‘We imagine that the people in power are there because they have a right to it. But that’s not the case. Those in power must be able to punish their subordinates. And for the people to make their “servants” act in their interests, they should have the ability to punish them.’ So speaks Yuri Mukhin, a long-time proponent of radical political change in Russia and founder of the newspaper Duel, a cult read among the country’s conservatives and far left between 1995 and 2009, when it was banned on grounds of extremism.
Indeed, it is this kind of thinking that underpins much of Mukhin's writing, and is a quote from the manifesto of the People's Will Army (AVN), a group founded by Mukhin in 1997. AVN's stated aim was to change Russia’s constitution via a referendum, allowing the populace to put the president and members of the Federal Assembly on trial and send them to prison. AVN was banned in 2011, again with the help of Russia’s extremism laws.
The banning of Duel and AVN would probably have been the end of Mukhin’s political activity had it not been for the long arm of the FSB and Russia’s Investigative Committee. In late July, Mukhin, along with two associates, was arrested by Russian security personnel on a beach in Crimea, and transferred to Moscow on charges of 'organising an extremist group'.
