"If you don't admit what you've done, your child is going to an orphanage"
To break her will, a Russian political activist is deprived of her disabled son.
By Nina Nazarova.
Natalya Filonova has lived the darkest nightmare of every parent. In September 2022, the 60-year-old was arrested in the province of Buryatia in Russia’s Far East during a demonstration against the military draft – Putin had just announced a ‘partial mobilisation’ for the war on Ukraine. Filonova was subsequently convicted of ‘using violence against officers of the police’ – and her adopted son was sent off to an orphanage.
"They said we had organised an illegal rally. But it wasn’t a rally, in fact: it was an open microphone. We were exercising our constitutional right to express our opinion," Filonova explains. She was detained while speaking live on a YouTube broadcast and issued with a protocol for a civil offence.
During the arrest, she offered resistance. At the hearing that followed, there was a sudden bomb alert at the courthouse, and Filonova was separated from her defence counsel and bundled into a car. Trying to struggle free, she scratched a police officer. A criminal case was opened.
This time, the arresting officers came to the school where she helped support her son Vova by working as a tutor. The prosecution case alleges that this was the moment when she broke the finger of one of the policemen. She was therefore charged with ‘using violence threatening to life or health’, a crime punishable with a term of up to 10 years behind bars.
The pensioner herself insists on her innocence. "The infliction of bodily harm, especially serious injury, to four police officers by an old lady is just physically impossible. It’s laughable, frankly," she says.
"Wearing my electronic bracelet, I set off down the highway to search for my child"
Vova was a year old when Filonova took him into her care. She also has adult children of her own, along with grandchildren.
“His mother died - she was my friend - so I took him in,” she says about Vova. The young man is now aged 19. She does not hide that Vova has a disability and has experienced delays to his development.
“He only started walking at age three. He had a very serious disease and had to go through open-heart surgery twice, along with lots of other secondary operations,” she says. The powers that be, she says, were perfectly aware of Vova’s difficulties.
At first, when she was put under house arrest, Filonova sent Vova away from the capital of Buryatia, Ulan-Ude, to her husband, who lived in a village in Zabaykalsky Krai. So as to be safe and for the boy’s peace of mind. There had been hope during the investigation that she could prove the charges of violence false.
Within a matter of weeks, Filonova’s husband suffered a heart attack and was rushed to hospital. Left to himself, Vova stopped answering his phone.
“The child went off the radar. What could I do? I started calling the prosecutor’s office, saying the child was missing. I asked them to let me go pick him up and bring him back to Ulan-Ude from the village. They mocked me, saying ‘Let’s first make sure your husband really had a heart attack!’” she recalls.
“Instead of helping at all, they just disappeared, but forbade me from doing anything myself. What was I supposed to do? Wearing the electronic bracelet, I went out onto the highway, and hitchhiked for five hours from Ulan-Ude to the village to look for the child. I arrived late at night and searched for him all over. I found him, we lit the stove, spent the night there, and in the morning went back to Ulan-Ude,” she says.
The authorities were already waiting for her when she returned.
Filonova was locked in a pre-trial detention centre since her trip to rescue her son had broken the terms of her house arrest. Some friends helped Vova get back to the village where her husband was back at home and become his de facto adoptive father.
Although Natalya was Vova’s legal guardian, her husband had frequently stepped in over the years, and nobody had objected. But in January 2023, law enforcement officers showed up unexpectedly at a hospital where Vova was undergoing routine therapy. He was taken away and put in a shelter for abandoned children.
Until that day, Vova had never been separated from his adoptive parents. Filonova had secured the tutoring job at the special needs school in Ulan-Ude simply to be with him.
“They knew the only way to truly hurt me was through my child,” Filonova says. “The investigator told me straight up: if you don’t sign and confess to what you’ve done, your child is going to an orphanage.”
“I didn’t abandon my child; I showed him that silence is not an option, that you have to defend human dignity, that you have to fight - not just go with the flow.”
The “Against All Odds" Newspaper
Natalya Filonova worked as a kindergarten teacher for 16 years, but during the Gorbachev years of perestroika and glasnost decided to become an activist and journalist.
“In the moment when the country started to collapse, everything inside me suddenly turned upside down too. I hurried to do what I could. My hope was that if we didn’t stay silent, if we could avoid mass repressions and keep things to isolated cases, then we might still have hopes for the future,” she says.
