Hundreds of community members add flowers, candles and photographs on Sunday to an altar for healing for local civil rights activist Thairie Ritchie at the Black Lives Matter mural in front of Santa Cruz City Hall. Ritchie tried to self-immolate at the site on Jan. 20 just hours after President Donald Trump took his oath of office and the local Martin Luther King Jr. Day march brought hundreds of people past the mural. Ritchie was treated on scene and then airlifted to an out-of-area burn center where he is now being treated. Photo: Shmuel Thaler/Santa Cruz Sentinel
A light, misty rain fell over Santa Cruz Sunday afternoon as hundreds gathered in the downtown area to honor the life and pray for the recovery of a prominent local activist who set himself on fire in front of City Hall less than two weeks prior.
Thairie Ritchie, a well known Santa Cruz community organizer, reportedly self-immolated Jan. 20 atop the Black Lives Matter mural on Center Street in downtown Santa Cruz, only a few yards from the city’s power center. According to police scanner recordings from that day, first responders around the 5 p.m. hour were at the corner of Locust and Center streets in response to a “male who set himself on fire.” The response was triggered only a few hours after the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day march had finished inside the neighboring Civic Auditorium and President Donald Trump had taken his oath of office for the second time in Washington.
Ritchie’s family, friends and acquaintances quietly poured into the open-air patio of Bike Church Santa Cruz on Sunday, the second day of Black History Month, with many carrying flowers as they embraced one another with tears in their eyes. The smell of incense and burning sage was carried by the crisp winter air as the sun set behind a gray curtain of clouds that covered the more than 300 people that had assembled to collectively process the incident.
Inside space had been cleared to set up a vigil for Ritchie, 29, with photos, candles and seating along with cookies and other snacks. Pens and paper were passed around for visitors to write private notes that many hope he will soon read as his recovery begins.
Ayo Banjo, a friend of Ritchie and the designated media contact for the event, said that Ritchie was awake Sunday and recovering in an intensive care unit. He said “a lot” of Ritchie’s body was covered in burns but declined to share a percentage, adding that the recovery process is estimated to take about six months.
“He (Ritchie) means a lot to us because he was all about community and everybody here from all different walks of life, all different races, all different genders, all different places, come together because we celebrate his representation,” said Banjo. “He is the example of what I think makes America, America. The ability to bring everyone together around issues that are beyond us and bigger than us. And I think that message has to be communicated.”
Late Monday evening, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that effectively lays the groundwork for a sweeping ban on the 15,000 transgender troops currently serving in the United States military. The order, delegating much of its implementation to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, declares that being transgender is “incompatible with service.” It further mandates that all transgender personnel must be misgendered in official military communication and policy. Most notably, the order frames transgender identity as inherently at odds with “a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life.”
The executive order, titled “Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness,” claims its purpose is to “protect unit cohesion” from “ideologies harmful” to it—explicitly targeting the service of transgender troops. It asserts that the medical needs of transgender individuals are incompatible with military service, despite evidence that treatments like hormone therapy result in no operational downtime. Aware of this contradiction, the order offers an additional justification for the ban, framing transgender individuals as inherently “selfish” and “false.”
See the rationale given by the order here:
Consistent with the military mission and longstanding DoD policy, expressing a false “gender identity” divergent from an individual’s sex cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service. Beyond the hormonal and surgical medical interventions involved, adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life. A man’s assertion that he is a woman, and his requirement that others honor this falsehood, is not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member.
While the order itself is vague on the specifics of implementation, its intent is clear: to serve as a ban on transgender service members. It declares that being transgender is “inconsistent with service” and mandates that pronouns used by the military must “accurately reflect an individual’s sex.” The order gives Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth 60 days to implement these directives, including ending “invented and identification-based pronoun usage” and prohibiting transgender service members from bunking with others of their gender.
If implemented broadly, the ban will have immediate and damaging consequences for both transgender service members and military readiness across the United States. SPARTA, a leading transgender military advocacy organization, estimates that removing 15,000 transgender service members would result in the loss of an $18 billion capital investment, with the Palm Center projecting an additional $1 billion cost to recruit and train replacements. Notably, up to 73% of these service members are senior enlisted personnel with 12-21 years of experience—expertise that cannot be easily replaced by the U.S. government.
You can see SPARTA’s figures here:
When asked about the potential for a ban when it was first floated in November, Emily Shilling, President of SPARTA, stated, “The most immediate impact is that transgender people serve in every theater of the world. If it were a fairly fast-moving ban, you would be pulling these individuals out of their units, leaving critical gaps in skill sets, experience, and leadership positions that you’re just not going to be able to fill with equivalent people anytime soon, especially given the shortfalls in recruiting,”
A transgender officer with years of military experience, speaking anonymously about the rumors of an impending transgender military ban, shared that she had recently spoken with several transgender service members deeply concerned about the possibility. When asked about claims that transgender people are a liability to the military, she dismissed the notion outright, stating, “Every trans service member that I have observed performing their job excels at their job, and that’s because we have to… Every trans sailor, every trans soldier, every trans Marine, and airman that I have known has excelled at their job.”
It remains unclear how swiftly or extensively Defense Secretary Hegseth will implement these changes, how many transgender service members will face discharge, or whether the administration will revert to a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach—forcing transgender personnel back into the closet or demanding their detransition. What is clear, however, is the administration’s framing of being transgender not as an inherent aspect of human diversity but as a dishonorable and incompatible choice. This rhetoric signals a chilling disregard for the thousands of transgender service members who have served with distinction for decades, suggesting the administration feels no obligation to temper its actions with respect or restraint.
Within hours of his inauguration, President Trump signed an executive order titled “Defending women from gender ideology extremism and restoring biological truth to the federal government”, following a whipping up of anti-trans feeling during the US election.
The order states that Trump’s administration will make it “the policy of the United States to recognise two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.”
The response from LGBTQ+ groups was dismay and fear. Quoted in the Detroit Free Press, trans woman Rachel Crannell-Crocker remarked that Trump “wants to say we are not real,” while Bobbie Hirsch said “I’m scared, I’m really scared for my future.” Kimberly Frost, co-director of ILGA World, said Trump was “emboldened by anti-gender movements” to “use the lives of trans people as tools to sow divisions in society. Our communities deserve better.”
Trump’s move is not unexpected. During a fraught and divisive election campaign, Republicans spent nearly $215m alone on network TV ads that vilified transgender people, according to recent data from AdImpact. The past few years have seen a rush of anti-trans bills in red states, such as banning changes to birth certificates or defining sex as immutably set at birth. Books featuring LGBTQ+ content have been banned, and drag shows have faced protests and been subject to lurid conspiracy theories by Trump’s far right supporters.
Having spent nearly a decade reporting on far right threats to gender rights, the order’s purpose is clear to me: it sits squarely within the attack on so-called “gender ideology” with the ultimate aim to restore a “natural order” of white male supremacy. And while the target is trans people, the threat goes much wider, potentially laying the groundwork for further attacks on the US’s already degraded abortion rights.
What is gender ideology?
Originating in the mid-1990s in Catholic and other conservative Christian circles, the term “gender ideology” sprung up in response to feminists seeking to place “gender” into a United Nations report on its 1994 women’s conference. Initially the term focused on abortion rights, but quickly expanded to criticise any rights related to gender and sexuality, including LGBTQ+ and trans rights.
As the term gathered momentum, it became framed as a threat to ‘traditional’ – see conservative and Christian nationalist – values. LGBTQ+ activists and feminists were accused of imposing “gender ideology” on everything from schools to families and government, determined to “indoctrinate” children and young people with the “transgender agenda.”
Attacks on “gender ideology” were amplified by conservative writers such as Dale O’Leary who popularised the term in her book Gender Agenda, and picked up by the Vatican, as well as the anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ+ ‘religious freedom’ organisations such as Alliance Defending Freedom and the Heritage Foundation. The right-wing think tank is behind the controversial Project 2025, with ADF on the project’s advisory board.
The project – which brings “together … over 100 respected organizations from across the conservative movement, to take down the Deep State and return the government to the people” – is key to understanding Trump’s move.
