Metro 2033 author Dmitry Glukhovsky sentenced to 8 years in prison in absentia
pcgamer.com
pcgamer.com
> Glukhovsky was found guilty of posting text and video messages on his social media channels accusing Russian soldiers of committing crimes in Ukraine. Prosecutors dismissed Glukhovsky's allegations as fake.
> Fortunately for Glukhovsky, he is not actually in Russia, and was sentenced in absentia. His current whereabouts are unknown.
Thankfully he isn't anywhere to be found, hopefully he made it to a safe country.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53091298
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maksym_Shapoval
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvine...
You might also be surprised to learn that Andrei Tarkovsky, director of the film Stalker (1979), didn't personally learn C++ and program S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (2007). Neither did Arkady and Boris Strugatsky who wrote the novel Roadside Picnic (1971) that all of these works, including Metro, are inspired by.
The Russian omnipresent assassination machine is as much a myth as its invincible military.
That said, the West keeps playing as if there's no hostile power trying to infiltrate everything it can, 30-50yo Russian males with unexplained biography gaps or no background checks at all still allowed to travel freely, establish businesses with sketchy financials and so on.
They got a prostitute the night before their botched Salisbury trip, rather than shag each other. The whole gay bit came from their Russian TV ruse appearance.
but plenty of not-men out there doing SVR work. Anna Chapman comes to mind, or the little lady who was making friends with the NRA and all of those GOP politicians...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Chapman
I'll grant you illegals in general, those are typically married couples.
And yes, I agree that Chinese nationals are to be treated with way more suspicion as well. Anyone with relatives in China can be pushed to do whatever CCP needs. Also everyone with official links to the CCP should be under 24/7 monitoring, something something "covert police stations" and Confucius Institute.
If I was Russian I'd never go above the 1st floor of any building, it would be ingrained in my culture.
Sometimes I think authoritarianism in the US can get pretty bad but then I read what goes on over there and I realize it's not even close.
For many, it happened in 2014 when the precursor of the current RU-UA war has started, with the (technically brilliant, admittedly) capture of Crimea, and the support of insurgency in western Ukraine.
Being a vocal critic of the Russian regime is and has been unsafe in Russia, for many years, and for obvious reasons. Look at the guy named Girkin [1]: a hugely prominent Russian nationalist and imperialist, who has actually fought on the Russian side in the RU-UA conflict, and only demanded more of the war, is under arrest. He happened to criticize the ineptitude of the Russian military too loudly.
Girkin had criticized the military for over a year, and suffered no consequences. He is said to have protectors among the security services. His troubles started only this summer just after he demanded a new president for Russia, someone other than Putin – in Russia you can criticize the boyars, but you can’t ever call for the tsar’s removal.
or very far from that
Gonzalo Lira supports a lot of the same positions as Russian propaganda would like to promote.
I don’t know why anyone would expect him to remain free when he decided to stay in Ukraine after the invasion started when he continued to justify Russias brutal invasion of Ukraine.
He also said that he was fleeing the country too hungry after he got released on bail, so he clearly doesn’t make smart decisions.
I mean we don't really blame US or Britain for jailing openly (pro)Nazi propagandists operating inside their territories during WW2?
OTH few people are willing to justify Nazi Germany imprisoning/killing opposition activists in Germany.
Of course Ukraine is deeply flawed country in many ways (just like US/Britain/etc. were back then) that doesn't mean that the war itself is necessarily morally ambiguous or that Russia's action aren't wrong/evil.
>Of course Ukraine is deeply flawed country in many ways
The irony being that due to its history many of its flaws and values are very Russian in character. That includes imprisoning Lira for "informational terrorism".
I didn't realize that these Russian characteristics would be quite so popular on Hacker News though. Apparently freedom of speech isn't that important.
Equating squelching propagandists of the invaders of your country to limits on freedom of speech shows that you don't actually understand that freedom of speech is a right, but not an absolute one, merely a shorthand for saying that you can criticize the government without ending up in jail. And in that sense spreading propaganda for an active belligerent enemy goes well across the limits set on free speech because it falls under 'aiding and abetting the enemy'. At some point in the not so distant past that got you a cigarette and a bullet, in that order. Freedom of speech is very important, as is a sense of reality and proportionality.
