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Though he excelled at maths and was fascinated by physics and tech, he had planned to study political science, in an attempt to better understand what was happening in Russia and with the hope that it would teach him how to improve the situation further down the line. But instead of going to high school, he now finds himself in prison, and when his erstwhile friends go on to higher education, he\u2019ll still have three years of his sentence left to serve.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
The doorbell rang at the Turbins\u2019 flat at 6am on Tuesday 29 August of last year. The summer holidays were drawing to a close and Arseny was fast asleep. His mother, Irina, went to open the door. His grandparents wondered who on earth it could be at that time. \u201cFSB,\u201d voices on the other side of the door said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was the first time I\u2019d come across FSB officers,\u201d Irina Turbina explains. \u201cI never realised how dishonest they were.\u201d<\/p>\n
They had come with a search warrant.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey didn\u2019t lay a finger on Arseny,\u201d Irina says, her voice quavering. \u201cI woke him up and he sat there on the couch, with his hands on his lap. They said: \u2018You posted a photo of Putin with his face crossed out on your VK page. Is that your way of showing what you think of the president? Why do you do it openly, in your own name? Aren\u2019t you afraid?\u2019 He said: \u2018No, I\u2019m not afraid. I\u2019m not breaking any laws.\u2019 And he said to me, \u2018Don\u2019t you worry, mum. Everything will be OK. I didn\u2019t do anything wrong.\u2019\u201d The officers left, taking his phone, tablet and laptop with them.<\/p>\n
Three days later, Arseny started ninth grade. Within days, on 5 September, the FSB appeared at the Turbin home again with another search warrant.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat morning, Arseny went to school, and I went to the balcony to wave him off,\u201d says Irina. \u201cI saw a car pull up. Two men got out, stopped Arseny, turned him round and led him back towards the house. I ran out and they showed me their ID.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
![\"Arseny](\"https:\/\/novayagazeta.eu\/static\/records\/6c4603c748084e3f9a0005cee807e7e3.webp\")
<\/picture>\nArseny and his mother<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Turbin was charged with involvement with a terror organisation. According to the investigation, in the spring of 2023, Turbin had repeatedly viewed material online posted by politicians who opposed Putin\u2019s decision to invade Ukraine on 24 February 2022.<\/p>\n
In June, Turbin had printed off \u201cabout 100 leaflets painting a negative picture of the Russian president\u201d and dropped them in mailboxes within a five-minute walk of his home.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
![\"The](\"https:\/\/novayagazeta.eu\/static\/records\/ecc19dbcdaf44f7ab3e9b5bcc2954be5.webp\")
<\/picture>\nThe Putin leaflet<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The leaflet read: \u201cHe ordered his enemies to be poisoned, shot and jailed. He gutted and embezzled businesses he took a liking to. He stole from Russia and stashed his ill-gotten gains with his cronies. He put sycophants in key government positions. He built himself palaces and bought yachts. Do you need such a \u2018president\u2019?\u201d<\/p>\n
A hard copy of the leaflet was the one thing the FSB officers had been unable to find at the Turbins\u2019 home, but they ended up finding the key piece of evidence almost by chance. As Arseny and his mother were being taken to the police station for questioning in September, the officers stopped off at one of the addresses where he had posted the leaflets back in June, and found one just lying there.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn court, Arseny said he hadn\u2019t hidden what he was doing as he didn\u2019t think he was breaking the law, just expressing an opinion,\u201d Irina says. \u201cHe always made it clear that he stood for a peaceful transition of power and for free and fair elections. He just wanted to inform people what was happening.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
The Investigative Committee petitioned the court to keep Turbin in custody due to his \u201cdangerous\u201d status, but the court ruled he should still be allowed to attend school, so he prepared for his exams while under house arrest.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
