Asylum Seekers

Kazakh authorities have granted Russia’s request to extradite activist Yulia Yemelyanova, a former employee of the late Alexei Navalny’s Petersburg office. According to the Russian opposition-in-exile’s Anti-War Committee, Kazakhstan violated its own protocols in making the decision to extradite Yemelyanova, as the Russian activist’s application for asylum is still under review in the country.

This past October, Kazakhstan’s Prosecutor General’s Office had guaranteed that extradition requests would not be considered until all administrative procedures related to obtaining asylum were completed. Yemelyanova’s defense intends to appeal the extradition decision to the country’s Supreme Court.

Yemelyanova was detained on Aug. 31, 2025, at Almaty airport while in transit to a third country. She has been held in pretrial detention ever since. In Russia, she is being prosecuted for theft (Part 2, Article 158 of the Criminal Code) in connection with a 2021 incident in which she allegedly stole a mobile phone from a taxi driver. Yemelyanova’s defense calls the case fabricated. It was sent to court in July 2022, by which time the activist had already left Russia.

Yemelyanova is the fourth Russian asylum seeker since late January to be handed a deportation decision from Kazakh officials. The others are Chechen Mansur Movlaev, an open critic of Ramzan Kadyrov; Crimean resident Oleksandr Kachkurkin, who is facing treason charges in Russia; and Yevgeny Korobov, an officer who deserted from the Russian army.

Source: “Kazakhstan moves to extradite former employee of Navalny’s St. Petersburg office to Russia,” The Insider, 11 February 2026

Dmytro Kulyk with his wife Oksana and daughter Elina. Source: Daily Beast

A Ukrainian dad escaped Vladimir Putin’s drone and missile attacks back home only to be grabbed by a band of ICE stooges in a Walmart parking lot in Minneapolis.

“I hoped I would find peace in America. I’ve done everything the government required, I don’t understand why I am behind bars,” Dmytro Kulyk told the Daily Beast from the Kandiyohi County Jail in Willmar, Minnesota.

The 39-year-old father was getting a pickup order at a Walmart in Maple Grove when he found himself surrounded by immigration agents last month. He’d been working as a delivery driver to make ends meet, while also supporting his family by doing roofing work.

Kulyk legally entered the U.S. in late 2023 along with his wife, 38, and daughter, who’s now 5. The family was sponsored by U.S. citizens as part of the Uniting 4 Ukraine program, a humanitarian program set up in April 2022 to allow Ukrainians fleeing Russia’s war to live and work in the U.S. on “parole.”

Once the initial two-year parole period expires, entrants can file for re-parole to remain in the country longer. That’s exactly what Kulyk says he did. His wife and daughter’s applications were approved. But his remained pending.

He said he was putting groceries in his car on Jan. 1 when he was approached by three ICE agents.

“I explained to the ICE officers that the war was killing people, that my wife had a disability, that it was violence, terrorism which we had escaped from but one of them began to laugh,” Kulyk told The Daily Beast. “I asked why he was laughing and I was told that he was pro-Russian, wanted Russia to win the war.”

DHS and ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

He can’t understand why he’s been treated like a criminal. He did everything by the book, he says–paying taxes and filing his immigration paperwork on time, working multiple jobs to take care of his family. He had no criminal record to speak of.

His immigration attorney, Julia Bikbova, suggested his re-parole application may have intentionally been stalled to provide immigration authorities with a pretext to deport him.

“Our government, our Homeland Security, promised Ukrainians to protect them during the war. There are approximately 280,000 Ukrainians on U4U, Uniting for Ukraine program in the United States, including the Kulyk family,” she told the Daily Beast.

“My client did everything the government required him to do: on June 5 he applied for the re-parole and his wife paid $2,040 of fees for her and child’s granted applications. His wife and daughter have recently received their re-paroles but he has not, his application is pending.

“ICE detained him as ‘illegal’ and began deportation proceedings: This is a sick way of forcing a man with a clean criminal record to become unlawful in the U.S. by delaying the review of his application, which the very same authority had requested to file.”

Kulyk is now terrified he’ll be sent to the frontlines to fight Vladimir Putin’s troops if he is deported back home. He and his family endured relentless Russian attacks before finally deciding to flee their home in the Odesa region in 2023. When they saw ruins on their own street in Chornomorsk, they called their friends in Texas and asked for help, leading to their enrollment in the U4U program thanks to having U.S. citizens as sponsors.

Kulyk now can’t stop worrying about his wife, Oksana, and daughter, Elina.

“I am worried they can drag my wife and kid out of our home,” he told The Daily Beast, adding that he wanted to appeal directly to American authorities to make them understand he’d done nothing wrong.

“Please hear me: I came to America to escape the war, to pray in church and work hard. But now my heartbroken and sick wife has lost over 10 pounds since ICE arrested me on January 1. She’s been panicking, and my little daughter has been crying without me every night – this is unjust,” he said.

Oksana says she’s been too “terrified and lost” to leave home while her husband is locked up, afraid that immigration agents might return for the rest of the family.

“I am too scared to drive my 5-year-old daughter to school in my husband’s car. I’m terrified ICE will detain me and our daughter will end up alone,” she told The Daily Beast. “This is just as scary as the war in Ukraine, except now we don’t have Dmytro with us. Our daughter Elina cries herself to sleep with her cat plushie. She says the toy is daddy.”

Most Ukrainian refugees are women and children but some men have also left the country for various reasons. Kulyk was granted a permit to leave in order to care for a family member with a medical condition.

But Kulyk is not the only Ukrainian refugee to be swept up in the Trump administration’s controversial immigration crackdown.

Nearly 1,000 miles away, in Philadelphia, Zhanna was poring over messages in a group chat of 349 other refugees called “Ukrainians in Detention.” She joined the group last month, when her friends Andrii and Yaroslav ended up in detention. Although Bartosh has legal Temporary Protected Status, she stopped going to the office and now works from home.

“ICE rounds up men who buy tools or work in construction, so every day I call my husband, a construction worker, to check if he is OK. Even when the war started in Ukraine and we had to escape abroad, the same morning I wasn’t as stressed as I am now,” she told the Daily Beast. “In our chat I read that all arrestees are men, that at least five of them have signed up for self-deportation… but where is there to go now? Europe is also deporting Ukrainians. Our TPS is good until October but we want to understand, are we really legal in the United States, or is it time to pack up our suitcases again?”

Immigration attorneys count about 300 cases of detained Ukrainians across the United States and up to 150 refugees deported to Ukraine, Bikbova said.

“Most of the arrested Ukrainians are men, the majority of them have a clean criminal record but as we see in Kulyk’s case, they are equated to people who jumped the border, broke the law,” attorney Bikbova told the Daily Beast. “Behind every deported man, there are crying women and children, left without support. For some mysterious reason, we see male Ukrainian refugees being arrested and put on airplanes. If he gets deported, my client Kulyk will most certainly go to the front.”

Trump’s administration has also been deporting Russian asylum seekers. According to a report by Current Times, more than 50,000 Russians have fled the war and political repression to the U.S. since February 2022. Journalist Ilya Azar has been covering the deportations for Novaya Gazeta.

“They send out 40-60 people on each plane. There have been five airplanes,” Azar told the Daily Beast on Tuesday. The deportation planes transit to Russia through Egypt, and Russian security services meet the deported citizens. Azar’s report noted that “all men received draft notices” upon their arrival in December.

Source: Anna Nemtsova, “Laughing ICE Goons Seize Dad Who Fled Ukraine War at Walmart,” Daily Beast, 12 February 2026. The emphasis, above, is mine. \\\\\TRR

German authorities last week denied asylum to 47-year-old engineer Georgy Avaliani, who deserted from the front line in 2022. His wife and two children were rejected alongside him.

“There is no reason to believe that, upon returning to the Russian Federation, they would face a high probability of persecution or serious harm,” wrote an official from the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF), despite Avaliani’s account of being tortured after fleeing the front.

Mediazona has reviewed BAMF decisions in Avaliani’s case and those of other deserters, discovering that officials are producing boilerplate documents that repeat one another almost word for word. In justifying the refusals, the German agency argues, for instance, that mobilisation in Russia was intended to “strengthen the armed forces” rather than repress dissent, and therefore cannot be considered political persecution. They further say that mobilisation has effectively ended because Vladimir Putin announced it—verbally.

When describing potential punishments for deserters, officials cite not the criminal code but an administrative article regarding failure to comply with military registration duties. They even specify that the maximum penalty is a fine of €302.

Most notably, in every decision examined, BAMF cites Mediazona’s own article from 2023, “Evading > refusing > fleeing. A year of mobilization in Russia through trials and verdicts”, as evidence that mobilised men face little more than a fine. That article noted that, at the time of publication, failing to respond to a summons did not yet carry a heavy penalty. While the situation has since changed—an eventuality the original article warned about—the original reference remains in the German files.

Relying on information from that article is also fundamentally flawed because BAMF applies it to people already wanted under serious criminal charges for desertion or abandoning their unit. In its rulings, the agency ignores the severity of these consequences, lumping deserters in with those who simply left Russia when mobilisation was first announced. This is exactly what happened to Georgy Avaliani.

A year in a refugee camp

Avaliani, an engineer, arrived in Germany with his wife, Oksana, and their two children on January 26, 2025. By then Georgy, who was drafted shortly after mobilisation began and later deserted, had been on a federal wanted list for over six months.

The family was granted asylum-seeker status without an initial investigation into the specifics of their escape. Like other applicants, they were placed in temporary housing: a small portacabin with two bunk beds at the former Tempelhof airport site. Their journey to Germany had been arduous. On January 18, Georgy, who had managed to leave Russia before his name appeared on the wanted list, met his wife and children in Bosnia. From there, they travelled to the Croatian border and requested asylum.

In Croatia, the asylum process is largely a formality; in practice, obtaining protection there is nearly impossible. Consequently, many migrants use it only as an entry point into the EU before heading to countries with functioning reception systems. The Avalianis did the same. After a preliminary registration in Croatia, they spent a week travelling to Berlin.