Project 2025 published a “Mandate for Leadership”, providing an anti-rights blueprint for the incoming administration. It offered policy ideas to demolish so-called “gender ideology”, demanding that “enforcement of civil rights should be based on a proper understanding of those laws, rejecting gender ideology.” It demanded that “gender ideology” be removed from school curricula and, in language echoed in Trump’s order, warned “radical gender ideology is having a devastating effect on … young girls.”
The project also called on the government to “reverse the DEI [diversity, equality, inclusion] revolution in Labor policy”. Trump’s order did so willingly, revoking previous executive orders that protected against discrimination and stating that government agencies must “take immediate steps to end Federal implementation of unlawful and radical DEI ideology.”
A threat to abortion?
While the executive order is first and foremost a frightening attack on trans people, its wording sets alarm bells ringing for abortion rights, too. It will be no surprise that curtailing abortion rights is a key focus of Project 2025 – the mandate mentions “abortion” 199 times.
Trump’s previous administration created a conservative-majority Supreme Court that overruled Roe vs Wade, opening the door for individual states to implement deadly and devastating abortion bans across the US. Now, the executive order’s wording suggests a wider attack on reproductive rights.
The order defines “female” as meaning “a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell”, while male is defined as “a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.”
As well as being troubling for trans identity, the wording defines male and female foetal personhood from conception. If the foetus is recognised as a person at conception, then that foetus legally has the same rights as a born person, with catastrophic consequences for pregnant women and people. Foetal personhood means a woman can be prosecuted for murder if she has an abortion, as it violates the right to life. She can face manslaughter charges if she has a miscarriage for which she is blamed.
Bethany Van Kampen Saravia, senior legal and policy adviser at the gender rights NGO Ipas, told openDemocracy that “the language used in this cruel and dehumanising executive order is undoubtedly deliberate and deeply flawed on several counts. Simply put, it is outside of the executive authority to declare a fertilized egg a ‘person’ who has constitutionally protected rights.”
This is not a new threat. So far, 24 US states have included foetal personhood language in laws regulating or banning abortion, while 17 states have foetal personhood by law or judicial decision that applies to either criminal or civil law, or both. There have already been multiple cases where women in the States have been criminalised for miscarriage.
“Personhood arguments have long been used by anti-rights actors in attempts to fully ban and criminalize abortion and to punish pregnant people,” warned Van Kampen Saravia. “This language can also ban some forms of birth control and fertility treatments like IVF. This is a clear and deliberate signal of what is to come from this Administration.”
“It is outside of the executive authority of the President to instate a nationwide abortion ban, yet there is much that he can do to limit access to medication abortion and those threats need to be taken seriously,” she added. “Ipas US condemns these egregious acts of hate and bigotry. These executive orders are nothing shy of human rights violations and the world should be paying very close attention now to what is being feigned as ‘defending women’ and who is actually being targeted and criminalized.”
The ideology behind the ‘natural order’
The attacks on abortion and LGBTQ+ rights are often interlinked, as both pose a threat to the far right idea of a ‘natural order’ which has been undermined by feminism and human rights, and must be returned to through reversing social progress and protections.
The idea that there is a ‘natural order’ which needs to be re-established has its roots in fascist ideology, and its intent is found in almost all attacks on gender rights including from Trump, Putin, and anti-gender ideologues in Europe. It valorises male supremacy, female subordination, and declares the non-existence of LGBTQ+ people.
As I write in my book, the existence of trans people is a grave threat to the natural order and its advocates who want to reassert male supremacy and abolish the rights of LGBTQ+ people. The goal of male supremacist, anti-gender movements is to ‘naturalise’ gendered stereotypes about men’s and women’s behaviour and status: they want to naturalise male supremacy and female inferiority.
The far right wants to tie women’s inferiority to biology, and to claim that harmful gendered stereotypes are biologically innate in order to pin women to specific roles in society. These same stereotypes are used to justify women’s oppression: women are just more nurturing, or they are bad at leadership, for example, they should stay in the domestic sphere and leave the public sphere to the boys. The anti-gender movement wants to claim that women’s oppression is natural, rooted in women’s biology, and therefore cannot be challenged.
But biology is not destiny, as the famous feminist slogan states. The ‘natural order’ of female inferiority and male supremacy is disrupted by feminists saying women can have control over their fertility, or LGBTQ+ people saying one can express their gender identity as they choose. They therefore have to be stopped.
This order has nothing to do with “defending women” from “extreme gender ideology.” The extreme gender ideology is the one that tries to push women into oppressive boxes, ban abortion, and seek to abolish the existence of trans people and the LGBTQ+ community more widely.
The extreme gender ideology is the movement that elects a President after a judge in New York found a rape allegation made against him to be “substantially true”. It is the movement that celebrates his election with the slogan “your body, my choice.”
Programmer Viktor Filinkov was released after seven years in police custody and prison as a defendant and convict in the Network Case. Filinkov himself told Mediazona that he had been released in the morning from Penal Colony No. 1 in Orenburg, after which police officers drove him to the border with Kazakhstan and turned him over to local border guards.
Before his release, Filinkov was interviewed by the penal colony’s case officers, who warned him not to return to Russia after he was deported. Police officers transported him to the border in handcuffs.
Jenya Kulakova and Viktor Filinkov after crossing the border with Kazakhstan. Photo: Mediazona
Filinkov is a Kazakhstani national. In 2021, while he was still incarcerated, the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) ruled that Filinkov’s presence in Russia was “undesirable” and banned him from entering Russia for eight years, a common practice for those convicted on terrorism charges. Based on this ruling, the Orenburg office of the Interior Ministry ordered Filinkov deported.
Filinkov and his wife Yevgenia [aka Jenya] Kulakova are now in Kazakhstan. They are headed to Petropavlovsk in the north of the country, where Filinkov’s mother resides.
Before his release, FSIN officers laundered and gave Filinkov the green jacket in which Filinkov was detained seven years ago and tortured with a stun gun by FSB officers.
Programmer and antifascist Viktor Filinkov was detained in St. Petersburg on 23 January 2018. He was twenty-three years old at the time. After his arrest, Filinkov described in detail how FSB officers had taken him to the woods and tortured him with a stun gun, forcing him to memorize the testimony they wanted him to give. Other defendants and even witnesses in the case described similar torture.
FSB investigators then charged eleven antifascists and anarchists in Penza and St. Petersburg under Article 205.4 of the Criminal Code (which criminalizes “organization of a terrorist group”). According to the FSB, the young men had banded together into “the Network terrorist community” and were preparing for an“armed overthrow of the regime.”
The sentences handed down to the Penza defendants ranged from six to eighteen years in prison, while the Petersburg defendants were handed sentences of between three and a half to seven years in prison. Filinkov was the final of the Petersburg activists to serve out his sentence.
Since the summer of 2021, Filinkov had been incarcerated at Orenburg Penal Colony No. 1, where at first he faced pressure from the prison wardens: he was repeatedly sent to solitary confinement, and his letters were constantly stolen and forged. Filinkov, however, consistently filed legal appeals against the penal colony’s punishments with the assistance of his lawyer Vitaly Cherkasov and his public defender Yevgenia Kulakova. When they began to win one court case after another against the penal colony, the wardens preferred to leave Filinkov alone. They had not harassed him during the last couple of years.
Vitya and I are finally together and free. There was no certainty until the last moment that everything would work out, so today’s event is a miracle to me and a relief after a lot of effort and tension.
Thank you all so much for the congratulations that have been pouring in from everywhere! It’s quite cool to know that a happy event in my life has brought so much joy to people who know me. And thanks to the media for their coverage of Vitya’s release (and, consequently, their requests for interviews).
All of this is quite precious to me, but right now neither Vitya nor I can even read everything that has come in, let alone reply. Please understand that both of us (Vitya especially) need time to come to our senses and experience these moments.
This Saturday, 23 November, at 7 p.m., the last presentation about and fundraiser for Ilya Shakursky will take place at Schwarzmarkt in Hamburg (Kleiner Schäferkamp 46). After the new year, a big update is in store for the project, but in the meantime we look forward to seeing the local public and thank everyone who has supported us this year!
Este sábado 23 de noviembre será la última presentación sobre Ilya Shakursky con posibilidad de donaciones en Hamburg im Schwarzmarkt (Kleiner Schäferkamp 46), después del año nuevo el proyecto espera una gran actualización, pero mientras tanto esperamos al público local y ¡gracias a todos los que nos han apoyado este año!
