On Tuesday, police arrived at the Department of Computer Science and Information Security at the St. Petersburg State University of Railway Communications while 43-year-old Associate Professor Dmitry Burakov was giving a lecture. The lecturer was taken to the police station and a report was filed against him for "discrediting" the army. “Discrediting” involved having a trident symbol on a Ukrainian flag as his social media avatar. Burakov was fined 30,000 rubles and then was asked to resign from his job. "I do not regret what I did," he told journalists from Okna.

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"They came about 15 minutes before the end of the class and peeked into the classroom," Dmitry recounts the police visit. "I asked them to wait until I finished the lecture, and they stayed in the corridor. After the lecture ended, they entered the classroom, and I went with them to the police station. Essentially, the university staff and students saw that the police had come for me. Initially, the police tried to find me at my old address, but I haven't been registered there for 12 years. So they came to arrest me at work."
At the police station in the Admiralty District of St. Petersburg, Burakov was presented with materials from the "E" Center (Center for Combating Extremism). The report, drawn up under Article 20.3.3 part 1 of the Russian Code of Administrative Offences, stated that "the profile picture of 'Dmitry Burakov' featured the national emblem of Ukraine, with the text 'No to War' below the image."
"I first put the Ukrainian flag with the emblem on my avatar in 2014 when the Crimea events began. I kept it for a while, then I removed it. I put it up again after February 24, 2022," Dmitry says.
After the report was filed that evening, he left the police station and went home. News of his detention had already been broadcast in many media outlets, and the dean's office called him to find out whether to cancel classes or find a substitute.
That same evening, Dmitry received various messages on social media from trolls: 'They're going to mess with you now,' 'You've jumped too high, rooster?' 'Dima, this is just the beginning. You'll forget Latin, you'll learn to speak in criminal slang'. Kremlin-aligned media also joined in, reporting that the associate professor's page on "VKontakte" "featured the President of Ukraine, jokes about the Russian Constitution and the President of Russia," and that "over the years, he has posted publications critical of the authorities in Russia and St. Petersburg."

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"Somebody has to stay here"

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Dmitry Burakov, a native of St. Petersburg, has been teaching at the St. Petersburg State University of Railway Communications, from which he graduated in 2003, for the last 13 years. After earning his diploma, he continued in postgraduate studies. He became a candidate in technical sciences and began his teaching career, leading classes related to programming, information security, and IT technology.
Dmitry participated in the opposition Strategy-31 protests. During one of the protests in 2011, he was detained for a fight with a riot police officer. For more than ten years, he has been an observer at elections for the Observers of Petersburg Association. Dmitry has long realized that the country is moving in the wrong direction, even before the annexation of Crimea. But the atmosphere in Russia became unbearable for him after the war began.
"This has all shocked me, I have not yet recovered from it. But now at least I can sleep normally and not cry. I've probably become hardened," Dmitry admits. "But still, my conscience torments me. I have a good friend who moved to Kharkiv back in 2013 and is still there. Everything that happens to Kharkiv, I see practically before my eyes. He calls and tells me: today it hit here, there. We've been sitting without electricity for a week now, but you already know that."
Начало формы
In February 2023, exactly a year after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Dmitry Burakov's fixed-term employment contract with the university expired. He left the university and moved to Kyrgyzstan, where his sister had already been living for a year with her family. However, after six months, in August, Dmitry returned to Russia because his colleagues asked for his help: due to the departure of many teachers, there was simply no one to conduct classes. "I could have left Kyrgyzstan and moved further, as I work for a company that relocated to Georgia. And I could have easily moved there, but I didn't want to. As strange as it may sound, I probably realized that I can't live outside Russia," Dmitry says. "Someone has to stay here, inside, to somehow remedy all this."
In St. Petersburg, he had no close relatives left. His parents had long passed away, he had no family of his own, only colleagues and friends. After weighing the risks, Dmitry decided to return to Russia. He wasn’t afraid of mobilization due to having a non-draft category, but at the same time, he understood that in today's realities, he was likely to be charged for "fakes" and "discrediting" the army.
"It's not that what happened was a surprise to me, of course," Dmitry says. "After all, it had all been on my page in open access, and I hadn’t deleted anything because it was my conscious position. And I was essentially prepared for what happened. Now I've removed it because I don't want a repeat fine or criminal charges."

