"Since the very beginning of my activism, I have probably been detained a little more than 10 times. I don't know exactly because it was many times. They would take us to the department and release us without any record. Or they let me out of the car, or I managed to escape from the car. When I worked as a journalist I once convinced a policeman that I was doing a newsroom task and he let me go. In short, there were many arrests, but those that are documented will be around ten. Much of it occurred when I was a minor, and under our laws, minors cannot be held in a police station for more than three hours for breach of the peace. In those three hours, all the procedures have to be completed, all the paperwork handled and I have to be handed over to my legal representatives. My mother had to pick me up, and if she couldn't make it, maybe she was out of town, I was placed in a juvenile delinquency center where I could spend up to several months. The conditions there were not very comfortable, resembling a 'special detention facility' where adults serve short-term sentences. I was there two or three times and I didn't see anyone else there besides me. My mother criticized it, said it was senseless and dangerous, citing the examples of Politkovskaya and Nemtsov who were murdered for opposing the Putin regime. She was afraid something similar might happen to me. She told me to try to achieve something in Russia or to go abroad. But I wanted to live in Russia, I have never been abroad, not counting Ukraine sometime in 2011 and Belarus in 2015 with the sports team and in 2020 as a journalist. But back to my mom - at first she condemned it, after a few months she started to understand and stopped criticizing me. However, until I came of age she was very negative about my detentions because she had to pick me up and deal with the police and also with social services who exert a lot of pressure, with teachers who tried to convince her to make me stop my activism. But she was more on my side, and the closer I got to adulthood, the more she approved of my activities instead of criticizing them."
"I was hiding in conspiracy apartments for a while and then I got the news that there was a monitoring team outside from Center E around my house, waiting for me to show up so they could detain me. It was clear that they knew about the actions I had taken earlier. Hiding would have been pointless as the statute of limitations on these matters is one year. It would mean hiding for a year or being detained and being released that much faster. I pulled up to the house, I was on my bike, and when I stopped, two plainclothes officers and about three uniformed officers ran out of the car. They twisted my arms, told me I was under arrest. The plainclothes ones were aggressive, one of them, who was bearded and looked like an Armenian, started threatening me. I asked him for his police ID to prove that he was really a police officer; the uniformed officers did nothing, they did not react in any way. After some time a van arrived, they confiscated my things and we went to the police station. There the bearded policeman started threatening me again in various ways, saying we would meet again. He then let the police officers at the station deal with my matter. The clause I had breached stipulates ten days in jail, so they kept me in the cell until the time of the trial. A court date was set, but my lawyer wanted to see the documents, so - to my surprise - they let me go. Then, on 23 February 2022, there was a demonstration by truck drivers against the Covid-related restrictions. I was there as a journalist, but I was detained along with other participants. I was taken to the police department, where two members of the E Center came specifically for me. One of them, the bearded one, I knew from before, the other I had never seen before. They took me and dragged me to the first floor office, where the bearded one hit me several times. He started to threaten me with trouble, saying that if I didn't stop my [activist] activities, it would end badly for me, he said he knew very well how. I have several options, he said. The first one is that I stop doing anything and they leave me alone. The second is that I don't stop doing it and I will have serious problems. And the third is that I can go on and cooperate with them. That means informing them of events that are going to take place; about the participants, time and place, giving them all the information about other activities and movements with which they interact, and getting paid for it. Specifically offering money and help with education, work and solving other problems."
"Until the beginning of the war, when we were children, we were told in patriotic classes how strong our army was, perhaps even stronger than the USA. They showed us pictures and videos of exercises, and I thought we had one of the strongest armies in the world. And that's what I thought at the time that I got into activism. But after a year of service with a real-world battalion, I realized that the situation was different from reality. Irresponsibility, laziness, careless attitude to duty, corruption, theft, all sorts of schemes to make money or take property out of the barracks. For example, our unit commander used to take away huge quantities of iron and sell it as scrap to enrich himself personally. Another example was the car fleet with a large amount of automotive equipment only being in a working order on paper, but in reality it could not even be started. The equipment that was operational was practically always in need of repair. It was said that our equipment was either shooting or driving, but never both."
Andrei Karelin was born in St. Petersburg, Russia on 13 December 2002. His father was an archaeologist but sadly died when Andrei was 12 years old. Together with his younger brother and sister, they were brought up by their mother without a university education. Although sceptical of Vladimir Putin’s regime, she did not dare publicly express her disapproval. Andrei believed the ideological massage at school, but later discovered the opposition activist Alexei Navalny. His ideas appealed to him, but at first he was afraid to participate in demonstrations. He first joined the protests on the day of Vladimir Putin’s inauguration on 7 September 2018, when Navalny announced the action “It’s not our car”. Later, he attended protests regularly and began working for Alexei Navalny’s movement by distributing leaflets and conducting polls among people. He was detained by police about ten times, but in his teens he could only be held for three hours at most and had to be picked up by his mother. At first she did not like her son’s activities, nor did the officials of the school that Andrej Karelin attended. After graduating in the summer of 2020, he worked with the SOTA Vision opposition website. In late October 2020, he travelled on his own to Belarus amidst protests to testify on the repression of demonstrators. He was detained and expelled from the country. In mid-December 2020, he enlisted for compulsory military service with an Air Force unit near his home, where he guarded an automotive equipment base. The service was disappointing to him. Until then he had believed the repeated thesis that the Russian army was strong and modern - but he had seen for himself that some of the equipment was only functional on paper, soldiers were wasting their time in pointless activities, and sloppiness and corruption were rampant everywhere. Andrei Karelin was discharged from service in December 2021, and he immediately joined the activities of the Vesna youth organisation. After the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, he was actively involved in protests and spent eight days in prison as a result. By that time, he was already in the crosshairs of the Interior Ministry’s anti-extremist department, also known as Centre E, which is responsible for fighting opponents of the Putin regime. The officers pressured him to cooperate and eventually gave him a choice - either denunciation or a criminal record. He was given a day of free time to think about it, used it to escape to Turkey and from there, through a humanitarian visa granted by the Czech authorities, made his way to the Czech Republic. During his time with Memory of Nations, he has worked in a refugee facility in Kostelec nad Orlicí and in a car parts factory, and in his spare time organized anti-Putin demonstrations in Prague.