For nearly a year, the family was cramped in a camp with 2,000 other applicants. Finally, just before the start of 2026, they were moved to a hostel in western Berlin. But Georgy’s hopes of integration (he had been diligently learning German and hoped to return to engineering) were soon shuttered. On January 16, just two weeks after their move, BAMF rejected the entire family’s asylum claim.

Avaliani intends to appeal. If he fails, the family must leave Germany within 30 days or face deportation to Russia, where Georgy faces up to 10 years in prison for abandoning his unit during a period of mobilisation. Despite having clear evidence of persecution, the German authorities have ignored his claims.

The two escapes of Private Avaliani

Before the war, Georgy Avaliani was a well-paid engineer at the Moscow water utility, Mosvodokanal. He had no plans to leave Russia. Shortly before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he even enrolled in a seminary to pursue a religious education.

Georgy had never served in the army due to a heart condition. However, following the “partial mobilisation” announcement, he received a summons on October 6, 2022. At the time, his three children were minors; by law, as the father of a large family, he should have been exempt. The couple tried to contest the draft through the military enlistment office and the prosecutor’s office but failed. Georgy chose not to go into hiding, unwilling to abandon his family.

After a medical commission in November, he was sent to a training camp in the Moscow region and then to the occupied Svatove district of the Luhansk region. His unit was stationed in the village of Novoselivske, 20 km from the front line. After a few days, noticing the chaos within the unit, Avaliani decided to slip away, gambling that no one would notice his absence. He reached a nearby road and hitched a ride to the village of Troitske, a gathering point for mobilised men.

Part of a local hospital had been turned into a shelter for soldiers with nowhere else to go—some had lost their units, others were waiting to withdraw their pay, and some were recovering from wounds.

While staying there, Georgy met another mobilised soldier. They shared the same grim impression of the front and a desperate desire to return home. They found three others who felt the same and hired a taxi driver to take them to a spot where they could cross the border on foot.

After the driver dropped them off, the group split up. Along the way, Avaliani and his companion heard a helicopter. Georgy later told journalists and BAMF officials that the second group had been gunned down from the air. While there is no independent confirmation of this, Avaliani and the other man survived only to be detained in an abandoned village.

There is little doubt Georgy made this journey on foot; “Goodbye to Arms”, a project that assists deserters, thoroughly verified his route. Alexei Alshansky, a coordinator for the organisation, says the helicopter story is the only detail rights activists have been unable to confirm.

Following his capture, Avaliani was thrown into “a basement” for 10 days. He says he was beaten repeatedly and subjected to mock executions. Mediazona has previously reported on this location, known as the Zaitsevo Centre for the Detention of Servicemen, based on the testimony of another deserter, Sergei Savchenko. Volunteers from “Goodbye to Arms” identified the site in the occupied village of Rassypne by comparing testimonies with video footage.

From the basement, Georgy was sent to an assault unit. Two days later, an ammunition dump near their position exploded. Avaliani suffered a concussion and a heart attack. He was sent to a distribution point where he befriended the doctor issuing referrals. The medic sent him to a hospital inside Russia, hinting that he could just as easily head straight for Moscow instead of the ward.

Avaliani did exactly that. After reuniting with his family, he hid at a dacha in the Tula region. Occasionally, he ventured to Lyubertsy for medical treatment. As time passed he grew less cautious, but in mid-February 2024 military police arrested him outside his home.

He was sent to Kaliningrad in western Russia, the permanent base of his unit, to await his fate. When a commander learned of Georgy’s engineering background, he set him to work renovating his private dacha. Meanwhile, Georgy pushed for a formal medical commission. When it finally took place, the results were surprising: he was not only declared fit for service but his category was upgraded from “partially fit” to “fit with minor restrictions”.

In May, he was told to report for questioning regarding a criminal case. Georgy fled again. On the way to the commander’s dacha, he got a taxi and flew to St Petersburg. His wife met him there to hand over his passport. From there he flew to Belarus, then Uzbekistan, Georgia and finally Montenegro, where he was taken in by a Swedish artist for whom he helped build a swimming pool.

Oksana remained in Lyubertsy with the children. Weeks after her husband left, an investigator began calling her. Georgy was placed on a federal wanted list.

In September 2024, security forces raided the family home. They confiscated phones from Oksana and the children, returning them only two weeks later. The stress caused Oksana to suffer a nervous breakdown, leading to a month-long stay in a psychiatric clinic. The visits from military police continued; the last raid occurred on January 7, 2025. After that, Oksana finally agreed to leave Russia.

Georgy has spoken openly to the press about his escape. In Montenegro, he was interviewed by Current Time TV. The family crossed the German border accompanied by a journalist from Die Welt, which later published a detailed account. A report for the Franco-German channel Arte was also filmed by Russian journalist in exile Masha Borzunova.

The first six months in Germany were particularly precarious. Under EU law, the migration service could have deported the family back to Croatia, their first point of entry. To prevent this, Georgy sought help from the church.

The tradition of Kirchenasyl, or church asylum, began in 1983 after Cemal Kemal Altun, a 23-year-old Turkish activist, took his own life in a West Berlin court while facing extradition. His death moved church communities to unite to protect refugees from deportation. Every year, hundreds of people receive a reprieve through this practice. The Avalianis were among them.

“It is a semi-legal, more like a cultural phenomenon that works differently in different states,” explains Alshansky. “The church gives the applicant a document stating they are under their care, and the authorities leave them alone.”

Thanks to this intervention, BAMF could not reject the family simply because they entered via Croatia. They were forced to consider the case on its merits. They rejected it anyway.

BAMF’s motivation

During his personal hearing, Georgy Avaliani detailed his service and desertion. When asked what he feared if returned to Russia, he replied: “I fear for my life. Legally, I could be imprisoned for up to 20 years. But more likely, I will be killed before trial or in prison… I know for certain that if they find me, a subhuman death awaits me.”

His wife, Oksana, tried to explain the psychological toll the military police raids had taken on her and the children. The family provided lots of evidence: the mobilisation order, the wanted notice from the interior ministry’s website, a letter from a German humanitarian organisation, medical records and Georgy’s military ID.

In its rejection, the agency claimed the Avalianis were “apolitical people”, making it unclear why they believed the Russian state would view them as opponents. BAMF argued that if they were truly targeted, Georgy would never have been able to leave Russia so easily.

Having erroneously stated that Avaliani faced only an administrative fine, the official added that it was “not evident that in the applicants’ case, due to specific circumstances, a different [punishment] should apply”.

The document also asserted that officials found no evidence that mobilisation continued after Putin’s verbal announcement. Even if it were to resume, BAMF argued, it was not certain Avaliani would be called up again, given Russia’s 25 million reservists.

“Even taking into account that the applicant evaded mobilisation, it is not to be expected that… he would be subjected to the inhuman or degrading treatment required to grant asylum,” the decision stated.

The agency concluded the family could lead a dignified life in Russia. Despite the economic crisis, the official noted that people in Russia are still provided with food, social benefits and pensions. “It is not seen that… they would find themselves in a completely hopeless situation,” the ruling said. Their physical and mental health was also deemed insufficient to require treatment specifically in Germany.

A template for rejection

Alshansky attributes the BAMF decision to the wave of draft evaders who fled to Europe after 2022.

“A crowd of people rushed to claim asylum over mobilisation, some without even a summons,” he says. “I think they have exhausted the Germans to the point where, as soon as they see a Russian applicant and the word ‘mobilisation’, they just churn out this rejection.” Artyom Klyga, from the rights organisation Connection E. V., confirms that around 1,000 Russians have requested asylum in Germany due to mobilisation.

Alshansky points out that the rejection text clearly treats Avaliani as a mere draft dodger rather than a man who fled the front and is now a fugitive. He believes BAMF compiled the document from fragments of other cases without truly studying Georgy’s story. “I have compared this rejection with others. It is a template; paragraph after paragraph is identical. They just changed the personal details in a Word file,” Klyga agrees.

Mediazona compared several BAMF decisions regarding Russians who fled mobilisation. The similarities are striking. In the case of a young man who left after an attempt to serve him a summons, the agency also cited Putin’s words on the end of mobilisation. The description of the economic situation in Russia—including the detail that 15% of Russians live below the poverty line—is identical in both his and Avaliani’s files.

In another case involving a reservist who left on a tourist visa, the agency used the same argument: that mobilisation is about military strength, not political vengeance. That document also cited the same €302 fine.

The same arguments were used against Anton Sh., a deserter from Ufa whose story was covered by Sever.Realii. He had been tortured in the same Zaitsevo cellar, where guards pulled out almost all of his teeth. Despite his ordeal and the fact he is wanted in Russia, BAMF ruled he faced no danger because he had been able to leave the country freely.

Georgy Avaliani is now consulting with lawyers to appeal. “From my interview, it is perfectly clear that my situation is different [from other cases BAMF cited in the rejection]. This rejection shows that these people either cannot read or didn’t bother to try,” he said.

Even if his appeal fails, Georgy has no intention of returning. “I didn’t come here for tastier sausage, but to avoid dying in prison,” he says. “I had a good job in Russia. I will never reach that standard of living here; I’m not 20 or even 30 years old anymore. I didn’t travel far for a better life. I left solely because of persecution. Pity they don’t understand that.”

“Goodbye to Arms” estimates there are currently about 100 Russian deserters in Germany. For others planning to follow Avaliani’s route through Croatia, Alshansky recommends heading to other countries, such as Spain, where he says the bureaucratic logic remains more straightforward than in Germany.

Source: “Rubber‑stamping rejections. Germany turns away Russian army deserters who refused to fight in Ukraine, claiming they face only a fine back home,” Mediazona, 5 February 2026. Thanks to News from Ukraine Bulletin for the heads-up. The emphasis, above, is mine. \\\\\TRR

Leavers vs. Remainers, Vol. 1

Kirill Medvedev,* a poet, publisher, and member of the band Arkady Kots, left Russia in 2023 and returned in late 2024. At Republic Weekly’s request, he explains his winding road, what Moscow looks like when one hasn’t seen it from the inside for a long time, and what remainers have to say about leavers.

