On June 19, 2026, the Yakutsk City Court heard the case of a man who has never killed anyone, never stolen anything, and has never been convicted of taking a life.

Judge Maxim Gorokhov extended Alexander Gabyshev’s compulsory psychiatric confinement — through December 2026. It is the same Judge Gorokhov who sent Gabyshev to a specialized psychiatric hospital back in 2021. The circle closed in the literal, procedural sense of the word: the man who once locked this door came back, five years later, to check personally that it was still shut.

Three months earlier, in March, the Supreme Court of Yakutia had reviewed an appeal against the previous extension. Doctors from the psychoneurological dispensary were summoned into the courtroom to explain why the patient still “posed a danger to society.” They explained. Among their arguments, relayed from the hearing by his defense, was this one: the patient is “prone to solitude.”

Read that again. A shaman — a man whose spiritual practice has been built on solitude for thousands of years — was declared a danger to society by state medicine on the grounds of an inclination to solitude.

Kafka could not have written it. Kafka worked with absurdity that had a logic. There is no logic here — there is a method.

This volume is about the method. Three of them, to be precise. The state whose poisons, bullets and “window falls” we document in The Registry also commands a subtler toolkit — the kind that leaves no body. A man can be killed without killing. Destroy his reputation with a charge that never washes off. Switch justice on selectively, like a circuit breaker. Declare him insane — and treat him until he agrees that he is ill.

Three methods. Three men. All three are on Memorial’s lists of political prisoners. All three, as you read these lines, are exactly where the system put them: a strict-regime penal colony, a strict-regime penal colony, a psychiatric ward.

Case File: Russia. Volume I. We begin.

Yuri Dmitriev is a Karelian historian and the head of the Karelian branch of Memorial. From the late 1980s he did the work the state should have done and would not: he searched the Karelian forests for the mass execution sites of Stalin’s Terror and gave the murdered back their names. On July 1, 1997, he found the Sandarmokh clearing — a killing field where, according to archival records, thousands were shot between August 1937 and December 1938, including the “vanished” Solovki transport: 1,111 prisoners. Dmitriev and his colleagues compiled the lists. He wrote the books. He turned a forest into a memorial where, every August 5th, people came from around the world.

Sandarmokh is an inconvenient place. It cannot be explained away as “complicated times”: named individuals lie there, shot by their own state. From 2016 — synchronously with the start of Dmitriev’s prosecution — a campaign unfolded to rewrite the site’s history: state media and loyal historians began promoting the theory that Sandarmokh might hold not victims of the Terror but Red Army soldiers executed by the Finns. “Alternative excavations” were staged on memorial ground. The memory had to be dug over — and its keeper removed.

On December 13, 2016, Dmitriev was detained — on an anonymous tip. The charge was chosen with precision: production of pornographic material involving his adopted daughter. What the investigation called “material” were photographs Dmitriev had taken to monitor the health and physical development of a child adopted from an orphanage with a raft of medical problems — which he had explained to doctors from the very beginning.

Understand the design of the method. A murder charge can be contested publicly — people will stand up for the accused. A charge of this kind is a social execution before any verdict: part of the audience recoils forever at the mere wording. The method does not require proof. It requires a formulation.

And then came the thing that distinguishes real justice from its imitation — and that the imitation could not tolerate. In 2018, a court examined the case and the expert findings and acquitted Dmitriev.

The acquittal was overturned by the Supreme Court of Karelia. The case went around again — with a new, graver article added. July 2020: 3.5 years. Not enough. In September 2020 the Supreme Court of Karelia turned 3.5 years into 13. In December 2021, the final tally: 15 years of strict regime. Every time the system received an “insufficient” result, it revised the result upward — until the number became, for a man born in 1956, effectively a life sentence. That is the method’s signature: the punishment is not fitted to the deed; the deed is fitted to the required punishment.

On January 28, 2026, Dmitriev turned seventy — in a strict-regime colony in Mordovia, his ninth year behind bars. According to his support group, he has a prostate tumor — discovered by prison medics “by touch”: no biopsy, no tests, no confirmed diagnosis, and no oncologist at the medical facility where he is taken once a year to be “examined.” He suffers severe dizzy spells. On August 1, 2025, he was sent to a punishment cell for 13 days — for sitting down on his bunk ten minutes before the permitted hour because his head was spinning. Before that, solitary for “performing poorly at morning exercises.”

A seventy-year-old scholar with an undiagnosed tumor is punished with solitary confinement because his body is failing. That is not an excess by some guard. That is the protocol.

