French publishing house Albin Michel, which released ZOV, a novel by Pavel Filantiev, a paratrooper who escaped from Russia, has now published another book about Russia titled In Putin’s Prisons. It is allegedly written by Russian opposition activist Alyosha Deminn and tells how the protagonist was kept in either a pre-trial detention center or a penal colony in the Moscow district of Biryulyovo. There her hands were tied with barbed wire and she was doused with urine from a bucket. Agentstvo has reasons to believe that this book may be a hoax by the Belgian writer Alison Deminne. She is most likely the one hiding behind the alias «Alyosha Deminn».
- The story claims that the woman became an oppositionist on 5 December 2011, «the day after the parliamentary elections». On that day, the book says, Deminn went to a rally at Chistye Prudy, which, according to various estimates, was attended by between 2,000 and 10,000 people. Deminn claims she was detained after the rally.
- Another detention took place in Vladivostok on 23 January 2021. Alyosha Deminn was there to «fulfill a promise [she] had made a few months earlier to the best friend’s young son: to return his hockey stick,» which had been left at her home by «his recently deceased father.» As Deminn writes, she heard Alexei Navalny’s call to «not be afraid of anything» and in the early hours of 23 January «decided to go to the rally closest to the hotel».
- According to her description, the rally was attended by thousands of people. Deminn writes that more than 300 people were detained in Vladivostok, including her. After the detention, she was allegedly accused of participating in an unauthorized rally and placed under house arrest. However, she was also tried for other offenses — propaganda of «nontraditional relations», insulting religious beliefs and distributing offensive materials at the «Mayakovsky Readings».
- The trial took place in the «Tver court,» the book says. Contacted by Agentstvo, Deminn clarified that she was referring to the Tverskoy District Court of Moscow. She was supposedly released in Vladivostok, returned to the capital on her own, and only then was she convicted, the book specifies. However, in an interview with Le Parisien, which Deminn gave immediately after the book’s release, she said that after her detention in Vladivostok, she was transferred to Moscow, where she was placed under house arrest. According to the book, she was tried by a judge named Kurkov.
- Deminn writes that she pleaded guilty as agreed with her lawyers, and received a one-month sentence under the «Dadin’s article». After that, she was taken home (as she writes, to the Dorogomilovsky district, near Victory Park) to pick up «some things» and then sent to Biryulyovo. According to the book, there was a building there used to keep «those who were called ‘supporters of the uprising’ by the regime’s sympathizers». It is not entirely clear from the book whether this was a pre-trial detention center or a penal colony (one can draw different conclusions from different lines). «From the outside, there was nothing to indicate that a prison was hiding behind these walls. The building had … the facade of an ordinary apartment block,» the book says.
- In the prison, Deminn was met by an employee, Olesya Kotova, who, according to the book, said: «Theoretically you have the right to a medical examination. But to hell with that nonsense! To hell with what you believe are your rights. This place is not a labor camp, much less a summer camp. Its purpose is to put you back on the right path, the path of respect for traditional values, which include God, family and the defense of Russian historical truth.» Kotova referred to the institution as a «red camp,» according to the book. Demin’s hands were then tied with barbed wire. It was also wrapped around her armpits, and guards beat her with batons on the way to her cell, Deminn writes. In her cell, the «oppositionist» was visited by a guard, who at least once poured urine from a bucket on her. She was constantly beaten in prison, and once a bat flew into her cell. The barbed wire torture was repeated several times.
- According to the book, the doctor at the prison was a retired veterinarian. Deminn visited him at the end of her imprisonment when she was in a «critical condition» after being beaten by a guard, she writes.
Discrepancies in the book
- The scale of the detentions in Vladivostok is clearly exaggerated. There was indeed a large protest rally that day, which was attended by Yury Dud, among others. According to OVD-Info, 42 people were detained at that rally. The list of detainees does not include anyone with the surname Demin(n). The Investigative Committee reported two cases of violence against law enforcers.
- A trial on participation in a protest in Vladivostok being held in Moscow also seems unlikely.
- Deminn writes that she was charged under several articles at once (propaganda of «nontraditional relations» and insulting religious beliefs), and convicted under the «Dadin’s article», i.e., for repeated participation in unsanctioned protests over a six-month period. By January 2021, only four people had been convicted under this article, and yet another conviction should have attracted some attention. «Dadin’s article» provides for a minimum of one year in prison. Deminn told Agentstvo that her detention only lasted 33 days. Her explanation for this discrepancy was «the leniency of the system».
- The bailiffs first bringing her home after the verdict, and only then to the penal colony, also seems unlikely.
- Agentstvo could not find any mention of Judge Kurkov of Moscow’s Tverskoy District Court or a Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) officer by the name of Olesya Kotova. Olga Romanova, head of the Russia Behind Bars Foundation, told Agentstvo that there are no pre-trial detention centers or colonies in Biryulyovo.
