This op-ed was published in French by the Azat Miftakhov Committee in the newspaper Le Monde on June 20, 2023.
When the 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 its 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. In spite of this, the FSB, the Russian intelligence service heir to the KGB, failed to exercise the slightest restraint in its brutal arrest of Azat, which was filmed and broadcast on the public television station Russia-24. Torture, a sham trial on false charges of “hooliganism” and a disproportionate sentence of six years in prison followed. The latest abuse, the homophobic criminal exploitation of Azat’s bisexuality, was revealed recently by his wife.
Azat was charged with “manufacturing explosives” when he was arrested in February 2019. He was tortured at the police station, but after three days the court dismissed the case for lack of evidence. He was released and then arrested again before he left the police station. This time he was accused of participating in a plot more than a year earlier to break a window in one of the offices of President Putin’s United Russia party. Azat pleaded not guilty. But on January 18, 2021, a Moscow court handed down a six-year 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.
The Russian human rights organization Memorial had already recognized Azat as a political prisoner in 2019. Human Rights Watch declared the verdict unjust and abusive, and called on authorities to overturn it.
Azat is currently serving his sentence in penal colony 17 in Omutninsk in Kirov province. He is assigned to hard physical labor in a carpentry workshop. He was slated to be released on September 23, 2023. However, according to several reports, the FSB is fabricating a new criminal case against him, and is considering charging him with being a member of the anti-government group known as “Network”. The FSB obtained forced false testimony against Azat from Igor Shishkin, a prisoner it was interrogating in the penal colony in Valdai. Igor was exfiltrated from Russia and took refuge in France. He told Mediapart how he ended up agreeing under torture to compromise Azat by loading his file with imaginary crimes. If he is found guilty on these new bogus charges, Azat faces a much longer additional prison sentence.
Shortly after his arrest in 2019, state television Russia-24 aired a second report on Azat showing private and intimate photographs of him seized during the search of his apartment in Moscow. Elena Gorban, Azat’s wife, recently announced that around the same time, the FSB exposed Azat’s bisexuality to his fellow inmates by unveiling similar (presumably the same) photographs to them, so that he would be marked as a member of the so-called “offended” caste, the lowest status in the Russian prison caste hierarchy. This status remained attached to Azat after his transfer to the Omutninsk penal colony.
The offended, also known as the downgraded and the shamed, are the lowest of the low, and are often isolated from the general prison population. It is strictly forbidden for other detainees to touch them, to touch their belongings, or to borrow food or cigarettes from them, on pain of being downgraded themselves. All the dirty work – like cleaning toilets – is usually left to members of this caste. Given the extreme level of homophobia in Russian society, LGBT inmates are particularly vulnerable in the Russian prison system and are automatically cast into this lowest caste. According to experts, about 40% of the downcasts are forced to have sex. A similar social caste has existed in the Russian military since Soviet times.
The international mathematical community mobilized to defend Azat as soon as he was arrested. Numerous professional associations, including the national mathematical societies of France, the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Italy and Spain, have issued public statements expressing concern about his case. The Doctoral School of Mathematics of Paris-Saclay University named Azat an honorary student and invited him to complete his doctorate in Paris as soon as he is released. The Scholars at Risk section of Harvard University awarded Azat a fellowship to continue his research at Harvard.
The ICM, initially scheduled for Saint Petersburg in July 2022, was an important mobilization lever. After its transformation into a virtual congress following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we continued the mobilization for the liberation of Azat by integrating it in the more general mobilization against the atrocities committed by the Russian authorities against the Ukrainian people, and against the repression of all free voices in Russia who dare to express their opposition to the war. We draw our inspiration and our faith in the cumulative effect of our actions in the history of the commitment of the mathematical community to the defense of fundamental rights and against injustice: in particular that of the Audin committee and the committee of mathematicians for the defense of several persecuted mathematicians in the world, for instance the Ukrainian Leonid Pliouchtch during the Soviet era.
The case of Azat Miftakhov 