It is a tradition in Petersburg to visit the improvised memorial to Timur Kacharava outside the Bukvoyed bookstore on Vosstaniya Street every year on the evening of November 13. Candles and portraits of the antifascist, who was murdered at this spot nineteen years ago, are brought there by his mother and a changing roster of first-time visitors. Last year the memorial was torn down by far-right activists.
Eight people were convicted of the knife attack on the twenty-year-old Timur and his friend Maxim Zgibay (who was wounded but survived the assault), and five of them were sentenced to prison. All of them have been released (the killer was paroled in 2016) and disappeared from the limelight.
Bumaga asked Irina Kacharava about the people she has seen at the memorials over the past nineteen years, how she feels about the release of Timur and Maxim’s assailants, and what life choices her son would have made in today’s Russia.
— 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?
“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.”
When you woke up yesterday the idea that Pete Hegseth—a philandering morning TV host who has never run anything bigger than a frozen banana stand—could serve as the secretary of defense was the most preposterous idea in the history of the federal government.
By the dinner time Trump issued two nominations that made Hegseth look like Bobby Gates.
The Matt Gaetz appointment is getting most of the attention because of the irony. The DoJ being controlled by a man who was recently investigated by the same department for having an alleged sexual relationship with a 17-year-old girl, whom he (allegedly) paid to travel with him? It’s too good.
Also, in the near term, the attorney general can a lot of damage to America. The AG has the power both to turn the state against its citizens and to shield wrongdoers from accountability.
But it’s the appointment of Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence that worries me more. Because for a decade Gabbard has looked and behaved like a Russian asset.
In four terms as a congresswoman her most notable actions were ongoing defenses of two war criminals: Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin.
Ildar Dadin. Photo: social media, via Ukrainska Pravda
Russian opposition activist Ildar Dadin has been killed in action in Ukraine, where he was fighting on Kyiv’s side.
Source: Ksenia Larina, a former journalist for radio station Ekho Moskvy (Echo of Moscow); Meduza, a Latvia-based Russian media outlet
QuotefromLarina: “Ildar Dadin has just been reported killed in a battle in Kharkiv Oblast.”
Details: She learned about Dadin’s death from Igor Volobuev, another Russian fighting on Kyiv’s side and former vice-president of Gazprombank, one of Russia’s largest banks.
For reference: Ildar Dadin arrived in Ukraine in early 2023 to enlist in Ukraine’s Armed Forces and fight against the Russians. He joined the Siberian Battalion at the front, fighting under the alias Gandhi.
He is the first Russian to be convicted for repeatedly violating rally regulations in Russia, a charge introduced in the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation in 2014, commonly referred to by journalists as the “Dadin article.”
In December 2015, Dadin was sentenced to three years in prison, which was later reduced to two and a half years.
In 2016, Dadin spoke about torture in the Karelian Penal Colony No. 7, where he had been held. Information about torture and beatings was confirmed by other prisoners and their relatives, but Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service and the Investigative Committee found no violations following their inspections.
Since the outbreak of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine, the country’s repressive apparatus has turned so severe that absolutely anyone can face serious prison time. You can evince complete indifference to events or even support the “special military operation,” but one day it could happen that a family member of yours has been captured by the security forces. Often these family members are minors. They are now being given quite “adult” prison sentences, but they have virtually no chance of being released as part of high-profile prisoner exchanges.
The number of Russians imprisoned for political offenses has been growing, and the situation is unlikely to improve in the near future. We decided to tell the stories of several family members of political prisoners in order to try and answer the simplest questions: why relatives of prisoners often need support themselves, how best to help relatives of political prisoners, what mistakes it is better to avoid making if your relative is detained by law enforcement, and the vital role played by letters to political prisoners. Ivan Astashin, a human rights activist with the project Solidarity Zone and a former political prisoner himself, and two mothers whose sons have been convicted of “terrorism” by the Russian authorities helped us to answer those questions.
Cast of characters:
Anna, Nikita Uvarov’s mother. Nikita Uvarov was a defendant in the high-profile case of the Kansk teens. The three teens charged in the case were detained by law enforcement after posting leaflets on an FSB building and organizing an anarchist “terrorist” group. Uvarov was sentenced to five years in prison.
Tatyana, Yegor Balazeikin’s mother. Yegor Balazeikin, a prep school student, was detained for allegedly throwing a Molotov cocktail at the wall of a military enlistment center in the Leningrad Region which failed to ignite. According to investigators, in February 2023, Balazeikin tried to set fire to military enlistment offices in St. Petersburg and the town of Kirovsk by way of protesting against the military mobilization. He was sentenced to six years in prison.
Ivan Astashin was a political prisoner in the high-profile 2010s criminal case against the so-called Autonomous Combat Terrorist Organization (ABTO). He spent almost ten years in prison. Nowadays, he does human rights work as part of the project Solidarity Zone, which we featured in a previous article.
Arrest and Verdict
Tatyana and Yegor Balazeikin
Tatyana, Yegor Balazeikin’s mother: The telephone rang at 11:40 p.m. on 28 February. It was an unknown number. A woman’s voice said that our son had been detained whilst attempting to torch a military enlistment office in the town of Kirovsk in the Leningrad Region. At the time [of his arrest], Yegor was in the room which we had rented for him [in St. Petersburg]. He stayed there on school days because it was near the prep school he attended. We live in the Leningrad Region, and it was quite complicated to commute there. When I heard what the woman said, I told my husband what happened and that we should get ready to go. We got ready instantly and went there. What were we feeling at that moment? We probably felt that was happening was not real because Yegor had never broken any rules, not at school or kindergarten, not at his sports club, not outside or in public places. We realized that something out of the ordinary must have happened to move him to do what he did.
We were not allowed to see Yegor when we arrived: he was with the police, the FSB, or the Investigative Committee. I don’t know exactly who was in the room with him, as none of those people introduced themselves to us. We talked with the juvenile justice officer, who took our statements. Yegor at that moment was in a separate room with law enforcement officers, and I was let in there to see him only when another juvenile justice officer had taken his statement, which either his father or I was supposed to sign. Only when Yegor had made his statement was I let into the room.
What was the hardest thing for us during the process? There were a lot of hard things, but the hardest thing was understanding that this was an injustice and that we were powerless, that we had no way to fight back and prove that an injustice was taking place. The verdict was one of the hardest stages. And for me it was not the verdict that was the scariest, but the prosecutor’s oral arguments, when he asked the court to sentence Yegor to six years. That was horrible. It was during the trial, and I had a very hard time coping with my emotions. I started crying, taking sedatives, and drinking water, because my oral arguments were next. I had to put myself together and make my speech. These six years requested by the prosecutor were the most terrible thing.
Nikita and Anna Uvarov
Anna, Nikita Uvarov’s mother: It all began on 6 June 2020. Five teens were detained in Kansk around five o’clock in the evening, and my son Nikita was amongst them. Their telephones were immediately confiscated and they were taken to the Investigative Committee. Among them was the Marxist-leaning grandson of the former mayor of Kansk, Nadezhda Kachan, and a guy who associated himself with antifa and had met the other boys online shortly before their arrests. He was the first to be approached by a police detective and asked to set up a meeting. Those two immediately turned witnesses, while Denis, Bogdan and Nikita were identified as suspects, although only two people had pasted up the leaflets. An FSB detective called me and told me that my son had been detained and that I needed to come to the Investigative Committee. When I arrived there, Nikita and five officers were sitting in an office. There, I learned that Nikita and Denis, who had asked to spend the night at our place, on the night of 5 June, after waiting for me to fall asleep, had pasted a leaflet on the treasury building that read “Their luxury guarantees your poverty!” and next to it, on the FSB building, a leaflet that read “Hands off the anarchists — the state is the main terrorist!” and included four photos of political prisoners.
I was told to sign a form giving consent to a search of our apartment and voluntarily hand over leaflets and other items. At the apartment, Nikita turned the leaflets and the sugar substitute (?) over to them, while a detective went through his notebooks and computer, which was then also confiscated. Then there was another interrogation by a detective from the department for combating extremism and terrorism, in which after examining the contents of the phones he began to ask questions about the Molotov cocktail, and Nikita’s reply that they had just been fooling around didn’t satisfy the detective.
