In his cell in prison, Artiom Kamardine lost inspiration. But no strength to write. This artist and activist, opponent of Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin and his “special military operation” in Ukraine, sent a letter to Monde. A long signed text “an oppressed poet”. Prosecuted for “calls for actions threatening national security” after publicly declaiming his anti-Kremlin and anti-war verses in Moscow, Artiom Kamardine was sentenced, on December 28, 2023, to seven years in prison.
Almost a year later, the courts have just transferred him from a pre-trial detention center from Moscow to penal colony No. 2 in Pokrov, about a hundred kilometers south of the capital. A few days before, Artiom Kamardine, 34, had taken up his pen: “Poetry is not a crime. And love is stronger than repression. A poet, in Russia, is more than a poet. »
It is in the name of this principle that, on September 25, 2022, just after the Kremlin decree on military mobilization for the Ukrainian front, Artiom Kamardine decided to put pen to paper. At the foot of the statue of the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930), in a square in the heart of Moscow and a place of political-poetic meetings since the Soviet decades, he came to launch his angry verses: “Kill me, militiaman. » A rebellious poem against the forces of order and, beyond that, against « siloviki »these men from the security services who seized power during nearly a quarter of a century of Vladimir Putin’s reign. Artiom Kamardine denounces their “punitive arm”accuses them of“having already tasted blood”evokes the “common graves” a Ukraine. A wise le chief du Kremlin : “Your president will be very happy with you. Tear me to shreds! »
“Choose to make an example”
Twenty-four hours – and a few death threats on the Internet – later, the masked men of an elite troop saw down the door of the poet’s apartment with a grinder. They brutally arrest him. Artiom Kamardine is forced to present a filmed apology, a practice that has become routine since the war in Chechnya in the mid-1990s. In the premises of the investigative committee, he was allegedly raped with a dumbbell.
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“I was born in free Russia. This country no longer exists, destroyed and devoured by a monster that calls itself Russia.a writes Artiom Kamardine from his damp 8 square meter cell in Moscow, shared with two other convicts for “extremism”. He explains the essence of his poetry. “It was in a free and democratic Russia that I formed myself as a person. In retrospect, the common thread of my art has been the reflection on the process of transformation of my homeland into a fascist dictatorship, on the awareness of the impossibility of stopping this process. » He proclaims his love of freedoms, “as natural and necessary as breathing, as kissing a loved one…”. And to conclude: “My art revolves around poetry and actionism. »
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