by Tragedy gripped Russia for days. Federal lawmakers convened a special committee and launched an investigation, as hundreds of volunteers searched for the victim in subfreezing temperatures and state media broadcast live updates on the aftermath.
Eventually, the victim, the cat Twix, was found dead.
A national outcry over the disappearance of a pet that an attendant mistakenly threw from a long-distance train has highlighted both the limits and demand for emotional outlet in wartime Russia.
A national survey found that about two in three Russians were familiar with Twix, a very high proportion in a country where people increasingly ignore negative news, such as the war in Ukraine, according to Denis Volkov, director of the largest independent pollster. from the country. the Levada Center, which conducted the survey.
A combination of propaganda, a crackdown on dissent and public fatigue over an unfinished war has turned Internet curiosities into a national spotlight for days, even weeks. Last month, a video by a Russian influencer throwing your 2 month old baby in a snowbank in an apparent maneuver received thousands of comments, most of them negative, and led to a criminal investigation.
Part catharsis and part political theater, events like Twix’s death are giving Russians rare opportunities to let off steam and bond with like-minded people without running afoul of police or censors.
“People have grown tired of political adversity, and here we have a helpless creature who has created all this resonance,” said Olga Kudriashova, a retiree who organized a week-long search for Twix, a red-haired 4-year-old boy, in the province. capital of Kirov, with temperatures reaching -30 degrees Fahrenheit at night. “It’s the injustice of all this, the outrage.”
President Vladimir V. Putin’s government has long understood the value of providing safety valves for public discontent, as it gradually monopolized power and eliminated alternatives to its rule.
Twix’s story fits perfectly with the type of narratives the Russian government hopes to amplify.
“This story has lowered the temperature and helped divert attention from the darkness,” such as the horrors of war and rising food prices, said Volkov, director of the Levada Center.
The story of how a local mascot tragedy came to dominate the national conversation is a case study in how information spreads in modern Russia.
Ms Kudriashova, the volunteer, said Twix’s owner, Edgar Gaifullin, contacted her via social media on January 12 and asked for help finding the cat, who was traveling on the state train with one of the family members. from Mr. Gaifullin.
A train attendant mistook Twix for a stray cat and threw the cat from a passenger car as the train stopped in Kirov, northwest Russia. according to Mr. Gaifullin and Russian railways.
Ms Kudriashova began posting about the missing cat on local animal chat groups.
The search effort mobilized hundreds of volunteers from across the Kirov region, attracting local media coverage and eventually attracting the attention of state television.
Cats tend to dominate the Internet everywhere, but feline content is particularly popular in Russia.
Nearly half of Russian households have a cat, one of the highest rates in the world. He cat exploits receive prominent coverage in the national media, and a new Russian television series called “Catastrophe“It’s not about war, as some might assume, but about a free-spirited talking ginger cat.
The discovery of Twix’s body a week into a week-long search added an emotional element that catapulted the furry victim into a cause célèbre, with an online petition calling for the offending assistant’s punishment quickly gathering 380,000 signatures. The propaganda machine responded.
Ruling party legislators He formed a congressional committee. review the rules for transporting animals. A prosecutor’s office announced that it was investigating a possible case of animal cruelty. A conservative activist proposed erecting a statue to Twix in Kirov.
And dozens of pro-government commentators issued heated opinions about Twix’s role in Russia’s zeitgeist.
“What is known about the death of the cat Twix: main news” read the headline from an article in the state newspaper Izvestia.
Journalists pressed the head of state-run Russian Railways about the episode, using a tough style rarely seen in the interrogation of a top official.
“I have two dogs and a cat at home,” railroad executive Oleg Belozerov, who runs the country’s largest employer and oversees nearly 100,000 miles of railroad tracks, told the state. journalists.
“Could someone compensate me for his loss? “I’m not sure,” he added.
He described the cat’s death as “force majeure,” a legal term for an unforeseeable catastrophe usually reserved for natural cataclysms and terrorist attacks.
He Russian Railways suspended the assistant, opened an internal investigation and changed its animal handling guidelines just days after Twix’s death. (The assistant, whose name has not been made public, has not commented on what happened.)
In a statement, the company apologized to Gaifullin, Twix’s owner, but blamed the person accompanying the animal for losing sight of it.
State media has helped turn Gaifullin into a minor media personality. He hired a lawyer to handle a compensation claim against the railway company, filed a official count on Telegram for Twix and is regularly interviewed by state media. Voting center director Volkov said most respondents blamed the person accompanying Twix for his death.
Volkov said the Twix scandal diverted much of the national conversation away from discontent over egg shortages, heating failures in a cold winter and other negative quality of life issues.
State-sanctioned public outrage often targets what the government views as inappropriate or immoral behavior, which in turn supports Putin’s broader effort to present himself as a global defender of what he calls “traditional values.” .
But the government’s rapid and apparently disproportionate response to viral phenomena has also allowed it to create a sense of responsibility at a time when genuine political expression is increasingly criminalized.
The country’s top federal investigator personally announced a criminal case against Sergei Kosenko, the influencer who threw his baby into the snowbank. Kosenko, who has seven million followers on Instagram, titled the video “Leo’s First Flight” before deleting it.
When conservative commentators expressed outrage against an erotic-themed celebrity party in Moscow in December, authorities responded by jailing one of the attendees, blacklisting others, fining the host and temporarily closing the venue.
The search for acceptable targets for moral outrage has added even a darker edge to Twix’s story. A Russian woman has received numerous threats after being wrongly identified on social media as the train attendant who threw the cat. according to the woman’s daughter.
Reporting the death of a cat in Russia is, of course, much safer than expressing a political opinion or protesting against war.
“The country has lost the ability to express itself freely and to be human,” Boris B. Nadezhdin, a long-term anti-war candidate who plans to run against Putin, said at a news conference. talk show this week with a large photo of Twix in the background. “Expressing support for a kitten you’ve never seen in your life is showing humanity.”
Alina Lobzina contributed with reports, and Oleg Matsnev and Ivan Nechepurenko contributed to the research.
