stories

A Russian teenager commented on a social media post about Navalny. Then, the FSB came knocking.

Source: Holod

In 2023, a 16-year-old student commented on a post that called for people to attend a protest in support of Russian opposition politician Alexey Navalny. A few months later, officers showed up at his family’s apartment with a search warrant, and he was summoned to Russia’s Federal Security Service (better known as the FSB) for a “warning.” In a firsthand account published by the independent outlet Holod, the teenager recounted what it was like to have his home searched over a single comment. Meduza shares a translation of his testimony.

In my early teens, I liked Putin.

I first got interested in politics around middle school. Mom was always watching the government news on TV or [Russian propagandist] Vladimir Solovyov’s evening show, and sometimes I’d watch along with her. I didn’t like the opposition and supported whatever my mom did.

But then Alexey Navalny was poisoned. It was such a big event that even TV news covered it. I became curious about who he was and why there was so much hatred toward him, so I went online to learn more. I liked his YouTube videos and, over time, I found myself siding with him more than with the current government.

By the time I reached high school, Navalny was already in prison and the war in Ukraine had begun. I’d already stopped believing that peaceful protests could work, and under one post calling for people to go to a protest, I commented that real change in the country would only come through radical means.

The bitter truth is that events in Russia affect your life, too. Help Meduza continue to bring news from Russia to readers around the world by setting up a monthly donation.

‘Better to beat someone up’

Two, maybe even three months later, early one morning, there was a knock on the door of the apartment where Mom and I lived. Standing there were police officers with [a search warrant]. I had an exam at school at 1:00 p.m. that day, so I was still asleep. Mom didn’t have time to wake me, and I woke up to the sound of the police saying, “Get up.” I was so groggy that I didn’t even have time to be scared.

The officers searched everything in my room — they looked through my computer and tried to check my browser history, but I clear it regularly. They rummaged through everything but they didn’t examine it all. For instance, I have a tall cabinet in my room, with about 30 to 40 centimeters [12 to 16 inches] of clearance between it and the ceiling, and on it sat a model airplane in a box. They didn’t touch it or even open the box. But for some reason, they asked me to unroll a 120-centimeter-long [about four-foot-long] roll of poster paper that had been sitting unused for a long time.

Luckily, just before all of this, I’d lost my main phone. Mom was driving a friend and me to his place and on the way, we made a quick stop. I got out of the car, kneeled to tie my shoelace, and set my phone on the ground next to me. I got back in the car [and] I completely forgot about it. Someone eventually found it — I was able to track it briefly, but the signal later disappeared. So basically, because of that incident, [the police] couldn’t get into my phone.

They tried to get into my Telegram account on another phone but couldn’t get past the two-factor authentication so they gave up. They asked for the password, but I said I couldn’t remember it. While the search was still going on, one of the officers showed me a chat in some messenger app. It included a screenshot of my comment, but he only showed it for a second, so I didn’t catch what it was all about.

Then another officer, who seemed to be of higher rank, took me to the kitchen for a chat. He didn’t threaten or try to intimidate me, but he did say something like: “You’d be better off beating someone up than doing this. The sentence would be lighter.”

The search lasted about three hours; they finished around noon. At the end, they asked me to sign a report and a form listing everything they’d confiscated. They took everything that holds information. All my tech stuff: computers, my phone, the memory cards from my drones (I have two, though I haven’t used them since getting them for my birthday).

I read the document about five times before signing it, fearing they might add something later. But the thing is, I had to rush off to my exam. They said they’d confiscate what they wanted and write down the rest of the items themselves so they wouldn’t have to come back after my exam. They gave me some blank sheets to sign, and I signed them, but later I worried I’d made a mistake.

After my exam, one of the officers showed up with a bag from [a liquor store] with the seized items they hadn’t listed earlier. He came into our apartment so I could review the updated list, which had been filled in without my knowledge. I think I really frustrated him because I took forever going through the list, while Mom kept hurrying me, saying I was “holding the man up.”