After a year and a half of living in other countries for personal (but, of course, political) reasons, I have been living in Moscow for several months now. Despite certain risks, I really don’t want to leave, and I am terrified of everything having to do with living in exile. I’m willing to speak in allegories or even to keep silent altogether just to be able to live in my hometown. Although what could be more important than waking up in the morning and smacking the Putin regime in the face without pulling your punches?

Everything in Moscow is still familiar and homely. I am indifferent to Sobyanin’s renovations. Things have improved in some places, while in other places it’s the reverse. Half-abandoned spots have suddenly emerged even in the most expensive neighborhoods, as if the money had suddenly been hoovered out of them. I’m certain that’s literally what happened.

I don’t see any particular feasting amid a plague, but I guess I’m just not hitting the right spots. Moscow has become more desolate and wild on the whole. When the capital is finally moved to Siberia, the Moscow I know and love will look even better. But for now, it is still what it is: a crazy quilt fashioned from Eurasian chaos, absorbing a million shades of the glitz and poverty of the entire country and its neighbors, and tempting us with new revolutions somewhere in its squares and back alleys.

All of Russia can be found in Moscow, and yet, as everyone knows, Moscow is not Russia. Thanks to this fun fact, it is easier for Muscovites than for anyone else to love the entire country, albeit an imaginary and unfathomable country, shaped from different scraps. “I stand as before an eternal riddle, / Before a great and fabulous land,” sang one remarkable Muscovite. I repeat another poet’s line about another city, thinking that love for one’s capital city and one’s country is an enormous, complicated privilege: “May it not be my lot / To die far away from you.”

Online public communication habits have actually changed a lot because of the risks involved. It no longer feels like your event didn’t happen if it wasn’t written up online and if you didn’t post a photo of yourself with a crowd of happy spectators.

There are [now] more personal channels of communication within communities and more word of mouth. Reactions are more reserved in public and more emotional among friends. Pardon my sentimentality, but there is little to compare with physical hugs with friends and family in a city charged with your own and other people’s memories.

Of course, there are a lot of new problems, and I’d rather deal with some variety of internet addiction than the nightmare in which everyone has found themselves. And yet there is the perception that the war has ushered in the degradation of all ways of living in Russia. This is not true. Humans are ultra-creative and crafty creatures. Violent shocks do not neutralize life but propel it into new forms. A caveat: no new ways of living and creating can justify the mass murder of people who will never wake up to life again. But cultural, activist, educational, and other communities who persist and change, albeit semi-clandestinely, albeit at the cost of compromise or risk, increase our chances of transitioning to a different way of living in this country in the future. The more allies we have here at home now, the more likely they are to be in the right place at the right time—that is, if the first flights our friends who have been shoved out of the country plan to take are delayed a bit.

Irony or irritation towards the people who have left [Russia] for one reason or another is evident among almost all those who have stayed, except for those who are definitely planning to leave. One of the frequent complaints is “They left to live in safety, and they did the right thing—they just shouldn’t pass it off as a political act.”

That is true, though with many caveats. Bravo, of course, to the activists who have been helping people who have to leave to get out of the country and to adapt to life abroad. Bravo to the journalists who have moved to relatively safe places and continue to fulfill their professional obligation to their fellow citizens. Regular albeit serious news, reported with respect for themselves and the audience, without unnecessary harshness (“so that you can send it to your grandmother”) is needed desperately: almost everyone talks about it. But pessimism and aggression about life inside the country on the part of fellow citizens who have left the country is completely out of place. It is clearly old-fashioned exile self-therapy and should be practiced in private.

While the demand for alternative information is great (many people in the USSR who were not necessarily anti-Soviet also listened to Voice of America), one can see skepticism or simply a lack of interest in émigré politics. Why is this the case? There seem to be many examples in history when political émigrés came back home, were involved in great transformations, or even spearheaded them. Escaping from prison in Russia, making one’s way abroad, drinking to a successful adventure with comrades in Geneva, discussing future strategies in a relaxed atmosphere, and soon returning home to work underground was a typical trajectory for Russia’s radical democrats in the early twentieth century.

Things have changed since then, although today many also travel back and forth. You can talk at length to those who have stayed in Russia about the hardships of emigration, and they will agree and sympathize with you, especially if you were actually in danger here at home.

For the most part, though, people still see someone else’s moving abroad as their means of upgrading their private existence.

By renouncing your past life, it is as if you automatically renounce your past community. The propaganda, of course, does its best to inflate the resentment, but it’s not just propaganda at work. Emigration is indeed an experience of constant self-denial. Especially today, when Russian emigrants are so evidently prodded (gently and not so gently) to cancel themselves in terms of of their citizenship, background, language, identity, or even flag. Moreover, the reanimated ethical-religious discourse of the Cold War, with its confrontation between good and evil on a global scale, has played a considerable role in this.

The field where dialogue should have taken place between leavers and remainers, as well as between moderate oppositionists and hesitant loyalists, has been overrun by moralizers in proverbial white coats and rabid patriots. They are the dividers and conquerors.

The leavers more often argue in terms of negative freedom—freedom from censorship, political crackdowns, and military mobilization, from having to indirectly finance the war or live among its supporters. The remainers stay because they do not see how they can realize themselves abroad, at least not without the sort of superhuman effort and self-denial that many of them find more frightening than living under the threat of arrest or self-censorship. They often speak of duty—to elderly relatives, students, patients, voters, political prisoners, the graves of relatives, the homeland, etc. And they often hear in response that it is immoral to be involved in the normalized life in today’s Russia. The ethical conflict is evident.

I wander the Pokrovkas and the Ordynkas, thinking about where I can get money to pay the bills and pay off my debts. There are posters calling for men to sign up for the army. Somehow I don’t feel more upstanding than the guys who go off to kill for money. I would definitely not go to do that, but this certainty does not raise my moral self-esteem. I think of an old comrade who perished in the “special military operation.” His debts, low social status, and leftist anti-western ressentiment had blossomed into imperialist obfuscation.

I sit in a cafe, thinking about my plans. The people around me talk about different things, while people in a neighboring country are bombed in our name.

I’m good at displacing unpleasant things. We all are good at it.

Being here, dissolving into this life, it is difficult to feel like a member of an ethics committee. It’s easier to realize that all people are basically the same, that there are no insuperable differences between them. All our actions (whether ordinary, shameful, or magnificent), all the passivity of the masses, all the revolts of nations, are manifestations of the same human principle in different historical circumstances. The way humanness manifests itself in our present circumstances, the way my own humanness manifests itself in them, is the most interesting thing to observe. Okay, we’ve established that.

No, of course, there is a huge difference between opposition to evil, passive non-participation, and complicity in it. Putin’s propagandists have been blurring the distinction between the first, second and third to depoliticize and morally degrade society. We know this, and you can’t fool us. In both the secular and Christian systems, a person always has a choice and a responsibility for it. We should not see the individual as a unwilling victim of want and propaganda. But something else is also true: even if you believe that you have made your own super-correct moral choice once and for all, endlessly judging your neighbor, or believing they are made of some qualitatively different stuff than you, or finding them complicit in collective guilt without trial is also a quite devilish temptation, akin to the temptations proffered today in our country by various spiritual and political leaders.

Political evil is countered not by personal virtue, and even less by moralistic posturing. It is countered by political or civic ethics, but our country has a huge problem with that.

All the debates between the leavers and the remainers, all the debates over the slogans “peace now” vs. “war until the dictatorship’s defeat,” all the debates about whether Navalny should have returned to Russia, revolve around the missing answer to the ethical (aka political) question: for what are we willing to risk our private lives, for what collective ideals?

I certainly don’t have a clear answer. Russia is long past the heroic times of liberalism and socialism, when people believed that civic heroism was not weak-mindedness or recklessness, but a deliberate, mature step toward a better future. Popular willingness to take to the streets against war and dictatorship is impossible without the conviction that we are on the right side of history, that we are in a movement that both overlaps with and transcends our private interests.

The Bolsheviks believed in communism’s inevitable advent on a global scale, and were able to convince many people this would happen, which was why they won. In 1991, Russians believed that by defending the [Russian] White House and confronting the coup plotters’ tanks, they were leading Russia onto the road of progress which all democratic nations were already rolling down. Whether we like it or not, Russia is not ready to follow any well-trodden path. There is no single road anymore: the road is just going to have to be paved anew. (I’m reckoning on this.)

Today we see a faint glimmer of hope in republicanism, with its idea that community spirit is not a consolation prize for people who lack professional fulfillment and personal happiness. It is not reducible to a professional or personal virtue and is not a profession itself.

Anyone willing to stand with others to oppose tyranny and then work every day to prevent it from happening again is capable of demonstrating civic valor. And the brighter, bolder and more constructively a person commits to this work, the more they make use of their professional, creative and other kinds of potential, the greater their authority in the community will be and the more likely they will remain in the community’s memory. This sounds good as a motivation, but if the republican ethic is realizable, then it is realizable in the small and medium-size spaces of campaigns around residential buildings, courtyards, neighborhoods, and (at most) cities, where it is possible to find analogues of the ancient Greek square for people to hold meetings.

A national community is imaginary, no matter how you look at it, and it is based on a rather sketchy common historical plight and collective memory. If we do not want it to be the memory of how “everyone was afraid of us,” it should be the memory of how we survived together and resisted—secretly and explicitly, passively and actively—the extermination of others and self-extermination, of how we built ties, engaged in “culture,” taught children, supported political prisoners, and helped the bombing victims and the homeless.

This is the ground of community, a ground not nourished by moral superiority, by denying oneself and one’s roots, or by essentializing differences. It is nourished by responsibility for the people who stand or have stood next to you in the same squares and the same queues, for the people who walk the same streets, who went to the same schools, who share the same hopes for the future.

If we indeed stand on this ground, then it makes sense for us to challenge and set our hearts on something together.

* Medvedev has been placed on the Russian Justice Ministry’s registry of “foreign agents.”

Source: Kirill Medvedev, “I Returned to Moscow from Exile and I Don’t Want to Leave,” Republic, 5 January 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader

Yosif [sic] Brodsky, “Stanzas to the City,” trans. Nicholas Zissermann, Landfall 20, 2 (1966): 152. You can read the original poem in Russian here.

