“I’m not budging a millimetre from here.” The Russian opposition's last man standing
What you need to know about one of Russia’s leading opposition figures, Yevgeny Roizman.
By Elizaveta Fokht
Yevgeny Roizman, former mayor of Yekaterinburg, was seen by many as the last opposition politician still in Russia - and not in prison - following the invasion of Ukraine.
But on August 24th, Roizman’s house was searched by the police, and a case was brought against him for ‘discrediting’ Russia’s armed forces.
The BBC summarises the key things you need to know about one of Russia’s top opposition politicians.
On July 13th, Yevgeny Roizman tweeted a photo of himself with opposition activists Ilya Yashin, Vladimir Kara-Murza and Andrei Pivovarov.
“I’m the only one not in jail,” read the caption.
At the time, Yashin and Kara-Murza had already been arrested for spreading ‘fake news about the army,’ while Pivovarov was awaiting sentencing for the crime of co-operating with an ‘undesirable organisation’. (Later that month, he was to get four years in prison.)
On the morning of August 24th, masked special forces and police visited Roizman at his home, searching the premises before taking him away.
“The last nationally known politician to remain in Russia, who opposes Putin and the war, has been detained,” commented Ivan Zhdanov, an ally of imprisoned activist Alexei Navalny.
Roizman was charged under brand new article 280.3 of Russia’s Criminal Code, approved by the State Duma after the invasion of Ukraine, outlawing the ‘discrediting’ of the Russian armed forces.
The war on drugs
Yevgeny Roizman was born in 1962 in the city of Yekaterinburg, then known as Sverdlovsk. His father worked as a power engineer at the Uralmash machine company while his mother was a kindergarten teacher. Roizman's grandparents had moved to the Urals region from Ukraine.
In many interviews, Roizman has spoken of how he was a bad pupil who changed schools several times. He left home as a teenager following an argument with his father, and eventually ended up in a penal colony. At the age of 17, the future politician received a suspended sentence for theft, fraud and the illegal possession of an offensive weapon - and was sent to prison after violating his probation.
In 2017, the BBC spent several days with Roizman. He recounted how little his criminal past had interfered with his political ambitions: “On the contrary, it helps!” he joked. “I’ve been a deputy of the State Duma, placed people in the regional legislative assembly, been a city mayor, and have never hidden the fact [that I’ve done time].”.
Upon release, Roizman got a job as a fitter at the Uralmash factory, where he worked for about a year. In an interview with the Russia.ru project, he revealed that one of his friends had been Alexander Khabarov, a leader of the Uralmash criminal gang.
Roizman’s critics have frequently brought up his possible links to organised crime. In fact, Russia’s Channel Five broadcast an entire programme dedicated to the topic in 2013, prior to Yekaterinburg’s mayoral elections. The city prosecutor's office promised to verify the programme’s claims, while Roizman took the author to court.
In the 1980s, Roizman began training as a historian and archivist at Ural State University, although he did not graduate until the early 2000s. The future politician has also published poems, both privately and in literary journals, as well as opening a jewellery business.
But the project that brought him to national attention was his ‘City without Drugs’ foundation, which he co-founded in 1999, becoming its president shortly afterwards. The foundation’s activities remain the most controversial episode in the politician's life.
“We brought together all the unofficial leaders at the time,” Roizman told the BBC. “We managed to convince them that this was a problem that affected everyone — that someone needed to take a stand. Essentially, it was a popular uprising against the drug dealers.”
The foundation has been repeatedly criticised by activists and the media for the means — not always legal — that it used to combat drug trafficking, as well as for its brutal methods of rehabilitation. The foundation’s employees have been tried for the kidnapping and illegal detention of drug addicts, with claims some were locked in so-called rehab centres and forced to undergo withdrawal without medical treatment in strict isolation from the outside world.
In 2003, Russian riot police stormed rehabilitation centres belonging to the foundation, citing concerns about the improper treatment of the inmates.
In a recent interview with the prominent journalist Katerina Gordeyeva, Roizman (who has always maintained that the foundation’s methods were justified), revealed that this was the event that pushed him towards a political career.
“I never aspired to politics,” he admitted. “For me, these things were just tools whose power I didn’t understand — at least not until a certain point. My first step into politics had a very specific aim: to avoid imprisonment, to prevent the dismantling of the foundation, and to stop my business from being destroyed.”
