In Putin’s Russia, the arrests spread rapidly and widely

They came for Dmitry Kolker, a sick physicist, in the intensive care unit.

They came for Ivan Fedotov, a hockey star, as he left practice with a film crew in tow.

They came for Vladimir Mau, rector of a state university, the week he was re-elected to the Gazprom board.

The message sent by these high profile arrests:

Almost all of them are now punishable in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

The wave of arrests across the country in recent days has signaled that the Kremlin intends to further tighten the noose around Russian society.

It appears to be a manifestation of Putin’s statement in the first weeks of his war in Ukraine that Russia needed to cleanse itself of “pro-Western scum and traitorsand it’s creating an unmistakable thrill.

“Every day looks like it could be the last,” said Leonid Gozman, 71, a commentator who continues to speak out against Putin and the war, in a telephone interview from Moscow, acknowledging fears that he too may be arrested. .

None of the targets of the recent crackdown have been an outspoken critic of the Kremlin.

Many of Putin’s staunchest opponents who chose to stay in Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, such as politicians Ilya Yashin and Vladimir Kara-Murza, They were already in prison.

But each of the targets of the recent crackdown represented an outward-facing Russia that Putin increasingly paints as an existential threat.

And the ways they were stopped seemed designed to do waves.

Kolker, the physicist, was hospitalized in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk last week to be treated for advanced cancer, so weak it couldn’t eat.

The next day, agents from the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the successor agency of the KGB, arrived and, accused of treason, took him to a Moscow prison.

During the weekend, died in custody.

“The FSB killed my father,” his 21-year-old son Maxim wrote in capital letters on social media along with the image of the three-line telegram sent by the authorities notifying the family of the death.

“They didn’t even let our family say goodbye.”

Maxim Kolker, following in his father’s footsteps as a physicist in Novosibirsk, said Dmitry Kolker was known for hiring students to work in his laboratory, which helped persuade some budding Russian scientists not to seek work abroad.

Now, he said in a telephone interview, the family must return Kolker’s body from Moscow at their own expense.

It was not clear why the FSB had targeted Dmitry Kolker, 54, a specialist in quantum optics.

State media reported that he had been jailed on charges of pass secrets abroad.

But Kremlin critics say it’s part of a growing FSB campaign to crack down on free thought in academia.

Another Novosibirsk physicist, also arrested on treason charges last week, Anatoly Maslov, is still in custody.

The arrests come at the same time as the arrest on fraud charges of Mau, a prominent Russian economist who is director of a large state university, the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration.

Mau, 62, was by no means a public critic of the Kremlin.

He joined more than 300 senior academic officials in signing an open letter in March calling for the Russian invasion of Ukraine to “necessary decision”, And was re-elected last week to the board of Gazprom, the Russian energy giant.

But it also had a reputation for being what Russian political scholars call a “Systemic liberal”someone who worked within the Putin establishment to try to push him in a more open and pro-Western direction.

It turned out that his links with the Kremlin weren’t enough to save Mau a case of fraud which has already caught the rector of another major university and which critics say seemed designed to eliminate the remaining pockets of dissent in Russian academia.

“A great enemy of government and government stability is the people who pass on knowledge,” said Gozman, who worked with Mau as a government adviser in the 1990s.

“Truth is an enemy here.”

Ekaterina Schulmann, a political scientist who taught at Mau Academy until April, called the institute “the educational center for most of the country’s civic bureaucracy” and described her arrest as the highest-level criminal case. of Russia since 2016..

He indicated, he said, that ideological purity was becoming an increasingly important priority for the Russian authorities, especially in the education sector.

“In education, it is important for a person to actively profess and share the values ​​he has to instill in the heads of his students,” said Schulmann, now a member of the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin.

“Here, ambiguous fidelity may not be allowed.”

Putin himself said so.

In his March speech in which he criticized the traitors in the middle of Russia, he called those who physically reside in Russia but live in the West “in their thoughts, in their consciousness of slaves”.

He is also increasingly claiming that truly patriotic Russians must engage live and work in Russia.

He said at an economic conference in St. Petersburg last month that “real solid success and a sense of dignity and self-respect only happen when you connect your future and your children’s future to your homeland.”

In that context, the news that Fedotov, the Russian national hockey goalie who won the silver medal at the Beijing Olympics in February, signed a contract with the Philadelphia Flyers in May was likely seen as a challenge.

Fedotov, 25, one of the hockey world’s rising stars, had plans to travel to the United States this month, according to Russian media.

Instead, on Friday, as he was leaving a free practice session in St. Petersburg, he was stopped by a group of men, some wearing masks and camouflage, and taken away in a van, according to a television reporter. shoot a special reportage. on him and saw the accident.

Fedotov’s alleged crime, according to Russian news agencies: evading military service.

Russian men under the age of 27 are required to serve for a year, although sports stars can usually avoid conscription.

On Monday, the state news agency RIA Novosti reported that Fedotov had been brought to a training base of the unidentified Russian navy.

The elaborate arrest was widely perceived as punishment for choosing to play in the United States rather than stay in Russia.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if they put him on a submarine and sent him out to sea,” RIA Novosti said, citing a veteran of Soviet sports.

“He’s not going anywhere after.”

For Gozman, the liberal commentator who remained in Moscow, a common thread between the recent arrests was his seemingly gratuitous cruelty.

In Putin’s system, he said, such behavior is more likely to be rewarded than censored by the state.

“The system is built in such a way that excessive cruelty on the part of an official is rarely punished,” Gozman said.

“But excessive softness can be. So any officer is trying to show great tenacity. “

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