Then there was an interrogation involving investigators and a bunch of FSB guys with a readymade record of the interrogation, which even included the date of the alleged bombing of the FSB, or the Interior Ministry. My son and I refused to sign it, and then they began to write up the arrest. It was horrible, as I realized I could do nothing to help Nikita. I couldn’t get my head around what was happening and what would happen next.
And then there was the arraignment, at which the judge read out terrible character references from the school, while the juvenile justice inspector, who had never been to our apartment and never spoken with our neighbors, nevertheless tried to describe our living conditions. After eleven months, my lawyer Vasin and I managed to get the remand in custody changed, and Nikita was free for nine months. But the lawyer immediately said that the sentence would most likely involve actual prison time, so throughout that whole time it was hard and scary for my son. The verdict was the hardest, because I had hoped for a suspended sentence, even if it was minimal, thinking that due to his age they would take pity on him, because there had been no such instances involving actual prison time, it seems, before Nikita, and these kids had already been punished for their views. The case was an obvious frame-up, and I think the judges saw that too, but they didn’t give the defense much room to make its case, and many of its motions were overruled. Still, I thought to myself that now everything would be over and we would be free at last…. The verdict was meant to make an example of my son, because he hadn’t pleaded guilty or asked for mercy.
Problems and Challenges
Ivan Astashin: Of course, it is better to learn about the problems faced by relatives of political prisoners from them. For my part, as a human rights activist, I can emphasize the fact that after a person is arrested, their relatives often either do not know where to turn, or are afraid to go anywhere for help. This is a big problem, as the initial hours and days are crucial in many respects.
Ivan Astashin
Anna, Nikita Ugarov’s mother: My main difficulties now are emotional fatigue and constant worries about Nikita, his health, and the attitudes of both the prison staff and the people serving time with him. After all, prison is a terrible place, and my son should not be in there. He has a good heart: he is not bitter now, and forgave everyone long ago. We are still coping financially: ordinary, caring people help a little, and I am very grateful to them for this. They write to me and support me, which makes me feel better. Nikita receives a lot of letters, which help him a great deal to hold on and not get discouraged. Thank God, I have not encountered bullying or stigmatization from others. No one cares at all here in Kansk. I get mostly sympathy and understanding from neighbors and the people I know, and many of them ask me to send Nikita their regards.
Tatyana, Yegor Balazeikin’s mother: There are a lot of difficulties we have faced along the way, actually. First of all, getting a decent medical examination, to which Yegor is entitled by law, because he has autoimmune hepatitis, because he has a disability, and he is entitled to certain medical care. It is very difficult to make this happen. We have struggled to get this done while he has been in the pretrial detention center in St. Petersburg. I can’t even imagine what will happen when he goes to the penal colony, because every three months he has to take tests to monitor his health.
Looking at all the political prisoners who have health problems, some of whom are already serving time, I assume that this will be very difficult to achieve. It’s probably even impossible. Psychologically, it is quite difficult, because you go through all the stages. First is the denial stage: “No, it can’t be happening, it can’t be happening to us.” Then there is the hatred stage, in which you hate everybody, just not understanding at all how it could have happened. The acceptance stage, I guess, has come to us a little bit, that is, we have accepted this situation, although we don’t agree with it. And then there is the feeling of powerlessness, the feeling that you are just a speck in this world, that you can’t protect your own child, you can’t defend his rights, you can’t prove in court that his actions were not offenses under Criminal Code Article 205 [“committing a terrorist act”], but offenses under Article 167 [“intentional destruction or damage of property under aggravating circumstances”] at most. They don’t even listen to you, because they already have their marching orders from above. And they have to execute these orders, because they have to maintain the picture they want to create—a picture of universal support for the “ruling party” and universal support for the so-called special military operation. And there is no way to fight it.
As for financial challenges, it is quite difficult financially to support a political prisoner, especially a child, given that Yegor shares a cell with boys who are often from orphanages or dysfunctional families, and they do not get care packages. We have been going to the pretrial detention center for fourteen months, and we bring a very large care package every week, which is meant not only for Yegor but also for the other five boys. Because we know that in order for our child to eat one apple from the care package, we need to pack five more apples, so that each of the boys eats an apple, and the same goes for all the other products. They are children. And we can’t feed only our own child and leave the other five hungry, so we certainly bring very large care packages, once a week. Each care package costs about seventeen to twenty thousand rubles [approx. 200 euros], and financially it is quite difficult. So, I think that financial difficulties are not the least of our difficulties either, actually.
Letters to Inmates
Ivan Astashin: Letters and correspondence are first of all personal interactions. A person in prison often does not have a telephone or internet, and is very limited in terms of personal interactions: they have their cellmates (although sometimes people are in solitary confinement) and the prison staff—that’s it. And their lawyer, if they have one, who visits them. Therefore, correspondence should be used first of all as a tool for personal interaction. In the first letter, it is better to tell them a little about yourself and your interests, so that in the future general topics for personal interaction can take shape. You can write almost anything, but the best option is to tell the inmate about your own interests, and ask them what they would be interested in finding out. Often people are interested in the news, and they have interests in a particular area. This should all be taken into account individually. And of course, you shouldn’t write anything that could harm a person by discrediting them or giving additional information to the prosecution
Anna and Nikita Uvarov
Anna, Nikita Ugarov’s mother: I would very much like people to not stop writing letters to Nikita: this aid should be the highest priority. I would advise people who would like to help political prisoners and their families to write letters to political prisoners, and if they want to find a connection with their relatives to communicate with them. Information about political prisoners is available on the Telegram channels Memorial: Supporting Political Prisoners and Solidarity Zone.
Support for Relatives
Ivan Astashin: You have to act differently in different cases. In some cases, the families need financial support to pay a lawyer or spend care packages. In other cases, this is not an issue, but emotional support is needed. I think it is always needed, in fact. In my experience, when you telephone the relatives of political prisoners, those conversations often last longer than is strictly necessary for discussing practical matters. People need to speak their mind, to share their feelings with someone. Often, they do not live in an environment in which they can share, as they are often ordinary people who don’t run inb activist circles. Emotional support is thus quite important.
Anna, Nikita Uvarov’s mother: The support of others is actually quite important, because when a person is left alone with this trouble, they can probably go crazy. I don’t know what would have happened to me if the case had not been publicized. I remember those six months of silence and fear, when there was no one I could tell and with whom I could consult, in order to feel that I was not alone…. And then I felt, I recognized how many of us there were, both those who were in such situations ourselves and people who understood everything we were going through and were willing to help and support us!
You can find information about what support Nikita Uvarov and his family need on the Telegram channel Case of the Kansk Teens.
You can send letters, books and articles to Nikita at the following address:
You can also send letters to Nikita via the online service ZT and the volunteer-run project RosUznik.
Yegor Balazeikin’s parents, wearing t-shirts that say “Common cause.”
Tatyana, Yegor Balazeikin’s mother: The support of others is the most important thing we have. We have the support of our son. You wouldn’t believe it, but he manages to support us whilst he is in prison! We support him in every way we can, and he supports us. He gives us the energy to go on with our lives. But at the same time, the support of the people around you is quite important, because you realize that you are not alone in this fight, and the people around you, they understand how unjust the court’s decision is, how unjust and unfair the sentence they passed is.
In fact, we have not dealt with any direct harassment in the wake of Yegor’s criminal case from family or friends. There are people whom we don’t know who write all sorts of nasty things about both Yegor and us in the feedback chat of Yegor’s Telegram channel, but there hasn’t been any large-scale bullying. Thank God, we’ve managed to avoid that. For the most part, people support Yegor and us. They write messages of support and comments that support Yegor and us.
What advice can I give to people who would like to help? To write letters, of course: it is safe, it is inexpensive, and it can be done from anywhere in the world. And, probably, to provide financial assistance to the families of political prisoners. Because it is quite dangerous to send packages or parcels without vetting them with the families, since a prisoner may not be given a care package that their family planned if someone suddenly sends one without vetting it first. And financial assistance is quite important, because relatives know what they sent in the last care package, what they need to send in the next one, and how many kilograms they have left to send. For the time being, this does not concern Yegor: he is a minor, so there are no restrictions on care packages to him. But on 6 August he will turn eighteen and the number of care packages he can get will be strictly limited. Generally speaking, letters and financial support are absolutely necessary. But nothing should be sent to political prisoners without the consent of their support groups or their families.