Politician and Mayor of Yekaterinburg
In 2001, Roizman became adviser to the then governor of Sverdlovsk region, Eduard Rossel. Two years later, he ran for the State Duma as an independent candidate, and was elected as an MP. He worked on the Duma’s security committee and was a member of the governmental committee for combatting drug use.
In 2006, Roizman began working with groups linked to Sergey Mironov and his Russian ‘Party of Life’, becoming head of the party’s Sverdlovsk branch before joining the newly-created party ‘A Just Russia’.
But although the party intended to nominate Roizman for election to the 5th State Duma, he was subsequently excluded by Mironov from the party’s list of candidates. Roizman alleged that Mironov made the decision under pressure.
It was several years before Roizman was again to take up an active role in politics. Then in 2011, at the invitation of billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov, he joined the centre-right ‘Right Cause’ party. After just a few months, however, his party membership ended in scandal.
The plan had been for Roizman to enter the Duma through the party list system, with Prokhorov supporting his candidacy. According to media sources, however, the Kremlin opposed the idea. The conflict eventually led to a party split, with Prokhorov in effect being expelled from its leadership before leaving the party along with Roizman.
During the presidential elections, Roizman became Prokhorov's close confidant. He joined Prokhorov's ‘Civic Platform’ party and was nominated in 2013 as the party’s mayoral candidate in Yekaterinburg. Roizman won the election with 33.31% of the vote, while his main rival, Sverdlovsk vice-governor Yakov Silin, the representative for the governing ‘United Russia’ party, gained just under 30%.
Roizman now became one of Russia’s few opposition mayors. He attended Alexei Navalny’s rallies, as well as other protests, and criticised Russia's policy in Ukraine. Instead of the boilerplate photograph of President Vladimir Putin, Roizman displayed in his office a portrait of dissident Russian poet Joseph Brodsky.
After being elected, Roizman retired from his work with ‘City Without Drugs’, having also quarrelled with the foundation’s leadership. He also left the ‘Civic Platform’ party.
One hallmark of Roizman’s leadership was the public ‘surgeries’ he held as mayor. Once a week, citizens would queue up outside Roizman’s office to tell him about their problems.
By his own admission, however, Roizman didn’t always have the authority he needed to tackle the issues raised. In truth, there were two people running the city. While Roizman was in charge of public relations and the local duma, operational management was entrusted to a separate city manager.
In 2015, deputies of the regional legislative assembly tried to abolish the post of mayor, allegedly in an effort to avoid confusion between the mandates of the two municipal leaders. But the resolution was revoked by governor Yevgeny Kuyvashev - and blocked until Roizman had completed his term in office.
Roizman stood for election as governor of Sverdlovsk region in 2017, but withdrew from the race shortly afterwards when he failed to collect enough signatures to pass the threshold for the ballot.
Then, at the end of 2018, Kuyvashev submitted a bill to the regional Duma proposing the abolition of direct mayoral elections in Yekaterinburg. The draft was passed in spite of protests from local residents, and it was decided that the leader would henceforth be chosen by city deputies from a list of candidates selected by a competition commission.
Roizman resigned, calling the move “a full-on deception of the people and a betrayal of the city’s interests.”
Kuyvashev, however, who is still governor of the region, unexpectedly came out in support of Roizman after the raid on his home on 24th August.
“I have always had an uneasy relationship with Yevgeny Roizman,” he said. “We were and still are political opponents. But the law is the law. He deserves justice and respect, just like anyone else, and I hope he gets both.”
Roizman has himself admitted that his rivalry with Kuyvashev has a personal dimension connected to relationships both politicians have had with the journalist Aksana Panova, founder of the publication Znak.com, which ceased operating when war broke out. Panova is mother to two of Roizman's children. He has four daughters and a son.
Despite losing his post as mayor, Roizman continued to conduct regular surgery-type meetings with Yekaterinburg residents, only this time as a representative of his own charitable foundation.
Historian and philanthropist
Yevgeny Roizman became involved in charity work in the 1990s, helping support several impoverished orphanages in Sverdlovsk region.