Alexander Podrabinek: Opposition Politicians Must Live in Russia to Do Their Jobs

The recent prisoner swap has suddenly and quite vividly clarified the emotions and motives of the militant segment of the Russian emigration. Those who did photography in the old days will remember how you would dip a blank sheet of photographic paper into developer and gradually an image would appear on it. At first, the image would be vague, just outlines, but then it would become clearer and clearer, until finally you would pull it out from under the red lamp and hold it up to the white light: wow, you could see everything clearly!

I will avoid beeing politically correct and say everything I think. Emigrants from the so-called liberal crowd went abroad because they were afraid of going to prison in Russia. It’s an understandable fear—a valid reason, one might even say. The issue of personal security, their personal well-being and that of their families, was more important to them than Russian freedom and democracy, about which they spoke with such pathos and fervor at protest rallies, in the independent press, and on the internet. They did not have the guts, and such things happen. There is nothing laudable about it, but nothing catastrophic either. No one obliges them to sacrifice themselves, and they themselves were willing to be heroes on the podiums, but not in a real showdown with the repressive regime. All right, so they left: it’s no great loss. In any case, it is better to leave in time than to spill your guts later during an investigation.

I think most of those who have left Russia feel fine, but a certain segment of the emigration, the most militant and vocal, experiences emotional discomfort. They sense their own political inferiority, especially amidst what has happened in Russia to those who stayed, to those who have been resisting and are now in prison. To prove to themselves and others their insightfulness and to confirm the correctness of their choice to emigrate, they portray those who have remained in Russia as naive fools who don’t understand life. The very existence of political prisoners irritates them. They believe that people have been imprisoned by mistake or because they overestimated themselves. But they themselves didn’t overestimate!

Alexei Navalny’s decision to stay in Russia cut them to the quick. A month before his death, Navalny wrote in a letter from prison camp: “I have my country and my beliefs. I don’t want to give up either my country or my beliefs. I can betray neither the first nor the second. If your beliefs are worth something, you must be ready to stand up for them. And if necessary, to make sacrifices.”

The bombastic Ekaterina Schulmann just doesn’t get it. “The context of events is such that the first thought that comes to mind upon hearing the news is how he could have failed to leave [Russia] after the first [guilty] verdict, and almost the only emotion is amazement at this fact.” She is amazed: isn’t personal well-being the most important thing?

Dmitry Gudkov, a politician who is quite nimble in all respects, was even more definite at the time. “Almost all public figures, including well-known opposition figures, have been allowed to leave. But in case they didn’t get the signal, they go to jail. So if you don’t want to go to jail, you don’t have to wait for mercy from the Investigative Committee—there are flights to Tbilisi and other beautiful cities. At the slightest hint of danger, save yourself. The decision to take care of your life is always the right one.”

Gudkov and Schulmann are simple people, and they write about the benefits of cowardice in a straightforward, uncomplicated manner. But some others feel uncomfortable in such situations. They don’t like to feel as if they are fugitives saving they own skin—they need decent arguments. They want to remain on top, preferably at the heights they commanded in Russia, where everyone listened to them.

And what arguments are these? The most murderous one is that Russia is a lost country and the whole nation supports the fascist regime. As if there were not hundreds of political prisoners in camps and prisons who have chosen resistance rather than escape. As if there had not been rallies and marches throughout Russia, attended by many thousands of people, when such events could still be organized. As if the authorities didn’t have to falsify election results to avoid revealing Putin’s paltry electoral support.

Anna Rose writes about her Russian acquaintances, but it reads as if she is writing about Russians in general: “My Russian acquaintances didn’t show any sympathy for the real victims of aggression. The fact that in Ukraine, due to Russia’s fault and with their own tacit consent, people were being killed every day, that not only only cities were destroyed but also the basis for civic life in a sovereign country, seemed to them a backdrop, not the essence of what was going on.” What to do with such a worthless people? Clearly, run away from them and denounce them in the crudest possible language. And God forbid anyone should think that you are one of them yourself.

Journalist Victoria Ivleva took it a step further by attacking Vladimir Kara-Murza, Ilya Yashin, and Andrei Pivovarov on her Facebook page for talking too little and saying the wrong things about Ukraine at their press conference. “I would very much like to hear a single word of repentance from you, not stories about how Putin is to blame while the nation is wonderful and fresh. Who elected Putin time after time, was it not the nation? The war started by our Motherland has left us all with only one right—to get down on our knees.”

A well-off emigrant, Ivleva expects words of repentance from recent political prisoners who were imprisoned for their anti-war stance! Ivleva herself has nothing to do with it, she has nothing to repent for. It is they, the Russians, who should all fall on their knees as one, while those who left in time are not to blame for anything. But if we are talking about sincere repentance, shouldn’t Ivleva repent for the Soviet Union’s war against Afghanistan? That war was no less bloody than the current one, and Ivleva was then a civic-minded Soviet student and a successful journalist who was published in the Communist Youth Union’s newspaper. She didn’t protest. She didn’t get down on her knees. If we call everyone to repent for the sins of the regime, shouldn’t we turn to ourselves?

No, of course, only the people are to blame, the people who, according to Ivleva, have elected Putin time and time again. That is, the presidential elections, in her opinion, have been fair and transparent time and again: the president was elected by the people, the president is legitimate, and, therefore, the evidence of the people’s worthlessness is clear. And let’s forget about how the ballot rigging has been exposed and pretend that it didn’t happen.

The great thing about collective responsibility is that personal responsibility dissolves into universal responsibility. If everyone is to blame, then no one is to blame. It is a very convenient position. In a debate on Facebook, Konstantin Borovoy denounces the freed political prisoners: “Asking the West to lift sanctions when the regime has gone berserk and the citizens are supporting it is stupid and mean.” To say nothing of playing fast and loose with the facts (they were not talking about lifting sanctions, but about targeting them correctly), claiming that the citizenry supports the brutal regime is a sin against the truth. Some people support it and some don’t. No one knows the exact percentage, but it is certain that millions of people in Russia do not support this regime. Why should we talk about the unity of the party and the people and thus echo Putin’s propaganda? And if we are to blame everyone, shouldn’t we start with ourselves? Borovoy was a member of parliament during the crucial years and had much more sway in politics than the average man on the street. If something has gone wrong in our country, maybe we should think about our place in these processes? Or is everyone else to blame?

The premise of national guilt is not enough for successful self-affirmation. The liberated political prisoners are hysterically pointed to the plight of Ukraine and its prisoners of war in Russia, as if anyone would argue with this. But this generates the illusion that only the political emigrants are concerned about it, while no one in Russia understands any of it and no one in Russia sympathizes with Ukraine. The opinion that there are also Russian problems that require a political solution is jealously disputed: no, today there is only one problem—the war in Ukraine.

Yes, it is true that the war is the most important issue for Ukraine. But for Russia it is not the most important issue. It may be the most painful, but it is not the main one. For Russia, the primary problem is the authoritarian regime, a dictatorship which at a single person’s whim can start a war, murder dissidents, take away all freedoms, and threaten the entire world. The war in Ukraine is a consequence of Russia’s primary problem and this is what the liberated political prisoners were talking about. The fundamental solution to the issues of war and peace depends on the nature of the regime, not on military successes or defeats. Russia’s policy towards other states depends on the kind of regime it has. This is obvious.

Kara-Murza’s and Yashin’s desire to engage primarily in Russian politics and address the interests of Russia’s democratic future is understandable and rational. A democratic Russia will have no need of enemies on its borders or anywhere in Africa. It will return all annexed territories, pay reparations, and atone for and eventually redeem its guilt before Ukraine and the other countries it has attacked.

Opposition politicians must be in Russia to make this all happen. It won’t work otherwise. It’s understandable that this elicits a rabid reaction from political emigrants who label cowardice prudence and prefer glamorously clamoring in emigration to risking resistance in Russia. In my opinion, Kara-Murza explained it all quite clearly to them in an interview which he gave in March of this year while still in prison.

“A politician cannot work remotely. It is not a matter of practical efficacy; for a public figure, it is a question of ethics and responsibility to their fellow citizens. If you are calling on people to oppose an authoritarian regime, you cannot do this from a safe distance—you must share the risks with your community.”

Source: Alexander Podrabinek (Facebook), 6 August 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader. Mr. Podrabinek is a well-known dissident, journalist, human rights activist, and former political prisoner.

Irina and Anna’s Big Adventure

Pensioners Irina Nippolainen and Anna Trusova, friends and residents of the small Karelian town of Segezha, fled Russia in the spring of 2023 after the FSB came to search their homes. Anna and Irina were forced to make a long trek to Azerbaijan via Belarus before making their way to Germany, where they now have residence permits and social housing, and where they hope to find work. Meanwhile, back in their home country their relatives have been summoned for questioning in the criminal investigation against them. Journalists at the website Okno tell the story of the two women, who chose forced emigration over unfreedom.

ESCAPE

On 20 March 2023, 60-year-old Irina and 58-year-old Anna said goodbye after taken a stroll and went home. A few minutes later, Irina called Anna and told her that the FSB had come to see her. Anna rushed to her house after Irina’s call.

“As soon as I rang Irina’s doorbell, I immediately turned on the video on my phone to put the squeeze on them: Who the hell are you guys? The FSB guys saw that I was filming on my phone and immediately called someone, saying, ‘She’s here, come over.’ Anyway, it transpired that they had come for both of us.”

During the search, the FSB officers confiscated their phones and computers from the two pensioners. The search warrant stated that the searches were part of a criminal investigation into “public calls to engage in activity threatening state security.” Anna and Irina guessed that the case had been triggered by a denunciation. They both had written many posts on their VKontakte pages about their opposition to war, and in response had received a “barrage of hatred” from those who had read the posts.

