While History will surely remember the name of Alexeï Navalny as having been the greatest opponent that Vladimir Putin has counted, other figures are asserting themselves and deserve to come out of his shadow. Resolved for years or revolted by the intervention in Ukraine, five independent spirits are presented here, those of a woman and four men preferring the expression of the truth to the comfort of lies.
Yuri Shevtchouk brings the opposition together through song
AFP
Yuri Chevtchouk is the kind of opponent that a dictatorial power particularly fears. Not only was he a singer, the kind of man capable of stirring up more crowds than a politician, but he was also one of the greatest Russian artists of the time. For more than forty years, the founder of the rock group DDP has been denouncing, through popular rhythms, the abuses of power in Russia, and therefore for more than twenty years he has targeted Vladimir Putin in person. Tuesday, August 16, he was sentenced to a fine of 50,000 rubles, or 800 euros, for having “discredited the use of the Russian armed forces”, during a concert organized in Oufa last May. In today’s Russia, we do not sing with impunity: “The homeland, friends, it is not the president’s ass that must be kissed constantly”. In the Russia of 2022, patriotism is war, and it is not a satirical lyricist who will prove the contrary. To silence this opposition, the method used is the same as for many others: an initial condemnation in the form of a warning, and the insinuation of an idea: the next time, it will be worse.
Born in 1957 in the Russian Far East, Chevtchouk devoted himself very early to his great passion: music. In 1980, he founded the DDP group, whose specialty became political and societal satire. Several of his texts denounce the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, which does not fail to alert the censorship. The press attacks him, the pressures multiply, and, in 1985, he is obliged to dissolve his group. But DDP is not dead. Two years later, it rises from its ashes. The dislocation of the USSR could have silenced Checchouk, but if the USSR is dead, there is no shortage of scandalous material, and therefore of song: the constitutional crisis of 1993, the first war in Chechnya in 1995, all institutional excesses are denounced by DDP. Courageous, the man certainly is. In 2010, during a televised meeting between Putin and the main representatives of the Russian cultural world, the singer harassed the president with questions: on democracy, on freedom of expression, on freedom of the press… His opposition to all forms of oppression and war seems unshakeable and, at 65, he does not intend to let his conduct be dictated to him. As he said three days after Russia invaded Ukraine: “I never crashed in front of superiors.” The little ones, like the big ones.
Marina Ovsiannikova in a court in Moscow on July 28, 2022.
afp.com/Alexander NEMENOV
She is the “journalist with the sign”, the one who dared to disturb the smooth running of the TV news Vremia, broadcast on Russia’s first television channel, Pervi Kanal. It was at the beginning of the war, on March 14, but no one has forgotten the courage of Marina Ovsiannikova. That evening, she stands behind the presenter and shows the camera a hand-written sign that reads in Russian and English: “No to war. Stop war. Don’t believe propaganda. They are lying to you here. Russians against the war”. The broadcast of the newspaper is then interrupted and a past report is broadcast. To explain her gesture, she had published, a few minutes earlier, on her Telegram account, a video in which she denounced “the fratricidal war led by Vladimir Putin”, and called on the citizens of Russia “to go and demonstrate”. She knows then that she has just crossed “a point of no return”, and prepares for the wrath of the Kremlin. A few hours later, she was arrested, interrogated for 14 hours, and fined 30,000 rubles, or 250 euros. Her gesture goes around the world and Emmanuel Macron goes so far as to offer her political asylum, which she refuses, not wishing to leave her country.
For a long time, however, Marina Ovsiannikova, 44, preached the good word of the Kremlin on the antennas, and it is probably her origins – her mother is Russian and her father Ukrainian – which explain this radical change of ideological course. Returned temporarily to her freedom in March, she multiplies political actions. She was on the steps of the court, on July 13, when the opponent Ilia Iachine appeared before the judge, or even before the Kremlin, on July 15, to lay three bloody dolls on the ground, brandishing a sign on which was written: ” Putin, assassin. His fascist soldiers. 352 children are dead. How many more have to die for you to stop? On August 9, as expected, she was arrested and placed under house arrest for two months. While waiting to go, in turn, before a judge.
The Russian opponent Ilia Yachine was arrested in July.
AFP
After his arrest in June 2022 for “disobedience to the police”, Ilia Yachine presented his titles to the authorities: “Independent municipal deputy, critic of President Putin and opponent of the war in Ukraine”. A few days later, he found himself accused of “disseminating false information about the Russian army”, and was placed in pre-trial detention until September 12. Like his friend Alexeï Navalny, imprisoned since February 2021, this 39-year-old man, deputy of a Moscow district since 2017, has no illusions as to his fate, which has the merit of accentuating his determination.