- The book’s descriptions of torture do not look plausible either, said Georgy Ivanov, head of the Moscow branch of Team Against Torture. «Tying wrists and armpits with barbed wire would result in massive blood loss and leave very distinctive marks, I can’t imagine such torture in Russian realities, as there are far more accessible and discreet types of torture,» Ivanov said, noting that it looks like a biblical allusion. He also noted that one can only be imprisoned for at last two months, lesser terms are not possible under the Criminal Code.
Claims by “Alyosha”
- In her conversation with Agentstvo, which took place exclusively via private messages on a social network, Deminn said that she is a woman and her ‘’passport name‘’ is ‘’Anya‘’. However, she refused to provide her full name, citing the fact that part of her family still lives in Russia. Demin clarified that the pseudonym she took was not «Alesha» (she claimed that was her middle name), but «Alyosha», which, according to her, was «the name of a little girl from an old Yakut fairy tale that [her] father used to adore».
- The book states that her father’s parents are Dolgans (native people of Yakutia) and her father’s brother lived in Chechnya. Deminn herself told Agentstvo that her father is from the Sakha people and her mother is Polish.
- In the book, Deminn writes that her father had problems with the Russian law because he transferred money to his brother in Chechnya. However, she told an Agentstvo journalist that her father actually got in trouble because he was «accused of speaking in favour of the independence of the Sakha Republic».
- According to Demin, she lived in Russia from birth until 2000, and then from 2006 to 2021. Agentstvo failed to find any documentary evidence of Anna, Alyosha or Ali Demina’s stay in Russia in any of the leaked databases. We also searched for the surnames Demin and Dyumina, to no avail either.
- While answering Agentstvo’s questions, Deminn often spoke of herself in the masculine gender. When asked why she refers to herself both in masculine and feminine, the woman said that her main language is Yakut and she “uses gender-neutral language out of habit,” although at times the language errors she made were more akin to automatic translation errors, which occur when using programs like Google Translate.
- Deminn denied the requests of the Agentstvo journalist for a phone or video call multiple times. She also refused to show any documents regarding her detention, or photos or videos of her in Russia. She explained this decision by saying that she did not trust him.
- Agentstvo was unable to find any public mention of Deminn’s case. She wrote about it as follows (quoted without any editing): «3 years ago, it was enough to go to the Ministry’s website to find all the documents related to my case. This is what the journalists were doing at that time. Then came April 2023 and the Ukrainian investigation of tortures in Kherson. They searched publicly available Russian databases and found that documents relating to the cases of detainees who had testified about being tortured were no longer available. And they began to gradually disappear. Since then, 274 court cases have disappeared from the databases.” Agentstvo has not been able to find public references to this story.
- Katerina Ostapenko, a former coordinator of Navalny’s headquarters in Vladivostok, told Agentstvo that she had never seen Deminn and had never heard of her. When asked to explain why her version of the events in Vladivostok differed from what was publicly known, Deminn wrote: “I know what they write about Vladivostok. They say that there were not so many protesters, not so many arrests. But I was there.”
- There is a photo of Deminn in Le Parisien, the newspaper which interviewed her immediately after the book’s release. The caption reads: “While telling us about her shocking book, the anti-Putin activist hides her hands. They bear the scars of the brutal treatment she suffered in prison.» However, a year later, the Parisien Week-end journalist Gaëtane Morin, who interviewed Deminn, claims that it’s not her in this photo. “This is clearly stated both in the link to the image and in the printed version of the article,” she said. Agentstvo could not find any mention of this in the archived version of the article.
- This is not the only discrepancy between what the French journalist told Agentstvo and the article in Le Parisien. Last year’s article said that Alyosha Deminn spoke “beautiful French”. However, a year later, the author of the interview told Agentstvo that Deminn spoke Russian and they communicated through an interpreter. Spokesperson of the Albin Michel publishing house Agnès Olivo told Agentstvo that Deminn did not write the book herself because she does not know French well enough.
- Morin told Agentstvo that she had no doubt about the veracity of the story of Deminn, whom she met four times in 2021 and 2023. According to Morin, Le Parisien journalists checked Deminn’s arrest documents and indictment, and read through documents from Moscow’s Tverskoy District Court. She also specified that the journalists had seen a video of Deminn’s arrest.
- Albin Michel spokesperson Agnès Olivo said that the publishing house also checked the authenticity of the facts in the book with the help of public documents, lawyers, exiled prison officials and medical reports. The fact-checking also involved an unnamed independent Russian journalist, who obtained confirmation from a FSIN official that such actions had indeed taken place and that hundreds of ethnic minority Russian citizens, often from poor families, had suffered from them. The spokesperson also clarified that a representative of the Red Cross had helped with the work on the book. On Sunday evening, Agentstvo sent an inquiry to the Red Cross. According to Olivo, the book does not contain any fiction, except for the name “Alyosha”.
