The tragedy rocked Russia for days. Federal lawmakers convened a special committee to investigate, as hundreds of volunteers searched for the victim in sub-zero temperatures, and state media gave live updates of the aftermath.
Eventually, 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 and the demand for an emotional outlet in wartime Russia.
A national poll found that about two in three Russians were familiar with Twix, a very high percentage in a country where people are increasingly spreading negative news such as the war in Ukraine, according to Denis Volkov, director of the largest independent poll of the country. the Levada Center, which conducted the research.
A combination of propaganda, suppression of dissent, and public fatigue with the futile war has turned Internet curiosities into the focus of national attention for days, even weeks. Last month, a video of a Russian influencer throwing his 2-month-old baby into a snow bank in an apparent stunt received thousands of comments, most of them negative, and led to a criminal investigation.
Part purge, part political theater, events like Twix’s death provide Russians with rare opportunities to vent and connect with like-minded people without running afoul of police or censors.
“People are tired of political vicissitudes, and here you have a helpless creature that has created all this hype,” said Olga Kudriashova, a retiree who organized a week-long search for Twix, a 4-year-old ginger male, in the province. capital of Kirov, in temperatures that reached minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit overnight. “It’s the injustice of everyone, the indignation.”
The administration of President Vladimir V. Putin has long understood the value of providing escape valves for public discontent as it has gradually monopolized power and erased alternatives to its rule.
Twix’s story is just right for the kind of narratives Russia’s government hopes to amplify.
“This story lowered the temperature and helped shift attention away from darkness,” such as the horrors of war and rising food prices, said Mr. Volkov, director of the Levada Center.
The story of how a local pet tragedy dominated the national conversation is a case study in how information spreads in modern Russia.
Ms Kudriashova, the volunteer, said Twix owner Edgar Gaifullin contacted her on social media on January 12 and asked for help to find the cat, which was traveling on the state train with one of his relatives Mr. Gaifullin.
An attendant on the train mistook Twix for a stray and threw the cat out of a passenger carriage while the train stopped in Kirov, northwest Russia, according to Mr Gaifullin and Russian Railways.
Ms Kudriashova began posting about the missing cat in local animal chat groups.
The search effort mobilized hundreds of volunteers from across the Kirov region, drawing local media coverage and eventually attracting the attention of state television.
Cats tend to dominate the internet everywhere, but feline content is especially popular in Russia.
Almost half of Russian households own a cat, one of the highest percentages in the world. The cats’ exploits are widely covered in the national media, and a new Russian TV series called “Catastrophe” is not about war, as some might assume, but about a free-spirited, talking ginger cat.
The discovery of Twix’s dead body a week after a week of searching added an emotional element that catapulted the furry victim to a distinguished cause, with an online petition calling for the offender to be punished quickly gathering 380,000 signatures. The propaganda machine responded.
Lawmakers from the ruling party have formed a congressional committee to review animal transport rules. The prosecutor’s office announced that it is examining a possible case of animal abuse. A conservative activist proposed erecting a statue of Twix in Kirov.
And dozens of pro-government commentators have issued heated opinions about Twix’s role in Russian zealotry.
“What is known about the death of Twix the Cat: Key developments,” was the title of an article in the state-run newspaper, Izvestia.
Journalists pressed the head of state-run Russian Railways about the episode, using a hardline style rarely seen in questioning a senior official.
“I have two dogs and a cat at home,” railroad director Oleg Belozerov, who runs the country’s largest employer and oversees nearly 100,000 miles of rail, told state reporters.
“Could anyone 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 unforeseen disaster usually reserved for natural disasters and terrorist attacks.
The Russian Railways suspended the handler, opened an internal investigation and changed its animal handling guidelines just days after Twix’s death. (The attendant, whose name has not been released, would not comment on what happened.)
In a statement, the company apologized to Mr Gaifullin, Twix’s owner, but blamed the person accompanying the animal for letting it out of his sight.
State media helped turn Mr. Gaifullin into a minor media personality. He hired a lawyer to handle a compensation claim against the train company, made an official Telegram account for Twix and is regularly interviewed by state media. Mr. Volkov, director of the polling center, said most of the respondents to his survey blamed the person accompanying Twix for his death.
Mr. Volkov said the Twix scandal shifted much of the national conversation from resentment over egg shortages, heating failures to a cold winter and other negative quality-of-life issues.
State-sanctioned public outrage is often directed at what the government characterizes as inappropriate or immoral behavior, which in turn supports Mr. Putin’s larger effort to portray himself as a global defender of what he calls “traditional values.”
But the government’s swift and seemingly disproportionate response to the 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 federal investigator personally announced a criminal case against Sergey Kosenko, the influencer who threw his baby into the snow bank. Mr Kosenko, who has seven million followers on Instagram, captioned the video ‘Leo’s first flight’ before deleting it.
When conservative commentators expressed outrage at a sex-themed celebrity party in Moscow in December, authorities responded by jailing one attendee, blacklisting others, fining the host and temporarily closing the venue.
The search for acceptable targets of moral outrage has added an even darker tone to the Twix story. A Russian woman received several threats after being mistakenly identified on social media as the train attendant who threw the cat out, 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 the war.
“The country has lost being able to express itself freely and be human,” Boris B. Nadezhdin, a longtime anti-war candidate who plans to run against Mr. Putin, said on a talk show this week as a large photo of Twix. sat in the background. “Expressing support for a kitten you’ve never seen in your life is humanity.”
Alina Lombzina contributed to the report and Oleg Matsnev and Ivan Nechepurenko contributed to the research.
