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The Accidental Death of Navalny Now Serves as a Perfect Excuse for Full-Scale Repression
Employees of defense firms are being warned that ‘everything’ is being monitored.
A family friend in St. Petersburg met with my mother-in-law and asked her to limit any communication with him to simple pleasantries: the weather, his home-brewed beer, dacha plans, etc. He told her that «everything in the wake of Navalny’s death» is being monitored. The Prigozhin thing last summer seemed to scare the Kremlin’s chief scaredy cat, Vladimir Putin.
«Lyosha» works in IT for a company that is on the fringe of the defense sector. All the employees were gathered and asked via a written note outside the room where they met to turn off their phones and leave them in the outer room.
Once inside the meeting room, phone-less and fidgety, everyone was informed that a loyal FSB friend informed the company’s CEO that the Navalny death had spooked «grandpa» — Putin — and so the switch had been thrown. The Russian secret services have gone back into the kind of eavesdropping that only existed before in the Soviet Union. The first line of those who will be monitored are those working in defense companies.
The thing about Lyosha’s company is that it had never before been labeled a…