“It was stressful. I lost eight kilograms during that time: I was so worried, I didn’t eat, and I didn’t know what would happen. I knew that people in Russia are sent to pretrial detention centers at any age even for sneezing at the authorities, and I did not know what exactly the law enforcers would find in the devices they confiscated and how they would interpret what they found. As soon as we were searched, my children immediately got involved in the problem, checking out everything they could: internet sites, their acquaintances, and then their acquaintances who had left the country. They decided how we should proceed—where and how to get asylum or other options. After analyzing everything, they decided that a humanitarian visa was the best option. We had to decide where to go, where to stay, and what to take with us,” says Irina.

They considered fleeing to two countries—Finland and Germany—but decided on the latter because it was easier to get a visa there.

But first Irina and Anna went to St. Petersburg, because they had to get papers for Anna’s dog Ramona. They stayed with an acquaintance of Anna’s, but the woman was very afraid that she would be “prosecuted for her connection” with the fugitive opposition activists, so they had to move out.

“Our children, who were assisting us, gave us the contact information for a man who did not know us at all but who wrote, ‘Come and stay as long as you want’. He helped us out and fed us, and we spent all that time while we were taking care of business at his house,” they explain.

Anna and Irina stayed in St. Petersburg for a week before departing for Azerbaijan.

They did not travel to Baku directly. For security reasons, they got themselves new cell phones, discussed the route, decided not to buy plane tickets in Russia, but to do it in Belarus, and went to Belarus by cab, paying 20,000 rubles [approx. 200 euros] for the fare.

“We took everything into account because we didn’t know how quickly they would come for us. In fact, we were very surprised that they didn’t nab us right away. We also chose Belarus because the dog was with us, and we felt bad about putting her in the luggage hold. Belavia is one of the few airlines that allow passengers to transport small animals in a carrier on a seat in the passenger cabin,” says Irina.

Irina and Anna flying from Minsk to Baku

After taking a cab to Minsk, they immediately went to the airport, bought tickets, and flew to Azerbaijan at night. In Baku, Irina and Anna initially settled in a small hotel.

“I was in such a state that my hair stood on end. For Anna, it was like an adventure, but for me it was like a misfortune, because I had left my home, my husband, and my pets. I didn’t want to leave my home or my country. That’s why I was very anxious. I even reached out to a psychologist from an aid organization, but she didn’t help me much,” Irina says.

Anna’s mood was a little different.

“I’m generally a traveler, but I hadn’t been able to travel lately. First there was the pandemic, then this whole thing happened. Not that I was freaking out about it, of course; I was freaking out for other reasons. But when it happened, I put three bathing suits in my suitcase—Ira makes fun of me—and went to the airport. I assumed I might have difficulties in Russia due to my intemperate tongue: I supposed that I would have to leave. I have a daughter in the Czech Republic, but the Czech Republic has a very bad attitude towards Russians, and they wouldn’t give me a visa. I thought that I would go to India, it’s quiet and peaceful there. My suitcase was initially packed with summer clothes. Of course, I was a bit nervous about the dangers. But basically, I always try to stay positive and hope for the best,” says Anna.

Anna, Ramona and Irina on the beach in Baku

Irina and Anna ultimately stayed in Baku for four months. They submitted the paperwork for humanitarian visas to Germany quite quickly, and had been approved by early June. But due to the local and the German bureaucracies they had to wait a long time for their papers. During this time, the pensioners already had their own circle of contacts—their landlady, their neighbors, and other refugees from Russia.

“And while there was uncertainty as to whether we would be granted a visa or not, we were already considering Azerbaijan as a place to live, because we could have lived there on our pensions. We had already found some channels for cashing money there, because our bank cards didn’t work there anyway. But still, we didn’t consider ourselves safe there,” Irina explains.

“GOD, HOW DID YOU BEAR IT ALL?”

In July, all their papers were in hand, so Irina and Anna began packing for Germany. They decided to make their way to Georgia first, since it was cheaper to fly to Germany from Tbilisi than from Baku. They went to Georgio by bus, stayed in Tbilisi for a couple of days before flying to Germany.

“When we arrived in Germany, I was already on VKontakte recounting all our adventures. And people wrote, “God, how did you bear it all?” Because there were a lot of hard moments. Personally, I was constantly stressed out, but it had become a way of life, you know. Anya is fine, she’s easygoing, but I can’t improvise when it comes to serious matters, I have to prepare and think things over. If I hadn’t followed all those rules, maybe we could have flown to Germany more easily, who knows. I’m a thorough person, I don’t want to lose money and end up stranded at the airport not knowing what to do. That is, I was preparing, I was checking out all the chat rooms and websites, seeing what papers we needed to get and where to go. There was a lot of preparation just for the dog. Without the dog, we would have done it all ten times easier, if not more. Because in different countries there are particular papers and certain vaccinations you have to have, and the airlines have certain requirements for the carrier. Ramona is a basically a ‘homeowner’—she had three portable houses,” Irina says.

“For the first time in her life, probably, when leaving Baku, Irina took sedatives because the dog in its carrier had to be placed in the trunk of the bus. And I was so worked up that even I took them too,” Anna remarks.

Anna and Irina flew to Frankfurt, where they were met by a friend of Irina’s who had lived in Germany for a long time. They had to get to their initial placement site, the town of Suhl in Thuringia, which is a three-hour drive from Frankfurt.

“But when we arrived there, we were told that pets were not permitted. Ukrainians used to bring pets there with them, but since now there are few Ukrainians in this camp and mostly Muslims, who have a bad attitude to dogs and are afraid of them, it is prohibited. So we urgently began looking for help on the chat rooms. A Ukrainian family agreed to take Ramona in for a while. They lived right next to the camp, and so we would go to their house to walk the dog. But then this young woman found out she had allergies, so Ana’s daughter quickly came from the Czech Republic and took Ramona away,” Irina explains.

A room in a German dormitory for refugees

The refugee camp where the pensioners were initially placed was a complex of five buildings, mostly inhabited by people from Arab countries.

“It was a bit scary to live in such an unfamiliar environment, given that the doors to the room in which we were put were unlocked. The police even came once because of a conflict in the building. We also had our passports taken from us and there was a risk that we would be processed in a different status—as refugees, even though we had ‘humanitarian visa’ stamped on our papers. We wrote everywhere, because they said that if we were registered as refugees, we could change this status only through the courts, and the courts could take years. That was scary. I said that we could not even return to Russia without a passport. Basically, it was a massive problem. I’d only recently been released, and I had put on two or three kilograms, because one thing or another was causing stress, but there was no getting around it,” Irina recounts.

Everything worked out well, ultimately. After a week, they were moved to the town of Greiz, a two-hour drive from Suhl. There they were allocated a social apartment, started to receive an allowance, were insured, and were issued social security numbers. By October, Anna and Irina had received residence permits for three years. During all this time, however, the pensioners had to confront the famous German bureaucracy more than once.

“They have an algorithm, as it were. But the human factor often gets in the way. People who work in this system, they do not know all the laws, or often they do things just to check off the boxes. But our case was quite peculiar for them: we are Russian pensioners, we have humanitarian visas, and they probably have a million other refugees here. Things were difficult, but when you look back, you think, What was there to worry about?” said Anna and Irina.

After the paperwork was completed, the friends moved again, but not far—to the city of Gera, thirty kilometers from Greiz. Each of them found rented accommodation there, which is paid for by the municipality. The apartments there are rented empty, with no furniture or appliances.

“When we moved from one place to another, they stopped paying us in the old place, but here they hadn’t started paying us yet, and it took two months to process the registration. So for two months we were without money or furniture,” Irina explains.

Since she had not yet been discharged from social housing, they could still live there together legally for some time and work on furnishing their new homes.

“The Ukrainians who live here have set up a help chat room and chat rooms for selling different things. I bought a bed and a chest of drawers from Ukrainians. I got some things for free. Germans often sell things they don’t need for very cheap. For example, I bought a complete kitchen set for only 100 euros, which is practically nothing. Now I’m looking for a bigger refrigerator,” Irina says.

Irina’s apartment after she furnished it

Anna, on the other hand, found an app similar to the Russian website Avito, where used furniture was sold, and bought almost everything she needed at wholesale prices.

“The only thing I was left without was a kitchen. I didn’t have a stove, but I got a microwave, and I could survive with a microwave. I bought a kettle. And that’s how I lived for the first few months,” she said.

The pensioners were at pains to point out that no one refused to help them. People who had also immigrated to Germany, some twenty years earlier and others two years earlier, offered them bedding, dishes, and household supplies. When Irina and Anna had settled in, they passed some of these things on to a family from Ukraine.

Expiring products are given to immigrants for next to nothing

People who have been granted humanitarian visas in Germany can choose not to work and live on benefits. But they can try to find a job if they want. Before they retired, Anna was involved in marketing cosmetics, while Irina helped animals. After ten years at the official municipal animal shelter, she ran a mini-shelter for five dogs, one of which she ultimately adopted. Finding a job in Germany is still difficult for them.

“We don’t speak German, so the opportunities to find work are few and far between for the time being. I am registered at the job center, while Irina is now registered with the Sozialamt, and she can live on her pension in peace, but I will only go on 31 July to test the level of my German. God willing, I will test out at A1, since I almost got A’s in German back in school. After taking this test, I do not know when I will be able to take German-language classes. Many emigrants take these courses two or three times. Then again, I’m old, so things don’t stick in my head nowadays. Of course, I would like somehow to learn the language faster and integrate faster,” Anna says, laughing.

Irina says that she has not been assigned to an integration course, so for the time being she is also living without knowledge of the German language and therefore jobless. While she was still living in Greiz, she worked a two-hour trial day as a seamstress in a local factory . Irina liked it very much. When she moved to Gera, she also wrote to one of the factories there, but was told that German was required. Getting a job is likewise important to Irina because she wants to invite her husband, who stayed behind Russia, to join her in Germany, which is impossible to do if she is unemployed. Irina’s husband would also need to know German, but how and where he can learn it and pass the test for the simplest level is still unclear. Irina herself attends German language courses, but they are run by volunteers and thus unofficial.

Anna and Irina say that even without jobs they have enough to do—they have traveled all over the area.

“We have been traveling a lot since day one. While we didn’t have papers, we used to walk, and then we got the chance to buy transit passes that enable us to travel by rail, buses, trams, and subways,” says Irina, who has also been to travel to Finland to visit her children, and to Stockholm and Copenhagen to meet friends.