Jailing a person who spreads the propaganda of the country that has invaded you, and also gives Russian intelligence the position of your military units?.
Absolutely the right thing to do.
As a sidenote, that dumbass was stupid enough to live-tweet his attempt to jump bail and illegally cross the border. But I would expect nothing less from someone who unironically went by the name "Coach Red Pill".
Personally I'm quite attached to freedom of speech (defined as "I think people who espouse views I despise should be allowed to do so"), but I know that many people aren't and they are extremely happy with both Ukraine and the west aping Russia's crackdowns on freedom of speech.
The comparison to Glukhovsky really doesn’t work.
FWIW you can replace “Lira” with “The Amish” in this sentence and it’s still true. Hardly a justification for throwing someone in jail.
Leonardo di Caprio seems to believe at least the first half.
> When the war broke out, he started parroting Russian propaganda
This is more like it.
Mao believed in freedom of political speech. For views he liked. Stalin believed in freedom of speech. For views he agreed with. If believe in freedom of speech you either believe in freedom of speech for views that you despise or you don't believe in freedom of speech at all.
It appears you don't believe in freedom of speech at all.
He literally posted a video of Russian soldiers committing crimes in Ukraine. I love the word play here. "Accusing."
"How dare you accuse me of murdering that man by showing everyone a video of me murdering that man !? I am taking you to court for slander!"
"In that case, why bother with a trial at all?"
"Because the people demand it. They enjoy watching justice triumph over evil every time. They find it comforting
IMO that context deserves to be in the title, as it was in the original headline. I don't quite understand why it was left off when posted here.
There, I did it.
“Receives $X years” Is an idiomatic way of expressing prison terms. Same kind of thing as saying “20 to life”.
Sometimes I can't decide if Gen X in the US was the luckiest or unluckiest generation. On one handed we got to spend our teens and 20s during the 90s, one of the most hopeful/optimistic periods in human history (fall of the Iron Curtain, US budget surpluses, rise of the Internet), but on the other hand we got to see it all reverse in a scant 20 years: liberal democracy teetering across the globe, climate change not being some far off thing but an immediate concern, unimaginable wealth inequality, the rise of technology as a force used to destroy our social fabric, and just generally feeling so many people be angry/scared/depressed all the time. Hopefully "this too shall pass".
Edit: since many people seem to be misunderstanding what I was saying: yes, I know Russia was a complete, corrupt shit show in the 90s - I saw it first hand, and it was really, really sad. What I meant is that there was a ton of hope by many people (at least the Russians I knew/lived with in Moscow) when communism first fell that they would be able to transition to a successful democracy. Much of the sadness was that potential never came to fruition.
Yeah, it wasn't far off that.
A blatant lie that keeps getting repeated. Yeltsin hired some American campaigners and advertisers because he wanted a loud Western-style election campaign. It's funny how Yeltsin having American campaign/advertising advisers has been spun into claims that the US did a coup in Russia.
One thing west didn't properly grok - russia was never your friend. Never, ever. There was no period where this was true, not even in 90s, not when we talk about people on top. Paranoid suspicion and fear of losing power to steal and control entire country was too much for those in power. Especially since now you could actually steal last bolt and nut, unlike during communism where everything was state owned by definition and you competed only for power trip and some basic benefits on top of what many others had.
The Kremlin lies, period.
And a government composed of people who lie, backstab, and cheat each other and their population to this extent - again, with ample evidence from history since 1917 - is NEVER to be trusted, and ALWAYS an enemy.
Clinton/Gore administration openly aligned themselves with Yeltsin/Chernomyrdin, their "friendship" with the autocrat was a big and visible thing. They ignored all the red flags and helped to create the problem they tried to "fight" later, despite of the existence of much more prominent politicians who were clean and principled enough (ex. Nemtsov, who was hugely popular before that campaign and publicly declined to run for the president when he heard about Clinton's support for Yeltsin).
Regardless of the extent of the actual involvement (it was probably not that strong), it was enough for many in Russia to despise them and call it a collusion, which it at least partly was - absolutely open and marketed as something noble, without any conspiracy. Denying that is silly.
Well, kinda, but not in the way russian propaganda and delusions project. Clinton wantes to help Russia join the human civilization but Putin throwed all that to trash.
