Petrozavodsk in the mist. Photo CC BY-SA 2.0: Mikhail Kryshen / Flickr. Some rights reserved.At 52, Svetlana Chechil, a member of Russia’s liberal Yabloko party and the former head of a municipality in Russia’s northwestern Karelia Republic, was the oldest inmate in the women’s ward of Penal Colony No. 9. Chechil was a sort of mother to the other inmates, teaching the younger women to knit, and tutting when they cursed.
In a case described by Yabloko as “groundless, absurd and politically motivated,” Chechil was convicted of official misconduct in April 2016. She was found guilty of illegally turning two hectares of agricultural land into an area for holiday cabin development — her former district covers the western shoreline of Lake Onega. Today, that land lies as fallow as it’s been for decades. New municipal head Alexey Luchin explains that because Chechil failed to go through proper channels to change the land’s status, she was sentenced to a year and a half behind bars.
Chechil’s imprisonment is one in a growing number of instances of intimidation against the opposition in Karelia following the election of a Yabloko-backed mayor in the republic’s capital of Petrozavodsk in 2013. Until the crackdown, Karelia had one of the strongest branches of Yabloko in Russia