And here is the detail that will not let this chapter close quietly. People who correspond with Dmitriev are struck by one thing: from the remand prison, from the colony, from the camp, he keeps up the spirits of those on the outside. “Alive, healthy (relatively, as befits my age), reading the papers, following the life of my country and its ‘hostile encirclement,'” he writes. His daughter Katerina says their calls are about the simplest things — weather, food, books. The man whose life they broke holds his back straighter than the people who broke it.

The European Court of Human Rights has communicated Dmitriev’s application under Articles 5, 6 and — critically — 18 of the Convention: an alleged political motive behind the prosecution. PEN America, FIDH and Memorial call the case fabricated. And in 2026 the United Nations entered the record: the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Russia, Mariana Katsarova, officially called for Dmitriev’s immediate release, warning that his conditions of detention endanger his life, and demanded an end to punishing him for actions dictated by his illness. Her letter to the Russian government is dated April 21. Under procedure, Moscow had 60 days to reply.

The sixty days have run out. There is no reply. Silence is also a document.

In September 2018 the thing happened that the vertical of power does not forgive: LDPR candidate Sergei Furgal crushed the Kremlin’s incumbent in the Khabarovsk gubernatorial election — 69.6% of the vote. He did not merely win. He crushed. Then he did the second unforgivable thing: he became a popular governor. He cut his own perks, sold the administration’s yacht, spoke to people like people. The Far East, which had felt like Moscow’s colony for decades, saw one of its own for the first time in a generation.

The answer is in the number itself: 69.6%. The system rests on the axiom that there is no alternative. Furgal was the axiom’s living refutation — proof that the Kremlin could be beaten at its own elections.

Here the method differs from the Dmitriev case — and honesty requires saying so. The charges against Furgal were not conjured from thin air: he was accused of ordering two murders and an attempted murder arising from business conflicts in 2004–2005. Real people died. The question of this volume is not whether Furgal is clean. The question is when the state decided to find out.

For fifteen years those episodes lay in the archives. For fifteen years a man with that biography was elected to the State Duma — three times — passing every security screening, vetting and clearance. The charges did not come alive when new evidence appeared. They came alive two years after he beat the Kremlin at the ballot box.

And here it is necessary to tell how exactly he beat them — because the motive is hidden in the how.

In the first round, Furgal was considered a technical candidate — a spoiler meant to siphon protest votes and stand aside. He behaved accordingly: between the rounds he publicly accepted an offer from Vyacheslav Shport — the United Russia incumbent who had run the region for nine years — to become his first deputy governor. A source close to the regional government told Kommersant that a full withdrawal from the race was discussed, so that “the ballot would carry one name — the incumbent governor’s.” According to RBC, the arrangement was brokered with the participation of Vladimir Zhirinovsky himself. The script was written: a runoff as formality, the obedient spoiler collects a deputy’s chair, the vertical keeps the region.

Then the script broke. According to Meduza’s reporting cited by Mediazona, Furgal first agreed to withdraw — and refused at the last moment. Meanwhile a video was circulating across the region showing him accepting Shport’s offer; supporters spoke of betrayal, and Furgal declared the recording had been re-edited — the closing words “but only if you win” cut out — and posted: “I have not withdrawn my candidacy. The race goes on.” Five days later he took 69.6%.

The vertical does not forgive such things — and does not forget them. Sources close to the presidential administration, cited by Meduza and the BBC, later gave the arrest a name no court document ever will: “deferred revenge.” He had broken the unwritten deal twice — first refusing to withdraw before the runoff, then refusing to resign “voluntarily,” which, those sources say, was insistently recommended to him. The fifteen-year-old murders were not the cause of his case. They were ammunition, waiting its turn in the depot.

On July 9, 2020, Furgal was taken. And then came the detail worth this entire volume on its own: on July 20 — before any trial, before any verdict — Putin removed him from office by personal decree “in connection with a loss of trust.” Consider the legal construction: the head of state publicly certified the guilt of a man whose case had not reached a courtroom. The presumption of innocence was repealed by presidential decree.

Khabarovsk answered as no Russian region ever had: from July 11, 2020, protests ran for months — among the largest in modern Russian history. Tens of thousands. Every Saturday. “I am / We are Sergei Furgal.”

In 2024 the movement “I am / We are Sergei Furgal” was declared extremist by a court and banned. The grammatical formula of solidarity itself — a pronoun plus a surname — became an offense in Russia.

