IRKUTSK, Russia – In the days immediately following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, a pro-war banner prominently featuring the Latin letter Z appeared on the colonnaded facade of the drama theater in the center of this Siberian city.
It was just one of many thousands of similar jingoistic signs featuring the Kremlin’s new symbol for demonstrating support for the war and the policies of President Vladimir Putin that local administrations trotted out at the time.
Critics of the often aggressively brandished Z symbol see it as a fascistic emblem of state-mandated loyalty and militarization, derisively referring to it as a “Zwastika.”
For many months, the Irkutsk banner flapped in the breeze. But in May, local media reported that representatives of the city’s theatrical community had quietly sent two requests to municipal authorities asking that it be removed. According to their letters, the banner had been attacked more than once by vandals throwing hollowed-out eggs filled with a staining green antiseptic called zelyonka, purportedly damaging the historic structure.
The mayor’s office ignored the appeals, but Vadim Palko, who runs a local news channel on Telegram called Irkutsk Blog, launched a public campaign demanding that the huge banner be removed, quickly drawing 440 supporters. Late last month, Deputy Mayor Tatyana Makarycheva sent a response rejecting the appeals, arguing that the banner “defends the motherland, the people, and our traditions.” She also warned darkly that “negative statements” about the Z symbol could be prosecuted under legislation criminalizing “discrediting the armed forces.”
But the fight to remove the Z banner from the theater “is not over,” Palko told RFE/RL’s Siberia.Realities. “According to our plan, we are now preparing new letters to the prosecutor’s office.”
The building of the State University of Architecture and the Arts in Yekaterinburg, clear of Z banners
The growing opposition to the Irkutsk banner -- both the campaign to remove the banner and the anecdotal evidence that vandals had attacked it -- echoes similar stories across Russia that could be indicative of growing popular weariness with a costly war that is dragging on toward its third year since the full-scale invasion, with no clear end in sight. In addition, it has now been more than a year since Putin declared military mobilization in September 2022 and brought the war directly home to hundreds of thousands of Russians.
“There was no grassroots support for the war from the beginning,” said Aleksei Ivanov, a resident of the northwestern city of Syktyvkar who fled Russia after facing criminal charges for calling a police officer a “fascist” during a small anti-war protest in February 2022. “I only saw the first Z sign on a car in the middle of April [2022]. There were stories then of people slashing the tires of cars with those stickers. From conversations I have had, we still don’t see widespread support. So this news is not at all surprising.”
'One Of The Less Dangerous Paths'
For over a year now, 17-year-old high school student Yevgeny Fokin has been waging a campaign to get authorities to remove Z banners from public spaces in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk. In late May 2022, he succeeded in persuading municipal authorities to remove a banner after arguing it violated city regulations on advertising.
“After the first banner, a new version appeared on the [same] building,” Fokin told RFE/RL. “I wrote a second complaint to the administration, saying the banner ‘again does not conform to city standards and must be removed.’”
To Fokin’s surprise, the second banner also disappeared. Since then, he estimates, he has succeeded in securing the removal of nearly 10 more, leaving the downtown area of Russia’s third most-populous city largely bereft of government-organized pro-war banners.
A Z banner in Novosibirsk was removed after a student’s complaint.
“The situation with the banners is so much better that…there are almost none left,” he said. “They are not hanging up banners that violate architectural standards, and the ones that were removed have not reappeared. The only ones left are those placed on legally installed advertising platforms. Z signs have also been removed from almost all city transport. They’re still on the buses, but they’ve been taken off of the trams and trolleybuses.”
Fokin attributes his successful record to the fact that shortly after he began his anti-banner efforts, he was hired as an assistant to independent Novosibirsk City Council member Svetlana Kaverzina.
Yevgeny Fokin: “The situation with the banners is so much better that…there are almost none left."
“When a deputy asks, [officials] are obligated to respond substantially,” Fokin said. “Plus, they know a deputy can confirm any information they provide and raise a fuss if necessary.”
In April, students at the State University of Architecture and the Arts in Yekaterinburg, Russia’s fourth-largest city, began collecting signatures on a petition to remove a Z banner from the facade of their school. Unknown vandals even slashed the banner and splattered it with red paint.
When the petition had collected more than 600 signatures, university officials summoned two of the campaign’s organizers and ordered them to compose a written “explanation” addressed to the local branch of the Interior Ministry’s Anti-Extremism Committee, known as Center E, according to a report by the news outlet Mediazona in July. They refused, and the dean told them the Z banner would remain in place.
Eight months later, however, the Z banner was removed without explanation.
Mediazona documented similar cases in Perm, Yaroslavl, and St. Petersburg.
“I hope that people who read my social media posts and publications will also write,” St. Petersburg resident Aleksei Lakhov, who has campaigned against Z banners on the streets and in the subway system, was quoted as saying. “I think it is important to use this quiet resistance because I think it is one of the less dangerous paths.”
On November 17, Komi Republic head Vladimir Uiba complained on his Telegram channel that there were too few patriotic, pro-war symbols in his region.
“I ordered all state agencies to support our boys and display these slogans,” he wrote. “But transport companies tell me they won’t do it. I ask why. They answer: ‘Someone will break the windows.’ That means that our boys are dying over there, and we are afraid of broken windows.”
Total Unanimity?
Given the severe restrictions on independent polling and the fact that Russians have long been conditioned to be cautious in their public statements, it is difficult to gauge the extent of public support for the war in Ukraine with any certainty. According to the Levada Center polling agency in November, 67 percent of Russians say the country is “moving in the right direction” and 85 percent approve of President Vladimir Putin. In October, Levada found that 76 percent of Russians either “support” or “tend to support” the war, while just 16 percent said they either “oppose” or “tend to oppose” it.
However, when the same agency in October asked Russians who agreed that things were moving in the right direction to specify what policies they had in mind, only 14 percent named the “special military operation,” using the mandatory Kremlin euphemism for the invasion of Ukraine. By contrast, among the minority who said Russia was moving in the wrong direction, 45 percent mentioned the war in Ukraine, more than any other cause for concern.
Meanwhile, the families of mobilized Russian soldiers have stepped up their protests across the country in recent weeks, organized in part by a Telegram channel The Way Home that has collected more than 30,000 subscribers.
Another Telegram channel, Visible Protest, documents quiet expressions of discontent with the war, including anti-war slogans scrawled on currency or written in freshly fallen snow or vandalism targeting pro-war posters.
“If the Z banners are hanging everywhere and no one says anything, that would mean that the Zwastika is normal,” said Irkutsk activist Palko. “But if someone is fighting for them to be removed and is starting a public discussion, that means there could be something wrong with the symbol, that there isn’t total unanimity.
“This fight lets people who do not accept the war feel they are not alone or powerless," he said. “And it pushes others to think.”