From the Moscow Conservatoire to death in a prison cell in Russia’s Far East

Pianist Pavel Kushnir’s fatal hunger strike went unnoticed as the West exchanged prisoners with the Kremlin.

By Elizaveta Fokht.

Pavel Kushnir was a talented classical pianist. ©Okno Group

Fourteen time zones away from Washington, in a remote jail in Russia’s Far East, as preparations were finalised for a fanfare announcement of the biggest exchange of prisoners with Moscow since the Cold War, the classical pianist Pavel Kushnir died in silence.

The musician had spoken out repeatedly against the invasion of Ukraine and was eventually arrested in May and remanded at a pre-trial detention centre in Birobidzhan.

Behind bars, Kushnir began the ‘dry’ hunger strike – neither food nor water - which took his life on Sunday, 28 July, a few days before the group of better known dissidents were flown out of the country. They were swapped for Kremlin spies, sleepers and killers imprisoned in the west.

Kushnir was 39 when he died, slowly, and without publicity.

"We couldn't chip in and send him a lawyer - we didn't know,” said Svetlana Kaverzina, an independent politician in Siberia. “We didn't write him letters of support - we didn't know. We didn't talk him out of sacrificing himself - we didn't know. He was alone," she wrote on Telegram.

The pianist was cremated on Thursday. Eleven people were in attendance.

Pavel Kushnir plays Rachmaninov’s Prelude in C-sharp minor, Op. 3 No. 2 at a festival in his home town of Tambov in 2010. Source: his late father Mikhail Kushnir’s YouTube channel.

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"Fascism is the death of our Motherland" 

The YouTube channel where Pavel Kushnir published his anti-war videos only had five subscribers when he was arrested. He only managed to post four recordings: "Greetings, anti-fascist diaspora of fascist Russia!" was how he introduced them.

‘Foreign Agent Mulder’, the name of the channel, adopted a pseudonym from ‘The X-Files’ television series while punning on Russia’s ‘foreign agent’ law against those Moscow doesn’t like and who allegedly receive overseas support. In one clip, Kushnir appears with a hand drawn ID badge of a US agent.

Slender, with dishevelled brown hair, dressed in a black cardigan, and wrapped in a garland of Christmas lights, Kushnir recorded the videos against a white wall with a photo of the American actress Jean Seberg hanging in the background. The recordings are grainy, low quality: as if filmed on a very old phone.

The prompt for starting the YouTube channel was apparently the adoption of a law completely banning LGBT ‘propaganda’ in Russia. In the first video, Kushnir links the legislation to the war in Ukraine, and quotes off camera from the Bible to suggest that Jesus would not have worried about ‘traditional, normal sexual orientation’ because ‘Christ is not with the oppressors, but with the oppressed.’

In his videos, ‘Foreign Agent Mulder’ calls the Russian authorities ‘fascists’, ‘scum in uniforms, suits and tracksuits’, ‘desperate chimpanzees’ seeking to ‘turn people into insects’, who ‘kill with impunity and endlessly’ and ‘destroy the beauty of the human face so that there can be no freedom of communication, but only lies that follow their rules’.

The final recording takes the form of free verse and addresses the massacre of civilians by Russian troops in Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv, in 2022.

“Fascism is the death of our Motherland. Putin is a fascist,” Kushnir says, calling for resistance to the war and the Kremlin regime. "Freedom for all political prisoners! Freedom in general for all prisoners, and in general—freedom for everyone!" 

The videos refer to the scriptures, the philosophy of Plato, and the lyrics of the late Nirvana frontman, Kurt Cobain, as well as George Orwell’s 1984 –the year Kushnir was born.

While Kushnir’s YouTube channel had single-figure subscribers in his lifetime, the most popular of his four clips has now been viewed more than 18,000 times.

‘Foreign Agent Mulder’ published his last video in January. A few months later, a Telegram channel close to the secret services called Operational Reports posted the following: “An attempt by a resident of Birobidzhan, Pavel Kushnir, born in 1984, to set himself up as an opposition blogger has ended in a criminal case.”

The post described him as "formerly an active participant in protest actions and currently an opponent of the Special Military Operation” – the name the Kremlin gives to the invasion and war. It claimed Kushnir "regularly published materials in which he called for the violent overthrow of the constitutional order of the Russian Federation through revolution”.

The Operational Reports post included a video showing masked men leading Kushnir into a white minivan, and featuring his ‘Foreign Agent Mulder’ badge. The author stated that the case against Kushnir concerned a public call to engage in terrorist activity, punishable by up to seven years in jail.

The author of the post made no mention of the fact that Kushnir was a well-known figure in Birobidzhan, or that a year and a half earlier the pianist had been appointed soloist at the city philharmonic orchestra.