She wrote her first piece for the local newspaper in 1991, the year the USSR collapsed. But it wasn’t long before Soviet-style controls were creeping back into the media.
“In 2003, the city mayor gathered the editorial team and told us, ‘If you want to stay in the same boat with us, don’t even think about rocking it!’” Filonova objected, saying media law should be honoured and that information policy should be transparent.
In the end, she chose to publish a newspaper of her own. She called it ‘Against All Odds’, and it had a circulation of 999 copies – the maximum permissible before one needed to register with the state. She worked all hours to fund her paper, including as a nightwatchman, a stoker and a cleaner.
Against All Odds focused on social issues. One article, Filonova recalls, was written by a doctor who worked in a home for children with disabilities. “She wrote that instead of helping children escape the system, they were labelling normal children who had simply been neglected educationally as disabled in order to tap into state allocated funding.”
“I believe [publishing the newspaper] was my life’s work. It’s something I look back on with nostalgia,” the pensioner says. “The authorities began to fight against me. First, they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they start to crush you. It’s a drawn out process.”
She casually mentions during an interview that her house, where she worked on the newspaper, was set on fire three times. On another occasion, someone tried to run her down with a car while she was out cycling with her child.
Filonova kept the newspaper going till 2015, when she decided to move from her village to the city of Ulan-Ude – schools and healthcare were better for Vova in the regional capital. Her husband stayed behind to look after their smallholding in the countryside.
All the while, she kept up her protests. She held solo pickets against changes to the constitution, in memory of murdered opposition politician Boris Nemtsov, and joined rallies to support Alexei Navalny.
“There’s a saying: if you’re afraid of wolves, don’t go into the forest. According to the constitution, I have a right to speak up. I have the right to express myself. Who can forbid me? If we don’t resist, we’ll end up with no rights at all,” she says.
Nearly always, the pensioner got a fine for repeatedly breaking the rules on protests. In 2021, a civil case was launched for allegedly disobeying the order of a police officer. And in April 2022, just after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, she was fined 35,000 rubles for ‘discrediting the army’: she had asked the driver of a bus to remove the ‘Z’ symbol (representing support for Russia’s ‘special military operation’) from his vehicle, and in response the man had ejected all the other passengers and ferried Filonova directly to the nearest police station.
“My child was kicked off the bus too,” she says. And while nobody spoke up, there was a certain silent support, she feels. “Complete strangers who were also on the bus walked him all the way home, even though it was quite far. They made sure he got back indoors and that everything was okay. That kind of quiet, hidden support.”
Filonova says there were numerous issues with the criminal case against her for allegedly assaulting police officers in 2022, and she attempted to challenge them in court.
The authorities claimed her civil defence, Nadezhda Nizovkina, lacked official attorney status, and therefore could not represent her – though no such requirement exists under Russian criminal procedure. They then designated Nizovkina a witness in the same case, because she had been among those at the YouTube-streamed demonstration at which Filonova was detained.
“A mother showed her child that you must not stay silent. That human dignity must be defended”
The police that came to Vova’s rehab centre in January drove him more than 500 kilometres from the village to the ‘Star’ orphanage in another part of the province.
Filonova managed to speak with her son by phone on just one occasion. The rest of the time she wrote him letters. “I tried to support him while encouraging him to see that people are the same everywhere, and he might try to be more tolerant,” she remembers. “Perhaps he saw it as being told off again,” she says, tears coming to her eyes.
Vova asked the orphanage director if he could go to his mother’s court hearing and see her. He recorded the conversation on his phone, and later Nadezhda Nizovkina published it.
“What was your mother thinking? Before doing something like that, she should’ve realised she’d hurt you, not herself,” a man’s voice says. “Right, so she thought that just because you’re a disabled kid, she wouldn’t go to jail? Shit, if someone breaks the law, they go to jail. That’s how a state with the rule-of-law works. Pissing against the wind – why would you even do that?”
A journalist visited Filonova in the remand centre, as part of the work of a local council monitoring commission.
“She said: ‘What kind of mother are you? You knew perfectly well how this would end, and you still went out there on that square to speak out,’” recalls Filonova. “And I said: You’re looking at this from the wrong angle. We should be asking why the authorities took a child away from someone for expressing her opinion. Instead of blaming the mother.
“I didn’t abandon my child; I showed him that silence is not an option, that you have to defend human dignity, that you have to fight - not just go with the flow.”
