A pianist, a shaman, a pacifist: faces of suffering in Putin’s prisons

Russia locks up its best.

A brilliant concert pianist, an outspoken crane operator, a poet, a historian, a self-proclaimed shaman and hundreds of bloggers, retirees, activists and journalists have been jailed for challenging President Vladimir Putin’s regime.

Some have died in prison in murky circumstances, including opposition leader Alexeï Navalny. Some are seriously ill and denied medical care. Some were tortured or raped. Dozens of people have suffered forced psychiatric incarceration reminiscent of Soviet times.

A prisoner exchange in August freed a number of Russia’s most prominent political prisoners, but more than 1,300 remain in detention, according to Mariana Katzarova, the U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in Russia. A similar exchange is unlikely in the future, with Western pressure largely focused on foreign prisoners.

A September 24 United Nations report said Russians were being sentenced to “incredibly long sentences for absurd reasons” – such as reading a poem, saying a prayer, producing a play or posting on social media. “The country is now run by a state-sponsored system of fear and punishment, including the use of torture with impunity,” Katzarova said.

This punitive approach to political prisoners, including intimidation and prolonged isolation, appears designed to break them down and deter others from even the slightest expression, activists say.

Vladimir Kara-Murza, an opposition leader and Washington Post columnist who was released in the August swap, said at a Sept. 23 rally of the Global Magnitsky Justice Campaign in London to celebrate his liberation: “I wake up every morning and every night. I think of all those who are still left behind. For many of them, this is not only an unjust imprisonment, although that in itself would be unacceptable, but also a matter of life and death.”

The situation is only getting worse, said Olga Romanova, founder of the prisoners’ rights group Russia Behind Bars, noting that prison officials responsible for Navalny’s death have been promoted. “It’s a different reality now. Just torture political prisoners and everything will be fine,” Romanova said.

Romanova praised those who refuse to remain silent in the face of their government’s repression. “These are people who have a strong sense of justice,” she added. “These are people who do not fit into society. We all remember the time when we were teenagers and we had this fire, a kind of madness within ourselves.

The pianist

The case of Pavel Kushnir, a young concert pianist who died in detention while on hunger strike, received particular attention. The solo pianist of the Birobidzhan Symphony Orchestra in eastern Russia was imprisoned after posting a 50-second video titled “Life” on January 5 on his YouTube channel, which had only five subscribers.

“Life is something that can never exist under fascism. Freedom, creativity, love, sincerity, truth, tragic beauty of the human face,” he said in the video. “Down with the war in Ukraine, down with Putin’s fascist regime. Freedom for all political prisoners!

Kushnir was arrested in May and charged with inciting terrorism. He went on a hunger strike in prison and died at the end of July. Many only discovered his talent after his death. Eleven people attended his funeral in August, including no family members.

Grace Chatto, British cellist with the band Clean Bandit, studied at the Moscow Conservatory with Kushnir in 2004 and called him “an incredibly special person and an incredibly special musician.” She lived in the student dormitory, where she listened to Kushnir and other brilliant pianists give impromptu concerts in their fourth-floor room until dawn.

“He played with such a passionate and unusual style, with so much rubato,” she said, referring to a nuanced and expressive technique. “He played all of Shostakovich’s preludes. And… there are only a handful of people in the world who can do this from memory.

“And it’s so heartbreaking that people now only hear his performances in a broader sense across the world.”

Kushnir recalled those student years in an interview with Birobidzhan state television in January last year. In it, he states that “real art can take place in a dormitory.”

“At five o’clock in the morning, in the presence of two tramps from Sadovaya, in a room full of drunken bodies, one can brilliantly play Debussy’s preludes on a keyboard doused in alcohol and set on fire, and see the tears in the eyes of the tramps. »

The son of music teachers, he began playing at the age of 2. Olga Shkrygunova, a Berlin-based Russian pianist who had known him since early childhood, said he had avoided the possibility of a big career because of his artistic integrity and his aversion to miserly ambition.

“Pacha was a genius,” she said, using his nickname. “He was unique. He was a very morally strong person. He was never afraid of anything. »

The shaman

For two years, Alexander Gabyshev, a self-described “warrior shaman” from the Republic of Sakha in Russia’s Far East, attempted to travel thousands of miles across the country to Moscow, gaining a following in line.

His plan was to carry out a burning ceremony in Red Square which he believed would result in Putin’s resignation.

But he was intercepted by several dozen masked special police officers near Lake Baikal, in the Republic of Buryatia, and in 2021 he was forcibly committed to a psychiatric institution, after doctors reported that he was suffering from ” delusional ideas of reform.”

His lawyer, Alexei Pryanishnikov, said his client had been subjected to “punitive psychiatry” and described how Gabyshev had begged during his trial to be sent to prison rather than return to a secure psychiatric facility.

At one point, he was so drugged that he passed out during a court hearing, Pryanishnikov told independent Russian media outlet Bereg.

The activist crane operator

Rafael Shepelev was also committed to a psychiatric institution for having ideas of reform. The longtime Yekaterinburg activist, crane operator and vegan had previously been arrested and imprisoned for protesting and was featured in the documentary film “The Last Relic.” He fled to Tbilisi, Georgia, in 2021 but, according to activists, was lured to a Russian military base in October, before being arrested and charged with terrorism.

In April, a commission at the Sverdlovsk Regional Clinical Psychiatric Hospital said he suffered from chronic psychiatric disorders and did not understand the “social danger of his actions.” He was confined indefinitely in a secure psychiatric facility in the Sverdlovsk region.

Daniil Shepelev, his son, told Bereg that “if he talks about the opposition, something is injected into him” that makes him lazy. Now his father no longer discusses his opinions for fear of being drugged, the son said.

Citing court records, Bereg cited at least 86 similar political cases.

“Raphael is a very honest, open and sincere person,” an activist friend from Yekaterinburg said in a telephone interview, speaking on condition of anonymity for security reasons. “I’ve never met anyone like him. He always tried to talk to people, to educate them. He wanted people to know the situation in the country.

The pacifist

Alexander Demidenko “always wanted to perform heroic deeds,” according to his son Oleg, who lives in the Czech Republic. “Such stubbornness, high self-esteem and self-confidence helped my father do everything he did.”

Demidenko, a trained rocket engineer who lived in the Belgorod region bordering Ukraine, was a committed pacifist and worked as a geography teacher and textbook salesman. He helped about 1,000 Ukrainians stranded in Russia return home after Putin invaded their country in February 2022, according to a volunteer who worked with him.

“He believed in the law. He believed in good and evil,” said the volunteer, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid persecution by Russian authorities. “But we always felt like something bad was going to happen to him. He argued with the administration to try to improve conditions for refugees at the border.

Demidenko was arrested last year and tortured by the Akhmat special forces, a Chechen unit operating in the region, the volunteer said. He was accused of possessing an old hand grenade, but later learned he also faced treason charges. In April, authorities announced that he had committed suicide.

His son doubts it was suicide. There were scratches on his father’s face, a bruise near the ear and the body was not autopsied, Oleg said.

A Russian human rights project, Faces, has highlighted 16 other urgent cases – such as that of historian Yury Dmitriev, of the banned rights group Memorial, who was jailed for 15 years on abuse charges of children whom Faces describes as fabricated after having denounced. the mass graves of the victims of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin; and Artyom Kamardin, a poet and mechanical engineer, who was arrested for reading an anti-war poem and, according to the group, brutally raped by law enforcement.

“You can’t name all the names,” Kara-Murza explained, “because it would take a whole day.”