Arseny Turbin turns eighteen
Arseny Turbin turns eighteen today. He’s spending it in a remand prison in Perm.
He was just fifteen when he was detained for handing out leaflets criticising Vladimir Putin, and was later sentenced to five years in a juvenile penal colony.
Arseny grew up in Livny, Oryol Oblast, and studied at the Bulgakov Lyceum, where he was a regular prize-winner in school competitions and olympiads. Physics was his first love — he’d been teaching himself the subject since primary school — before maths and economics caught his interest too.
His mother, Irina, remembers him as a ‘truth-teller’: a boy who couldn’t stay silent in the face of injustice.
Arseny never hid his politics. At just thirteen, he got through to the independent broadcaster TV Rain to talk about corruption and failings in the education system. A friend filmed the call and posted it online, but pressure from the school on his parents forced them to take it down. On his own channel, Arseny kept posting videos criticising Putin and the war.
On 29 August 2023, security forces raided the flat where Arseny lived with his mother, grandmother and grandfather, seizing his tablet, laptop and phones. He was detained on 5 September, and by 20 November his name had been added to Russia’s official list of ‘terrorists and extremists’.
Investigators allege that opposition media radicalised him, that he applied to join the Freedom of Russia Legion through a Telegram bot, and that — as a supposed member of this ‘terrorist organisation’ — he put leaflets reading ‘Do you need a president like this?’ through his neighbours’ letterboxes in June and July 2023.
The pressure has only grown in custody. He was deliberately placed in a cell with an inmate who beat and threatened him, and has repeatedly been thrown into a punishment cell. In February, a new charge followed — ‘participation in mass riots’ — built on testimony from ‘a wide circle of people’, his relatives say. What he’s actually accused of remains unclear. He has since been moved from the colony to a remand prison.
He should be celebrating with friends today. Instead, he’s spending his 18th birthday behind bars.
Adults in uniform have punished a schoolboy for refusing to stay silent, taking from him one of the most formative chapters of growing up. No exam results, no graduation with his mates. Instead: a fabricated new case, and a remand prison in Perm. Russia’s authorities are afraid of exactly what Arseny Turbin represents: a future their past can’t survive.
Write Arseny a letter. Let him know he hasn’t been forgotten:
246a Solikamskaya Street, Perm, Perm Oblast, 614056, Russia, Remand Prison No. 5, Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia for Perm Krai, Turbin Arseny (b. 2008)
It really does matter to people inside to know someone remembers them on the other side of the wall.
The team behind Animators Against War has released an animated film about Arseny. You can watch it here.