Who really is “Alyosha Deminn”?
- Analysis conducted by Agentstvo suggests that “Alyosha Deminn” from Le Parisien’s photo is actually a Belgian writer named Alison Deminne. Booknode.com, a writer database, says that Deminne was born in Belgium in 1987 and had published a book called Normality (Normalité) by the time her profile was compiled (probably around 2010).
- In 2019, Deminne released a book called The Wind Builders (Les bâtisseurs du vent). In 2020, she won the René-Fallet Prize for it. However, the writer now uses a slightly different name: she calls herself Aly Deminne. “Alyosha Deminn” told ‘Agency’ that Alison Deminne is a different writer, but did not deny her connection with the second author. According to a photo analysis service, Aly Deminne and Alison Deminne are the same person.
- The difference between Alison and Aly is not only in the name. The former is a native of Belgium, while the latter is described as “Russian by birth, translator and teacher of Slavic languages». For the release of The Wind Builders, the regional newspaper of the Belgian province of Namur published an article about the author. According to that article, Aly Deminne was “born in the former USSR” but grew up in Namur. The text says that she moved to Belgium just four months after her birth. The book, according to Duminne herself, is inspired by the style of Russian fairy tales.
- Aly’s connection to Russia isn’t just a historical one. In 2023, Aly Duminne skipped the Literary Days festival in the French town of Jaligny-sur-Besbre because of “detention in Minsk.” As the spokesperson for Flammarion publishing house (which published The Wind Builders) explains, Aly was detained for “helping Russian oppositionists escape to Europe”, and after her detention she was allegedly sent “to Tverskoy (the text does not specify whether this refers to the oblast, the Moscow district court or something else — Agentstvo) and accused of discrediting the Russian armed forces”. Agentstvo was unable to reach the phone number listed on the website of the Flammarion publishing house on Monday morning.
- Commenting on this piece, “Alyosha Deminn” wrote to Agentstvo (verbatim quote): “I had never been to Minsk in my life. At that time I still weighed 41 kg and was physically unable to move. The communicators found something. Honestly, I discovered this article.”
- The Twitter and Instagram pages that now run under the name Alyosha Deminn and repost news about Russia were probably previously run under the name Aly A. Deminne. In 2020, they claimed Deminne was a “teacher” and “writer” (these words were written in Russian), as well as a professor of Slavic languages and a translator. Private library website Baronnesperchees.fr states that Aly Deminne and Alyosha Deminn are the same author.
Why did “Alyosha Deminn” draw our attention?
- In her Instagram account, «Alyosha Deminn» not only promotes the book, but also sharply criticizes Russie-Libertés, a French association that has existed since 2012 and opposes the Russian authorities and the war in Ukraine. Demin accused Russie-Libertés of denying the existence of torture chambers in Russian prisons, ‘lying’ about Maria Pevchkikh’ statement about the preparation of Alexei Navalny’s exchange, mocking the memory of the oppositionist and persecuting «those who actually do something [to help Russian political prisoners].»
- In the comments to these posts, Deminn is supported by a user with the nickname «Dmitry Orov» (and that’s not a typo). He wrote that Deminn, along with former Novaya Gazeta editor-in-chief Dmitry Muratov, managed to get letters with the signatures of 23,000 Russians sent to the Federal Penitentiary Service and the Red Cross about conditions in the penal colony where opposition politician Alexei Gorinov is held, after which he was moved to a warm cell and given a mattress and blanket. Dmitry Muratov told Agentstvo that he was not acquainted with Deminn. ‘Orov’ also urged not to buy books published by Russie-Libertés and instead donate money to Russian political prisoners. In another comment, ‘Orov’ accused Ilya Yashin of engaging with Russie-Libertés, which had allegedly insulted Navalny.
- Russie-Libertés has never been involved in conflicts with other Russian opposition figures, a spokesperson for the organization told Agentstvo. «It all sounded very strange to us. There was not the slightest reason to accuse us of insulting Navalny’s memory,» the organization said.
- The photos that «Orov» uses in its Instagram profile are stolen from the account of St. Petersburg resident Daniil Voronin. Agentstvo contacted Voronin. He said that he has not used Instagram for a long time. According to Voronin, he deleted his own account. «Apparently, it was hacked and photos were downloaded from it,» Voronin suggested.
- Agentstvo is unsure whether the social media activities of «Alyosha Deminn» and «Dmitry Orov» are some sort of bodacious marketing, or if we are dealing with a politically motivated attack.
- P.S. After this article was originally published in Russian or shortly before it (Agentstvo could not determine the exact time), the user Alyosha Deminn renamed her X.com and Instagram accounts to Aly Deminn.
Text by Mikhail Maglov, Viacheslav Ogloblin and other Agentstvo authors
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