The founder and editor-in-chief of the samizdat “My friend, yes you are a transformer” announced the closure of the project on December 31

Samizdat “My friend, yes you are a transformer” will be closed on December 31 this year. About it wrote on Facebook, the founder and editor-in-chief of the project, Egor Mostovshchikov.

“I made the decision to close it a long time ago and have been working all year to implement it. I could not afford to close the publication before I paid off all its debts, so throughout 2021 I was doing samizdat almost alone in order to finally bury it. During the year I handed out more than five million rubles of debts, almost finished paying off and, according to my plans, I’ll distribute the last sums in time for the New Year, ”Mostovshchikov wrote.

He added that starting from December 31, the samizdat site will cease to be updated, but users will be able to read the archived materials of the publication. According to Mostovshchikov, within two months before the closure of Batenka, the project team plans to release a documentary film about punitive psychiatry, hold two courses at a samizdat school and publish materials “dedicated to the funeral of the publication”.

Samizdat “My friend, yes you are a transformer” was founded by Yegor Mostovshchikov and Anton Yarosh in the summer of 2014. Since 2017, the publication has been part of the Mamihlapinatana media artel. The project does not have a media license issued by Roskomnadzor. The publication published reports and long essays, portrait sketches, pamphlets, memoirs, essays, as well as analytical and journalistic materials.

On December 18, 2018, “My friend, yes you are a transformer” published an article entitled “Heroin is the property of a model”, which told about a girl under the pseudonym Theo (model Anna Glazova) who had allegedly been using heroin for ten years. On December 20, the Ministry of Internal Affairs decided to block the article. Later, samizdat filed a lawsuit against the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Roskomnadzor, which demanded that the article be removed from the site.

February 1, 2019 Kuzminsky Court of Moscow sent Glazov under arrest… A criminal case was initiated against her on “illegal acquisition, storage, transportation, manufacture, processing of narcotic drugs.” She was later released on recognizance not to leave.

In February 2020, the Kuzminsky Court of Moscow sentenced Glazov by one year and eight months in a general regime colony.