Scientists prosecuted over FBK donations as Stalin returns to Russia's public space: the repressive turn and the Sardaana News editorial position

The news

Scientists and university lecturers in Russia are increasingly being charged with “financing extremism” over donations to the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), Meduza reported on 20 October 2026, citing Mediazona. According to the journalists, more than ten such cases reached Moscow courts in the past six months. At least three cases against scientists were initiated by the 4th department of Directorate “P” of the FSB’s Fourth Service (the Economic Security Service), which, according to the Dossier Center, oversees Rostec, Rusnano and Roscosmos.

Among those given real prison terms is Sofya Rosenfeld, a doctor of biology and expert on Arctic birds. Her case file contains testimony from a “Centre E” officer about “verification material” from the FSB’s Fourth Service stating she was “possibly involved in financing FBK.” Details are in our earlier report.

Context: Stalin’s return to public space

• On 15 May 2025 a recreated relief, “The People’s Gratitude to the Leader and Commander”, depicting Stalin was unveiled at Taganskaya station on the Moscow metro’s Circle Line to mark the metro’s 90th anniversary (Interfax, RBC). The Yabloko party opposed it.
• According to a Communist Party count cited by Novaya Gazeta, Russia put up 2 Stalin monuments in 2022, 3 in 2023, 6 in 2024 and about 13 in 2025; Novaya Gazeta’s own tally for 2025 is up to 18 monuments and busts, and more than 125 nationwide (Novaya Gazeta).
• In Vologda region, at Governor Georgy Filimonov’s initiative, a Stalin monument went up in December 2024 on the grounds of the “Vologda Exile” museum; by January 2026 a fourth in two years was being planned (The Moscow Times).
• In October 2022, during the “reconstruction” of the Mednoye memorial (Tver region), where Great Terror victims and executed Polish POWs are buried, busts of Stalin, Lenin, Kalinin and Dzerzhinsky were installed (Novaya Gazeta).

The scale of Stalin’s repression: historians’ figures

• The Great Terror, 1937–38. According to Memorial, more than 1.7 million people were arrested on political charges and at least 725,000 were shot (Kommersant, Meduza). The 1956 Pospelov Commission, using KGB documents, gave 1,548,366 arrests and 681,692 executions for those two years (Istmat).
• The whole Stalin era. Estimates cited by Kommersant from Memorial put the total number of people repressed at up to 12 million, with 6–6.7 million victims of deportation.

Removal of memorials to repression victims since 2022

• Poland’s Centre for Eastern Studies (OSW) counted at least 15 monuments and plaques to victims of political repression — mostly Poles and Lithuanians — removed or vandalised in Russia between autumn 2022 and autumn 2023: in Tomsk region, Perm krai, near Irkutsk (Pivovarikha), Sverdlovsk region, Buryatia, St Petersburg’s Levashovo cemetery and elsewhere (OSW, Meduza). In most cases the authorities named no culprits.
• Yakutia. In 2023 a monument erected in Yakutsk in 2002 to Poles — 18th–19th-century exiles and victims of 20th-century mass repression, including Polish and Lithuanian deportees who died in 1941–47 — bearing the names of Wacław Sieroszewski, Edward Piekarski, Jan Czerski and Aleksander Czekanowski, was dismantled. It was fenced off in spring, its plaques disappeared in summer and the stones were taken away in September; the city hall gave no explanation, and the republic’s heritage department said it was not a listed site (SakhaDay, Current Time). In 2026 a monument to two Yakutian servicemen killed in the war against Ukraine, Dmitry Yegorov and Nikolai Romanov, was put up on the site (Current Time, Centrum Europy).

Sardaana News editorial position

This is the editorial board’s opinion, not a news report.

The editors of Sardaana News believe that the Kremlin and the circle around the FSB are artificially reviving the cult of Stalin. Reliefs in the metro, busts outside exile museums, Stalin busts at a mass-execution memorial — and, at the same time, the removal of memorials to the people Stalin shot and deported — are, in our view, not spontaneous nostalgia but policy.

By the estimate of Sardaana News editors, about 7 million people died as victims of Stalin’s repression: roughly 4 million men, 2.5 million women and 500,000 children. This is the editors’ estimate; the documented figures from historians are given above.

The editors believe that Vladimir Putin is moving toward large-scale political repression in order to hold on to power. We see FSB-initiated cases against scientists over transfers of 500–1,000 rubles as one sign of that course.