A court in Vladivostok has fined 2 million rubles to Marina Zheleznyakova, deputy chair of the Primorsky regional branch of the Yabloko party, in a case on alleged Nazi rehabilitation over a Victory Day post. According to the report, the defense argues that the text did not mention any specific state and that the prosecution is politically motivated.
The article says that on November 10, jurors at the Primorsky Regional Court found Zheleznyakova guilty under Article 354.1 of the Russian Criminal Code. The criminal case on publicly spreading false statements about the activities of the USSR during World War II was opened on April 24, 2024, after law enforcement officers discovered her post dated May 9, 2021.
In the Victory Day greeting, she said that responsibility for unleashing the war and for its victims lay “with the communist totalitarian regime,” and that the task in current conditions was to prevent fascism in the country and ensure a peaceful transition to a democratic path of development.
Investigators said the publication had been addressed to an unlimited audience and contained signs of Nazi rehabilitation. A linguistic expert told the court that the text was a congratulatory message but carried a negative tone and included an assessment of the Soviet leadership’s actions. The defense, however, insisted that the publication contained no direct name of any state, so it could not be clearly understood which state was being discussed. The outlet Zolotoy Most reported that this was central to the defense position.
Yabloko also pointed out that journalists were absent from the hearings until the end of September 2025. The appearance of a reporter on September 25, party members said, was linked to an attempt to bring the expert’s position into the media space and indirectly influence the jury.
The report notes that Zheleznyakova had long been under close attention from law enforcement. In February 2021, her apartment was searched in connection with a case about blocking roads during a rally in support of Alexei Navalny, although she was only a witness and, according to the article, was not even present when the roads were blocked. The party says that during the search her husband was thrown to the floor and struck on the head, while her phone and work computer were seized without any documents being left behind.
Another search took place on March 2, 2022, when officers from the FSB and Center E came to her home. According to the party, she was neither a suspect nor a witness, and the search was formally tied to an inspection for extremist materials and electronic devices because of a message posted by another user in a large Primorsky chat, with which she had no connection. Her phone and laptop were seized. Zheleznyakova herself linked the search to the fact that on February 25, 2022 she had posted a photograph of herself holding a sign reading “No to war!”
Nikolai Rybakov, chairman of Yabloko, called the prosecution political and said local authorities needed a pretext to silence Zheleznyakova. In his view, the case was inflated out of historical facts that until recently had appeared in school textbooks, while her post itself was dedicated to the Soviet people’s heroic struggle for life and freedom.