Nothing more was heard of Kushnir from that moment on. Until this month, when an article appeared, in which the human rights activist Olga Romanova and the pianist’s friend Olga Shkrygunova reported his death in pre-trial detention following the ‘dry’ hunger strike. His 79-year-old mother, Irina Levina, who lives in Tambov, later confirmed her son had passed away on Sunday, July 28^th.

The exact circumstances of Pavel Kushnir’s death in detention in the Birobidzhan prison are as yet unclear. But it has emerged that the musician engaged in hunger strikes and other forms of protest before, as a means of expressing his opposition to Russia’s war in Ukraine.

"Calm, deep, confident, detached, suffering" 

Pavel Kushnir was born in Tambov, central Russia, about 400 kms southeast of Moscow. His father was the pianist and educator, Mikhail Kushnir. Pavel’s childhood friend, Olga Shkrygunova, told the BBC that his father had “developed a system for cultivating perfect pitch, and in this sense, Pasha was his student”. [‘Pasha’ is the affectionate form of the name Pavel in Russian – BBC.]

Their relationship remained close until Mikhail Kushnir’s death in 2020. The latter’s YouTube channel features a recital by his son of Sergei Rachmaninov’s 24 Preludes, recorded at a festival in the composer’s honour in Tambov in 2010.

Kushnir repeated in numerous interviews that music had always been a part of his life. He started playing piano at the age of two, guided by his parents. His mother, Irina, was also a music school teacher.

Kushnir spoke about his studies on a local TV station. ©YOUTUBE/@SLAVINCTC

Speaking to Birobidzhan’s ‘Autoradio’ station, Kushnir said he had realised as a teenager that “the content of art is connected to values” he had chosen to follow and to which he intended to “dedicate his life”. Of these values, he said, freedom was the most important.

According to Shkrygunova, who knew him since he was five years old, Kushnir had from an early age "lived, spoke, and acted differently from what other people were used to”.

"He never compromised. He always came up with something unusual, and in all things, he had to go all the way. This meant going beyond the bounds of the ordinary."

Shkrygunova recalls a concert that 17-year-old Kushnir gave when they were studying together at the Tambov Music School. He played the entire cycle of 24 preludes and fugues by composer Dmitri Shostakovich - a performance that takes around two and a half hours. "In the whole world, you can count on one hand the number of people who are capable of this," she said.

Later that year, Kushnir was admitted to the Moscow Conservatoire as a student of renowned pianist Viktor Merzhanov. In an interview in January last year, shown on state TV in Birobidzhan, Kushnir spoke about his studies: "It was a journey of communication, observing brilliant people. Immersing oneself in how people solve the challenges of art."

The interviewer was taken aback by Kushnir’s frank description of his first year at the conservatoire:

"True creativity can happen in a dorm room. At five in the morning, in the company of two homeless guys, amid a room filled with drunken bodies, you can perform a Debussy prelude brilliantly on a keyboard soaked in strong alcohol and set on fire, and watch as tears stream from the eyes of the homeless men."

A classmate of Kushnir, Julia Wertman, recalls the musician’s stamina: "Pasha could go without sleep, food, and even life itself, and still play absolutely stunningly," she remembers.

He cultivated a “dissident image”, she says, often wearing a shabby coat, with a half-litre bottle sticking out of a pocket for show. Beneath the coat, the young Kushnir always wore black—a habit he seems to have maintained, judging by his interviews and concert recordings.

Shkrygunova describes Kushnir as a "loner," though he was never short of friends. "The people he encountered were left with a vivid and positive impression which lasted a lifetime."

An interview with Kushnir from 2005 can still be found on the conservatoire's student newspaper website. Aged 21, in his third year of studies, Kushnir describes his idea of the "perfect pianist": "Calm, deep, confident, detached, suffering."

He was also asked what composition he would never perform under any circumstances. His answer: "The Russian national anthem."

Fifteen years on, he said his ideal artist was a “punk rock star” – naming Kurt Cobain, Ian Curtis of Joy Division, and Janis Joplin, among others.

Kushnir performing in Kurgan in 2020. ©YOUTUBE/@USER-YU7BX3EF1C

Olga Shkrygunova explains his decision not to stay in Moscow after graduation: "When it comes to academic music as a business, you have to be flexible. You have to make compromises. To be nice, open, pleasant, and, most importantly, to conform. Then you’ll be invited to the next festival. Moscow isn’t a place where you can speak the truth and achieve something, especially without connections. And that wasn’t Pasha."

First he moved to Yekaterinburg, then worked at the philharmonic the city of Kursk in southern Russia, before three years in Kurgan and eventually the decision to move to Birobidzhan in 2022.

"The world of Moscow, the world of success, was not for him. He did what he could. It was easier for him to go to these small towns to play the programmes he wanted, instead of bowing to somebody else,”  Shkrygunova says.

“If I’m not imprisoned, drafted into the army, or fired...”

