In Russia, New Year's Eve is celebrated for the second time tonight, according to the old Julian calendar, which the Bolsheviks replaced with the Gregorian one. The opposition politician Alexej Navalnyj reported on Facebook how he spent his first year in the penal colony. According to Navalny, they only ate the usual watery balanda prison soup, but in the evenings the prisoners were allowed to use the kitchen, and they celebrated with tangerines, a cake and Coca-Cola until one o'clock. At eleven-thirty the guards came and lined up the prisoners to wish them a Happy New Year. Then other inmates disguised as animals and as Father Frost appeared, which was filmed by employees of the education department for documentation purposes.And when Father Frost asked the "boys" to recite a poem, a 71-year-old prisoner serving time for aggravated assault actually recited verses he had written himself: "Father Frost, Father Frost, let's go early! And if not all of them, free half of them from the trap.”

At the beginning of the year, the opposition author and satirist Viktor Shenderovich left Russia to avoid being taken into custody by the criminal justice system, which he found to be no longer a judiciary. Shenderovich had been declared a "foreign agent" the day before New Year's Eve, but above all the oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, who is close to President Putin and who is associated with an Internet troll factory and the private mercenary company Wagner, threatened him with criminal proceedings for alleged defamation. Prigozhin, who, while Navalny, who was poisoned with Novichok, was still in a coma, announced that he would ruin him and his comrades-in-arms, called it slander when he called him a criminal with reference to his criminal record, Shenderovich explained. As with Orwell, truth is now considered slander.He or Prigozhin, either of them is dangerous for society, said Shenderovich, who only wants to return when Russian courts go after people like Prigozhin.

Writer Maxim Osipov greeted the New Year with the memory of a friend who had to spend New Year's Eve in Moscow's Butyrka prison during the comparatively moderately repressive era of the early 1980s.

The prison director, apparently not a bad person, wished everyone in his radio greeting to the prisoners that the sentences should be as small as possible in the new year.

With this in mind, Osipov wished himself and his Facebook friends that the new year would bring them "as few penalties as possible".