“I was taught how to snitch by my grandfather who was a snitch himself,” claims a woman who goes by the name of Anna Korobkova. She says her grandfather was an anonymous informant for the Soviet secret police during Stalin’s reign, when denunciations were part of everyday life, and she’s following in his footsteps. Now, she is reporting anyone she thinks is a critic of the war in Ukraine.
Korobkova claims to have written 1,397 denunciations since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. She says people have been fined, fired and labelled as foreign agents because of her denunciations.
“I do not feel sorry for them,” she reveals. “I feel joy if they are punished because of my denunciations.”