You can find information about what support Yegor Balazeikin and his family need on the Telegram channel The Yegor Balazeikin Case.
You can send letters to Yegor at the following address:
Balazeikin Yegor Danielevich (born 06.08.2006) Primorsky rayon, pos. Talagi, d. 112, FKU Arkhangelskaya VK UFSIN Rossii po Arkhangelskoi oblasti Arkhangelsk 163530 Russian Federation
You can also send letters to Yegor via the online service ZT and the volunteer-run project RosUznik.
Mistakes to Avoid
Anna, Nikita Ugarov’s mother: I was shocked when Nikita was detained. You see, when I’d gone to bed, the kids were home and I didn’t even suspect they had done something. I asked the police officers right then and there what would happen to the kids, and they replied that they would get off scot-free since they were minors. This reassured me and so I didn’t bother to do anything, but now I very much regret that I didn’t immediately retain counsel. I was completely stunned, at the arraignment, when they read out the statements by Bogdan and Denis (Ugarov’s “accomplices” in the case — Ed.), in which they requested that Nikita be remanded in custody since they feared for their lives because they were cooperating with the investigation. It was quite hard and hurtful that Nikita was betrayed by people he considered friends. The boys had been pressured by their mothers into signing the statements, and persuaded by the investigators, who had told them that due to their age no one would been punished. They had signed confessions, on which the investigators and FSB officers had worked very hard, running back and forth between interrogation rooms and adjusting the boys’ statements so that they coincided down to the last gramme when one of the boys didn’t know or remember a particular detail. Since Nikita refused to confess, he was made the main villain, and the confessions were the basis of the charges against him. Later, though, the mothers understood the mess they had made. They hired good lawyers and we all started sticking to the same position.
Ivan Astashin: It happens that a family turns down the services of civil rights lawyers, entrusting themselves instead to the court-appointed attorney and the lead case investigator, and naturally this harms the defendant. The case of Ilya Podkamenny is a perfect illustration of this. His mother decided that telling everything straight was the best thing to do. She told the authorities that her son had been storing petrol and was also planning to torch a military recruiting office. Ilya was ultimately charged with two more crimes, including planning to torch the military recruiting office. I don’t know whether Ilya also said anything about this or not, but it’s a fact that you don’t have to say anything, especially since Article 51 of the Constitution gives you the right to refuse to testify not only against yourself but also against your close relatives. You can say nothing at all. As we know, any testimony can be used against you and your relatives.
Or there’s the case of Alexei Rozhkov, who was released on his own recognizance in 2022 and could have left Russia. His relatives were opposed to this and tried to talk him out of it. He ultimately left the country but only a few months later. After he left he had to wait several months in Kyrgyzstan for an entry visa to Europe. Whilst he was waiting he was abducted by the security forces and taken back to Russia. It is hard to talk about what “might have been,” but it is possible that, had he left Russia earlier, he would have been able to leave for Europe more quickly and would not have wound up back in a Russian remand prison. But now he’s facing over twenty years in prison.
In late July 2024, 39-year-old pianist Pavel Kushnir died in a Birobidzhan pretrial detention center. His musician friends and musicologists have no doubt he was a genius. Many of them had been unaware of his arrest in May 2024 on charges of “publicly calling for terrorist activities.” The grounds for his arrest were his anti-war videos, although his YouTube channel had only five subscribers at the time.
According to close friends, Kushnir himself had wanted to go “far from the capitals,” so he chose Birobidzhan hoping that he would not be forced to perform WWII Victory Day concerts amidst the ongoing war against Ukraine. As soon as the war started, Kushnir wrote social media posts opposing it, posted antiwar leaflets, and staged hunger strikes in protest. Before he was taken to the detention center, he had gone on at least two protest hunger strikes, one of which lasted for over one hundred days.
“He was almost a professional faster, so I don’t think he could have died in the pretrial detention center solely due to that,” his close friend Olga Shkrygunova told Okno.
“We Live in a Fascist Society”
“I am a musician, a pianist, and I graduated from the Moscow Conservatory, where I studied under Victor Merzhanov. I worked as a soloist at the Kursk Regional Philharmonic for seven years, and as a soloist at the Kurgan Philharmonic for three years. I have also tried my hand as a writer, and published an anti-war novel called ‘Russian Mash-Up’” was how Kushnir introduced himself in one of the interviews his friend Olga quoted to Okno.
Kushnir was born in Tambov, where his closest relatives still live. He studied at the music school and the Rachmaninoff Music College in Tambov. After graduating from the Moscow Conservatory, he worked in the Kursk and, later, the Kurgan philharmonic orchestras. In 2023, Kushnir was appointed soloist to the Birobidzhan Regional Philharmonic, and he was arrested in Birobidzhan in May 2024.
The person closest to him, his father Mikhail Borisovich Kushnir, a music school teacher in Tambov and a promoter of musical cognition, died several years before the Russia-Ukraine war started. Many of his friends note that had Kushnir senior lived to see this day, he definitely would not have survived his son’s death.
“They had a very close relationship. Mikhail Borisovich had great faith in him and was proud of him. They laughed a lot together, and he was very supportive of him,” Olga recalls. “The loss of his father was hard for [Pavel].”
Kushnir’s friends invariably call him super-talented, and even more often they call him a brilliant pianist.
“Pasha was just an incredible person. Ever since he was a child, everyone has talked about his incredible ear for music. For me, he was always a genius, both as a person and as a musician. A genius is an idealist who brooks no compromise, who battles on behalf of love, creativity, and freedom. His inexhaustible imagination knew no bounds. He once studied the language of Avatar and wrote a poem in it. He loved the cinema and knew it well, and he read a lot. He loved Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. He wrote an anti-war novel, Russian Mash-Up: it is an original dystopia with references to Russian literature, and the main idea is to denounce the state dictatorship. Pavel was able to send me the manuscript of the new novel by mail. I hope that we friends of his can pool our efforts and publish it soon,” says Olga, who left Russia for Germany in 2012.
It was then, twelve years ago, that Kushnir last visited Shkrygunova in Moscow. In May 2012, he went to Bolotnaya Square to take part in the large-scale protests that were sparked by the fraudulent elections to the State Duma.
Kushnir’s description of his anti-war leafletting in Kurgan.
“He still believed back then that things could be fixed,” Olga says, sighing. “I know that Pavel protested the war in 2018 by going to pickets against the annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbas. When in May 2018 he went to Pushkin Square [in Moscow] holding a placard that said ‘Down with war, freedom for Russia,’ his homemade sign was torn apart [by police]. After the military invasion, he bitterly observed that nowadays [the police] would tear him apart at such a picket. So, he replaced pickets with leaflets, and leaflets with hunger strikes. They were his form of protest against fascism. He didn’t argue that we should give up picketing, but he understood that it required great courage, ‘because we live in a fascist society,'” Olga quotes her friend as saying.
As Kushnir admitted in his letters to friends, “the turning point and epiphany” for him had been Bucha.
“I think that the Bucha massacre is a disgrace to our motherland. Fascism is the death of our motherland. Putin is a fascist. Our motherland sacrificed millions of the best lives so that fascism would not exist, and we will not accept it. The criminal, despicable war which Putin’s fascism has been waging in our name is a challenge to my conscience, to all my personal hopes, to all the best things in me. I am sure I am not alone. For many people of my generation, accepting the war, ignoring the war, is unthinkable. Two nations are dying in this war. It must be stopped as soon as possible,” Olga quoted him as saying.
In 2022, Kushnir produced anti-war leaflets and posted them around Kurgan.
“At night, he put up large A4-sized leaflets, and during the day he put up small ones with peace symbols and biblical quotes in public places,” says Olga.
“Hunger Striking Is a Peaceful Form of Protest”
On 9 May 2023, Kushnir declared his first hunger strike, which was to last twenty days.
By his own admission, Kushnir did not expect a positive response from the authorities, but he hoped that other people would embrace his peaceful form of protest.
“I expect people to think hard about their attitude to the war, to end their silence. I expect a miracle,” he wrote.
According to his friends, Kushnir easily tolerated hunger and scheduled his next hunger strike, which was to last one hundred days, in the winter and spring of 2024.
