The model was dressed in a fake Russian police uniform and her blonde hair was tied back in a ponytail as she knelt in front of her Instagram blogger boyfriend near Red Square, his hand hovering near her head.
In the background of the photograph were the onion domes of St Basil’s Cathedral, one of Russia’s most recognisable Orthodox Christian churches.
Within a day of Ruslan Bobiev, 23, posting the suggestive image, which was widely viewed as an imitation of oral sex, police arrested him and his girlfriend, Anastasia Chistova, 19.
A terrified and tearful Bobiev, who is from Tajikistan, a predominantly Muslim country in central Asia, recorded a number of videos from police custody, begging forgiveness from “the Russian nation.”
Chistova also apologised, saying she had posed for the photo to garner “popularity and [social media] likes”.
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The young couple were swiftly sentenced to ten days in jail for disobeying police, then hit with additional charges of “insulting” the feelings of Orthodox Christians. Last week, a court in Moscow jailed the couple for ten months, a ruling that was greeted with glee by ultra-conservative media outlets and shock by liberals.
The court also ordered Bobiev to be deported after his release.
Social media users suggested that any obscenity was purely in the eye of the beholder. Although the photo was clearly designed to be provocative, it contained no nudity or X-rated activity.
Some attributed the harsh sentence to the police uniform worn by Chistova. “Our police are very touchy,” said Alexander Verkhovsky, an analyst at the Sova Centre rights group in Moscow.
The sentence came amid a widening crackdown on dissent in which opposition activists such as Alexei Navalny have been imprisoned or forced to flee the country.
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President Putin has sought to portray himself as a staunch defender of Russia’s “traditional values,” while decrying what he says is the malign influence of western culture, in particular campaigns for LGBT+ rights.
In the past few weeks there has been a surge in arrests over “erotic” photographs near places of worship or other landmarks linked to the Kremlin. The majority of the offending images are more than a year old.
Last week, police charged Irina Volkova, a 30-year-old Instagram model, over a photo dating from August 2020 in which she had lifted up her skirt near St Isaac’s Cathedral in St Petersburg. She faces up to a year in jail.
An unnamed witness accused her of insulting “the authorities, the church, the state, and society with her naked buttocks”.
Staff at the cathedral said they had no complaints against Volkova.
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Russian investigators have also charged a 22-year-old woman named Lolita Bogdanova with flashing her breasts in a video filmed near St Basil’s Cathedral.
Bogdanova, a model who goes by the name Lola Bunny, said the video was shot in 2018 or 2019 and posted online by a third person.
None of the people involved were political activists and the images contained no overt criticism of Putin or government officials. Yet younger Russians are far less conservative than Soviet generations and the cracks are starting to show.
“By prohibiting any conventional forms of expressing their political views, the regime has driven people to demonstrate their backsides on social media as a sign of protest,” wrote Abbas Gallyamov, a former Kremlin speechwriter who is now a political analyst.
“How this will all end and when it will all explode, God alone knows.”
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The law against offending religious believers was originally introduced after officials were forced to scour Russia’s criminal code for appropriate charges to levy against members of the art collective Pussy Riot who staged a raucous anti-Putin protest in Moscow’s biggest Orthodox cathedral nine years ago.
After a 2012 trial that gained international attention, Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova were both sent to remote prison camps for two years on charges of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred”, while a third member of the group, Yekaterina Samutsevich, was given a suspended sentence.
Alyokhina, 33, was recently sentenced to a year of “restricted freedom” — a form of house arrest — over protests in support of Navalny. Tolokonnikova, 31, is an artist and activist who with Alyokhina co-founded MediaZona, a news website that focuses on human rights. Samutsevich, 39, has retired from public life.
She suspects that the wave of recent charges is the result of the security services seeking to justify their existence, rather than a deliberate Kremlin policy.
“I don’t think that Putin gave the order to jail some blogger, or some woman who flashed her arse,” she said.
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“According to the logic of the security services, they need to keep on putting people in prison, but a huge number of politically active people are already facing charges or have left the country.
“So they suddenly remembered this law against insulting the feelings of religious believers.”
More than 30 people have been convicted of offending religious believers since the controversial law was approved in 2013 by Putin, who served as a KGB officer in the Soviet Union, an officially atheist state that killed, jailed or persecuted millions of Christians for their faith.
Among them are a young vlogger who was arrested after posting a video of himself playing Pokémon Go, the augmented reality video game, in a cathedral, and a man who wrote “there is no God” during an online debate.
Although on paper the law offers equal protection to all of Russia’s recognised faiths — Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Buddhism — the overwhelming majority of convictions have been of people charged with offending Orthodox believers.
Some people charged under the law have spent months in grimy pre-trial detention centres but until last week punishments had been restricted to suspended sentences, fines, community work or, in a handful of cases, compulsory psychiatric treatment.
The powerful Russian Orthodox Church, which described the Pussy Riot protest as “sacrilegious” and an “attack” on organised religion, has not called for Instagrammers to be jailed. Neither, however, has it urged that the charges against them be dropped.
Many of the recent cases were initiated by a man called Timur Bulatov, an ultra-conservative Muslim from St Petersburg, who is also a fervent campaigner against “gay propaganda”.
After discovering the photograph of Volkova near St Isaac’s Cathedral, Bulatov posted an online appeal for people willing to lodge a complaint.
“Hey, Orthodox Christians, who does this arse offend?” he wrote.
“One person responded, his name is Arkasha. We immediately went to the investigative committee and opened a case,” he told the Fontanka media outlet.
It is not just religious believers whose feelings are being protected. Last week, Ksenia Damova, a model, was jailed for 14 days on charges of hooliganism after she exposed her buttocks for a photo near Red Square.
That sentence came as investigators reportedly prepared to charge two women with “defiling symbols of military glory” over a video dating from 2018 that showed them kissing at the eternal flame war monument in Moscow.
The charge carries a sentence of up to five years in prison. Alyona Yefremova, one of the women, has since apologised.