Filonova tried to contact the director of the ‘Star’ orphanage. “I even tried calling him, pleading, I wrote letters to him personally. But he never answered. Only the carers did.”
So she began corresponding with them, hoping to learn about how Vova was doing. She says Vova still remembers them fondly. “Vova tells me, ‘Mummy, I want to go back there and visit, I want to see the carers again.’ And I told him, ‘Of course we’ll go. Why not? Of course we’ll go and see them.’”
Vova was to spend a year and a half at the home. In June 2024, he ended ninth grade and became legally an adult. He was brought back to Filonova’s husband in the village, she says, emphasising again the arbitrary nature of Vova’s removal in the first place, 18 months previously.
"On what grounds are you turning us into cattle?"
In August 2023, Natalya Filonova was sentenced to two years and ten months in prison. She was placed on arrival at the correctional colony under two special categories: one for allegedly being prone to attacking government officials, and another for her supposed extremist views.
“Why was I persecuted? Not because they hated me on a personal level, but because they had been granted a green light for their actions. I could feel it and I understood it.”
Filonova was put in solitary confinement three times. “What astonished me was how they banned absolutely anything for any reason they liked. If you were drinking tea together and talking about the weather, your children, TV shows, or books—that was considered an ‘unauthorised association’ and therefore forbidden.”
“On what grounds are you turning us into cattle, stripping us of our human dignity?” she once asked a prison warden. “They said I had used ‘foul language’ and put me in solitary. I tried to appeal it: I said ‘cattle’ is a literary metaphor.”
The absurdity was far-reaching. Filonova was banned from using the prison library because she had quoted out loud Alexander Pushkin’s ‘In the depths of the Siberian mines’ and the poet Odoevsky’s response.
The prison administration had set the goal of keeping her isolated, she believes, so her initial spell of general regime was swapped for ‘strict conditions’, and then ‘solitary confinement with harsh conditions’ – a more severe punishment still. At this point, she declared a hunger strike. Filonova has diabetes and her health quickly deteriorated.
She was given the option to write to President Putin and ask for clemency. She refused. Was it hard to resist the offer? “It was easy. Very easy, ” she says. “I don’t believe in such so-called humanitarian gestures. Besides, it’s an unspoken deal: you walk free but in return you drop all claims on the state. But I have claims. And I intend to pursue them as long as I’m able.”
For Filonova, as for other political prisoners, letters were her lifeline. Often, letters from friends and strangers were delayed for as long as half a year – and she had to go through the prosecutor’s office to receive them.
“I can be proud of one thing: I received a personal letter from Yury Shevchuk, with a postcard signed by all the members of DDT,” she says with a smile. DDT is one of Russia’s most loved and long-lived rock groups, and Shevchuk is its sometimes outspoken front man.
“I was so thrilled. I wrote back, a long emotional letter of four or five pages. Whether it reached him, I don’t know. But I poured my heart into it, and told him all about my adventures.”
“What’s the result of tearing away a child who was always by my side? I still haven’t fully understood”
On March 4 this year, Natalya Filonova was freed from prison and came back home to her husband, to Vova, and to the rural quiet of their village. Her sister also lives close by.
Before her release, shortly after refusing to petition Putin, their smallholding was torched for a fourth time.
“I came back to ruins, basically. My older children helped rebuild the fence and patch the roof on the burned buildings, but there's still so much left to do,” she says. “So much.”
Vova celebrated three birthdays without his mother.
“Of course, he has his own take on everything that’s happened. But he was very happy when I came home, he had been waiting for me, and he hoped things would sort themselves out,” Filonova says.
The consequences of their enforced separation are hard to measure. “What’s the result of tearing away a child who was always by my side? I still haven’t fully understood,” she says. “I can see it in the way he behaves, in his vocabulary... but he’s a kind boy, a good one. I have nothing bad to say about him.”
In the past three years, 22 boys from the ‘Star’ orphanage where Vova spent nearly 18 months were despatched to the war in Ukraine. Five of them are dead. One was only nineteen.
“My Vova knew the boy in question,” Filonova says. “I showed a photo of him and asked:
“Do you remember who this one is?”
“Yes, mummy. I remember. That’s Fedya.”
I said to him: “Fedya’s gone now.”
And he cried.
Read this story in Russian here.
English version edited by Chris Booth.
Brave woman against a cruel state.