Ihen Moscow State University mathematics PhD student and anarchist activist Azat Miftakhov was arrested in February 2019, Russia was not yet the pariah country it has become since the invasion of Ukraine. On the contrary, the city of Saint Petersburg had just been chosen to host the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in July 2022. This did not prompt the FSB, the Russian intelligence service heir to the KGB, to the slightest restraint : forceful arrest of Azat Miftakhov, filmed and broadcast by public television Rossia 24, torture, sham trial on false charges of“hooliganism”, huge six-year prison sentence and homophobic exploitation of Azat Miftakhov’s bisexuality; this latest abuse was recently revealed by his wife.
During his arrest, Azat Miftakhov was charged with “manufacture of explosives”. He was tortured at the police station, but after three days the court dismissed the case for lack of evidence. He was released, then arrested again; this time he was accused of participating in a plot more than a year earlier to smash a window in an office of President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party. He pleaded not guilty.
But, on January 18, 2021, a Moscow court handed down a six-year prison sentence in a penal colony, based on the testimony of two secret witnesses – one of whom claimed to have identified him, while he was allegedly masked, by his “expressive eyebrows” and died several months before the trial. Russian human rights organization Memorial recognized Azat Miftakhov as a political prisoner as early as 2019. Human Rights Watch called the verdict unfair and abusive, and called on authorities to overturn it.
The “offended” caste
Azat Miftakhov is currently serving his sentence in penal colony number 17, in Omoutninsk, Kirov province. He is assigned to heavy physical work in a carpentry workshop. He is expected to be released on September 23. However, according to several reports, the FSB is fabricating a new criminal case against him, considering accusing him of being a member of the anti-government group “Network”. The FSB obtained forced false testimony from Igor Shishkin, a prisoner it was interrogating in the penal colony in Valdai. Igor Chichkine was exfiltrated from Russia and took refuge in France. He told to Mediapart how he ended up agreeing under torture to compromise Azat Miftakhov by loading his file with imaginary crimes. If found guilty on these bogus charges, Azat Miftakhov faces a much longer additional prison sentence.
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