What you can still complain about in Russia: a cat being thrown out of a train

The tragedy gripped Russia for days. Federal lawmakers convened a special committee to investigate as hundreds of volunteers searched for the victim in subzero temperatures, and state news media provided live updates on the aftermath.

Ultimately, the victim – Twix the cat – was found dead.

A national outcry over the death of a pet accidentally thrown from a long-distance train by an attendant has highlighted both the limits of and the demand for an emotional outlet in wartime Russia.

A national poll showed that about two in three Russians were familiar with Twix, a very high percentage in a country where people are increasingly ignoring negative news such as the war in Ukraine, said Denis Volkov, director of the country's largest independent pollster. country. the Levada Center, which conducted the study.

A combination of propaganda, a crackdown on dissent, and public fatigue from the inconclusive war has thrust Internet curiosities into the center of national attention for days, even weeks. Last month a video from a Russian influencer throwing away his 2-month-old baby in a snowbank in an apparent stunt received thousands of comments, most of them negative, and led to a criminal investigation.

Part catharsis, part political theater, events like Twix's death offer rare opportunities for Russians to vent and connect with like-minded people without running afoul of police or censorship.

“People have grown tired of political misfortunes, and here you have a helpless creature who has created all this resonance,” said Olga Kudriashova, a retiree who organized a week-long search for Twix, a 4-year-old ginger male, in the provincial capital of Kirov, in temperatures that reached minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit overnight. “It's the injustice of it all, the outrage.”

President Vladimir V. Putin's government has long understood the value of providing escape valves for public discontent as it gradually monopolized power and erased alternatives to its rule.

Twix's story fits exactly with the kinds of stories the Russian government hopes to amplify.

“This story has lowered the temperature and helped divert attention from the gloom” such as the horrors of war and rising food prices, said Mr. Volkov, director of the Levada Center.

The story of how a local 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 on social media on Jan. 12 asking for help finding the cat, who lived with one of Mr. Gaifullin's relatives in the state train traveled.

An attendant on the train mistook Twix for a stray cat and threw the cat out of a passenger car as the train stopped in Kirov, northwestern Russia. according to Mr Gaifullin and Russian Railways.

Ms Kudriashova started posting about the missing cat in local animal chat groups.

The search mobilized hundreds of volunteers from across the Kirov region, attracting attention from local news media and eventually attracting the attention of state television.

Cats dominate the internet everywhere, but cat content is especially popular in Russia.

Almost half of Russian households owns a cat, one of the highest rates in the world. The exploits of cats are prominently discussed in the national news media, and in a new Russian television series called “Catastrophe' is not about the war, as some might think, but about a free-spirited ginger cat who talks.

The discovery of Twix's dead body a week after a week of searching added an emotional element that catapulted the furry victim into a cause célèbre, with an online petition calling for the offending handler's punishment quickly raising 380,000 collected signatures. The propaganda machine responded.

Lawmakers from the ruling parties formed a congressional committee to revise the rules for animal transport. The Public Prosecution Service announced that it was investigating a possible case of animal abuse. A conservative activist proposed erecting a statue of Twix in Kirov.

And dozens of pro-government commentators sharply criticized Twix's role in the Russian zeitgeist.

“What is known about the death of Twix the Cat: most important developments”, read the headline of an article from a state newspaper, Izvestia.

Reporters pressed the head of Russia's state railways about the event, using a tough style rarely seen when questioning a senior official.

“I have two dogs and a cat at home,” said railway director Oleg Belozerov, who runs the country's largest employer and oversees nearly 100,000 miles of rail lines. journalists.

'Can anyone compensate me for his loss? I'm not sure,” he added.

He described the cat's death as “acts of God,” a legal term for an unforeseeable catastrophe usually reserved for natural disasters and terrorist attacks.

The Russian Railways suspended the supervisor, opened an internal investigation and changed animal handling guidelines just days after Twix's death. (The supervisor, whose name has not been made public, has not commented on what happened.)

In a statement, the company apologized to Mr Gaifullin, the owner of Twix, but blamed the person accompanying the animal for letting him out of sight.

The state news media have helped Gaifullin become a minor media personality. He has hired a lawyer to handle a compensation claim against the train company official account on Telegram for Twix, and is regularly interviewed by state news media. Mr Volkov, the polling station director, said most respondents in his survey blamed the person accompanying Twix for his death.

Mr. Volkov said the Twix scandal has shifted much of the national discussion 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 deems inappropriate or immoral behavior, which in turn supports Putin's larger efforts to present himself as a global champion of what he calls “traditional values.”

But the government's rapid and seemingly 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 chief investigator personally announced a criminal case against Sergei Kosenko, the influencer who threw his baby into the snowdrift. Mr Kosenko, who has seven million Instagram followers, had titled the video 'Leo's First Flight' before deleting it.

When conservative commentators expressed outrage at 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.

In fact, the search for acceptable targets of moral outrage has added a darker undertone to the Twix story. A Russian woman received numerous threats after she was wrongly identified on social media as the train conductor who threw away the cat. said the woman's daughter.

Of course, condemning the death of a cat in Russia is much safer than expressing a political opinion or protesting the war.

“The country has missed being able to express itself freely and humanly,” said Boris B. Nadezhdin, an anti-war candidate who plans to take on Putin. talk show this week there was a large photo of Twix in the background. “Showing support for a cat you've never seen in your life is showing humanity.”

Alina Lobzina contributed reporting, and Oleg Matsnev And Ivan Nechepurenko research contributed.