But the FSB saw another motive. In their view, Turbin, dissatisfied with the Russian state, had decided to join the paramilitary Freedom of Russia Legion, which fights<\/a> alongside the Armed Forces of Ukraine against the Russian military, and which has been designated a terrorist organisation in Russia. He found their email address and exchanged messages with a recruiter. The recruiter sent him a questionnaire that all potential volunteers receive to assess their willingness and ability to contribute to the legion. The investigation argued that sympathy with the group was the sole possible explanation for Turbin\u2019s correspondence.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cArseny did download the questionnaire,\u201d Irina freely admits, but that is as far as it went. Arseny was charged with involvement with the organisation, without being a member.<\/p>\n Since Arseny is a minor, the criminal case against him was conducted by the Oryol region Investigative Committee. After the second search of the Turbin home on 5 September, he was held, taken to Oryol and placed in pretrial detention. The Investigative Committee petitioned the court to keep Turbin in custody due to his \u201cdangerous\u201d status, but the court ruled he should still be allowed to attend school, so he prepared for his exams while under house arrest.<\/p>\n Arseny grew up with his mother and grandparents.<\/p>\n \u201cHe wasn\u2019t like other children, even when he was very young,\u201d says Irina. \u201cWhen he was little, he used to take me to a bookstore to buy books for him. He loved encyclopaedias. \u2026 Then he got into physics \u2026 And little Arseny loved mathematics too.\u201d But, once at school, he didn\u2019t like his maths teacher. Irina found a tutor for her son, who discovered he could already solve complex mathematical problems. It was school that was the problem.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Things came to a head when a group of boys laid in wait for Arseny as he left school on 28 November, knocking him to the ground and beating him up.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Years later, nothing had changed. In November, he was forced to leave school, as news had got out that Arseny was a \u201ccriminal\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was a nightmare with his teachers. One, Yelena Kuksa, advised the head on pastoral matters. She showed the other children something about Arseny\u2019s case. The head and deputy head went from class to class telling pupils not to communicate with Arseny Turbin as he had been declared a foreign agent, which was nonsense! I went and asked the FSB how the school knew about the case. They said they had no idea.\u201d<\/p>\n Things came to a head when a group of boys laid in wait for Arseny as he left school on 28 November, knocking him to the ground and beating him up. He got away, ran into the nearest building and began ringing on all the doorbells. Two women came to his rescue. One ran out and shouted at the boys, the other began filming and threatened to hand the footage over to the police.<\/p>\n Irina home-schooled her son from then on. His friends stuck by him for a couple of months, but then contact dried up. Arseny then heard that the investigator had asked them to testify against him. One of them told Irina that they were promised a good grade in their exam if they cooperated.<\/p>\n Turbin was 14 when the investigation began. In most cases, criminal liability in Russia starts at 16, but in 2016, the lower house of Russia\u2019s parliament, the State Duma, lowered the bar for certain types of crime. Children could now be declared terrorists from the age of 14. Arseny was somewhat unlucky concerning the legion too. Russia had only declared it a terrorist organisation two weeks before he downloaded the questionnaire.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen they took Arseny and me to see the investigator, I was hysterical,\u201d Irina says, struggling to hold back tears. \u201cI was crying and shouted at them, asking if they\u2019d gone mad, acting this way with a child. Couldn\u2019t you have just spoken to him? He\u2019d have stopped!\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cIf we\u2019d known how dishonest they were, we\u2019d have reread the entire statement,\u201d says Irina. \u201cBut we thought they\u2019d just corrected the surname.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n A stumbling block from the investigation\u2019s point of view was that he hadn\u2019t filled in and returned the questionnaire. Arseny was interrogated by the FSB the day after the first search, on 30 August. He was accompanied by his mother, as a 14-year-old cannot be interrogated alone. He told the officers that he hadn\u2019t joined the legion. They carefully recorded his answers and then gave the Turbins a statement to sign. Arseny noticed a typo in his surname. They praised him for noticing the mistake and corrected it, but when they went to print out the corrected statement, the printer wouldn\u2019t work. The officers printed it out in another room. When they came back with the statement, Irina and her son made sure that the surname was now spelt correctly and signed their names.<\/p>\n \u201cIf we\u2019d known how dishonest they were, we\u2019d have reread the entire statement,\u201d says Irina. \u201cBut we thought they\u2019d just corrected the surname.\u201d<\/p>\n Only in court would they realise that Arseny\u2019s testimony had been rewritten. The new statement said he had sent the questionnaire back to the legion.<\/p>\n Three prosecutors upheld the charges against the teenager. Two teachers from Arseny\u2019s school and five of his friends were summoned as witnesses.<\/p>\n Pastoral care head Valentina Abramova said she had long been aware of \u201cTurbin\u2019s statements against the government and the Russian president\u201d, though corrected herself to say \u201cas she had heard from teachers and pupils\u201d. Abramova, a teacher of Russian language and literature, has 58 years of professional experience.<\/p>\n\n\nIt takes a village<\/h2>\n
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