The trial went to a jury — and that is a separate chapter in the anatomy of the method. In February 2023 the jury found Furgal guilty; the court gave him 22 years of strict regime. But on appeal came what the defense called direct evidence of a managed process: two alternate jurors confirmed that outsiders had been present in the deliberation room, and lawyers cited jurors’ testimony of pressure from the presiding judge. The appeal upheld the verdict. The cassation upheld it. In February 2025 the Supreme Court refused finally.

On December 3, 2025, the machine made its control turn: in a second, “economic” case, Moscow’s Babushkinsky court added 23 years — 25 in total, strict regime. The Prosecutor General’s office in parallel recovered 8.5 billion rubles from him. In his final statement Furgal, who admitted guilt on no count, said he had “served and worked for the good of Russia.”

A reporter who watched the second verdict being read recorded a scene that runs cold: traffic police crews outside the court, FSIN special forces in the courtyard — the police were braced for a crowd. Almost no one came but journalists and family. Five years on, the street that had marched for Furgal in the tens of thousands was silent. That does not mean people changed their minds. It means the method works: fear is also a product of the verdict — perhaps the main one.

Memorial has recognized Furgal as a political prisoner. In his Registry card we keep an honest formulation, and we repeat it here: his guilt or innocence in the twenty-year-old episodes cannot be independently established — a process with outsiders in the jury room left no instrument for establishing it. What is documented is selectivity: justice was switched on, like a circuit breaker, at precisely the moment the man became a political problem. Selective justice is not justice with flaws. It is repression with procedural paperwork.

To understand what Furgal was really punished for, you have to know who he was supposed to be by the script. Not an oppositionist. A spoiler — a technical candidate whose job is to siphon off protest votes and step aside at the right moment. This is neither metaphor nor conjecture: it is a distinct, well-documented Russian political technology, and Furgal is that rare case in which a component of the machine came alive.

Here is what that technology looks like when it runs as designed.

2017–2018. Ksenia Sobchak announces her presidential candidacy on October 18 — and reports herself that the day before, on the 14th, she met with Putin. The announcement lands precisely during the days Navalny is serving an administrative arrest. Novaya Gazeta publishes political analysts’ assessments in plain text: the candidacy was cleared with the presidential administration, and her task is to counter Navalny’s team. Navalny himself calls her a “caricature liberal candidate” and a pro-government spoiler: “You were used as an instrument to turn people away from the opposition even further.” He states that, in a private conversation, Sobchak told him about the “enormous money” she had been offered to run. On air on election day he lays out the whole scheme: “Putin’s scheme and yours is to keep me off the ballot and put up the most unpopular people in the country — you and Grigory Yavlinsky.” Sobchak denies the accusations.

The surname deserves a pause. Ksenia Sobchak is the daughter of Anatoly Sobchak — Putin’s mentor, who died in a Kaliningrad hotel room amid mutually contradictory forensic conclusions, with two bodyguards falling ill simultaneously and a murder case opened and closed without a single finding. His card sits in our Registry under the status “documented suspicion.” The father, by the public assertion of his widow and daughter, was poisoned by the system. The daughter, by Navalny’s public accusation, was used by it. One surname — two modes of application.

2021. The technology descends to the regional level and takes on a form beyond parody. In the St. Petersburg legislative election, two additional Boris Vishnevskys register against the Yabloko incumbent Boris Vishnevsky: both had legally changed their first names and surnames specifically for the election (one had been Alexei Shmelev), and both grew beards so as to be indistinguishable from the original on the ballot poster. Social media christens it “the attack of the clones”; Meduza launches a game — find the real Vishnevsky. And here is what matters most: the technique is publicly acknowledged by the chair of the Central Election Commission, Ella Pamfilova, who calls it “the lowest point of degradation of those political technologists who serve their clients.” A state official confirms it: the technology exists, and it has clients. Practitioners estimate a double siphons off between 2–5% and 20% of the original’s vote.

2024. Boris Nadezhdin runs for president on an antiwar platform. Queues form at the signature-collection points — people stand in the freezing cold to sign. He delivers 105,000 signatures to the Central Election Commission. According to The Moscow Times, citing two Russian officials involved in organizing the election, the order to keep him off the ballot came from the Kremlin — precisely after they saw those queues. The commission invalidates 9,147 signatures, reporting among them “11 dead people.” His campaign publishes what the “defects” actually consist of: in the commission’s own digitization, Rostov-on-Don became “rostov at home,” Salekhard became “Salikhard,” Mayakovsky Street became “Myakovsky” — and on these “address mismatches” the signatures were ruled invalid.