They also took the equipment in the bag away. They told me I’d get everything back as soon as they’d examined it — supposedly in about two weeks. But then we started getting formulaic notices: first, it would take another two weeks, then one more week, and so on. In the end, it took about a month and a half to get it all back.

A warning

Eventually, they called Mom and told her we needed to go down to the FSB office to pick up the equipment. I thought Mom could go on her own, but they insisted that I come too because they wanted to have a conversation with me. That made me really uneasy.

Before we went, I prepared a statement outlining the details of my case and sent it to a friend. The plan was that if anything went wrong, he’d send it to [the human rights project] OVD-Info. In other words, if it became clear that I was going to be held there, he’d send it. I was worried that they’d found something on the devices and that something might happen to me.

We got to the office, passed through security, and went up to the second floor. There was a room where two FSB officers were sitting; the door was secured from the inside with a metal gate. Mom and I went in together.

They spoke to us pretty harshly and aggressively. They mostly spoke to me, not my Mom. Occasionally, they’d ask her general questions about me, and she made some negative comments about things I’d done — like how I had left that comment on Telegram. Overall, she stayed pretty calm. If I gave vague answers or used phrases like “probably” or “maybe,” they’d say, “You won’t get away with those answers here.” It became clear during the conversation that they didn’t really know anything about me, like which [Telegram] channels I was subscribed to. But apparently, because I’d called for radical measures, they suspected I might be connected to some kind of partisan movement. They even started asking me what I knew about partisans during [World War II].

They made it clear that the officers who’d searched our home were young and soft, and that they themselves had higher ranks, were older and meaner. It felt like they were trying to scare me, to make me understand that next time, I wouldn’t get off so easily. They said that if something like this happened again, it would be much, much worse.

This went on for more than two hours. In the end, they gave the equipment back, but not everything. For instance, they didn’t return the drones or even mention them — those things cost around 4,000 rubles ($44) each, and they were basically unusable anyway, so why would they need them? They also kept the memory cards.

‘I don’t want to stay on the sidelines’

After the search, Mom started scolding me, saying now the whole building knows what a bad person I am. But she eventually calmed down. These days, she only brings it up when we talk about politics — she reminds me about my comment, my political stance, and what it could lead to. We don’t see eye to eye — she still watches Solovyov and other propaganda and supports the “special military operation.” But aside from that, she’s pretty understanding, and our relationship is okay.

For the first couple of months after the search, I was more cautious — I didn’t subscribe to any opposition Telegram channels for about two months, I think. Later, I created a new account and subscribed from that one, using a different phone.

I haven’t had any direct run-ins with the police since then. But when Alexey Navalny died, a local officer and some random woman came to our school. They warned us not to even think about attending any protests. I figured it was because of me, since nothing like that had ever happened before.

I’m pretty calm walking around the streets now, but whenever I see blue flashing lights reflecting off buildings or police cars, government vehicles, or anything that looks remotely official, I immediately start wondering if they’re here for me and how close they are. I also tense up when I walk past large black vans because I’ve seen videos of arrests where 10 people jump out of a van.

I’m also worried about the military and the possibility of conscription — I attended a military training camp [held for 10th-grade boys as part of the “Fundamentals of Life Safety” class], and those five days were enough to make an impression. You can’t bring your phone, and when you sign for cartridges, you always end up with less [than you signed for]. Everyone swears constantly, though I’m not exactly a saint myself. They show these films about how the Russian army is “amazing” specifically because it’s “Russian” in the ethnic or cultural sense, not just because it’s part of the Russian state. They go on about how the Russian man is strong, with great willpower, but those NATO soldiers value their lives too much. It’s bizarre.

An FSB agent also came and told us all kinds of things, like if we don’t get into college through our [exam scores], we could enroll in the FSB academy, where you only need a score of 45 in one subject to get in. That’s shockingly low. Despite what happened to me, I still want to be involved in political life. I don’t want to stay on the sidelines. And I don’t want to leave Russia either — there’s a different mentality abroad.