Pavel Kushnir involved himself in arts other than music, especially literature. The publisher and journalist Dmitry Volchek shared on social media that Kushnir had contacted him while he was working as a soloist in Kursk to "try his hand at literary translation from English to Russian". Volchek said he had not replied.

In 2014, a publishing house in Düsseldorf released Kushnir's anti-war dystopian novel ‘Russian Slices’. The book is difficult to summarise, but consists of several parts: the author’s diaries, a collage of 14 novels about World War II, and a retelling of Goethe’s Faust from the perspective of one of its characters, Margarete.

"A significant part of the novel is his diary, running backwards, as if retreating from the shocking events of 2014, which he compares to the arrival of a giant pig," wrote publisher Volchek after the pianist's death. 2014 was the year in which Russia annexed Crimea.

The novel includes the following lines: “Anschluss... Invasion... Russia has severed Crimea... On this f**** historic day, the trumpets farted in a more warlike way, the trombones sounded even more patriotic, and even the French horns botched notes in praise of Putin - and not just as they usually did on ordinary, non-historic days."

Kushnir had earlier taken part in the 2012 anti-Kremlin demonstrations in Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square, according to the online publication ‘Okno’. In 2018, he protested in Pushkin Square in the capital, bearing a sign that read "End the war, freedom for Russia."

Friends of Kushnir told Okno that his relationship with his mother and brother deteriorated thanks to his opposition to the war: they were supportive of it.

"I tried to influence Pavel, but I couldn't,” his mother told Okno after his death. “I certainly wanted him to conduct himself in a quieter way... I wanted him to stay out of politics altogether. Because in my opinion, people should only focus on matters that concern them."

In the interview, Kushnir’s mother added that she believed "Ukraine posed a huge danger to Russia," but that her son Pavel “could not understand this”.

"My older son and I tried to reason with him, sometimes almost coming to blows with him about it,” she said. “But in the end, we just didn’t talk much anymore. In recent years, he started to distance himself from us, because our views didn’t align with his."

Kushnir told the interviewer from Autoradio in Birobidzhan that music was the only work that he had been paid for. In 2022, he lost his job at the Kurgan Philharmonic. His friend Olga Shkrygunova says she is unsure of the exact reason for his dismissal but speculated that it might have been hard for him to function in any state institution: "This was a cog that didn’t fit any machine; and it had been that way since his childhood."

Money was running out, and the offer to be a soloist with the Birobidzhan Philharmonic was a significant event for Kushnir—so much so that he even remembered the exact date and time when the orchestra director called him: ten in the morning on 27 June. By then, he had been out of work for four months. "Thanks to this, I remained in the profession," he admitted in the interview.

Pavel hoped (his friends recall) that moving to a distant city like Birobidzhan would mean he might not be forced to perform in concerts marking 9 May – Victory Day in Russia – against the backdrop of war in Ukraine.

As a graduate of the Moscow Conservatoire, he was welcomed with fanfare to the provincial city. His concerts and lectures were often featured in the local media and the state television channel, ‘Bira’.

In one interview, he told viewers "I was offered another audition, but I cancelled it—I decided to take a risk and stay here, perhaps to work for about 12 years. If I’m not imprisoned, drafted into the army, or fired, then I hope to spend the next 12 years with you."

During the time he planned to stay in Birobidzhan, he had in mind to put together 50 concert programmes. He frequently joked about arrest or being conscripted – a surprising irony for his audience, but not for his friends, who knew he was still actively protesting against the war in Ukraine.

“What can we do? We can conquer ourselves!”

When not performing at concerts, Pavel Kushnir spent his free time distributing leaflets and posters in the city to protest against the war. He began right at the start of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and wrote of his work with his friends—Olga Shkrygunova still has messages Pavel sent her via email.

"Today, I handed out leaflets with this text: 'Dnipro—45 lives—45 beautiful and strong people—killed by one of our rockets—Russian—the country of Yuri Gagarin and Andrei Rublev: are we now fascists, or not yet?”

Kushnir was referring to the January 2023 Russian missile attack that destroyed a residential building in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro. The leaflets demanded of the reader:  “Indifferent? Or not? If not – resist!”

In another email, Kushnir described sticking A4 posters around Birobidzhan at night with the message “FUCK THE DRAFT!” in English, decorated with pacifist symbols. In a different letter he told his friend he had put up the pieces of a large poster in the centre of the city, with the slogan “PUTIN IS A FASCIST”.

Shkrygunova says Kushnir was a rational person and knew the danger he was putting himself in. After the war began, she tried to convince him to leave Russia—at least for a concert in Berlin, where she herself now lives. But they never managed to sort out the trip.

Kushnir was not only posting leaflets. He was also staging hunger strikes. The first, lasting 20 days, took place in the spring of last year. He told many friends about it, including Olga Shkrygunova.

