— How do you usually spend November thirteenth?
— The day before, I always wish it wasn’t happening. I wish it was the twelfth or the fourteenth. I wish I could just forget it, erase it, and be done with it. But I cannot. The thirteenth comes. I spend it at work or at home. Between five and six-thirty my husband and I go to the wall [at the Bukvoyed bookstore] on Vosstaniya Square. We go to the cemetery the day before, of course. We make sure to leave Timur’s favorite flowers, irises, [at his grave].
We hate this day, and we don’t want it to happen. For some reason it’s easy to go to the cemetery, but it’s very hard to go to the wall. But we gave our word that as long as we are alive, as long as we are able, we will go, no matter how hard it is.
We are always surprised that we are not the only ones there. Each year we think that this time round no one will come for sure. People come, and I’m surprised that all of them are young people. I ask them how they even heard about Timur, since they weren’t even alive when it happened. Nineteen years have passed. They say they heard [about Timur] from their moms and dads, and some from their brothers and sisters. That’s surprising.
We dislike this day very much, but we go to the wall, and then we try to start living again.
— Do you meet Timur’s friends? Do you communicate with them on other days?
— For a long time, ten years at least, we kept in very close contact with all of Timur’s friends. We would even get together. That has been winding down now, but it’s normal, I think. So many years have passed, and some have families, while others have left the country.
Mostly strangers or people who have been going for years come to the wall — for example, adults [sic] from the former Memorial.
— Over the years, it has been suggested that a memorial plaque be erected or a street be named in Timur’s honor. Do you think it is still possible?
— MP Nikolai Rybakov (who is the national leader of the Yabloko Party but not an MP — Bumaga) launched the campaign to put up a plaque. He personally approached us at the wall: he said he had made a request to the authorities, and that he was waiting for response. Time has passed, but nothing has happened.
— Would you like it to happen?
— I don’t know: I never thought about it. I don’t believe anyone will ever do it. And I don’t think it could happen at all given the current situation [in Russia].
By the way, there were fewer lads of conscription age [at the yearly memorial] when all these sad events [the war] began. At the beginning of the [military] mobilization, they were afraid to come. Law enforcement agencies are always present there to prevent mayhem.
— How did you react when one of the people involved in the attack, Alexander Zenin, who had been in hiding for twelve years, was detained in 2018?
— I laughed. He had been living in Pesochny the whole time. During that time he had managed to have two children, but the police had been unable to catch him. The trial was hard for me; my husband went to it. The police investigator called us and told us that the case would start to kick off again, that we would have to go to the court hearings again. He said that if we signed a paper that the case could proceed without our presence, then it would be wrapped up in one hearing. So we signed it. It turned out that he just wanted to tick a box and close the case quickly, and so there was no investigation as such. But it didn’t matter by and large. Whether he was caught or not, I wish him well and hope that his children grow up, for God’s sake.
— In 2007, you said about the attackers: “I have no vengeful feelings.” You haven’t had any since then?
— No, it’s not rational to seek revenge.
— Did they try to contact you, to apologize?
— What apologies could there be after I attended the court hearings?! I was alone there without my husband, and our lawyer was away at the time. I was alone against the seven defendants, their parents, and their lawyers. Twenty-one people tried to bite me (figuratively speaking), cut me, and kill me. I had started going to the court hearings to defend Timur. The parents of the defendants felt so angry with me that Timur had crossed their paths and caused their children to suffer.
Zenin sent us fifty thousand rubles in 201. He was apologizing, as it were, so that he would get a big plus [in his character testimony] in court. But I didn’t take the money. I asked the investigator how I could inform the court that I had not taken the money. He told me: “It was the good will of the defendant — he sent the money. Nobody cares whether you took it or not.” (Alexander Zenin was sentenced in 2018 to one and a half years in a medium security penal colony for inciting hatred and enmity.)
— You are employed as a teacher. Do you observe political activism among young children? Have their views been radicalized? Or are their attitudes apolitical?
— I’ll talk about their parents, because everything comes from the family. The parents are completely susceptible to propaganda. Of course, there are children who voice their opinions, but I do not get into these conversations with them due to professional ethics.
There are children who repeat what the TV says, what their parents say. Although there were some pupils whose parents were of the same opinion as me, and, accordingly, their children also think differently. I didn’t discuss things with them, but I was pleased to hear that not everyone was marching in lockstep. Although young people are chewed out, they are decent folk; there are all kinds of different people [among them], just like we were, just like you are. There are always pros and cons. It’s just that now the propaganda is so heavy that it is difficult to analyze the situation and have an opinion.
I can tell you this about the younger children. Whereas before [the war] they played cops and robbers, and no one wanted to be a cop, and everyone wanted to be a robber, now they play terrorists. And for some reason both sides are terrorists.
— What would Timur be doing in Russia in 2024?
— I think he would have left by 2022. He would have gone to Europe: he had his own people there. I would not say that he would have left for political reasons. The most important thing for him was music. He expressed his views through music. That’s where he would have gone. The politics would have been secondary.
— Is life in Russia more dangerous now than it was in 2005?
— Of course. There is no comparison. Despite what happened to our family in 2005, it’s not even up for discussion.
— Would you have been happy if he had left the country, but was safe and doing creative things?
— When children leave home or leave the country, it’s always sad, I guess. I’ve been trying to fool myself all these years (as psychologists have counseled me to do) that he’s alive but has just left the country. But it doesn’t work for me.
Would I have welcomed his leaving? I think it would have been his choice. His father and I would have had to accept that choice. It wouldn’t have mattered much whether we liked it or didn’t like it, whether we were sad or not. And who’s to say he would have been safe there? We don’t know what he would have done there. We would just have had to accept his choices, like we accepted his life choices in 2005.
I was reproached at the trial for not forbidding him from doing all those things. Doing what? Rescuing animals from the streets and feeding homeless people? (Timur Kacharava was a vegan and fed homeless people at Food Not Bombs events — Bumaga.) What were we supposed to forbid him from doing do? I just didn’t realize at the time that it would prove to be so dangerous. We would have just accepted his choice, because he would have had the right to it, as well as the right to make it a reality.
So, it is better that he lived a short, tragic life that was his own life rather than than the long, boring life which we would have dreamt up for him. Of course I would have been sad [had he left]. How could I not have been sad?
Source: “‘It is better that he lived a short, tragic life that was his own life’: The mother of anti-fascist Timur Kacharava, murdered in 2005, on who in St. Petersburg continues to remember her son,” Bumaga, 14 November 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader. As I was preparing this post, a friend of mine in Petersburg wrote me the following:
“Last night, I stood for a while next to the memorial to Timur outside the Bukvoyed store on Vosstaniya. Suddenly three antifa showed up, one of them sporting a mohawk. They told me that a bonehead [a neo-Nazi skinhead] had just shot at them with a trauma pistol. He had been going to attack one of the antifa, but when he noticed that there were three of them he ran away and fired a parting shot. That’s what they said. E. saw young boneheads at Avtovo that evening. Considering that they now often attack couriers and janitors [i.e., Central Asian migrant workers] in particular, there is partly the same disturbing feeling as before [i.e., during the intense wave of neo-Nazi attacks on ethnic minorities, immigrants, and antifascists in Petersburg in the late 2000s]. That’s on top of everything else.”
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