And then came the thing that is worth this entire chapter. On February 13, 2024, on the state channel Rossiya, Vladimir Solovyov thanked Nadezhdin for compiling a list of “enemies of the people” and “not-yet-finished-off Navalnyites” — and called for those lists to be handed to the security services.

Consider the construction. No leak was required. No covert handover, no hack, no betrayal. One hundred and five thousand people themselves, voluntarily, lawfully, with their passport data and home addresses, carried their names into a state body — because they wanted to vote. The legal procedure for nominating a candidate functioned as a census of dissenters. The commission, incidentally, also possesses a routine, statutory channel for sending queries to the Interior Ministry and the FSB to verify signatories — that is not a conspiracy, it is the regulation.

And Solovyov does not need the lists to go anywhere. He needs you to know they are already there. That is the whole method of this volume: not the punishment, but the knowledge that it is available. Not the shot — the weapon displayed.

July 2026. Nadezhdin tries again — running as an independent for the State Duma in the Mytishchi district. For the first time in history, a Duma candidate is designated a “foreign agent” during the campaign itself. On July 13 police detain him; the charge — “display of extremist symbols,” the pretext — a link to a video containing a photograph of Navalny. On July 17 the Dolgoprudny city court finds him guilty and fines him one thousand rubles — a derisory sum, but once the ruling takes effect he is barred for a year from participating in any election or collecting signatures. Medics are called into the courtroom during the hearing: his blood pressure has spiked. His lawyer calls the proceeding a disgrace to the system — delivering a verdict in the presence of doctors is unprecedented. Nadezhdin says it plainly: “The real goal of what is happening here is to shut my mouth and keep me from running for the Duma.” Leaving the courthouse, he adds: “I’m glad I’m alive and free.” By then he had already been barred from leaving the country.

Now go back to Furgal. In 2018 he was assigned exactly this role — a technical component in a well-tuned machine, a spoiler who would siphon votes and stand aside. He agreed. And then, at the last moment, he refused — and won. They did not take revenge on him for murders fifteen years old. They took revenge because the component turned out to be alive.

Alexander Gabyshev is a Yakut shaman. His story begins not with politics but with grief: his wife died in 2008, and he went to live in the forest. Three years as a hermit on a cape outside Yakutsk. He came back a different man — and with a mission.

In March 2019 he walked out of Yakutsk on foot. Destination: Moscow, eight thousand kilometers away. His stated purpose — to perform a rite and “exorcise” from the Kremlin Vladimir Putin, whom he called a creature of dark forces. You may smile. Many did — for the first few weeks.

Then the smiling stopped — not ours, theirs. As Gabyshev walked, people joined him. Villages came out to meet him, listened, walked alongside. Videos of him drew millions of views. The danger was never a shaman with a staff — the danger was that a man who was not afraid was walking across the country, and the country was gathering toward him. A vertical that had survived mass rallies was frightened of a pedestrian.

In the autumn of 2019, on the border of Buryatia and Irkutsk region, the march was stopped by a security operation. Then the system reached for the instrument with the longest pedigree in this country: psychiatry. A criminal case for “public calls to extremism”; a state evaluation — “insane.” May 2020: first forced hospitalization. In January 2021 they came for him again — and when he met the security forces holding a Yakut sword, an article on violence against a state representative was added. On July 26, 2021, a court committed him to compulsory treatment for an indefinite term.

Feel the legal construction: the punishment has no end. The longest camp sentence has a release date. “Treatment” has none — only a review every six months, conducted by the same doctors who declared you ill.

Then the geography of coercion: the Novosibirsk specialized psychiatric hospital with intensive observation — the harshest regime this system possesses; from 2022, Ussuriysk; from September 2025, Yakutsk. The defense has reported that he was injected with haloperidol — a heavy neuroleptic with devastating side effects. An independent evaluation: refused. In January 2026 came the fifth anniversary of his uninterrupted confinement in psychiatric institutions; counting from the start, the system has held him for the seventh year.

They struck him even from hope: by his lawyer’s account, Gabyshev was on the initial list of political prisoners recommended for the great 2024 exchange — and was crossed off.

This method carries a Soviet patent. It is exactly how the USSR handled dissidents: disagreement was declared a symptom, “sluggish schizophrenia” was the all-purpose diagnosis, and a psychiatric bed was a cell without a verdict. The instrument was thought to be buried with the Soviet Union. The Gabyshev case is its exhumation certificate.

