Born in Tambov, central Russia, Pavel Kushnir was by all accounts a musical prodigy, doubtless inheriting his talent from his musician parents. He began playing the piano at age two, and at 17, performed a 2-1/2-hour concert of the 24 preludes and fugues of Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. Later that year, he was admitted to the Moscow Conservatory. [Elizaveta Fokht, BBC News Russian, August 24, 2024.]

A classmate at the Conservatory, Julia Wertman, describes Kushir as having “cultivated a ‘dissident image,’ often wearing a shabby coat and black clothes, with a half-litre bottle of vodka sticking out of a pocket.” [Id.]

Another friend, Olga Shkrygunova, described him as “a cog that didn’t fit any machine, and it had been that way since his childhood.” [Id.]

After graduation, he moved around, taking jobs in smaller cities, where he believed he would have more musical and personal freedom than in Moscow — Yekaterinburg, then Kursk, followed by three years in Kurgan on the Asian side of the Ural Mountains, where he lost his job at the philharmonic orchestra in 2022, for reasons unknown. He finally wound up in Birobidzhan, playing with the Philharmonic there.

He began spending his free time protesting the war in Ukraine. He told friends he would go out at night to stick posters around the city, bearing slogans denouncing the draft and describing Vladimir Putin as a fascist.

He published four anti-war videos on YouTube, which had only five subscribers; the final one described the Russian massacre at Bucha, Ukraine, in 2022.

In 2023, he began staging hunger strikes. He felt the need to protest, and didn’t know how else to do it. His friends tried to convince him to leave Russia, but they never managed to arrange the trip. In late March of 2023, he told his friend Shkrygunova that he felt as though he was being watched, and that he “kept seeing the same person.” [Id.]

He was a man with a mission; he knew the dangers; yet he kept going . . . always alone.

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A few months after his last YouTube broadcast, a video was shown on a Telegram channel friendly to Russia’s secret services wherein Kushnir was seen being led by masked men into a white minivan. The report stated that a criminal case had been opened against him, charging him with “making a public call to engage in terrorist activity” — a crime punishable by up to seven years in jail.

And then there was nothing more until August 2nd, when his friend Olga Shkrygunova and human rights activist Olga Romanova published news of his death in an article on the Vot Tak online news report. [Id.]

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Oddly, there is no record in the Birobidzhan City Court of a criminal case against Kushnir, though there is a non-criminal charge of “petty hooliganism” filed on June 20th. On July 19th, he was fined an unknown amount; the copy of the verdict sent to him was returned on July 30th, marked “not possible to deliver.”

Pavel Kushner, age 39, had already died in pretrial custody — officially of “dilated cardiomyopathy and congestive heart failure.”

And in so doing, he accomplished what he had wanted to do all along: he became known for the cause he had undertaken. A book he wrote in 2014 has been republished in Germany. Tributes to him have been written by 22 leading classical musicians and others.

And his YouTube channel, which had only five subscribers in his lifetime, has now been viewed more than 22,000 times.

Pavel Kushner — a man with a conscience who chose his own form of imprisonment in order to protest the despotic regime of Vladimir Putin and the invasion of Ukraine — is no longer alone and unknown.

In his own way, he was another of Putin’s hostages.

Just sayin’ . . .

Brendochka
8/25/24