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Silence and fear

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Dmitry says that he never publicly discussed the war either with students in lectures or with teachers in the department, as this topic is taboo in the department and the university.
"Questions related to Ukraine are generally avoided at the university. In the beginning, when it all just happened, it was discussed and there were some words of support because everyone was simply horrified by what had happened. But now there's silence," he explains. "Only two colleagues wrote to me in connection with the fine and expressed their sympathy. One student sent a message as well, also with words of support and an offer to help pay the fine. On behalf of the group, as far as I understand. This silence and fear extend not only to the university. The bitterness in society is generally growing, I see it."
At the court, Dmitry Burakov confirmed that the "VKontakte" page mentioned in the report belonged to him and that he was the sole contributor, with no one else having access to his account. Dmitry explained that he had placed the coat of arms and flag of Ukraine on his page out of personal affection for the country where he has many acquaintances and which he had enjoyed visiting before the war began. The inscription "No to War" expresses his principled pacifist stance against any military conflict, and "situations in which sides oppose each other using weapon systems are usually called wars."
Burakov noted that by displaying the Ukrainian flag, he neither mentioned the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, which he allegedly discredited, nor did he give any assessments of the actions of Russian military personnel. It took Judge Elena Samsonova of the Lenin District Court 12.5 minutes to conduct the hearing and decide on the fine of 30,000 rubles.

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“They’re intentionally ruining his life"

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After the court session that evening, Dmitry again got a call from the university saying that Rector Oleg Valinsky was expecting him for a talk the next morning. The conversation with the university head was even shorter than the court session. The rector proposed that the associate professor resign by mutual agreement. The alternative in case of refusal was dismissal "under an article."
"The rector told me that my values, even if personal, sharply contradict the values that the university imparts to its students," Dmitry says. "And considering that this story got into the press, I now need to resign. And if I don't want to, they will find some grounds in the employment contract. Probably something about high moral character. Or they'll find something related to work discipline. Well, in general, it doesn't matter.”
"When I proposed asking the opinion of the ultimate consumers of my services, the students, the rector replied that this wasn’t significant or interesting enough to spend his time and would have no impact," Dmitry recounts. "And he hinted that no one is irreplaceable - they'll find someone. Today I have three classes. It might be my last working day at the university."
On the same day, April 4th, Dmitry Burakov was dismissed, and forced to write a resignation letter. According to him, they were in such a hurry that they didn't transfer the money due to him to his bank card but immediately paid him in cash.
St. Petersburg activist and acquaintance of Dmitry, Anastasia Kuznetsova, believes it is possible that someone who did not want Burakov to participate in the upcoming municipal elections could have reported him.
"It's terrible, they are intentionally ruining his life," Kuznetsova says. "What's happening to Dmitry looks like organized persecution. They made a show of detaining him, taking him right from the classroom. Then they immediately started to stir up an information wave. And the incident wasn’t covered just by some dubious Telegram channels, but by federal media like AIF, MK in Peter, and 'Kommersant.' In the Yandex news feed, the story about his detention was the top headline."
According to Kuznetsova, as a member of a Territorial Election Commission, Burakov made sure that polling site commissions had independent members and independent observers were present in polling stations. He also actively participated in discussions about the comprehensive development of territories.
"Dmitry helped children with disabilities and saved cats from a shelter. He has five cats at home. And despite all this, he never boasted about his deeds and did not strive to be in the spotlight. Such a person deserves respect, not persecution."

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Harassed, fired, forced to flee the country

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When Russia began the war in Ukraine, teachers from Russian universities started to leave en masse. Some left because they disagreed with their country's policies, others because students and postgraduate students received deferrals from mobilization while teachers did not, and others were forced out by their management—especially those who had signed a collective letter from scientists against the war or otherwise expressed their anti-war stance, for example, in their private blogs on social media.
It is difficult to specify the exact number of teachers who have left Russia, but "Novaya Gazeta Europe" calculated that, by conservative estimates, more than 2,500 researchers have left Russia since 2022.
Particularly many have left from Moscow and St. Petersburg. For example, St. Petersburg State University lost about 50% of its faculty in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science.
Other departments have suffered as well.
In 2022, Denis Skopin, an associate professor from the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences at St. Petersburg State University, was fired after he attended an anti-mobilization rally and was subjected to administrative arrest. Soon after, the Liberal Arts and Sciences program was closed.
Last summer, Mikhail Belousov, an associate professor and historian from St. Petersburg State University, was fired due to his anti-war views. He was harassed on social media before his dismissal.
In the fall of 2023, Svetlana Drugoveiko-Dolzhanskaya, a teacher from the Philological Faculty of St. Petersburg State University, a well-known philologist, member of the Orthographic Commission of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Council for the Russian Language under the President of the Russian Federation, and an expert council of the international educational action "Total Dictation," author of the manual for teachers, "Moral Potential of Russian Prose. 1990–2010," was fired. Her dismissal was prompted by her review of a linguistic expert examination related to the case of the arrested activist Sasha Skochilenko, conducted by other university employees.
At the beginning of 2024, it became known that the management of St. Petersburg State University did not renew contracts with four researchers from the Laboratory of High Energy Physics who had an active civic stance, including the physicist and science popularizer, a participant in experiments at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), Andrey Seryakov. Politician and teacher Yulia Galyamina was fired from RANEPA under the "foreign agents" law.

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