You probably already know what's happening in Astrakhan without me telling you.
(source) Shein's hunger strike is continuing, and the city is flooded with police (additional OMON riot police were brought in from Volgograd and Kalmykia), who, according to some plan known only to them, are constantly blocking off central streets and squares. The local authorities are whipping up some hellish, genuinely separatist campaign along the lines of "we live here on our own/we have our own rules/outsiders from all over the country are trying to stage a revolution/Astrakhan residents are in danger". What's amusing is that the main drivers of this campaign are the "Nashists" (members of the pro-Kremlin Nashi youth movement) who came from Moscow to help the local representatives of the same species. They keep following me around in a little pack, pointing their new iPads at me and, like, counter-propagandizing with questions such as, "is it true that at Yale University, where you studied, they hold gay pride parades every year?" The best way to deal with them is to be friendly. Though not everyone manages that. Astrakhan's media are setting some kind of all-time record for lying. I personally watched a report on RTR-Astrakhan where the anchor cheerfully claimed that Shein lost at most of the polling stations with KOIB electronic ballot scanners. So they are not just fibbing, suppressing facts, and twisting things, but simply turning everything upside down by 146%. You can imagine the reaction this provokes among the hunger strikers. Overall, the authorities' entire line of resistance is brilliantly captured in the speech by this official:
He's not from Astrakhan but from Volgograd, yet he's talking about the most discussed news story in Astrakhan: the trip by the city's former mayor, chief election falsifier, and now governor of Volgograd Region, Bozhenov, to Italy on a private jet with another 50 officials to celebrate a birthday there. The brazen pig, without the slightest embarrassment in front of the cameras, declares: everyone spreading information about the trip has one goal — to destroy our statehood. They are agents of foreign intelligence services. That is exactly how it sounds: don't like the fact that they steal and rig elections? Why, that's destabilization on orders from the West. Don't meddle in things that don't concern you; we want everything to calm down, and after that we'll go right back to rowing like galley slaves in tasting halls.
Take a look, it's brilliant, especially from 0:40. By the way, it's the very same pig who talks about the destruction of statehood. Today at 5:00 p.m. in Astrakhan there will be another rally demanding that the fraud be annulled and honest repeat elections be held. The jokester "creatives" from United Russia are plastering the city with posters like these:
And then there's the Putin reception office in Astrakhan that I supposedly trashed. For a long time everyone treated it as a joke: ha-ha, the police say Navalny trashed Putin's reception office. But the day before yesterday, an investigator from the regional Interior Ministry directorate approached me and said she intended to question me in a criminal case opened over vandalism. As a witness, for now. The whole thing looked strange, so I said that if there was some formal case, then they should send a formal summons. That was that. And yesterday, at the debate organized by Sobchak, a local member of the "party of crooks and thieves" (a common opposition nickname for United Russia) and State Duma deputy, angrily exclaiming, "Why are there so many police on the streets? To protect the city from marauding troublemakers who came from Moscow, of course," produced photographs with documentary evidence of the shocking vandalism being investigated by the regional Interior Ministry directorate.
The people of Astrakhan need support. Write to them, call them. Spread the word. If you can come, then come. If you can only make it for a day or two, someone else will relieve you afterward. Otherwise, they'll be left one-on-one with this mafia.