And now Putin wants the human civilization to join barbarism, with the help of populist right.
The accounting gimmicks, the revenue streams, the segregated assets, I learn so much replaying what oligarchs did when the state had to divest of everything
Life expectancy dropped by 2.56 years between 1990 and 1999 in Russia. Not great but not even close to being historically significant.
Life expectancy in the USA dropped by nearly 3 years in the space of 2 years between 2019 and 2021. More than the entire 1990s in Russia.
Or if you want to see what an extreme drop in life expectancy looks like, it dropped by 16 years in between 1940 and 1945 in Germany.
It is really funny when you read people experiences and memories from 90s extrapolated to modern 202x Russia.
You do not know jack shit about modern Russia, and if you think you are(from 90s), you only fool yourself.
-Pay a policeman 250 bucks to bury the guy you killed and make up the paperwork
-Oligarchs like Abramovich buying up privatization vouchers from poor grandmothers and factory workers who didn't know what a stock was and were starving.
-Yeltsin being drunk 24/7 and fucking everything up.
-Any big city being filled with gangs made up of disgruntled Afghan/Chechnya veterans.
- The start of the massive HIV epidemic because all the healthcare and tracking went to shit (Russia has about 1-2% of the population that is HIV positive, which is 4-5x of most european countries).Also start of the turbo drug problems in Russia.
99% of the Russian population at the time did not understand what free markets/liberalism/democracy meant. Those that understood are now the guys you see on Forbes lists and in government.
The expectation that west would baby sit every single step this naive and messed up country would do is dangerously naive, since it wouldn't be possible for numerous reasons. Any direct help offered was promptly stolen without trace (we talk about billions to prevent bankruptcy of the state, IIRC something around 7 billions USD never to be seen again, and state went bankrupt of course).
Communist Russia - the 'glorious' Soviet Union - was the epitomy of oppression for seven decades. It created the stereotype for the idea of 'dystopia' that embedded itself in popular cultures around the world.
That's a staggering achievement - built on human misery and lies. Don't belittle that.
And only now, while the Russian Federation is burning itself up in Ukraine, is this truth trickling through into the Russian consciousness. If Russia can be comprehensively defeated (as it must be), I hope that the full truth utterly guts the population for generations to come, as it did with the descendants of Nazi Germany.
1990s Eastern Europe was bad but this is extreme revisionism and exaggeration.
The despair and famines caused by Stalin, Hitler, Mao all caused far more deaths.
That's true, but if you take the demographic residue, the fall of the USSR is the only time, safe for the worst year of the stalinist purges, to make it dive into the negatives : https://ic.pics.livejournal.com/burckina_faso/26952019/74305...
It's hard to visualize how big of an impact it had on Russian society as a whole.
> one of the most hopeful/optimistic periods in human history
I first thought that you were American, but then I read more carefully
> and lived in Russia
Sorry, but how can you combine "90s" and "optimistic" if you witnessed it by yourself? For post-soviet people it was a nightmare, it was a total collapse of their world, with oligarchy, banditry, miserable salaries (or no salaries at all). I was a kid during that time, but I'm pretty sure nobody was giving a flying duck about US budged surpluses, and people wasn't able to admire the rise of internet, because they got it only in 00s.
Also, times of tumult like the 1990s are always times of opportunity for those who has the energy and connections. Huge businesses have been built in Russia during 1990s, and many of them were built honestly, so to say, not by plundering some Soviet-era resources. Some obvious examples familiar for the IT crowd would be Yandex, Kaspersky, ABBYY.
It was quite different from Soviet times, different enough to keep an illusion of things going in the right general direction in a sufficient number of people, especially in large cities, despite impoverishment and wars. The powers that were pushed the idea that it's either these transient problems, or the Communist rule back! (Which was ironic since many of them used to be high-ranking Communist leaders.)
After that, the mafia and KGB have completely overtaken the dominant heights, including the president office, so they strangled non-systemic local corruption. Oil prices also helped. The economy was growing. Some time in 2005, life in Russia might look genuinely attractive, if you happened to live in Moscow. Much like life in Shanghai might look fantastic, rich and free in 2005, too, compared to the times of the Great Leap.
But the authoritarianism bomb kept ticking.
