Lonely death of imprisoned anti-war Russian pianist

While the US and Russia were busy completing the largest prisoner exchange since the Cold War, a talented but little-known Russian pianist died quietly in prison.

Pavel Kushnir repeatedly protested the Russian invasion of Ukraine and went on a hunger strike shortly after his arrest in May. He later refused water.

He died slowly and unpublicized on July 28 — four days before a group of higher-profile dissidents were traded in for spies, dormant agents and Kremlin assassins imprisoned in the West.

After his lonely death in pre-trial detention in Birobidzhan in Russia’s Far East, the 39-year-old man was mourned by only 11 people at his cremation.

Svetlana Kaverzina, an independent politician in Siberia, said no one stopped him from sacrificing himself because they were not aware of what was happening.

“We couldn’t contribute and send him a lawyer — we didn’t know,” she wrote on the Telegram messaging app. “He was alone.”

The YouTube channel on which Kushnir posted four anti-war videos had only five subscribers when he was arrested.

His “Foreign Agent Mulder” posts were a reference to a character in the American TV series, The X Files, which was popular in Russia in the 1990s, as well as a Russian law that allows people deemed politically suspect to be declared “foreign agents.” In one clip, Kushnir even appears wearing a hand-drawn FBI badge.

His last film, released in January, was about the mass murder of civilians by Russian forces in Bucha, a suburb of Kiev, in 2022.

A few months later, Operational Reports, a Telegram channel closely tied to the intelligence agency, posted a video showing masked men escorting Kushnir into a white van.

It was also said that a criminal case had been opened, accusing him of making a public call for terrorist activities, which carries a maximum penalty of seven years in prison.

Nothing more was heard until August 2, when human rights activist Olga Romanova and the pianist’s girlfriend, Olga Shkrygunova, announced his death in an article published by the online news organization Vot Tak.

His 79-year-old mother, Irina Levina, later confirmed that her son had died.

Kushnir was born in Tambov, central Russia, where his father Mikhail was a pianist and teacher and his mother a music school teacher.

He began playing the piano at the age of two and at the age of 17 gave a remarkable two-and-a-half-hour concert of the 24 preludes and fugues of composer Dmitri Shostakovich.

Later that year he was admitted to the Moscow Conservatory, where classmate Julia Wertman says he cultivated a “dissident image,” often wearing a shabby jacket and black clothes, with a half-liter bottle of vodka in his pocket.

When asked in a 2005 interview which piece he would never perform, he replied, “The Russian national anthem.”

According to Shkrygunova, after graduating, Kushnir deliberately took jobs in smaller cities, believing that he would have more musical and personal freedom outside of Moscow.

He moved to Yekaterinburg, then to Kursk, and spent three years in Kurgan, a city east of the Ural Mountains, before losing his job at the philharmonic orchestra there in 2022.

Shkrygunova doesn’t know exactly why he was fired, but adds: “This was a cog that didn’t fit into any machine, and it had been like that since childhood.”

After four months without work, he became a soloist with the Birobidzhan Philharmonic. He told local television: “If I am not imprisoned, drafted or discharged, I hope to spend the next twelve years with you.”

Kushnir spent his free time protesting against the war.

In emails to friends, he described how he spent the night plastering posters all over Birobidzhan with slogans angrily condemning conscription and describing Vladimir Putin as a fascist.

He also began hunger strikes: first for twenty days in the spring of 2023, and later that year for three months.

Shkrygunova says Kushnir knew the danger he was exposing himself to.

“It was his lonely protest,” she says. “An act of someone who didn’t know what else to do.”

She tried to convince him to leave Russia, or at least perform in Berlin, where she now lives, but they were never able to arrange the trip.

Kushnir last spoke to Shkrygunova in late March, telling her he felt like he was being watched and that he “kept seeing the same person.”

“Whatever happens, happens: I do this for a reason,” he added.

The Birobidzhan District Court archives contain no information about a criminal case against him, although there is a record of a non-criminal case of “petty hooliganism” filed on June 20.

On July 19, Kushnir was fined an undisclosed amount, but it is unclear whether he attended the hearing.

The court subsequently sent him a copy of the judgment, but it was returned on July 30 with the note “not deliverable.”

By then, of course, Kushnir was already dead.

The independent news site Mediazona spoke to someone who saw him shortly before his death.

They described him as “like a skeleton”, barely able to walk by mid-July and in “very poor condition”.

The official cause of death was “dilated cardiomyopathy and congestive heart failure.”

The FSB and the Birobidzhan Court did not respond to the BBC’s request for comment. The regional head of Russia’s prison service, Vasily Mikhaylenko, told Mediazona he knew nothing about the case.

After Kushnir’s death, his mother told another independent news organization, Okno, that she had tried in vain to influence her son.

“I absolutely wanted him to behave more calmly and not get involved in politics at all.

“I feel very sorry that he gave his life, apparently for nothing.”

Shkrygunova disagrees. According to him, Kushnir knew all along that he was risking his life to express his anti-war views.

“He understood that there might have been another way,” Shkrygunova adds.

“But once he got it, there was no turning back. He knew he was going to go all the way so it wouldn’t be a waste of time.”

Since his death, Kushnir has attracted more attention than he ever received during his lifetime.

A book he wrote in 2014 was quickly republished in Germany.

Grace Chatto, a member of the Grammy-winning electronic music group Clean Bandit who studied with Kushnir at the Moscow Conservatory, wrote an emotional tribute on Instagram to her “gentle and funny” friend.

And 22 leading classical musicians, including Daniel Barenboim, Sir Simon Rattle and Martha Argerich, wrote an open letter to commemorate a “remarkable artist” they had never met.

Although Kushnir’s YouTube channel only had a few hundred subscribers during his lifetime, his most popular video has now been viewed more than 22,000 times.