Elizabeth Tsurkov writes:

Four men searched my mouth for implanted tracking devices. I had told them I didn’t have any—that, as far as I knew, such things existed only in movies. They asked if I had fillings, and I confessed that I did. They looked again. “No, you don’t,” one of them corrected me, having failed to find any glint of silver. My fillings are white. The men, wearing dark civilian clothes and balaclavas, seemed convinced that these unfamiliar fillings posed a threat to their operational security. That’s when I knew that my kidnapping was going to be a little bit different.

I was violently snatched on March 21, 2023, from the outskirts of Baghdad, where I had been conducting fieldwork for my Ph.D. at Princeton University. When my kidnappers delivered me to my cell, they cut the restraints they’d placed around my arms and legs, and lifted the cloth bag off my head. The secret prison where I was brought was run by Kataib Hezbollah, an Iraqi militia backed by Iran.

That was my first day of captivity. Nine hundred and two more followed. I spent the first four and a half months in a prison usually used for holding the militia’s Iraqi victims. The militiamen, I later learned, worked for one of Iraq’s security agencies, many of which have been extensively penetrated by pro-Iranian paramilitary groups. Even so, my kidnapping was purely opportunistic—I was taken for ransom, not for any political reason.

I have researched the Levant for almost two decades under the auspices of several think tanks, conducting fieldwork across the region. The kidnappers knew I was a Russian national affiliated with an American university—which was why they saw me as a lucrative target for kidnap and ransom. What they did not know—and what I was not eager for them to learn—was that although I was born in Russia, I am also an Israeli citizen.

The kidnapping itself was extremely violent, but for the first month of my imprisonment, I was not otherwise physically abused. I was given very little to eat—mostly rice and bread, in one or two meals a day—something that I came to understand was intended to weaken me, to soften me up for interrogation.

An officer who introduced himself as Maher led the interrogations. He wore a balaclava throughout so that I would not be able to identify him. The idea of a Russian doing academic research on Iraq was utterly befuddling to Maher and his colleagues. They felt that as a Russian, I should research Russia alone. Maher promised that if I was able to prove that foreign researchers conducted fieldwork in Russia, then he would be my “greatest defender.” When I started listing some, he looked downcast. He did not become my greatest defender.

The problem I faced was that my interrogations were premised on the idea that legions of foreign spies are roaming the streets of Iraq, and that all foreigners in Iraq are spies: Maher once asked me whether the entire building in a gated area of Baghdad in which I briefly resided was occupied by spies. Compounding my difficulty of proving a negative—that I was the rare foreigner who wasn’t a spy—was their incompetence at interrogation. One officer didn’t bother to give me a fake name, but I’ll call him the Short Pervert because of his constant grabbing of my body and his foul language. The Short Pervert claimed that his organization had recordings and photos proving my espionage work, though he declined to produce any such evidence when I asked for it.

The interrogators kept threatening me with torture, but in those opening weeks, they refrained from acting on the threats—I assume on orders from higher up. Instead, because they were clearly untrained in conducting interrogations that did not involve torture, they fell back on interrogation methods they had probably seen in movies. To intimidate me, Maher would blow smoke in my face, but because he was using an e-cigarette, all I got was a gust of strawberry-smelling vape. It wasn’t quite the tough-guy routine he was after. Later, he tried the “good cop, bad cop” routine on me but undermined the effect by playing both characters himself, on alternate days, which just made him seem deranged.

The comic aspect of this all changed when, a month after my capture, the kidnappers opened my phone after forcing me to give them the passcode and discovered that I was Israeli. Now they didn’t need to ask me to admit I was a spy; they could torture me to say so.

Authoritarian regimes—and the militias and security agencies that buttress them—rely on instilling fear in their subjects. They rule by enforcing conformity and obedience through terror.

I knew something about this, not solely because of my research but also from my upbringing. I was born in late 1986 in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) as the Soviet Union was sunsetting. Both of my parents were dissidents in the U.S.S.R. My father spent seven years in prison and another two years doing hard labor in Siberia for writing anti-regime flyers from a democratic Marxist point of view. My mother, for her part, was sentenced to three years in a Siberian prison after the KGB ransacked her apartment and found an extensive collection of anti-Soviet jokes that she had diligently collected from her dissident friends during their gatherings. This was the era of samizdat literature, when regime critics copied and shared reading material—essays, polemics, news—that they had diligently typed and retyped on paper, because publication was impossible. A typical satirical jest from my mother’s collection: A judge comes out of a Soviet courtroom laughing. A prosecutor asks him, “Why are you laughing?” The judge responds, “I’d tell you, but I just sentenced someone for five years in prison for telling this joke.”

In my own captivity, I recognized what many dissidents, including my mother, realized before me: Humor is a weapon that can be used even by the very weak to undermine the ruling authority, to break its terrorizing effect, to lift one’s morale. Repressive regimes fear being mocked because they hate having their incompetence and ignorance exposed. This is why they penalize the circulation of political jokes. [Continue reading…]