The thing is, under commies people were brainwashed that they live in the best country in the world. It wasn't some kind of evil dystopia with everybody suffering. Yes, they were poor, but they didn't know life outside do compare to understand their poverty. The state gave everybody the bare minimum to live. The state gave the clear direction and meaning of life. Even now there are plenty of (older-ish) people who feel nostalgic about that times!
edit: I agree that in 00s the situation became better, but that's the point, that life in 2005 != 1994.
Ps great books too.
What else to expect from the country of total repressions and terror in the past and the country in which power is privatized by oligarchs from the special services. The only achievement of Putin is his psychopathic ability to isolate and destroy people. Well, clearly working on psychology clinging to the vile historical past in which one of the relatives or relatives of friends could be in the frosty camps of the Far North (read at your leisure about USSR concentration camps). They don’t just do anything with this but on the contrary the Kremlin propagandists encourage not to be forgotten so that people do not relax and knew "their place". Any public protest in large cities now use face recognition alghorithms + phone location.
And for each oligarch there is a folder with crimes - otherwise you simply will not become an oligarch without gluing like in typical Italian movie about the mafia. To not jump from the boat. The exception is Oleg Tinkov - a kind of punk in Russian business.
On the other hand, Kara-Murza was literally and openly an actor playing against the country's national interests. He was running around Washington, DC, providing intelligence on who the U.S. should sanction next in Russia. It is not hard to imagine a reversed scenario of a hypothetical U.S. statesman who, for years, was sitting on a couch in the Kremlin and instantly jailed during wartime.
Kasparov might be good at chess, but it does not mean he is good at anything else. In fact, if you watch interviews with him, it is not hard to see that he is awful in geopolitics. He openly admits to being a monetary bridge between Washington and Navalny. Of course, no sane country needs foreign interference and destabilization through NGOs. It is not hard to imagine the consequences for such activity in the U.S.
Possibly, but it's pretty hard/impossible for Russians who might be good in geopolitics/public administration/etc. to rise to a position where anybody would be willing to listen to them.
Just like most famous dissidents in the USSR were scientists, artists etc. because any person even marginally related to politics was either working for the state/party or was heavily tainted by association with it. There were simply no venues for an independent opposition to form. Putin's Russia is not at all different from the post 50s USSR in this way.
> Of course, no sane country needs foreign interference and destabilization through NGOs
Good because Russia is the opposite of a 'sane' country.
> It is not hard to imagine the consequences for such activity in the U.S.
Unless you work for Israel or some of the Gulf states. Also last I checked the U.S. government does allow people to openly criticize its policies (or even to actively and publicly undermine them) without the threat of prison so I'm not quite sure what are you getting at...
The U.S. or any other behemoth corporation is no different, rendering this argument meaningless.
Why is it that, in a country of 300 million people, there are only a handful of individuals to choose from for the presidency, and they often come from the same families as before? (rhetorical)
> Good because Russia is the opposite of a 'sane' country.
There is nothing commendable about disrupting the lives of others for personal gain. There are some western countries with practices much more questionable than Russia; this became evident during the COVID-19 measures. Some countries seemingly simulated concentration camps for their citizens without delivering actual benefits, unlike Russia.
> U.S. government does allow people to openly criticize its policies
There is a considerable amount of open criticism in Russia, and individuals are not being incarcerated or silenced for it. However, when someone engages in double-dealing, harming their own people for personal gain, it is labeled as betrayal just like in U.S., or any other stable power structure.
Couldn't have said it any better! People, especially USAers, should really learn how things work at home before talking about how bad the situation is somewhere else in the world.
Not only people with access to presidency/government mostly come from the same group of families, or caste, they also share the core political views, differences are mostly cosmetic. This is true not just of USA but of most other western democratic countries.
You can't outvote capitalist imperialism in the west.
The game is rigged with modern and effective propaganda, but if it looks like you're going to win anyway then they throw democracy away and switch to fascism and terrorism. See "Operation Gladio"[0] for an example of how this works, or see the countless coups orchestrated by western countries to protect the status quo.
Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.
Judging from your comments, you clearly have a political opinion and you push for it often. Doesn't that behavior break the guidelines as well?
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity.