Born in Moscow in 1983, Ilia Iachine has never subscribed to Putin’s rhetoric, hence the premonitory title of his master’s thesis: “Organization and processes of protest in contemporary Russia”. As a student, he is an active member of the social-liberal Yabloko party. As an adult, he became responsible for the Moscow branch. But his greatest feat of arms is to have created, in 2008, with Boris Nemtsov and Garry Kasparov, the liberal party Solidarnost, whose goal was to restore freedom of expression in the country. The exile of Kasparov in 2013 and the assassination of Nemtsov in 2015 will deal a very hard blow to the party, but not to Iachine, which manages to be elected deputy under the label of the orange party. Closely watched by the Kremlin, he must resign as president of the city council in the summer of 2021, before the authorities take advantage of his open opposition to the war in Ukraine to arrest him. But Ilia Iachine continues her fight, in order to see, one day, the freedom of thought returned to the Russian people. During his court hearing on July 13, he greeted the announcement of his placement in pre-trial detention with words of unwavering resistance: “Don’t be afraid of these scoundrels, Russia will be free!”.
Oleg Deripaska stands out in the world of oligarchs.
AFP
Unlike Chevtchouk and Yachine, Oleg Deripaska’s opposition to the war in Ukraine is not part of a lasting logic of struggle against the authoritarian power of Vladimir Putin. It is even quite the opposite, since this 54-year-old man is close to the Russian president, as a member of the family of the oligarchs. However, as a good business-minded homo economicus, the “Lord of aluminum”, as he is nicknamed, cannot approve of the warlike designs of the chief. A few days after the invasion, on February 24, he called for peace in a message on Telegram. Less for humanistic reasons than to put an end to the sanctions regime which is paralyzing the Russian economy, and the activity of its company, RUSAL, one of the most important in the world of aluminium. At the end of June, he clarified his thoughts, calling the invasion a “colossal error”. Unlike Putin, he readily admits that the Russian economy is suffering terribly from Western measures and is sorry to see that “everything that was done in the 2000s” is swept away in a few weeks. Despite his positions hostile to the war, Deripaska is on the list of Russian personalities sanctioned by the European Union, as if not to forget that as the owner of a large industrial group, he participates, willingly or by force , to the war effort.
Born in 1968, Oleg Deripaska likes to recall that her two grandfathers took part in the great patriotic war against Nazi Germany, and that one of them even died there. He himself can boast of having military experience, within the strategic missile forces of Siberia, between 1986 and 1989. A graduate in physics from Moscow State University, he suffered economically from the collapse of the USSR, while understanding that building a new state was good for business. He begins to buy metals at low prices on the Russian market in order to sell them at international market prices. Then, he invests all his profits in the purchase of shares in an aluminum factory, of which he will eventually become the main shareholder. His story is that of a self-made man with Russian sauce, a child raised on a farm in the Krasnodar region who is now sitting on a fortune estimated at nearly 4 billion dollars. But “the lord of aluminum” does not have to sleep quite peacefully. Since the beginning of the Russian invasion in Ukraine, many oligarchs have been found dead in murky circumstances. And yet they had not spoken publicly against the intervention in Ukraine.
Evgueni Roizman during an interview given to AFP
AFP
Like Ilia Iachine, he refuses to obey the Kremlin’s rhetoric by speaking of a “special military operation”. And, like him, he resolves to go through the prison box. Already sentenced to three fines for having evoked an “invasion of Ukraine”, Evgueni Roïzman persisted, until being arrested, Wednesday August 24, by a dozen police officers in combat gear. From his window, the opponent had time to confirm to the journalists present that he was about to be arrested for having “discredited the army”, decidedly the Kremlin’s preferred legal reason. The following day, he was released, but he is prohibited from going to public events or communicating with people outside his family.
At 59, Evgueni Roïzman is well known to Russian power. Between 2013 and 2018, he was mayor of the large city of Yeakaterinburg, where he still lives, before resigning following the Duma’s decision to abolish the election of the mayor by universal suffrage. Also a deputy between 2003 and 2007, the man stands out, as much by his style of dress – he is often dressed in a leather jacket – as by his personality, since he is a great collector of Orthodox icons, which he covered the walls of his apartment. Much loved, he thinks he would be governor of the Sverdlovsk region today if the regime had not vetoed it. So, to continue to be heard, he specialized in “short and brutal anti-propaganda”, as he defined it, which notably goes through Twitter, his favorite social network. Officially, he no longer has the right to use it. But barely out of prison, he shared a video on his thread explaining the reasons for his arrest. Because he, too, is part of the indispensable family of the incorrigible.