None of this has anything to do with either law or justice.” Tikhon Dzyadko on his in absentia sentence

“None of this has anything to do with either law or justice.” Tikhon Dzyadko on his in absentia sentence

Today, Dmitry Arnaut, a judge of Moscow’s Golovinsky Court, handed down an in absentia sentence to TV Rain editor-in-chief Tikhon Dzyadko: 8 years in a penal colony, a fine of 250,000 rubles, and a four-year ban on running social media accounts over posts about war crimes committed by the Russian army in Bucha and Irpin and for refusing to label himself a “foreign agent.”

Speaking on TV Rain, Dzyadko commented on the sentence:

A prerequisite for the existence of any repressive system is that it must preserve ritualism. It is like elections. In the absence of independent candidates who have been registered, and in the absence of even the slightest hope that these elections will lead to any kind of unexpected result.

A repressive system must always demonstrate that it is in fact not quite so repressive, but still a system, that it has procedures which are supposed to inspire respect among the people, the population, and to some extent inspire trust.

It is obvious that in reality this inspires no trust in anyone.

But even so, it seems important to me to talk about this, because even in the most repressive system with the most ritualized events, it is very important every single time to emphasize that their ritualism is nothing but a performance.

None of this has anything to do with either law or justice. And this needs to be repeated again and again.

According to him, this sentence “hardly affects” his life:

None of this has anything to do with real life. Real life is happening in Ukraine, where the war continues and people are dying every day. Real life continues in Russian prisons and penal colonies, where there are already noticeably more political prisoners than there were in all 15 republics of the Soviet Union at the moment the Soviet Union ceased to exist.

Is this event significant for me personally? No.

Except that it is infinitely valuable for me to receive words of support from viewers, from family, from acquaintances, from colleagues, and from friends, and on the other hand, to remind everyone that all the problems that brought us to the point where we all find ourselves today, and to the point at which Judge Arnaut, in particular, is handing down this meaningless sentence to me, all these problems are still with us.

Tikhon Dzyadko thanked everyone for their words of support and urged those who are not in Russia to support two TV Rain projects:

The first is the “Davaite” project, which we are doing together with Meduza and Helpdesk — it is a project to help civilians in Ukraine.

The second project is the marathon in support of political prisoners. This is a project that supports Russian political prisoners, those who are actually imprisoned, unlike me.