A court in the southern Russian city of Volgograd sentenced a 23-year-old woman to 10 months of compulsory labor on April 5 after convicting her of "rehabilitating Nazism." The charge stemmed from a 2023 social media video that prosecutors said contained "cynical actions that disregarded the norms of morality and ethics."
In the video, Alyona Agafonova, a tourist from the mid-Volga region city of Samara, documented her visit to Volgograd and at one point, using a trick of perspective, playfully "tickled" the breasts of the enormous statue that dominates the city's memorial to the Battle of Stalingrad -- probably the most prominent icon of World War II anywhere in Russia. In court, prosecutors said she had "offended a symbol of the resilience of the Soviet people during the Great Patriotic War."
The head of the investigations department of the Volgograd branch of the Investigative Committee, Vladimir Surkov, said the case should be a warning to others.
"Anyone who wants to hype themselves in a similar manner should think about this and not do it," Surkov told a local news website.
The 85-meter Motherland Is Calling statue dominates the Mumayev Kurgan memorial complex to the Battle of Stalingrad in Volgograd.
Under longtime President Vladimir Putin, the state has used its draconian laws on "foreign agents," terrorism and extremism, and treason to stifle political dissent, successfully marginalizing all opposition. But the 2014 law against "rehabilitating Nazism," which includes punishments of up to five years in prison, has been used for a different purpose, analysts say: To mold an increasingly militaristic society by sacralizing a mythologized version of the Soviet and ethnic-Russian contributions to the defeat of Nazi Germany -- and, by extension, to bolster Putin's false claims that Russia is confronting "Nazis" in Ukraine and the West.
The law overshadowed a 2001 law against disseminating Nazi symbols, which Aleksandr Verkhovsky of Sova, a Russian group that monitors extremism, told the BBC in 2023 was a genuine attempt to combat far-right hate groups.
Activist Aleksandr Cherkasov of the banned human rights group Memorial told RFE/RL that under the "rehabilitating Nazism" law, repressions are being carried out in the name of "historical memory, which has itself become a quasi-religion."
'How Many More Alyonas?'
Agafonova was convicted despite publishing a public apology in July 2023.
"I would like to sincerely apologize for my actions, which by no means were intended to ridicule the history of my country or the lives of those who fell for the sake of our future," she wrote, noting that her grandfather had been killed during the war. "I am a patriot and I love my country."
She pleaded guilty in court and apologized again in her closing speech, arguing that the 13 months she spent in pretrial detention were adequate punishment. In addition to the 10 months of labor she was ordered to perform at a job assigned to her by the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) in Samara, Agafonova must give 10 percent of the salary she earns to the state, and she is barred from using social media for two years.
A participant dressed in Red Army World War II uniform performs at an open-air interactive museum to commemorate the 82nd anniversary of the World War II-era parade, at Red Square, in Moscow on November 6, 2023.
Immediately after her video appeared, Agafonova was inundated with criticism and denunciations from self-professed patriots. The pro-Kremlin Telegram channel Talipov, which is run from the Russian-occupied Ukrainian region of Crimea by blogger Oleksandr Talipov, wrote that the incident illustrated "the problem with the patriotic education of our youths."
"Can it really be that no schoolteacher in Samara or no one at the institute [she attended] was able to inculcate in Alyona a sense of respect for the glory of our grandfathers?" the channel wrote. "And how many more Alyonas are there in Russia?"
Sociologist Maria Turovets, who left Russia in the wake of Moscow's February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, told RFE/RL that the "rehabilitating Nazism" cases are a sop to "the active minority that welcomes them."
"I tend to call them 'the party of fascism,'" she added. "The authorities are trying to anticipate and accommodate this minority."
Russian soldiers on their way to Ukraine march past the Motherland Is Calling statue in Volgograd in January 2023.
The statue Agafonova was accused of insulting is called Motherland Is Calling, an 85-meter behemoth that dominates the Mumayev Kurgan memorial complex to the Battle of Stalingrad on a site where some 35,000 Soviet victims of the battle, which marked the turning point of the war when German forces there surrendered in February 1943, are buried in mass graves. It was dedicated in 1967.
'At A Time Like This…'
Among the dozens of "rehabilitating Nazism" cases that have been filed in recent years, only a few seem to objectively fit the definition. In February 2022, a St. Petersburg professor was tried under the charge for allegedly denying the Holocaust in his lectures. The same year, a teenager in the Siberian city of Irkutsk faced the charge for allegedly writing numerous social media posts lionizing the World War II German military and the notorious SS.
In some cases, the charge was brought against people who criticized Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's conduct of the war, particularly the 1939 Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact.
Communist Party supporters line up to place flowers at Josef Stalin's grave near the Kremlin Wall to mark the 71st anniversary of his death with the Mausoleum of the Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin in the background, on Red Square on March 5.
Much more commonly, the charge is used to prosecute actions that question Russia's "military glory." In February, authorities in the Altai region settlement of Staroaleiskoye filed criminal charges of "rehabilitating Nazism" against two teenaged boys who allegedly constructed a snow phallus next to a war memorial and posted photographs of it on social media.
Many other cases involve people accused of "insulting" the black-and-orange St. George ribbon or the pro-government Z and V symbols that are used to show support for Putin's war against Ukraine and confrontation with the West.
In fact, Cherkasov of Memorial said, one effect of the application of the law is to convey to such modern-day symbols a status equivalent to the status of the symbols of victory in World War II that has been carefully cultivated by the Putin government since he came to power nearly 25 years ago.
Also in February, investigators opened a criminal probe on the charge against Rasul Akhiyaretdinov, a Bashkir activist who wrote in a social media post that the Motherland Is Calling statue is not dressed modestly enough for Muslim and Orthodox Christian standards because her breasts are visible. He called the presentation a "mistake of the Soviet Union" and urged that they "put a shawl on her shoulders."
SEE ALSO: 'The Best' For Putin: How The Kremlin Stands To Gain From Iran's Attack On IsraelLike Agafonova, Akhiyaretdinov was savagely attacked by the so-called patriotic social media channels. Unlike Agafonova's, the investigation against him was closed after he publicly apologized.
"Looking through the reactions, I understood that for many people this statue is not just a statue but the Motherland," he said in a social media video. "As a person who does not want divisions and conflicts in the Russian Federation, I apologize to all veterans of World War II and to those who didn't understand me correctly or were offended by what I said. Our country is going through difficult times. The war in Ukraine and other things. I think that at a time like this I should not have posted such a video."
Roman Zaitsev, a lawyer in Volgograd, said the security forces like such cases because of the publicity and media coverage.
Military helicopters fly over a statue of the Mother Motherland at the Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery, where more than half a million Leningrad Siege victims were buried during World War II.
"Earlier there was a political subtext or protest activity behind these cases, but now they are opened just for the sake of statistics," he said. "In the case of [Agafonova], it is completely unclear what she did to dishonor a burial place. You might consider her actions inappropriate, provocative, or stupid, but it is hard to see them as criminal."
Yelizaveta Klochkova, of the OVD-Info group that monitors political repressions, agreed, saying the increased interest in such cases on the part of law enforcement and "denouncers" "is in complete accord with other general trends including the sacralization of World War II, the propaganda use of symbols associated with it, [and] the search for supposed Nazis or their supporters at home and abroad."
"For security agents and denouncers, such cases are just a way of [meeting quotas] and attracting attention to themselves for 'exposing ideological crimes,'" Klochkova told RFE/RL.
"There is a second aspect," said self-exiled Tatar political analyst Ruslan Aisin. "They need to scare people. The security forces are always hungry."