“He went on and off [hunger strikes] absolutely systematically,” says Olga. “In March, when he had finished, he called us to say that everything was fine, that he felt good. He had been drinking water, apple juice, and coffee. As an illustration of his hunger strike, he suggested we imagine a glass of apple juice. So I don’t think he could have died from the hunger strike alone. I don’t believe it. I can’t rule out that they could have beaten him up in the detention center or in some other way they exacerbated his condition.”
In late May 2024, Kushnir was detained by the FSB. A criminal case was launched against him on charges of “publicly calling for terrorist activities” (per Article 205.2 of the Russian Criminal Code). The community Vkontakte page Atypical Birobidzhan was the first to report Kushnir’s arrest, claiming that four videos posted on Kushnir’s YouTube channel had served as grounds for the charges. It also reported that Kushnir was allegedly found in possession of a “homemade FBI agent’s ID.”
The short anti-war video which Pavel Kushnir posted on his “Foreign Agent Mulder” YouTube channel on 5 January 2024
“Pavel had been running the channel ‘Foreign Agent Mulder’ since 2011, and there are only four videos posted there. All of them criticized the war and the policies of the current Russian government. Before Pavel’s death, the channel had exactly five subscribers,” says one of Kushnir’s friends. “Now there are [507] subscribers.”
Many of his friends first learned of Kushnir’s death in late July and only then that he had been behind bars when he died.
“Unfortunately, Pavel’s arrest has come to light only now. I, for example, do a monitoring of court proceedings in the regions quite often, but I missed the news of Pavel’s hearing… I think this was a case when publicity could have saved the prisoner. I learned about Pavel’s death from Arshak Makichan, with whom I was involved in environmental activism; Arshak later left Russia, but he had known Pavel at the conservatory. I think that the intervention of such well-known activists in the case could have prevented Pavel from taking such a desperate step,” says Marina, an activist who corresponds with political prisoners. “Pavel’s cellmates testify that his death resulted from a dry hunger strike, and there is no reason not to trust them. As I understand it, the family is afraid of publicity, as the Moloch of the political crackdowns may strike them as well, so we don’t really know anything yet. But if you watch Pavel’s interviews and listen to his statements, I think it is clear that he was a man of genius, a talented, brilliant, and sensitive man. Unfortunately, such people do not have the ability to stand up to brute, base force, and the only protest that was available in the pretrial detention center was a hunger strike, apparently. Many anti-war activists—Ivan Kudryashov, Maria Ponomarenko, and dozens of others—have gone on hunger strike. When there is no communication with the outside world, no media contacts, alas, this is all that is left to a person. It’s scary to imagine what Pavel went through. The country has yet to realize who we have lost.”
Anna Karetnikova, a human rights activist who for many years aided prisoners as a member of the Moscow Public Monitoring Commission and, later, as a lead analyst in the Federal Penitentiary Service’s Moscow office, argues that the official cause of Kushnir’s death will not be listed as hunger strike, even if that was the cause. According to her, concealment of the real cause of death is a common practice in the Russian penitentiary system, so there are no statistics for hunger strikes in pretrial detention centers and penal colonies.
Pavel Kushnir’s messenger service announcement of a hunger strike, dated 9 May 2023 (celebrated in Russia as WWII Victory Day): “I’m going on a hunger strike. I demand the liquidation of the fascist regime, cessation of the war in Ukraine, and release of all political prisoners.”
“Pavel Kushnir’s death in the Birobidzhan pretrial detention center has been attributed to his hunger strike, a dry hunger strike in which the detainee refuses not only food, but also water. In my experience, cases of hunger strikes in places of detention are frequent and fall into two main categories: those triggered by criminal cases, and those protesting conditions of detention. They can be both for serious reasons, such as gross violations of human rights, and for trifling reasons, such as an investigating officer refusing to bring an inmates cigarettes. They can also be individual and collective. But dry hunger strikes are quite rare, because most detainees realize that it can eirquickly lead to th death,” says Karetnikova. “The law provides for a detainee’s refusal to eat, but it also stipulates what actions wardens should take in such cases. After receiving a written application for a hunger strike, the wardens at a pretrial detention center must notify the person in charge of the criminal case, as well as the supervising prosecutor. In addition, the hunger striker is entitled to a daily checkup by a doctor, during which their temperature, blood pressure, and weight are measured and recorded, and, if possible, to be placed in a separate cell from which all food has been removed. Every day, they will be brought food, which is left on a table, or on the feeder tray if it is open. Also a mentor will come and try to persuade them to give up this waste of time. Information about hunger strikers in each institution is entered daily into the penitentiary service’s overall statistical summary.”
“Forced feeding of detainees is provided for by law. Most often, in agreement with the hunger striker, they are given glucose drips, possibly with something else added to the mix to support them. If their lives are threatened, they can be force fed through a tube.”
“I don’t think hunger strike was listed as the cause of Kushnir’s death, however. I think that only his relatives and friends and cellmates knew that he was on a hunger strike. Even after the publicity, for example, a medic could be punished if he forgot to perform certain formalities— for example, doing a physical examination and taking the inmate’s temperature. He could be reprimanded and, at worst, dismissed. In a similar case, the head doctor of the hospital at the Matrosskaya Tishina prison in Moscow was fired. Of course, no one explained the reasons for his dismissal, and a different cause of death was listed . But the [inmate] had been quite emaciated, and it was feared that the truth could come out. If it had come out, [the doctor] could have been jailed for negligence, for example, or endangerment.
“Force feeding is not practiced as a matter of principle in Russia, because, for example, in order to force feed Alexander Shestun[the ex-head of the Moscow Region’s Serpukhov District (2003–2018) and chair of its Council of Deputies, Shestun was sentenced to fifteen years in a penal colony on charges of fraud and money laundering, but Memorial listed him as a political prisoner] they contacted headquarters a hundred times, since they could not understand what to do and how to do it. But they didn’t get any reasonable instructions from headquarters either, except ‘do something or we’ll punish you,'” Karetnikova says.
According to Karetnikov, the hunger striker loses weight, their vitals deteriorate, and sometimes they are unable to walk.
“There are stomach pains, different organs can fail, and in the long term, people can become confused and sometimes go crazy. Some people engage in self-harm. This is not the case with dry hunger strikers: I usually was able to convince them to give up, in exchange for my promises to do something to help, promises which I tried to keep,” says Karetnikova. “Some detainees starved for months. The longest well-known hunger strikers included Nadiya Savchenko, Alexander Shestun (who was subjected to force feeding), Sergei Krivov, and many other people who were released, but whom I don’t want to identify here. One of the hunger strikers was a stoma patient. One can live without food for about two months, on average. However, many hunger strikers took week-long breaks that enabled them to go without food for months at a time, and they were also put on IVs while on hunger strike. If you give up water too, you can die within a week.”
“He Played for God”
After Kushnir’s death, it was revealed that that he had long foreseen his own arrest, as evidenced in correspondence with his friends.
“He often wrote ‘I haven’t been jailed yet,’ and he sent me interviews where he openly spoke of the current system in Russia as fascist. I tried to persuade him, especially when he was looking for a new place to work a year ago, to come to Germany. I said we would take him in and he would find a job. He agreed but then immediately refused to write a bio, which is what you have to do if you want to play concerts. Those are laws of the music market, what can you do. But he was uncompromising: ‘I am a musician, my music speaks for me,'” Olga recalls. “Then there was the hope that he would be hired in a remote city, as he had decided to stay in Russia. Basically, he strove to be far from the capitals, so that the political pressure would be minimal. For example, he did not want to be forced to perform those selfsame Victory Day concerts.”
“Maybe I’ll be able to get a job in Russia. Anyway, I had an audition for the Philharmonic, and it seems to have gone well. Anyway, they treated me well, even though I have a ‘no war’ status on my Facebook page… or maybe they just didn’t notice it,” Pavel wrote to Olga at the start of his tenure with the Birobidzhan Philharmonic. “I traveled across the entire country on the Moscow-Vladivostok train, and I looked out the window at the nature, at the people in the parlor car. We have a tragic country, and miserable, predatory people, but so much beauty. We can’t give it to the fascists. Before the audition I ate, so my hunger strike demanding an end to the war was a waste of time. (I had held out for more than twenty days after all.) Probably, a person is free in everything except their own profession. It holds you and doesn’t let you sink, but it also doesn’t let you soar. It’s an anchor of normality.
