The trial was held behind closed doors. Initially, Zyuzev was charged with confidential cooperation with a foreign state or organization, but by the time of the verdict the charge had been reclassified as treason. According to the Komi prosecutor's office, the court also confiscated 5.9 million rubles from him.
Zyuzev is 70 years old. He is a Doctor of Philosophy, a citizen of Russia and Canada, and a researcher of the legacy of Pitirim Sorokin. He taught at Syktyvkar State University, the Komi State Pedagogical Institute, and Ukhta State Technical University, and in 2005–2006 he worked with Sorokin's archives at Harvard. In 2008, the philosopher moved to Canada, received Canadian citizenship in 2015, and later taught again in Komi. After Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he left the country but continued to visit his native village of Podyelsk. In the summer of 2025, Zyuzev came to Komi again to visit relatives and stopped making contact, and his acquaintances, according to the professor's friend, tried to dissuade him from the trip and did not expect any interest from the security services.
In January 2023, in an article for the Canadian magazine Maclean's, which The Insider wrote about, Zyuzev said that in the fall of 2021 he had proposed to two acquaintances creating an online university of Finno-Ugric culture. He wrote that the project was supposed to provide Komi youth with an education in the social sciences, develop critical thinking, and tell them about the situation of the Komi people. After the war began, he moved to Vilnius and began seeking funding for a broader information and educational center for the indigenous peoples of Russia.
The Komi prosecutor's office calls this project the “Modern Russian University (online)”. According to the prosecution, from January 2022 to June 2024 Zyuzev and another person, using foreign funding, created a media platform where they published materials about alleged violations of the rights of Russia's small indigenous peoples, the worsening socio-economic situation, and the war in Ukraine. The supervisory authority also claims that they organized two conferences in Vilnius on changing the constitutional order of the Russian Federation, and that the criminal case against the second defendant was split off into separate proceedings and he was placed on an international wanted list.
The FSB, in turn, described the project even more broadly: it spoke of 12 areas, including training leaders of “national liberation movements” abroad and collecting and analyzing information on assignments from EU bodies and analytical centers. Among the 12 foreign organizations, the security service named the Hanns Seidel Foundation from Germany, the Czech Prague Civil Society Centre, the German Council on Foreign Relations, the Swedish Institute from Sweden, IREX Europe, the British Chatham House, and the Black Sea Trust for Regional Cooperation, and some of these structures are considered “undesirable” in Russia.
In the FSB video recording that was published, Zyuzev said that he had initially proposed an educational website for teaching the humanities. The FSB claims that he fully admitted guilt, while the professor's acquaintances interviewed by T-invariant consider the amount stated by the security service implausible.
Sources