Just like that father of a schoolgirl who drew antiwar drawings at school and had the impudence to criticize the government after the (scum) principal decided to call the police on her?
Really? What about other people who've been sentenced for years for doing absolutely nothing but sharing their (quite mild opinions) on the war.
> There is a considerable amount of open criticism in Russia,
From fascist imperialist who think that putin is not murdering enough people. Sure. As long as they they say out loud the open secret that he's utterly incompetent.
But no there isn't and there can't be. I bet you would've also have said that the USSR was a democracy and had freedom of speech?
> harming their own people for personal gain
If that was the case Putin and his cronies would've faced the firing squad years ago.
> The U.S. or any other behemoth corporation is no different, rendering this argument meaningless.
Come on... You can't just say "{RANDOM_COMPLETELY_NONSENSICAL_THING_} therefore you'r argument is meaningless" and expect anyone to take it seriously?
I'm just not quite sure why are you feeling compelled to share you ideas here? It's not like anything you say could make any sense to anyone who isn't a deranged pseudo-fascist...
This is only true if you consider the interests of Putin and his band of merry oligarchs equivalent to "the country's national interests".
> US is no better than Russia. [1]
But both Navalny and Assange are actual political prisoners in similar situations, so couldn't they be swapped & liberated (in exile)? Seems it would benefit the popularity of Western leaders.
Criticizing a war is not even remotely in the same league as divulging classified information.
Libel isn't free speech either.
He shared a video of Russian troops committing crimes, in Ukraine. Which they are - both in that video and thousands of others besides. Truthful statements are not libel.
But they might impact national security.
Specifically, the First Amendment protection of free speech (and the identical rules incorporated against the states by the 14th Amedment) are why, among other impacts:
(1) In the US, falsity is an element of libel, rather than truth being a defense (or, in some foreign jurisdictions, not even necessarily being defense always.)
(2) In the US, libel against public figures (either in general, or limited purpose public figures within the scope in which they are public figures), requires the plaintiff to prove actual malice on top of the elements of libel that apply in other cases.
We can prove it false right now.
The US committed multiple crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
There, I said it.
If grandparent poster is correct, then I guess I'll be arrested here in America for committing the same crime.
We'll see.
Maybe if America ran a proper ship, things wouldn't get released.
And they are still alive. Had they done the same to Russia they would have been poisoned with novichok or polonium, or they would have fell from a window, or ...
How many journalists have been killed for criticizing the POTUS ? [1][2]
How many for criticizing the war in Afghanistan, or Iraq ?
What about human rights advocates ?
Has any doctor been killed for criticizing the federal response to Covid-19 ? [3]
The US have their fair share of problem regarding freedom of speech, but they are really not at all at the same level as Russia.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in_...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in_...
[3] https://www.vox.com/2020/5/6/21248553/coronavirus-russia-doc...
It's like comparing pre WW2 France with Nazi Germany...
Whatever you think of the Snowden case, the US is far better than Russia on freedom of the press and tolerating political dissidents.
Look at the World Press Freedom Index. The US is ranked 45th in the world and gets a "satisfactory situation" rating. Russia is ranked 164th in the world and gets a "very serious situation" rating.
>when was the last time someone using controversial anti -government free speech in the US made a difference?
I think it's the wrong question. The question of free speech isn't whether your speech is going to make a difference. It's whether you're allowed to express views in public without retaliation from the government. Anyone who wants to publish their controversial anti-government opinions in the United States can safely make a website or a print magazine. That doesn't mean anybody else is compelled to take their opinions seriously.
The same can't be said for Russia. We can look at the level of criticism of Trump that was tolerated during his presidency, and compare it to the level of criticism of Putin that is tolerated. It's clear that Trump was unable to silence his critics, even though he wanted to, while Putin can very easily throw his critics and political opponents in prison.
If we go a little farther back in history, the Pentagon Papers are a good example. The New York Times and the Washington Post were able to publish the Pentagon Papers despite the Nixon administration's attempts to silence and prosecute them. This had a significant effect on the public perception of the Vietnam War. It's hard to imagine anything similar happening in Russia around the war in Ukraine.
If your speech is controlled in a way that it has no effect, why would the government spend further resources punishing you? This seems to be a warped perspective on the spirit of democracy and free speech.