A letter from Pavel Kushnir to a friend
Kushnir often gave interviews, and the All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company even did a story about him. In one of his conversations with journalists, the pianist said that he planned to stay in Birobidzhan: “I had an audition [with another orchestra] but I canceled it. I decided to take a risk to stay and work here for twelve years. If I am not imprisoned, drafted into the army, or fired, I hope I will be with you for the next twelve years.”
“He just wanted to play. Without ingratiating himself to anyone, without making connections, without bending to anyone. Apparently, the ‘plain old’ cities of Russia, unlike Moscow, seemed to him better suited for this. He spoke fondly of Birobidzhan, sent me a map [of the city], and told me that he goes on walks there a lot,” Olga says. “I think he could have been happy there. He could have been happy in any place where you could just say what you think and do what you think. He had a lot of faith in God. He played for God. Maybe now he’s found that place.”
Pavel Kushnir’s concert recordings, even the most amateurish ones, garnered thousands of views, unlike his YouTube channel.
“Pasha Kushnir was in our class,” writes his Moscow Conservatory classmate Julia Wertman.
“We became friends somewhere in the middle of third year, I don’t remember exactly when,” she continues. “We lived in the dormitory, and there was a time when he would often visit my roommate and me for a glass of tea.
“Pasha would recite Brodsky from memory for hours, for days on end. Pasha had a shabby beige overcoat with a bulging pocket. Under the coat he was always dressed in black, and a half-liter bottle of vodka often stuck out of his pocket. (In most cases, it was just there for image. Pasha cultivated the image of a dissident, as if he were Venedikt Yerofeev.)
“Pasha could avoid sleeping, eating, or living, and yet still play absolutely stunningly. There’s an interview with him, linked to in the comments, in which he talks about some genius contemporaries who could prepare for a solo in half an hour under any conditions. As far as I remember, Pasha himself was like that.
“Once, at five in the morning, I went to the dorm kitchen to make breakfast. An incredible scene unfolded before my eyes. Kushnir, as clear-headed as piece of glass, stood at the open window and gazed at Malaya Gruzinskaya Street with a sad, detached look. Before him, a drunken German student with whom he had been living it up way past midnight was crawling on his knees. The German’s speech was so slurred that not even his accent was audible. He was literally sobbing a river of tears.
“‘Brother! Forgive me! Forgive me if you can, for….. Forgive me!’ [he said]. ‘Forgive my grandfather, forgive my great-grandfather, forgive me!!!’
“One Hanukkah, he brought my roommate and me a menorah and candles. I had very little idea at the time what to do with them. I only remember reading on the label: ‘The light of the Hanukkah candles reminds us of G-d’s constant presence in our lives.’
“That was when we nicknamed him ‘Hasid,’ a nickname that stuck.
“‘That’s good,’ Pasha said. ‘Yes, call me that. I think it suits me…’
“Then Hasid showed up at the prom. My favorite person and I were drinking champagne and eating leftover cake. While all the graduates were eating the cake, we danced a waltz somewhere that only we could hear. And G-d knows where Kushnir had been, but he too came have a last piece of cake.
“‘Guys! Be happy! Cheers, guys! [he said]. ‘The main thing now is not to fuck away your diploma!’
“We were only happy for a little while. Hasid went back home to his dad in Tambov, and we went to graduate school. That is, we didn’t fuck away our diplomas. On the contrary, we got PhDs. You basically know what happened after that.
“I tried several times to find the pianist Pavel Kushnir. I found show bills, all of them for concerts in provincial towns. Two years ago, I found out that he was in Birobidzhan. I thought, Well, he’s getting closer to his roots, so maybe he’ll come [to Israel] soon.
“But he didn’t come. Instead, he wound up on on an Israeli news feed, and from there, just now, he came to my attention.
“Was he a rebel? Was he openly calling for some kind of nightmare? I don’t think so.
“He always said what he wanted to say. He didn’t bite his tongue. He wasn’t swayed by stereotypes. He didn’t fit into any system. He lived his own life, thought his own thoughts, and searched his own search. He tried to get to the heart of the matter, like Pasternak. But in all other respects, he was probably more like Vysotsky.
“Hasid, I don’t know what your mother’s name was. Pavel, son of Mikhail, a great pianist, may your memory be blessed.
“And there will be Hanukkah, and there will be light.”
“We will defeat the ogres, and their descendants will ask our forgiveness again.”
Muscovite Ivan Astashin knows firsthand what human rights activism, Russian prisons, and terrorism and arson charges look like. As a young man, he was close to Eduard Limonov’s National Bolsheviks and was arrested as part of the high-profile Autonomous Combat Terrorist Organization (ABTO) case, in which a group of young men were charged with a series of arson and terrorist attacks.
At the turn of the 2000s and 2010s, this story was widely discussed in the media, sparking debates over whether the arson attacks were justified. Astashin was convicted of torching an FSB district office in 2012 and spent over nine years behind bars.
Upon his release, Astashin worked for Andrei Babushkin’s Committee for Civil Rights and was involved in defending the rights of prison inmates. In February 2022, Astashin joined the protests against the invasion of Ukraine and was soon forced to leave Russia.
Astashin is now involved in the campaign Solidarity Zone, which aids Russians who have been arrested for radical anti-war protests.
How did the “Solidarity Zone” come into being?
When full-scale war broke out, large protests took place in many Russian cities, and criminal charges were filed against protesters, both charges of “violence against police officers,” which have been routine at protest rallies (police officers themselves use violence, but they don’t pay for it), and charges that were newish for Russia.
There was Anastasia Levashova, who threw a Molotov cocktail at police officers. There was the case against Anton Zhuchkov and Vladimir Sergeyev: they were detained near Pushkin Square in Moscow on 6 March 2022 on their way to an anti-war rally. A Molotov cocktail was found in Sergeyev’s backpack. The police did not know what they guys were planning, so they were able to accomplish part of what they’d planned. Zhuchkov and Sergeyev had planned to commit suicide publicly at an anti-war rally as a sign of protest—they were so desperate. As they were being detained, they took lethal doses of methadone. The police failed to notice this. They put them in a paddy wagon and beat them up there, but on the way to the station the police realized that their detainees were quite sick and took them to hospital. They were saved in the intensive care unit at the Sklifosovsky Institute.
Zhuchkov and Sergeyev were sent from the intensive care unit to a pretrial detention center after being charged with “attempted disorderly conduct.” According to police investigators, the men had been planning to set fire to empty paddy wagons. When detained, Sergeyev said that they “wanted to torch a couple of paddy wagons,” emphasizing that it was empty vehicles they had intended to target. At first, we wanted to find out the address where we could write to Zhuchkov and Sergeyev at the pretrial detention center, so we asked OVD Info, but we also learned that OVD Info would not defend them, as theirs was not a peaceful protest.
We realized that none of the existing human rights organizations was willing to take on such cases. We decided to take on Zhuchkov and Sergeyev’s case: we published the address to which people could send them letters and found them a lawyer. A little later, the authorities started charging people with arson attacks on military recruitment centers, and so we decided that we should also aid such people. By September 2022, we had launched Solidarity Zone’s social media accounts and expanded our work.
Do I understand correctly that the attitude of OVD Info, Memorial, and other human rights organizations to people engaging in “non-peaceful” anti-war protests has changed? Have their motives become clearer to these human rights organizations?
Yes, their attitude has changed. As I see it, it changed after the military mobilization, when people began setting fire to military recruitment offices en masse in protest. Now it is easier to get announcements of fundraisers for such detainees reposted. But the position of human rights organizations has remained the same.
We had a public discussion with Sergei Davidis, head of Memorial’s Support for Political Prisoners project. He said these people should certainly be supported, that in most cases they have been wrongfully charged with violating Article 205 of the Russian Criminal Code (“terrorism”), but that whereas the criminal code articles on “discrediting” the army and “disseminating fake news” about the army clearly contradict Russian law and international conventions, and people charged with violating these laws can be designated political prisoners without a detailed examination of their cases, then with regard to people who attempt to torch military recruitment centers, Memorial examines the cases in detail and is guided by international criteria. They have designated twenty such people political prisoners, but the number of these cases is many times greater.