Anna has bought a sewing machine and begun sewing.

“I used to do needlework, but in recent years things had not been coming together. Now I have started knitting curtains, and I will start weaving; I want to do a lot of things. I knitted myself a sweater. I bought brushes and paints and started drawing a bit, but have given it up for the time being. Mostly, I want to walk more. We are from Karelia and have a tradition of walking as the first thing one needs to do. And I had a dog then. Here I bought a bicycle as soon as I got the furniture: I jumped on the bike and went riding. You have to see everything around you. It takes a lot of time to see everything, to photograph it, to edit it, to upload it to the internet. So there is not enough time,” she explains.

By the way, both pensioners are each on their third VKontakte page: their previous pages had been blocked by the Russian authorities.

“DID THEY WRITE ABOUT BUCHA?”

Karelian law enforcement never forgot Irina and Anna.

In April 2024, it transpired that a criminal case had been opened against the two émigrés on charges of disseminating “fake news” about the Russian army. They found out about it because Irina’s husband was summoned to testify, for some reason, in the criminal investigation against Anna. Only when he met with the investigator, it transpired that Irina was also being prosecuted on the same charge. The husband refused to answer the investigator’s questions, invoking Article 51 of the Constitution (which permits an individual not to testify against themself or their spouse). Anna’s sister was then summoned for questioning in the same investigation. A little later, it transpired that both Anna and Irina had been put on the federal wanted list. And shortly before this interview, a person unknoiwn, who introduced himself as a policeman, wrote to Anna via WhatsApp and asked her where she was.

How many criminal “fake news” cases have been launched in Russia

In March 2022, after invading Ukraine, Russia adopted laws that criminalized disseminating “fake news” about the Russian army and “discrediting:” its actions. As of February 2024, 402 such cases had been brought. Dozens of Russians have been sentenced to lengthy prison terms for allegedly violating the law. According to human rights activists, this is tantamount to military censorship.

It is still unknown why the criminal case was launched. The relatives were asked during questioning what Irina and Anna had written on their first VKontakte pages. They made a special point of asking, “Did they write about Bucha?”

“It’s no fun feeling like a criminal. Although we all know what it means now in this [sic] country. In short, the crackdown continues: you are on the right side, and they are on the wrong side. They have to do something: there’s probably no one left in Karelia to sink their claws into anymore, but they need fulfill quotas. It’s a crackdown for its own sake. I feared for my relatives, because way back in 1938 there were so-called enemies of the people, and children, wives, and husbands of enemies of the people. I’m afraid lest it come to this,” Irina says.

The human rights activists consulted by Anna and Irina have advised them not to return to Russia before the regime changes, otherwise they will be sentenced to hard time in prison.

“FOR THREE DAYS I BAWLED LIKE A BELUGA”

Both émigrés follow the news from Russia closely. They argue that the country is “hurtling into an abyss.”

“What is happening is simply absurd. It feels like the country exists in a kind of distorted reality in which good is evil, and black is white. They are engaged in such insanity, frankly, and you don’t understand how it is possible to support all of this. And then there are the people who have gone crazy on a nationwide scale and who think everything is fine there, that it’s the way it should be. I worked at a polling place for many years and I used to say all the time that when we socialize only with our own kind, we don’t see what the rest of the people are like, but I saw all kinds of people at the polling station. I know that might sound kind of arrogant, but I saw how massively ignorant people were. I’ve always been skeptical of the claim that the Soviet Union had the best education system. I don’t know how it was the best if it didn’t teach people to think, and if people blindly trust the authorities. The authorities are king and god to them, as this whole situation has shown. Basically, you get the feeling that all people have come down with insanity, and some are immune. The analogy with Hitler’s Germany immediately comes to mind, where the people were fooled in the same way, gulled by propaganda. Maybe there is still hope that if the regime changes and they tell folks on TV how it really was, then…. We are now like spectators looking at Russia from the outside, and it’s scary to watch what is happening there,” Irina says.

When asked how they reacted to the news of politician Alexei Navalny’s death, Anna is unable to reply. She immediately starts crying.

“That’s how we reacted,” Irina explains, crying too.

“It’s good that my daughter was here that day: we went to Munich with her. I spent the whole day with them. But in the evening they went to a concert, and I got on the Munich chat rooms and found out that there would be a rally on Freedom Square and went there,” says Anna.

Alexei Navalny’s Death

The news of Alexei Navalny’s death came on 16 February 2024. He had been serving a nineteen-year sentence for “extremism,” after being convicted on seven criminal charges, including “creating an extremist community.” During his imprisonment, he was sent to a punishment cell twenty-seven times, spending almost 300 days there. After the politician’s death, pickets to mourn his passing were held in Russian cities, and the picketers were detained by the police en masse. The authorities refused to hand over his body to his relatives for a long time, demanding that they bury him in secret. Navalny’s associates argue that he was murdered and blame President Vladimir Putin for his death.

“I bawled like a beluga for three days. I still can’t even look at the photos of him calmly,” Irina adds.

“In the past, Ira, you used to say, ‘Navalny will be released and I’ll go home,'” her friend remarks.

Irina doesn’t make any predictions now that she has emigrated.

“I don’t make any predictions and I don’t listen to them. My motto now is: do what must be done and what will be will be. And I would also add: do what you have to do and what you are able to do. What matters most is saving yourself and your loved ones. We don’t know how long this will last. Analyzing things even as they stand now, I can confidently say that nothing good is going to happen…. Well, how should I put it? Nothing good is going to happen quickly. But I’m not ruling out either possibility: that I’ll stay here, or that I’ll go back there. I’ll go home as soon as I can. If nothing changes there, I’ll stay here.”

Anna, however, says that she has almost no one left in Russia: her daughter emigrated to the Czech Republic back in 2016, and she hardly communicates with her relatives who stayed behind in Russia.

“I will be better off here anyway. As long as they don’t kick me out, I’ll stay here,” she adds.

The pensioners nevertheless try to keep involved in Russian politics. They traveled to Leipzig to sign a petition supporting Boris Nadezhdin’s presidential candidacy and then to Berlin to vote in the presidential election.

Irina signing a petition in support of Boris Nadezhdin’s presidential bid

“There was such a huge queue. Because we were afraid of missing the train, we cut the queue a bit. A lot of people could not vote because, I think, only two polling stations were open in Germany—in Berlin and in Bonn. There were a lot of people who wanted to vote. We stood in line there with Yulia Navalnaya. And I talked to Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and we had our pictures taken with Ekaterina Schulmann. There were so many celebrities, and the queue itself was very cool. There were a lot of young people, all chanting “Russia without Putin.” But there were also a few pro-Putin people who have lived in Germany for twenty years and go vote for Putin, and we trolled them a little bit. But this is life, this is reality,” says Irina.

Irina Navalnaya, Kira Yarmysh, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky

What do Anna and Irina dream of?

“Grandchildren!” Anna answers immediately. “And first of all, of course, that the war end!”

“The first thing I wish for is that the war end. And the second is for me to go home,” says Irina.

Source: “‘It’s no fun feeling like a criminal’: female pensioners from Karelia emigrated to remain free,” Okno, 11 June 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader. Thanks to Comrade Koganzon for the heads-up.

Recent Russian Opposition YouTube Blockbusters: “Age of Dissent 2024” & “The Yashins”

Andrei Loshak, “The Age of Dissent 2024” (in Russian, with English subtitles)

The eve of the 2018 presidential election saw the release of Andrei Loshak’s series Age of Dissent, about young supporters of Alexei Navalny who were involved in his election campaign.

The sequel to the series, filmed on the eve of the latest presidential “election,” recounts how the lives of the activists who dreamed together with Navalny of “the wonderful Russia of the future” have changed dramatically in six years. Filming was almost completed when news came Navalny’s death. The movie’s protagonists ask themselves how to live without dreams and hope.

Source: Current Time Doc (YouTube), 3 June 2024. Annotation translated by the Russian Reader

The protagonists of Andrei Loshak’s documentary film Age of Dissent 2024: (clockwise, from upper left corner) Filipp Simpkins, Lilia Chanysheva, Ksenia Fadeeva, Yegor Chernyuk, and Violetta Grudina

On June 3, Current Time hosted the premiere of Russian filmmaker Andrei Loshak’s documentary Age of Dissent 2024. It is a sequel to Age of Dissent, which was filmed on the eve of the 2018 presidential election in Russia and focused on opposition politician Aleksei Navalny and the young supporters who helped him with his unofficial campaign. He was denied registration as a candidate but campaigned as if he was on the ballot.

Fast forward six years, to 2024, and another Russian presidential election, which was held in March and won, again, by Vladimir Putin with what the state said was 87.3 percent of the vote. Loshak’s new film, commissioned by Current Time, RFE/RL’s Russian-language TV and digital network, tells how the lives of the same activists who had dreamed, together with Navalny, of a “beautiful Russia of the future” changed dramatically.

Filming was almost completed when news broke in February of Navalny’s mysterious death in a Russian Arctic prison while serving a 19-year term on charges his supporters and many Western governments considered politically motivated.

On the eve of the film’s premiere, Current Time journalist Ksenia Sokolyanskaya met with Loshak in Tel Aviv.

RFE/RL: Did you think from the very beginning that this story would have some kind of sequel? Or did something happen at a certain moment that made you want to return to these people?

Andrei Loshak: I must say that, probably, this idea was there from the very beginning. After I released the first film, I saw that it kind of took off. People began to tell me that they wondered what would happen to the subjects next. And I thought, yeah, it’s really interesting that it will be a new election cycle six years later.

I had to monitor their fates, so I asked to film some things, although I didn’t know for whom it was to be done or when. But then I realized that they had all left Russia, that their fates had changed very dramatically, and that everything that they had fought for and lived for, all of it was destroyed in these past six years.

Yes, it seemed to me that this was enough to return to them and film what had happened to them. But you have to understand that we finished filming in January and early February [of 2024]. I sat in Tbilisi and thought about what to do with all of this.