"It was his solitary protest—an act by someone who didn't know what else he could do,” his fellow pianist explains. “In one of his letters, he wrote to me, 'What can we do? We can conquer ourselves!' That was the meaning behind it."

Kushnir staged a second hunger strike later that year, this time lasting three months. Shkrygunova learned about it from a handwritten letter he sent from Birobidzhan to Berlin in March this year. He included the draft of another novel, Noël. Its subject was the German terrorist organisation, the Red Army Faction, and he said it used words from 67 languages and quotations from 117 works by “authors of all times and peoples”.

"I jokingly replied, 'If you die, I will definitely publish it,'" she recalls - and she intends to keep that promise. In late March, they spoke on the phone. Kushnir said he was "feeling fine" and had "come out of the hunger strike," but mentioned that he "felt like he was being watched and kept seeing the same person".

"He reacted in his usual manner—'Whatever happens, happens: I'm doing this for a reason.'

He was ready for the possibility that he would be arrested," Shkrygunova says. It was to be their last conversation.

The last photograph of Kushnir to be published by the Birobidzhan Philharmonic, included in a post on its website in April.

In mid-April, the Birobidzhan Philharmonic’s website published a final news piece mentioning Kushnir, concerning a lecture on the history of Russian music that he helped organise. The soloist’s fellow musicians at the Philharmonic did not respond to the BBC’s requests for comment.

At the end of May, the video of his arrest appeared on social media, but his friends found out about Kushnir’s prosecution only after his death.

What happened to Pavel Kushnir in pre-trial detention remains unclear. The Birobidzhan City Court's records contain no information about a criminal case. On 20 June, an administrative protocol was submitted to the court, accusing Kushnir of ‘petty hooliganism’. This article of the criminal code is often used for the tactic of what is known as ‘administrative roundabout’ – in which people are detained on civil charges for an infraction like ‘using obscene language’ to allow time for criminal cases to be worked up. In the meantime, the suspects are sent to pre-trial detention.

But Kushnir was charged under a different part of the article - distribution of "information showing clear disrespect for society and the state". This ought to end only in a fine, rather than a custodial sentence.

It is not known which law enforcement agency drafted the protocol against him; and Kushnir was by then probably already in pre-trial detention on the criminal charges against him.

A month later, on 19 July, Kushnir was fined an unknown amount by the Birobidzhan Court. It is not clear if he attended the hearing. The court then sent him a copy of the verdict, but it was returned on 30 July, with a note stating it was “not possible to deliver”. By then, of course, Kushnir was already dead.  

“He knew he was going to go all the way – so it wouldn’t be a wasted effort”

The independent news site Mediazona spoke to someone who saw Kushnir shortly before he died. That person said the pianist began his hunger strike the day he was arrested.

Kushnir was described as "like a skeleton," and by mid-July, could barely walk and was "in very poor condition."

At that point, he was refusing both solid food and liquids—only occasionally moistening his mouth with water to speak.

"They say there had been intravenous drips, and they tried to support him somehow, but evidently it wasn't enough," said Kushnir's mother. She was recounting what she had been told by an investigating officer from the FSB, the successor agency to the KGB, which handles ‘terrorism’ cases.

The official cause of Kushnir's death was listed as "dilated cardiomyopathy and congestive heart failure." His mother said the family would not be requesting an independent autopsy.

Kushnir’s death became public knowledge only by chance. His family had not wanted to speak of it, but a friend discovered the news and shared them with his pianist friend from childhood, Olga Shkrygunova. She in turn informed Olga Romanova, the founder of the ‘Russia Doing Time’ NGO that supports prisoners. Romanova reported Kushnir’s story to the media.

Kushnir playing a street concert in Kurgan in 2020. ©YouTube

The BBC has asked the FSB and the Birobidzhan Court to comment. The head of the regional branch of Russia’s FSIN Federal Prison Service, Vasily Mikhaylenko, said he was not across Pavel Kushnir’s case.

“I haven’t heard of him. There are many such people, and knowing about each one isn’t part of my job description,” he said.

Kushnir's friends are now arranging the return of the musician’s remains to his home town of Tambov.

His mother, Irina, said her son had shown a “superficial” grasp of politics: "Which is why I am very sorry that he gave up his life, apparently, for nothing at all."

Kushnir’s friends disagree. “He knew that by expressing his uncompromising views on the war, Putin, and fascism, he was putting himself at risk,” says Olga Shkrygunova.

“He wrote to me: ‘It’s a shame I didn’t leave, and look after my creativity and freedom.’ He understood there might have been another way. But by the time he ahd realised it, there was no turning back. He knew he was going to go all the way – so it wouldn’t turn out to be a wasted effort.”

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Edited by Sergei Goryashko.

English translation and edit by Chris Booth.

Read this story in Russian here.