All human rights organizations have their own focus. OVD Info deals with cases related to peaceful protest; First Department, with high treason cases; and the Net Freedoms Project, with freedom of expression cases. Our cases do not fit these criteria. Before we started, there was no organization which was willing to support such people.
Is your campaign volunteer-driven? How many people are you assisting now? How do you define the people you support?
We support people who have been arrested for anti-war protests, for radical anti-war actions, although nowadays virtually all anti-war protests are radical. We handle cases where people actually set fire to a military recruitment center or a railroad signal relay box, and cases where they were merely planning to do such things.
Or they weren’t even planning to do such things, but the security services have fabricated a case against them, alleging that they were planning to torch a military recruitment center, as happened to Ivan Kudryashov.
We are currently supporting nineteen political prisoners. In almost all cases we pay their defense lawyers and organize fundraisers to this end, and in many cases we are also involved in arranging for parcels and care packages to be sent to the prisoners and replenishing their personal commissary accounts at their detention facilities. We talk publicly about their cases and similar criminal cases. We did a count in September 2023, and at that time there were around three hundred people in Russia facing criminal charges over radical anti-war protests. There was no further info on half of these people: we could not find out whether they were under arrest or wanted by the police.
We try to cover such cases as much as we can because we are a volunteer organization: we don’t get paid or have permanent funding, although we would certainly like to have such things. We raise money for political prisoners through cryptocurrency and PayPal donations. We also do personal ruble-denominated fundraisers to pay lawyers through the platform Zaodno (“In Cahoots”).
In the first quarter of 2024, we spent 900 thousand rubles (approx. 9,100 euros) paying for care packages and one-off visits by defense lawyers. When lawyers defend our prisoners in court, we organize personal fundraisers. Sometimes we hold events in Europe to raise money, and sometimes other campaigns hold events to raise money for us.
Let’s imagine that a programmer in Tver has been arrested for attempting to set fire to a military recruitment center. His relatives are scared: they are unlikely to want to do business with a volunteer campaign based in Europe. How do you reach out to those accused of anti-war protest?
Actually, we are increasingly being approached by relatives of arrestees as we are becoming famous. We are recommended in various chat rooms dealing with support for political prisoners. Often people contact OVD Info, and they suggest contacting us.
Aftermath of an arson attack on a military recruitment center in Kemerovo
We also search for information on detainees ourselves. If you have at least a first name and a surname, you can find the rest of the information in the public domain. But sometimes you cannot find out which thirty-year-old native of Voronezh has been detained. There are such case, unfortunately. Information can be obtained when a person is added to the list of “terrorists and extremists” via court filing. When a person is in the database, the locale of the pretrial detention center where they are held is identified as well. In many cities there is only one pretrial detention center, so we can dispatch a lawyer there to offer assistance to the arrestee and get their take on the case.
Some argue that publicity is not always beneficial to defendants in political criminal cases given the current conditions. Does Solidarity Zone not take this approach?
Our opinion is that publicity is beneficial in most cases. Despite everything, the security services still don’t like their lawlessness to become public. This still entails inspections, which, although they are formal procedures, are still unpleasant for them.
Publicity is a defense against torture and coercion. Also, you cannot raise money to pay a lawyer if there is no publicity. Without publicity, a person will not receive letters from supporters and well-wishers, but letters are very important. Publicity has practically no effect on the sentence nowadays, neither positively nor negatively.
So the lawyer is the prisoner’s link with the outside world? If a person ends up in this situation, they will still get a brutal sentence of ten, fifteen or twenty years or more, won’t they?
The lawyer is the only person who can visit someone in pretrial detention centers and penal colonies without limits on the number and length of visits. During the investigation phase of a case, relatives usually do not have visitation rights, especially if the individual has not pleaded guilty. So the support of a lawyer is very important.
As time goes on, this is less and less the case, but what the lawyer does can still affect the sentence. If a person has a court-appointed defense lawyer, they often tell them to agree to every deal offered by the prosecution and to sign every paper they ask them to sign, so the sentence will be shorter. Ultimately, however, the investigators and prosecutors add new charges, and the sentence is huge. But if there is a lawyer who really defends their client, they at least make sure that no new charges are filed.
A lawyer can go after the gross violations on the part of the state. Take Ivan Kudryashov: there was no evidence in his case, and so he should have been acquitted. But there are no acquittals in Russia, so he was sentenced to six years for “planning a terrorist act.” This is a short sentence by today’s standards, but his lawyer got it reduced on appeal to four years and ten months.
Although Ilya Baburin was just sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for violating six articles of the Criminal Code. For one incident—planning to torch a military recruitment center—he was charged with violating four different articles, for one and the same thing! And the lawyer could do nothing.
Ilya Baburin in court
There are news stories of phone scammers conning people into torching military enlistment office, of people being offered money on Telegram to torch railway signal relay boxes. Do you handle these cases?
We have been approached about such cases. Those people shouldn’t be in jail, of course. It is doubly cynical that the pensioners who were conned have also been charged with terrorism, although in terrorism cases what matters most is the person’s intent. We have limited resources, however, so we only assist people who take an anti-war stance, which is an important criterion for us.
You also have the criterion that the defendant not testify against anyone else. Whether they pleaded guilty or not doesn’t matter.
What matters is that they didn’t willingly testify against others. Anything can happen under torture.
The number of people who go down the road of torching military recruitment centers and railway relay boxes has not been decreasing, has it? Not all those who oppose the war and Putin have left the country or gone to jail, have they?
On the contrary. Whereas previously we tried to write about all arrests on such charges, we now realize that our small team cannot cover all the arrests because they occur almost daily. Often little is known about the detainees, but the news reports say that the person was on a mission for the Free Russia Legion, meaning that the person has an anti-war stance.
When a person engages in such actions, they seemingly first of all undergo an existential crisis because they live in a quasi-fascist empire that has also attacked its neighbors. Does this person want to do something even though they realize that their life may be in danger?
Yeah, that’s right. In the cases that are well known, the defendants say they wanted to do something, to take radical action by way of protesting.
In 2022, Navalny supporters were often detained for such actions, such as Igor Paskar, who threw a Molotov cocktail at an FSB building, or Vladimir Zolotarev, who set fire to a Russian National Guard building in Komsomolsk-on-Amur. People used to go to protest rallies, but then there were no more protest rallies. Another motive we can observe among such people (Zolotarev and the anarchist Alexei Rozhkov, who set fire to a military recruitment center in March 2022, spoke of it) is that they couldn’t tear themselves away from the news about Ukraine. At some point it was impossible for them to just read all of it: they had to do something as well.
When the military mobilization began, people realized that all of this was not happening somewhere far away, but could affect them. Many people realized that they would go to jail, but they went to commit arson because they thought it was better to go to jail than to go fight a criminal war. Roman Nasryev and Alexei Nuriyev were sentenced to nineteen years each for attempting to set fire to a military registration office in the Chelyabinsk Region. This phrase in Nasryev’s correspondence jumps out: “It’s time to start—or we’ll die as slaves.”
There are now people who are primed for a long-term confrontation with the military machine, for guerrilla actions, and for greater degrees of security. And if you look at the reports of sabotage, not every one leads to the capture of the perpetrators.
It is clear what could have prompted radical action in February 2022. In the autumn of 2022, it was the mobilization. But how can it be that someone tolerated the war for a long time and decides to act only now? Or are these just “guerrillas” who have avoided capture for a long time?
That is a good question, to which I have no answer. We know generally about those detained for radical protests in 2022, but there is still little data even for 2023. We can assume that some people went abroad in 2022, but had to return to Russia because they could not settle down here. Some people may not have resisted in 2022 because they hoped that everything would end quickly, but now they see that nothing ends by itself.
The case of Sergei Okrushko can be cited as an example. He is Ukrainian but has a Russian passport. In 2022, he went to Moldova, whence he wanted to enter Ukraine and work on humanitarian projects. But he was not allowed to enter Ukraine because of his Russian passport. He was forced to return to Russia. He got a job at an oil refinery (as an electrician) and set off an explosion there.
Are you also a wanted man in Russia? What are the charges?
The authorities have not yet responded to inquiries about what the criminal charges are, although my lawyer submitted a request over a month ago.
After this interview was recorded, Moscow’s Cheremushkinsky District Court published information that it had been petitioned to arrest Ivan Astashin in absentia on charges of “condoning terrorism.” Other details of the case are still unknown.