What was my idea? To draw attention to Aleksei Navalny, because for me, this was such a serious motivator. There was a moment when he was being transferred to [the Polar Wolf prison in Russia’s Arctic town of] Kharp, and he disappeared, and I was struck by how few people wrote about it. For two weeks, it was not clear whether he was alive or not.

They killed Aleksei on February 16. At that moment, I was simply lost. I didn’t understand what to do with the material.

I think it was important to record the reactions of [the film’s subjects] to the news of that day, before they had time to get used to it. Although, to be honest, I’m still not used to it. It killed me, too.

This is probably the most personal film I’ve made in a long time. Because usually you take the position of an observer and film all sorts of things, but in this film I lived with the subjects — with one dream, one hope — and Aleksei was as important a figure for me as he was for them.

RFE/RL: I read the comments under the teaser for the film, which was posted the other day. People wrote that it was painful to watch, that their hearts were broken. We live in a Russia we don’t want to live in, and Violetta in the film talks about “those traumatized by Russia.”

Loshak: Moreover, a psychotherapist gave them such a diagnosis.

RFE/RL: In the film, a separate theme is the question: How do you live when the main thing you’re living for is taken away? Do you think there is an answer?

Loshak: We are all asking this question now, and few people understand how to overcome all this. This is a recording of this moment, when our homeland rejected us. We found ourselves superfluous and unnecessary there. She needs us, but the circumstances are such that they don’t expect us there, they don’t want us there, they push us out of there.

Hope is such a straw. You still clutch at it. Of course, a few months is not enough time to understand how to live now. I am in this process, and my heroes are in this process of understanding. [In the film,] Oleg says this [phrase] from the point of view of common sense: “We need to stop this, guys.”

RFE/RL: Meaning that political activism is not a profession?

Loshak: Yes. It is possible in some historical cycles, but in others it is impossible. And when you find yourself rejected, uprooted and without a homeland, your plan must change….

That’s why I always look at this whole “opposition movement” with great skepticism. I don’t know who looks at it without skepticism. But on the other hand, I don’t deny it. It’s kind of necessary, because they’re doing the right things, but it’s virtually impossible to influence anything in Russia from [exile]. This must be understood clearly.

This feeling of helplessness with which Violetta says: “What, how, and why?” — the loss of these meanings is very painful. But we always have to say goodbye to something; everything has its own lifespan. And unfortunately, we are now at this point where we need to say goodbye to all this and start something new. The question is: What?

RFE/RL: Do you have faith? In the film people talk a lot about faith, and it ends with Aleksei’s words about the need to believe. Do you have faith that Aleksei’s story can also transform into something that people will watch, and that if they don’t know the story of Jan Palach, they will learn it from your film? (Editor’s Note: On January 16, 1969, 20-year-old university student Jan Palach set himself on fire in Prague to protest the August 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops. He died of his burns three days later.)

Loshak: I’m sure of it. I’m convinced of it. Such sacrifices, heroic deeds of such magnitude, cannot be in vain. I am absolutely sure that this is not a wasted sacrifice and that Aleksei will remain in the history of Russia forever as one of these heroic figures, which, of course, will acquire its own mythology. And in what our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will read about him, we would hardly recognize Aleksei.

There are always few such figures in history. I have never encountered anything like this in my life, such a level of self-sacrifice.

RFE/RL: The scale.

Loshak: Yes, but we also had, of course, our own Jan Palach: [Russian journalist] Irina Slavina, who set herself on fire in Nizhny Novgorod [in 2020], opposite the city police headquarters. (Editor’s Note: Before self-immolating, Slavina wrote on Facebook, “Blame the Russian Federation for my death.” A day earlier, she had written that police had searched her apartment, trying to find evidence linking her with the opposition Open Russia group and confiscated her computers and mobile phone.)

She didn’t do it in vain, either. I’m absolutely sure. Although who remembers her now? This was just a few years ago, before the war [in Ukraine]…. She will also be in this pantheon of heroic people who openly came out against evil.

Of course, Aleksei and what he did, and the way he died — all of this will later inspire people because everyone always needs bright examples, everyone needs these myths. And Aleksei has already become this myth. I can already see how people who never appreciated him during his lifetime — and, in general, I heard little good from them about Navalny — are now writing: “But Navalny would not have said that,” or, “Navalny would not have done that.”

His wings have already grown; he is already soaring over this unfortunate Russia, and he will always soar there from now on. This is actually good because you have to believe in something.

RFE/RL: After Navalny’s death, a discussion appeared in the Russian-speaking, mostly emigrant, community. It seems to me that the impetus was Shura Burtin’s manifesto on Meduza that a “beautiful Russia of the future” will not happen and that hope for some kind of good future is harmful. One of your subjects, Violetta, also talks about how she doesn’t feel joy, that she can’t say she lives, she just exists. Do you think you should actually believe such stories?

Loshak: Believe in what?

RFE/RL: You said Aleksei’s sacrifice was not in vain, but it seems to me that for a large number of people this is not true.

Loshak: That everything is in vain, that evil triumphs over good, and that this has always been the case in Russia? It has always been this way. But it seems to me that everything has its time. Even if we look at the history of Russia, evil has always defeated good, but there have also been moments when good had a chance.

There have always been thaws, rollbacks toward democratization, and liberation from the shackles with which the state always entangles people in Russia. We have always had this chance; we just never took advantage of it.

With Aleksei there was this chance; he gave us this chance throughout his political life, starting in 2017, but this liberal layer of us, so to speak, simply looked at it all with the curiosity of a TV viewer, nothing more.

Then he returned. He returned [to Russia from Germany in January 2021 after being treated for poisoning], realizing that, of course, he would most likely be imprisoned. But he gave us this chance again, and it was as if it was all staged. He returned, his documentary Putin’s Palace was released, which was watched by 100 million people. Then there was a rally, and the usual 20,000 to 40,000 people came out.

We wasted the chances that Navalny gave us.

I really believe that at some point people will understand how important it is to participate in politics, how important it is to be a citizen, and not just to be a resident of this country. One of the subjects in the first part of the documentary in 2017 said to me — I won’t say his name now, because he is in Russia, but he was on the Maidan; by accident, he ended up there — “When 10,000 people come out, it’s nothing. But when 1 million people come out, you can’t do anything about it.”

This is why I endlessly respect Navalny: for the fact that he did everything he could, and more than he could, to give us these chances. And we blew them. And I hope that someday this will become obvious. You see, what is happening to Russia now cannot last forever.

RFE/RL: Why?

Loshak: Because it’s against common sense, it’s against the passage of time. This is an attempt to turn back time, to turn it around….

In general, history is cyclical. Now there is some moment of crisis in which Western civilization finds itself. We see incredible divisions within Western countries. I don’t remember this before. This is also some kind of new sign of the times. But nevertheless, Western societies have gone through many crises, and their strength is that they are democratic, and thanks to this openness they survive them, work through them, and reach a new level.

But Russia is not doing this. Russia is simply driving us into some kind of Middle Ages with its boots. The rhetoric that is heard now is about a “holy war,” about the defense of traditional values. It all comes down to homophobia really. This is the only thing they found as a scarecrow around which they built this whole structure about the “holy war” of the Russian world with Western civilization, which is satanic, because gay people can openly hold each other’s hands and recognizes their marriages. This is complete bulls**t.

For this generation, about which I filmed in 2017, there was no issue of homophobia at all. They had already grown up in this cross-border world of the Internet. They saw that this was normal. This is how all people live, and they are happy.

I subscribe to Russian-language Iranian opposition channels. You’re amazed how much the same is there. It’s just that these grandfathers look more colorful there. Ours are in secular blue jackets, and in Iran there are bearded ones in dressing gowns. But everything is the same. People want to live freely; they want to be happy. It is impossible to be happy when everything is forbidden.

It is impossible to keep these prohibitions all your life because the reverse process is taking place all over the world. People are following the path of gaining more and more freedom, because it is more comfortable to live this way, and at the same time respect the freedom of others….

But at any moment the Russian state can invade your life and tell you how you should behave, how to dress. You have nothing. You owe them everything for some reason, but they don’t owe you anything.

This is such an old patriarchal model of the world order. If you look at all this more broadly, I see it as a rebellion against patriarchy. And what is happening in Russia is the agony of the patriarchy. In Russia, the strong are always right. To the question, “What is strength?” [I answer that] in Russia there is strength in strength. Not in any truth. This is nonsense. What is the truth? The truth was on Aleksei’s side. And where is he? I’m sure [these grandfathers] are becoming decrepit. Time will simply kill them because time is not on their side. And at some point they will simply stop being strong, and then they will be finished.

Arriving at Jan Palach’s grave [in Prague], Oleg tells the story about what happened in 1969. And in 1989, the Velvet Revolution [in Czechoslovakia] began with people coming to his grave. Yes, we had to wait 20 years for this name and this feat to become an impulse and begin to work. But now, it seems to me, time flows faster. I would like to believe that we will not have to wait another 20 years.

RFE/RL: When you invited people to the premiere in Tel Aviv on Facebook, you wrote: “I don’t wish you a pleasant viewing. That would be hypocritical on my part.” As someone who has seen the film twice, I can say it is indeed very difficult to watch. What effect do you, as an auteur, hope for?

Loshak: Due to what happened during the filming — and it was not I who wrote Navalny’s death into the script — I stopped thinking at all about who I was doing it for. It’s just a film that has a lot of my personal pain in it. I did this in order to try to part with this pain. It’s like psychotherapy: You have to work through it and live it in order to move on….

Navalny was important to so many people. This is a figure on a much larger scale than perhaps even we thought. Both importance and value. Still, his presence in Russia, even in prison, in this political landscape was completely incommensurable. We just don’t even understand yet how important. And we will understand gradually more and more. This film is probably for these people.

RFE/RL: You wrote a big post on Facebook about Aleksei and said that you miss him, and that it doesn’t go away. And in the end you say that despondency is a mortal sin, that Russia is a terrible fairy tale with a bad ending. You say that faith is an irrational thing. Do you want to return to Russia?

Loshak: Of course, I want to return to Russia now…. If Putin dies, then, of course, I will return….

