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.

“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.”

“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 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.

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.”

[…]

Source: “‘Life is something which will never happen under fascism’: the pianist Pavel Kushnir, arrested for anti-war social media posts, has perished in a pretrial detention center in Birobidzhan,” Okno, 4 August 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader. Thanks to Comrade Koganzon for the heads-up.