lya Kapustin, a 27-year-old industrial climber in St. Petersburg, Russia, says he’s not sure if he was arrested or kidnapped one cold night in January when he was thrown into a minibus while on his way home.
It was around 9:30 p.m. and Kapustin was walking from driving school when he claims he was snatched off the street a block from his house and thrown into the bus. In the vehicle, he said he was confronted by five men who joked that they were the “special service officers of the minivan.” Kapustin suspects they were members of the Russian Federal Security Service, also known as the FSB.
During the following three-and-a-half hours, Kapustin claims the men tortured him with an electrical cattle prod while questioning him about an acquaintance from work.
They demanded answers to their questions while one of them stood on my feet, pressing them to the floor, and a second man used the electrical shocker on my abdomen, hips and groin.
After torturing him, Kapustin claims his captors brought him to the FSB’s office for questioning and then later to his house, which the police searched. He didn’t see the faces of the men who tortured him, but he said the men who beat him and electrocuted him in the van were the same people who questioned him at the police station. In the FSB's office, the officers threatened to break his legs and kill him. But he was released soon after without being charged.
Kapustin says he was tortured because of his friendship with young, anti-fascist anarchists in Russia, and because of his own history of activism. Throughout the years, he participated in environmental protection projects, distributed food to the needy and joined anti-war protests, he says. He had plans to move south to start an agricultural cooperative. But those plans were cut short after his experience with the FSB. Today, he says he is too afraid to return to Russia, where a handful of young, left-wing activists are still being held in prison and are accusing the FSB of torture.
“They are charged with participation in a terrorist group. I would have to see the evidence against them to know if the charges are true, but given the quite credible torture allegations it’s likely the government doesn’t have sufficient evidence against them,” Tanya Lokshina, a Russia-based researcher with Human Rights Watch who has been following the cases, told Newsweek. “Torture is quite common in Russia, and it generally happens in those cases when they don’t have sufficient evidence. So torture is used to force an individual to incriminate himself and provide evidence about others.”
The most high-profile example is that of Alexei Mikheyev, who in 2006 won a case against the Russian government in the European Court of Human Rights. Mikheyev said the FSB used electric shocks and beatings to force him to confess to the rape of a 17-year-old girl.
In October and November last year, five individuals were arrested in the small city of Penza in southwest Russia. One of the men is under house arrest and the remainder are still in jail. Four more were arrested in St. Petersburg a few months later. Of that group, only Kapustin has been set free. All of the youth maintain their innocence and claim they were tortured while in detention.
Meanwhile, the St. Petersburg Public Oversight Commission, an independent body with permission to enter the city’s prisons, issued a public report after visiting two of the men arrested in St. Petersburg, Viktor Filinkov and Igor Shishkin, and said there was credible evidence of torture. After visiting him in prison, Filinkov's lawyer, Vitaly Cherkov, posted on his Facebook page that he had never seen injuries like the ones sustained by Filinkov during his time in detention. Through their lawyers and family members, the activists describe being shocked with electric cattle prods, beaten and hung upside-down. Filinkov’s wife, Alexandra, who asked that her surname be omitted for her safety, says her husband is innocent and that his rights are being violated.
“My husband held anti-fascist positions, he opposed any kind of oppression, went to meetings, supported trade unions and anti-fascist initiatives, advocated for free internet,” Alexandra told Newsweek.