Listen, this is our homeland. It’s not that we’re injured. It’s normal to want to live in your homeland with your people. They turned us into some kind of national traitors, although they are the national traitors. But we ourselves even began to get used to it, feeling that we were somehow different, which means we don’t belong there, that this is not our homeland.

But, damnit, this is our homeland, our roots are there, our everything is there. Why shouldn’t we want to go back? It’s normal to want to go back and desire to live in a different country. That is, to want changes in your country, which has simply turned into a fiend of hell, which threatens the whole world with nuclear disaster and is working to split the whole world and plunge it into some kind of abyss of chaos.

What is Western civilization? If we talk about European values, this is democracy, this is human rights, this is freedom — these are normal things. This is the norm. And they declared the norm to be evil. Who are they after that? This is some kind of madness that will end either in a nuclear apocalypse or in the fact that at some point they will simply die, as generally happens in history with villains: At some point, they simply died, and the world sighed freely until a new one was born.

RFE/RL: In an interview, you said you’d like to shoot a film in [the Ukrainian city of] Odesa, which is an important place for you. Did you have in mind a film that is less heavy than the one you have made for Current Time? Something entirely different?

Loshak: I really want to. I am very tired of politics, of Putin — of this creature, this absolutely insignificant bastard, who forces us to follow him all the time. Then we all write about it, film it, and react in horror. We are forced to because we react to abuse, to constant violence against us, because this person mocks us.

I want to film about something more metaphysical. With hope, with faith, with love. There is a lot of love missing.

Source: Ksenia Sokolyanskaya, “‘We Wasted The Chances He Gave Us’: Director Andrei Loshak Talks About His New Navalny Film,” RFE/RL, 4 June 2024. Although this isn’t a perfect translation, I refrained from editing it—except for the title of Loshak’s new film, which was translated flagrantly wrongly in the original text. ||| TRR

Tell Gordeeva: “The Yashins: ‘His Sentence Will End When the Regime Ends'” (in Russian; no subtitles)

In February 2022, opposition politician Ilya Yashin openly spoke out against the war while declaring that he would never leave Russia. In December, he was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison on charges of “discrediting” the army. Yashin has been held in a punishment cell over a month (since 17 May 2024), a visit from his parents was canceled, and nothing is known about the state of his health. We talked to Yashin’s parents about their son, whom they are proud of.

Contents: 00:00 Why do the Yashins not keep their son’s letters at home? 2:45 “A person is jailed for 15 days and until the last minute he doesn’t know whether he’ll be released or not” 7:15 “I’ll be the first to tell you’re wrong” 10:16 “Emigrating means admitting that we lost”11:47 “Gorinov doesn’t have it better because Ilya’s in prison” 13:43 “Who will know whether you gave your consent or not?” 17:36 “I guess I’ll have to be in prison for a while. What’s a little bit?” 21:21 How the clerk at the Tushino district court fell in love with Yashin and quit her job 22:36 Does Ilya Yashin have a fiancee? 25:20 How Yashin’s ex-girlfriends attend his court hearings 27:29 “We don’t communicate with Ksenia Sobchak” 31:27 Why didn’t Yashin become an actor? 33:53 “We accidentally met Lyudmila Navalnaya at the trial” 35:31 How Lyudmila Navalnaya taught Tatyana Yashina to put together prison care packages 36:48 Why do shampoo and toothpaste have to be poured into a plastic bag? 39:08 “His sentence will end when the regime ends” 40:46 “Now nothing good will ever happen” — on Navalny’s death 42:52 “Both my friends are dead” — Yashin’s letter after Navalny’s murder 44:55 “There are people who have it worse than we do” 48:53 Yashin’s health problems 52:49 How did Yashin’s parents meet? 54:58 Who taught Ilya to box and why 56:46 “I did everything to make sure Ilya was a momma’s boy” — Valery Yashin on parenting 1:00:28 “We Spartak fans are indomitable!” 1:02:16 Yashin asked for a wash basin in prison 1:06:01 “Ilya lived in a barracks in the tenth grade” 1:11:09 “He’s serving the longest sentence in the penal colony in Smolensk” 1:13:47 How his son has changed in prison, according to his father 1:14:36 …and according to his mother 1:19:19 “It’s him doing, but I’m the one who’s ashamed” — how Yasha’s mom taught her son to be a good deputy 1:25:00 “He went to his first protest rally in the eleventh grade after school”1:28:08 “Yabloko decided to do a deal with the Kremlin”1:31:24 How did Yashin and Nemtsov become friends? 1:33:48 “Even from prison, Ilya manages to send me flowers for my birthday” 1:34:46 “Mom, I’m in a paddy wagon but I’m okay” 1:36:57 The scariest day in Tatyana Yashina’s life 1:42:52 “I don’t consider Putin my enemy” 1:47:21 “Our son really did something wrong, but your son is paying for everyone” — what relatives of other prisoners say to Yashins 1:58:20 “Absolute strangers made care packages for him” — about the prisoner transport to Izhevsk 2:01:05 How did Yashin end up in the Okrestina detention center in Belarus in 2020? 2:03:48 “If you haven’t raised a person who is smarter than you, you’ve wasted your life” 2:05:34 “This is a marathon, and I have no doubt you’ll make it to the finish line” — a three-day visit with Ilya 2:07:05 “I missed your omelettes the most” 2:08:03 Why does Ilya Yashin’s mom not want him to become president? 2:10:13 “Guys, don’t get upset!”

Source: Tell Gordeeva (YouTube), 17 June 2024. Annotation translated by the Russian Reader

Russian opposition politician Ilya Yashin is currently serving an eight-and-a-half year sentence in prison for spreading “disinformation” about the Russian army after speaking out against the mass murder of civilians in Bucha, Ukraine. Journalist Katerina Gordeeva sat down with his parents, Tatyana and Valery, who still live in Russia, to learn how they’re coping with his incarceration, how they support their son in prison, and what hopes they have for the future. Meduza shares key points from the interview.

On not persuading him to leave Russia

We never pressured him on any issue — neither small ones nor something like this. It’s his life, and he has to make these decisions; we can only help. I always told him, “Ilya, no matter what happens in life, know that you have a strong support system. That doesn’t mean you’ll always be right. And if I think you’re wrong, I’ll be the first to tell you.” The decision [not to leave Russia] came in 2012, after the Bolotnaya Square case. Leaving would mean giving up, admitting that everything was in vain.

He didn’t leave then. And then Boris Nemtsov was killed, and he said, “Now, even more so, I can’t leave. Leaving would mean admitting that we lost. As long as I’m alive, I don’t believe that I’ve lost.” We didn’t try to talk him out of it because I understood how he felt, and I can’t imagine him being abroad now. I think it would have been such an ordeal that what he’s going through now is still much easier.

On an exchange

He himself doesn’t want an exchange. His main argument is: “Even if there are any exchanges, I’m far from being the first in line, and probably I’m the last, because there are people for whom it’s a matter of life and death. Secondly, I’m not ready to be exchanged for a hired killer who will then be free. Thirdly, agreeing to an exchange means leaving the country. I could have left the country right away.” I told him, “Ilya, it’s clear which way everything is going. Maybe if the opportunity arises, you shouldn’t be stubborn and should agree? After all, who will know whether you gave consent [for the exchange] or not?” He said: “I will know. That’s enough.”

On why they themselves stay in Russia

Because our son is here. We use any possible fleeting opportunity to see [him]. If there’s an appeal hearing, and he’ll be there via teleconference, maybe he’ll see us, and we’ll wave to him. And then he’ll see and make a heart. Maybe we’ll be given five minutes to exchange a few words. Letters are one thing, but it’s another when you can see him and understand by his expression, [by the way] he shuffles papers, what state he’s in, what his mood is. That’s why we attend all the court sessions.

On their son’s sentence

I was shocked when the prosecutor requested nine years for Ilya. I thought I’d misunderstood, I had misheard, because it couldn’t be true. Then, after we’d left the courtroom but before the sentence was pronounced, there was a moment when it overwhelmed me a little. But I quickly pulled myself together, and by the time of the sentencing, we took it quite calmly, philosophically: when the regime ends, the term will end. He chose this path, and we’re walking it with him. We are beside him, we are helping, and what will be, will be.

On family life

We never had any secrets. In our family, we made all our decisions collectively, so to speak. Any decisions — important or unimportant — were discussed by the whole family, and we included Ilya in this from a very young age.

On how Ilya has changed in prison

Tatyana: He’s become kinder and less rigid, paradoxical as it may sound. When he was young, he could break off relationships abruptly. Now, he’s more understanding, he doesn’t judge. Some things make him smile wryly — but without judgment.

Valery: He used to have moments where he was very categorical in his judgments. He’d listen, understand, agree, but still stick to his opinion. Now, he’s grown more tolerant. He’s developed [an open-mindedness]; he’s matured and become more resilient.

On people’s support

We were in Smolensk; the court was hearing an appeal on an administrative case for failing to fulfill the so-called duties of a “foreign agent.” And the [train] arrives just on the dot, so we had to take a taxi and rush into the building. When we got there, a journalist who’d arrived earlier called us and said, “They changed the courtroom because there are a lot of people.” And when we walked in, we saw a full hall — Smolensk residents of all ages. […]

And then these people came up to us — there were these guys, a very young man, a student, young women, and a local lawyer. They said, “Come with us, we’ll show you where you can sit, have coffee, eat, and warm up.” It was so touching. Then a charming woman, about our age, maybe a bit younger, came up to us. She said, “I live nearby too, you can always rely on me.” I’ve met a lot of people who say things like, “Hold on, everything will be fine, this will all end.” But no one has ever called my son a traitor or whispered it behind my back.

On the future

During our last visit, which lasted three days and was the first in two years, we could hug and talk about anything. We talked a lot. He said: “What can you do? It’s a marathon.” I told him, “Ilya, I might not make it to the end.” He said: “You’ll make it. I have no doubt.”

Source: “‘He chose this path, and we’re walking it with him’: The parents of imprisoned Russian opposition politician Ilya Yashin on coping with their son’s incarceration,” Meduza, 19 June 2024