In 2015, after winning the mayoral election, he founded his own charity which he named the Roizman Foundation. According to its website, the charity helps ‘people in difficult life situations.’
Among its other activities, the foundation played a role in the creation of the First Yekaterinburg Hospice, which works with parents of terminally ill children and supports other NGOs and charitable projects in Sverdlovsk region.
Roizman works on behalf of the foundation to help children with spinal muscular atrophy, or SMA. In February, the media reported the story of four-year-old Mark Ugrekhelidze, an SMA sufferer from Krasnodar, in the south of Russia. With the opposition leader’s personal involvement, the Roizman Foundation helped raise 121 million roubles to pay for the boy’s treatment with ‘Zolgensma’, the most expensive drug in the world.
Although the funds had already been raised, the medical council initially refused to prescribe the drug to the young boy on the grounds that he was already receiving treatment. After the prosecutor's office took an interest in the case, however, permission was finally granted in April to administer the new medicine.
In spite of all this, Roizman does not refer to himself as a politician or even a philanthropist, but as a ‘historian and researcher’.
“This is my primary, long-term, permanent occupation,” he explained.
As far back as 1999, as a specialist in Old Believer icon painting, Roizman founded the Nevyansk Icon Museum — the first private museum of its kind in Russia. The museum houses a collection of more than 700 pieces from the Nevyansk school of iconography, which developed in the Urals between the 16th and 20th centuries.
“I don’t know why I even do this. I just see that it needs to be done, he told Gordeyeva. “It’s some kind of island of sanity, a hymn to the Russian peasant, to the Russian Old Believers,”
Governor Yevgeny Kuyvashev has expressed the hope that the icon museum “can be preserved and remain open,” notwithstanding the criminal case against Roizman.
He has also helped establish a museum of naïve art, donating his own collection of such works to Yekaterinburg in 2015 - although for a long time, the collection didn’t have a plaque bearing the politician’s name.
An internet phenomenon
On the morning of Roizman’s arrest, Russian Twitter was awash with jokes calling for the dissident politician to be allowed to keep his phone. Roizman's Twitter account has more than 630,000 followers, several times more than other prominent dissidents such as Ilya Yashin or Ivan Zhdanov.
The politician is known for his ascerbic rhetoric, characterised by the occasional obscenity. He often responds to pro-government media accounts with criticism both of the journalists themselves and of the Russian authorities.
He has in the past been banned from various social networks. Last year, for example, he was temporarily blocked by Facebook, probably for using the word “ass” to describe an opponent.
In 2020, remarking on the Russian Foreign Ministry’s assertion that his poisoning may have been staged, Alexei Navalny joked: “It’s Yevgeny Roizman who should be commenting on this, not me. He always has a couple of nicely succinct phrases for such occasions.”
In early August, Twitter even temporarily restricted Roizman's ability to tweet.
“I find propaganda offensive,” Roizman said, explaining in his interview with Gordeyeva why he’s so active on social media.
“Firstly, because they view me as a moron. And second, they insult me by lying. That’s what I’m reacting to. With just one reply I can divert the story and give it a totally different spin.”
In May, Roizman was fined 85,000 roubles under a law criminalising “disrespect” of the authorities for a tweet addressed to the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov. Lavrov had stated that the ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine was designed to put an end to the “reckless course toward total dominance of the United States.”
“And for this you decided to f*** your country against a wall?” —the oppositionist retorted.
One of the last messages Roizman posted before the search of his house was in response to a tweet published by Gazeta.Ru that quoted Sergey Aksyonov, head of annexed Crimea.
“Whose voice is that I can hear from the rubbish dump?” Roizman asked.
On August 23rd, he commented on news released by the state news agency Interfax that Russia ‘may be left without Pacific mackerel-pike this year’, quipping “You’d even struggle to find sand in the Sahara.”
Despite the widespread expectation that he would be prosecuted for his position on the war in Ukraine, Roizman has refused to leave Russia.
“I’m attached to this land,” he said, just a week and a half before the raid on his home.
“I was born and raised here. I won’t budge a millimetre. Why should I flee? I love my country, I understand all the risks, but I can’t leave, if only because that would be running away. And I can't let myself do that.”
Translated by Camilla Yermekbayeva.
Read this story in Russian here.