After the June hearing, lawyer Olga Timofeyeva said two sentences about her client, and this whole chapter fits between them: “He’s holding on, of course. Trying to hold on.” And another of his defenders, Alexei Pryanishnikov, delivered a diagnosis — not of Gabyshev, but of the system: reading the Yakut psychiatrists’ conclusions makes your hair stand on end — they object even to his socializing on the ward and his correspondence with the outside world.

Socializing — a symptom. Solitude — a symptom. Walking — a symptom. Silence — a symptom. In this diagnostics there are no healthy people; there are only those not yet examined.

Amnesty International has demanded Gabyshev’s release since 2021, describing his indefinite psychiatric confinement as punishment for peaceful expression. Memorial recognizes him as a political prisoner and names the method outright: punitive psychiatry. On June 19, 2026, Judge Gorokhov extended the “treatment” through December. In December there will be a new hearing. And, if nothing changes, a new extension. This method has no ending. That is its essence.

And one last detail that runs cold. We cannot prove it, and we will not pretend that we can. But we have no right to pass over it in silence either.

In 2020 — precisely when the state first locked the real shaman inside a psychiatric hospital — a second one appeared on the Russian pop stage. The singer Yaroslav Dronov took the stage name SHAMAN. For two years he sang about love and the moon. Then, on February 23, 2022 — one day before the invasion — the song “Rise Up” was released, and the country acquired the voice of the war: “I Am Russian,” the Russian anthem performed on the same stage as Putin, an official proxy for the president in the 2024 election, Merited Artist of the Russian Federation. Investigators at The Insider analyze his music videos as an instrument of state propaganda.

Let us say it at once, and first, before the defense says it: no document proving intent exists. Dronov took the pseudonym before the country had ever heard of Gabyshev, and for his own reasons — fans had been calling his vocals “shamanic” since 2013. It was the war that made him, not a pedestrian from Yakutia. We do not claim that this shaman was placed on stage to eclipse that one.

But we are obliged to say something else as well: substituting a controlled double for the real thing is not a conspiracy theorist’s fantasy. It is a core discipline of the agency in question, with a declassified pedigree a century long.

In 1921 the Cheka created the “Monarchist Union of Central Russia” — an entirely fabricated anti-Bolshevik underground, invented at the Lubyanka. Operation Trust ran for six years, lured and destroyed more than a hundred people, split the emigration, and taught the West not to believe in real resistance. The KGB service responsible for such operations was originally called Service D — disinformation; later it was renamed Service A, active measures. KGB Major General Oleg Kalugin, who headed foreign counterintelligence, defined the profession without embarrassment: not the collection of intelligence but subversion — “the heart and soul of Soviet intelligence.” And in September 2025, analysts at the Jamestown Foundation recorded that, since the war began, the FSB has returned to the Trust scheme directly — creating pseudo-independent groups posing as opponents of the Kremlin in order to penetrate the émigré community.

And between 1921 and 2025 lies everything you read in the previous chapter: Sobchak against Navalny; three bearded Vishnevskys on one ballot, acknowledged by the chair of the Central Election Commission herself. The double is not an exotic curiosity. It is a working instrument, applied without interruption for a hundred years.

So the country now has two shamans. One it sings from the stage of the Kremlin Palace — in dreadlocks, in leather, performing the anthem. The other it injects with haloperidol in a ward eight thousand kilometers away, because he set out on foot to chant against the authorities, and holds him there in his seventh year, extending the term every six months.

This volume has no resolution, because none has been written: all three men are inside the method right now.

A seventy-year-old historian with a tumor diagnosed “by touch” waits in a Mordovian colony for the answer Moscow owed the United Nations in June — and never gave. A governor who beat the Kremlin at the ballot box is in the sixth year of twenty-five. A shaman waits for December, when Judge Gorokhov — or his successor — will decide once again whether he has been cured of his proneness to solitude.

Their files are three cards in The Registry of the System’s Victims, which grows with every update — the Registry stays open because the system has not stopped. Volume II — Poison as a Signature — will be about those who were less lucky: about the method that does leave bodies, and the laboratories of three countries that learned to read its handwriting.

Methodology note: this text relies exclusively on primary and independent sources — court decisions and defense statements, ECtHR and UN documents, Memorial and Amnesty International findings, and reporting by Novaya Gazeta, Kommersant, RBC, Mediazona, RTVI, Radio Svoboda, Interfax and regional outlets (2018–2026). Positions of the Russian authorities are presented in “What the Defense Would Say.” Where guilt has been established by a court, we cite the verdict; where it has not, we say so plainly. All quotations are authentic. Statuses are reviewed as new documents emerge. Named individuals deny wrongdoing unless a court has ruled otherwise.