Elista civic activist placed under house arrest for comparing Soviet soldiers involved in the deportation of the Kalmyks to Nazis

Boris Todaev, editor-in-chief of the unregistered newspaper Narn, has been placed under house arrest over an article about the deportation of the Kalmyk people. This was reported by Valery Badmaev, a human rights defender from Kalmykia.

Boris Todaev is charged with insulting the memory of defenders of the Fatherland using the media (Article 354.1, Part 4 of the Russian Criminal Code). A criminal case was opened over the piece ‘In Short Bursts’, published in Narn in December 2025. The excerpt in question, ‘Third Burst’, was devoted to the unveiling of a monument in the village of Maly Derbety commemorating the 1943 deportation of the Kalmyk people, and to the relocation of a similar memorial from the centre of Elista to the outskirts of the city.

The piece includes the recollections of Valentina Kukharenko, who was deported as a child: ‘My father was Kalmyk, and my mother was Russian. When the soldiers came and began deporting the Kalmyks, an officer told us — the minor children of a Kalmyk father — to get ready for exile. My mother was allowed to stay, as she was Russian. But she said: “I won’t abandon my children,” and went to Siberia.’

The excerpt ends with the author’s own comment: ‘Her father was fighting the Nazis at the front at the time, while other Nazis, in the persons of Soviet soldiers, were sending his children, his family, into the cold of Siberia. Forever.’ It was apparently this passage that investigators regarded as containing an ‘insulting characterisation of defenders of the Fatherland: the Soviet soldiers who took part in the Great Patriotic War.’

Boris Todaev is 66. In 1989 he was involved in setting up the Popular Front of Kalmykia, an opposition movement against Soviet rule, before going into business and becoming involved in sports development. In 2023 he stood as a candidate for A Just Russia in elections to the People’s Khural, Kalmykia’s parliament.