Fifty-nine-year-old environmental activist and Shiyes defender Andrei Khristoforov, also known as Drevarkh the Enlightened, has died in Arkhangelsk. The news was reported on his page on the Russian social media network VKontakte.
In late April, Khristoforov said that he had been admitted to hospital with severe cirrhosis of the liver.
In Arkhangelsk, Drevarkh was involved in environmentalism and was the leader of the Plant Your Own Tree movement. He wore white wings and a tree-shaped cap during his protest actions.
In 2022, the Ust-Vymsky District Court in the Komi Republic sentenced Khristoforov to a year of probation on charges of “violence against a law enforcer” (per Article 318.1 of the Criminal Code). Police investigators claimed that, in the summer of 2019, Drevarkh had attacked a policeman who was filing a report on him because he had, allegedly, pulled the emergency stop of a train at the Shiyes railway station, where protests against the construction of a landfill were underway.
Drevarkh said that the police officers had themselves beaten him during the arrest. Video footage of the arrest was posted online by other Shiyes activists: it shows police officers shocking Khristoforov several times with a stun gun.
After charges were filed against him, Drevarh was sent to a psychiatric hospital in Arkhangelsk for a forensic medical examination. The psychiatrists concluded that Khristoforov suffered from borderline personality disorder, but during the scuffle on the train he “would have been aware of the danger posed by his actions” and did not need compulsory medical treatment. Drevarkh then hurriedly left for Ukraine, where, according to him, he also planted trees. In the summer of 2021, however, he decided to return to Russia.
Upon arrival, the activist was placed under house arrest, and then released on his own recognizance. “The Creator thus sent me feedback via the Russian Investigative Committee, for which I am grateful to the former and the latter,” explained Drevarkh. Police investigators had written to Drevarkh via social media, after which he bought tickets home.
In May 2019, Drevarkh was fined for taking part in a protest march against the Shiyes landfill. He was later detained for ripping the epaulettes off a policeman’s uniform during one of the rallies. “When the brothers started pushing me back, the epaulettes flew off them. But they blamed me for the whole thing, saying that I was the one who had conjured it up. It’s like leaves falling off a poplar tree, that’s how the epaulettes fell off,” the activist said at the time.
That same month, “after firing several warning shots in the air,” Khristoforov shot his own urine at private security guards using a toy automatic rifle and smeared feces on the porch of a temporary police station. After he was detained by police, the activist dubbed the contents of his toy gun a “Drevarhh cocktail” and complained that “the [gun’s] clip was too small.”
Residents of the Arkhangelsk Region fought against the construction of a landfill near the Shiyes railway station for over two years. The company Technopark planned to haul waste from Moscow to the region. The project sparked outrage in the region, and local residents organized a 24-hour watch at the railway station and blocked the roads leading to it. The defenders of Shiyes were regularly detained by police. Andrei Borovikov, an activist and head of Navalny’s local team, was sentenced to 400 hours of compulsory labor under Article 212.1 of the Criminal Code, the so-called Dadin law.
In June 2020, Arkhangelsk Regional authorities announced the closure of the project, promising to terminate the agreement with Technopark. The investor announced the final abandonment of construction only in October 2020, promising to return the land where the works took place to its original state.
Source: “Drevarkh the Enlightened, environmentalist and Shiyes defender, dies in Arkhangelsk,” Mediazona, 3 May 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader, who also recommends reading Wikipedia’s rich and detailed account (in Russian) of the late Drevarkh the Enlightened’s astounding life and career.
