Vladimir Putin told the Russian people that they “will always be able to distinguish true patriots from the scum and traitors”, and will “simply spit them out...on to the pavement”.

“I am convinced that such a natural and necessary self-cleansing of society will only strengthen our country,” Putin added.

Denunciations create “total mutual suspicion, total distrust”, said Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Their return marks a reawakening of “totalitarian instincts” in Russian society, he said: “People begin to behave exactly as they did during the Stalin era.”

Informing was common practice in the Soviet Union. First cultivated as a tool to weed out counter-revolutionary ideas, it soon developed into a widespread system of self-policing that reached fever pitch under Josef Stalin.

Swaths of the population became active participants in maintaining the regime. Sergei Dovlatov, a Russian author, later captured this in a much-quoted phrase: “We are endlessly blaming Comrade Stalin, and, of course, with good cause. And yet I can’t help but ask — who wrote the 4mn denunciations?”

Since the start of the invasion of Ukraine, informers have become a key pillar of support for the Kremlin and a tool of control. With most public critics of the regime now silenced or in exile, denunciations allow the state to identify small-scale, private dissenters.

On March 17, a 40-year-old man travelling on the Moscow metro was denounced by a fellow passenger, who oversaw him looking at images that “discredit the army” on his mobile phone. The man was arrested a few stations later. He was sentenced to 14 days in jail.

Earlier this year, a couple discussing the war at a restaurant in the southern city of Krasnodar found themselves suddenly handcuffed by masked officers and thrown to the floor. Someone had reported their private conversation to the police.

Roskomnadzor, the state censor, said it received 284,000 reports from citizens in 2022, of which “the majority concerned illegal information posted on the internet, including fakes about the special military operation in Ukraine”. That figure does not include reports made to the police or FSB security service.

Russian sociologists have debated informers’ motives. Some point to self-interest: denouncing someone may offer the possibility of social advancement, especially for those at society’s margins.

But often there is no clear reward. Denunciations can be a way to simply “demonstrate to the state and to yourself whose side you’re on”, historian Sergey Bondarenko has said. Psychologist Maria Potudina has argued that becoming an informer allows people to feel they are protecting their group from attack, and taking control by punishing alleged “traitors”.

Varya Galkina, who has since turned 11, was denounced by her headmistress, a municipal deputy in Putin’s United Russia party. Elena was shown the denunciation letter when she reached the school.

There, she found her daughter surrounded by a police officer, a school social worker, and someone who claimed to be from the FSB. They listed Varya’s offences: skipping patriotism lessons, her pro-Ukraine profile picture, an antiwar comment she had made on a group chat with other kids.

They then said the child would be taken to the police station.

“When Varya heard that, she became hysterical,” Elena recalled. “She tried to rush to me, but they wouldn’t let her... One of them grabbed her and began to drag her to the car. The other twisted my arm. It was as if they were arresting criminals.”

Elena and her daughter were brought to the station. Elena was not permitted to leave to collect her other daughter from school. Nine-year-old Sonya had to travel home alone on public transport for the first time.

At the station, Elena and Varya were interrogated for four hours by a “crowd” of people. “They were asking questions as if they wanted to trap us into saying something,” Elena recalled. They’d ask Varya: ‘What does your mum tell you about Ukraine?’”

Elena feared that authorities wanted to accuse her of “discrediting the armed forces” or “spreading false information” about the war under laws introduced by the Kremlin in 2022 and deployed to hand out lengthy jail sentences to antiwar protesters.

Putin expanded the legislation this month, making it illegal to “discredit” informal groups of fighters including the Wagner private militia, a group accused of war crimes.

Such legislation has fuelled denunciations, said Daria Korolenko, a lawyer and analyst at OVD-Info. Previously, it was not possible to denounce your neighbour for something as small as ribbons in Ukrainian colours or having a peace sign at home.

Some local authorities have set up bots on messaging app Telegram that allow people to inform on others in a more automated and anonymised way, simply by sending a few details by text.

The fear of denunciations has become so widespread that fraudsters have developed a new scam, telling victims they are accused of treason for sending money to the Ukrainian army, and offering to open them a new bank account. The scam has become so common that Russia’s biggest bank, Sberbank, this month issued a warning about it.

After their interrogation of Elena and Varya, the police and child protection officers travelled to the family’s flat.

They trawled through Elena’s laptop and belongings. “They didn’t find anything...except some blue and yellow curtains,” Elena said, the colours of the Ukrainian flag. Finally, they left.

Elena was relieved, but worried what could come next. The examples around her were bleak.

Maria Moskaleva, a 13-year-old from the Tula region of central Russia, last spring drew a picture in school art class of Russian and Ukrainian flags, with the words “No war” and “Glory to Ukraine”. The headmistress called police.

After police searches of their home, Maria’s father, a single parent, was placed under house arrest, accused of “discrediting” the army in his own social media comments. Maria was placed in a children’s “social rehabilitation centre”.

According to the family’s OVD-Info lawyer, she has not been allowed to contact her father or anyone other than the authorities. A lawsuit has been filed to permanently restrict her father’s parental rights. On Tuesday, he was sentenced to two years in jail, but a night earlier escaped from house arrest. His whereabouts are currently unknown, according to the court’s press secretary.

Elena, too, was charged, but with an administrative rather than a criminal offence — the “improper performance of parental duties”, including “politically influencing her children”.

A social welfare centre was instructed “to organise a re-education plan for the whole family”, Elena said. A state psychologist has since come by to see them, but the family has been out: classes for Sonya, music school for Varya. The psychologist leaves notes on the door.

Varya continues to go to school, but still has not attended any patriotism classes. And her attitude to some lessons has changed. “The classes taught by my teacher who wrote the complaint about me, I don’t really feel like going to those any more,” she says.

Elena had to have a conversation with her daughter about not speaking in public about certain topics. “I told her: ‘You can think whatever you like, but just don’t say it out loud, otherwise here, they will just start to provoke you’,” Elena said, referring to the school.

“It’s something I thought would never happen in our family,” she added. “I always held that children should express their opinions... But now it had to be done.”

However, Elena has also taken a bold step: suing all the state institutions involved in Varya’s detention, including the police. She does not expect to succeed in court, but she wants to leave a record of what happened. “That these people behaved badly, in this exact way. I think that some day...we will be going back over all of this,” she says. “For some reason, I believe that.”

Written by: Polina Ivanova

© Financial Times