Lonely death of an imprisoned Russian anti-war pianist

While the United States and Russia were busy completing the largest prisoner exchange since the Cold War, a gifted but little-known Russian pianist died silently in prison.

Pavel Kushnir had repeatedly protested against Russia's invasion of Ukraine and began a hunger strike soon after his arrest in May. He later also refused to drink water.

He died slowly and quietly on July 28 – four days before a group of better-known dissidents were exchanged for Kremlin spies, sleeper agents and murderers imprisoned in the West.

After his lonely death in a remand prison in Birobidzhan in the Russian Far East, the 39-year-old was mourned by only eleven people at his cremation.

Svetlana Kaverzina, an independent politician in Siberia, said no one tried to dissuade him from his self-sacrifice because they were unaware of what was happening.

“We couldn't step in and send him a lawyer – we didn't know,” she wrote on the messaging app Telegram. “He was alone.”

The YouTube channel on which Kushnir published four anti-war videos had only five subscribers at the time of his arrest.

His “Foreign Agent Mulder” posts were a reference to a character from the US television series “The X-Files” that was popular in Russia in the 1990s, and also to a Russian law that allows politically suspect people to be declared “foreign agents”. In one clip, Kushnir even appears with a hand-drawn FBI badge.

His last film, released in January, dealt with the 2022 massacre of civilians by Russian troops in Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv.

A few months later, the intelligence-affiliated Telegram channel “Operational Reports” published a video showing masked men leading Kushnir into a white minivan.

It was further stated that criminal proceedings had been initiated against him. He was being publicly called upon to engage in terrorist activities, which could be punished with a prison sentence of up to seven years.

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

His 79-year-old mother, Irina Levina, later confirmed her son's death.

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

He began playing the piano at the age of two, and at just 17 he gave a remarkable two-and-a-half-hour concert of the 24 Preludes and Fugues of the composer Dmitri Shostakovich.

Later that year, he was accepted into the Moscow Conservatory, where, according to his classmate Julia Wertman, he cultivated a “dissident image”: he often wore a shabby coat and black clothes, with a half-liter bottle of vodka sticking out of the pocket.

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

Shkrygunova says that after graduating, Kushnir deliberately took jobs in smaller cities because he believed he would have more musical and personal freedom outside 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 with the local Philharmonic Orchestra in 2022.

Shkrygunova does not know the exact reason for his dismissal, but adds: “He was a cog that did not fit into any machine, and it had been that way since his childhood.”

After being unemployed for four months, he became a soloist with the Birobidzhan Philharmonic and told local television: “If I don't go to prison, get drafted into the military or get 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 in Birobidzhan putting up posters with angry slogans against conscription and calling Vladimir Putin a fascist.

He also began hunger strikes: first for 20 days in the spring of 2023, then for three months later that same year.

Shkrygunova says Kushnir was aware of the danger he was putting himself in.

“It was his lonely protest,” she says. “The 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 never managed to arrange the trip.

At the end of March, Kushnir spoke to Shkrygunova for the last time, telling her that he felt like he was being watched and that he “always saw the same person.”

“Whatever happens, happens: I'm doing this for a reason,” he added.

The court records of the city of Birobidzhan do not contain any information about a criminal case against him, but there is a file on a non-criminal case of “minor hooliganism,” filed on June 20.

On July 19, Kushnir was sentenced to an undisclosed fine, but it is unclear whether he attended the hearing.

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

By this time, 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 “skeletal,” 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 court in Birobidzhan did not respond to the BBC's request for comment. The regional head of Russia's prison service, Vasily Mikhailenko, told Mediazona he knew nothing about the case.

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

“I definitely wanted him to keep a low profile and stay out of politics altogether.

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

Shkrygunova disagrees. She says Kushnir knew all along that he was risking his life to express his anti-war views.

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

“But once he realized it, there was no turning back. He knew he would persevere to the end – so that the effort would not turn out to be a wasted effort.”

After his death, Kushnir attracted more attention than ever before in his life.

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 under Kushnir at the Moscow Conservatory, wrote an emotional tribute to her “gentle and funny” friend on Instagram.

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

Although Kushnir's YouTube channel only had single-digit subscriber numbers during his lifetime, his most popular clip has now been viewed more than 22,000 times.