Dmitry Grinchiy, an 87-year-old pensioner, was recently assaulted by two hefty men on a Moscow bus for muttering about the former Wagner Group mercenaries and against the war in Ukraine. The assailants then forced the driver to take them to the political police headquarters to turn Grinchiy over.
Instead of ending up in prison, Grinchiy received an outpouring of support. His story throws light on the deepening anti-war sentiment in Russia behind the repressive clampdown orchestrated by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The human rights organization OVD-Info reported Aug. 9 that Grinchiy was physically attacked for calling Wagner’s thugs “murderers of children and women” when the bus passed a memorial to the mercenary group. The two men pushed away a woman who repeatedly tried to stop the assault.
A video of the incident was taken and posted by another rider. It shows the two attackers, a middle-aged man and his son, aggressively twisting Grinchiy’s arms, punching him in the kidneys and cursing the elderly survivor of World War II as a “fascist.”
The assailants forced the bus driver to stop outside the infamous Lubyanka building, now the Federal Security Service (FSB) headquarters. They dragged Grinchiy off the bus to hand him over to the police. All three were detained. But Grinchiy was released without charges and filed a complaint about the assault.
The Wagner memorial was erected by supporters of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine after the death of Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin. His plane was blown up in flight two months after his aborted mutiny in June 2023. He accused Russia’s military leaders of incompetence over prosecution of the war.
Former Wagner forces operate for Moscow in conflict zones from Ukraine to Syria and several African countries. Prigozhin often boasted of their extremely thuggish methods, including within their own ranks.
Grinchiy explained that he was attacked for “simply remembering that in ’37 all my relatives were shot.” When he was a year old, his father, Pavel Grinchiy, was framed up as “an enemy of the people” and executed by firing squad. This was in 1938, part of the Great Terror under the dictatorial regime of Joseph Stalin.
At least three-quarters of a million people were killed in Stalin’s purges and over a million more sent to forced labor camps known as Gulags. Thousands were revolutionary fighters seeking to continue the proletarian internationalist course of Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin.
Dmitry Grinchiy didn’t know his real family name until he was 15. His father was posthumously “rehabilitated” in 1966 during a political thaw after Stalin’s death.
Dmitry Grinchiy told reporter Ilya Azar that he “didn’t disgrace anyone” on the bus. “I just regret that I had to be born in a country where people are not considered people. Decent people,” he said.
In fact many “decent people” responded when his story got out. OVD-Info said they received “tons” of messages “asking for a donation link or another way to support the retiree.” Their lawyer helped him to file a counter-report free of charge. “Russians from all over the country raised enough money to buy Grinchiy a new laptop.”
OVD-Info noted that criminal charges against Dmitry Grinchiy were never filed. Instead, police opened a criminal hooliganism case “against the two thugs who attacked him.”