“It is foolish to think that I will keep quiet” 

The owner of a sewing workshop from the tiny town of Mehamn on the Barents Sea coast is not particularly well known to the general public, but he is quite active on social media, regularly publishing critical posts about Putin’s policies and the war in Ukraine. That is why Timofei Rogozhin assumes that the reason for his persecution was a “traditional story involving a denunciation”.

“In 2022, I ran the Telegram channel ‘Invasion’, where I did OSINT journalism, but in essence just straightforward fact-checking of what was happening at the front and in the rear,” Rogozhin says. “I wanted to get through to my former compatriots: that’s it, we’ve hit rock bottom, and from here on it’s only disaster. Zuckerberg blocked me on Facebook a million times, but there were never any questions from the state. Now, when I’m no longer so active and my focus has shifted somewhat, it has come back to hit me,” says the businessman. 

Rogozhin was born and raised in Murmansk and lived for many years in Karelia and the Arkhangelsk region, where he worked in tourism development. Timofei ended up in Mehamn, in the far north of Norway, at the end of 2022, having moved there from Svalbard — on the polar archipelago he spent seven years organising excursion tours as part of the Arktikugol trust’s operations. “I left for Spitsbergen in 2014 deliberately,” Rogozhin admits. “After the annexation of Crimea, it became clear that the country had been set on the tracks of fascism and had no prospects whatsoever.” 

According to the entrepreneur, Arktikugol’s tourism project was entirely commercial and existed solely on the money it earned. At the same time, while being an employee of a state-owned company, Rogozhin regularly criticised Russia’s Arctic development policy on social media, as well as the regime’s aggressive actions in general. 

“As a result, in 2021 I was forced to resign,” says Timofei. “They told me: either a criminal case, or I write a resignation letter of my own accord. Moreover, they promised a criminal case both for me and for the CEO. And since the CEO was basically a good man and had a lot of children, I didn’t want to set him up, so I left.” 

After leaving, Rogozhin decided to develop his own company in order to work in international tourism. But in February 2022 all those plans were “put on hold”. “I realised that I had neither the moral right nor the physical and psychological strength to do tourism in the way I would like,” the businessman admits. “At first I sat down at the sewing machine with my friend, and then it all grew into a company that does sewing, printing on T-shirts, design, and a bit of art at the same time.” 

That is how Arctic People came into being — as the company’s page says, “the northernmost workshop in the world”. In fact, a month and a half ago Rogozhin, who has never stopped being a fan of the Arctic, took the “first step towards returning to tourism”, to which he devoted more than 20 years of his life — he began managing the social media accounts of the Nordkinn peninsula, where Mehamn is located, under contract. 

“For a very long time, I believed that people who travel broaden their horizons and become better educated. On the one hand, they see beauty and untouched nature, and on the other, the ruined nature of the Arctic. I believed that tourism and travel make people better, and yet, as you can see, nothing came of it,” Timofey laments. But he admits that this will change nothing about his position: “It is foolish to think that I’ll shut up — it’s ridiculous.”