Anastasia Shevchenko is a democracy leader from Russia. Most such leaders are in prison or in exile. Mrs. Shevchenko is in exile. I have recorded a podcast with her, a Q&A, here. Mrs. Shevchenko is associated with the Open Russia movement. She was the first person to be prosecuted under the dictatorship’s notorious law concerning “undesirable organizations.”
She was arrested in January 2019. She was kept under house arrest for two years and one month. During this time, her daughter Alina died in a hospital. (Alina had had special needs.) Mrs. Shevchenko was not permitted to see her until the final hours. Alina’s death, and the treatment of Mrs. Shevchenko, sparked protests in several Russian cities.
In 2021, Mrs. Shevchenko was convicted in court and sentenced to four years — suspended.
With her two surviving children, Mrs. Shevchenko fled Russia in the summer of 2022. She is considered a fugitive by the Russian state and has a place on its Most Wanted list. Earlier this month, Mrs. Shevchenko was a guest at the Oslo Freedom Forum (by video hook-up). A film, a documentary, has been made about her and her family: Anastasia.
Here are some excerpts from our podcast together. I will paraphrase both the questions and the answers, though closely.
Your life has taken many twists and turns. I’m sure you could not have predicted what your life has been. Did you have a plan, when you were a girl? Certain life dreams?
When I was eight, I dreamed of being a shop assistant. Several years later, I decided that I would like to be foreign minister. I never wanted to be a political prisoner, that’s for sure.
You were twelve years old when the Soviet Union collapsed. Did you have a feeling about it, or were you thinking about other things, as a twelve-year-old would?
Well, I was very young. I can give you a memory involving Lenin, though. My stepfather came to me and said, “Lenin was a criminal, not a leader.” I started crying because it crushed everything in my head. They had taught me in school that Lenin was the great leader of our country.
In the ’90s, you know, I was very far from Moscow. I was born and bred in Buryatia, on the border with Mongolia. It’s like living in another country. And what was going on in Moscow, I didn’t care very much about, at all.
Everyone likes to talk about identity — nationality, ethnicity, identity. Do you think of yourself as Russian, a human being — what?
That’s a difficult question. And, you know, I asked myself this question when I was fleeing Russia. My father is Georgian and my mom is Russian but half Asian. And I was born in Buryatia. When I was living in Rostov-on-Don and sending letters to relatives back home, postal workers would sometimes ask me, “Is it in Russia?” It’s a very big country.
But when people ask me, “What is your nationality?” I will say “Russian.”
Where did you acquire your excellent English?
When I was a child, I read a lot, and my mom was a teacher of Russian and Russian literature. She was very bad in English. And it was her dream that her daughter speak English well. I did everything I could to make this dream come true. I started English at school, and then studied it in college, and so on.
In Russia, is there a certain nostalgia for the Soviet Union and a desire to rebuild it?
Absolutely. But this generation is dying out. And we have a new generation that doesn’t know what the Soviet Union was, actually. And, yeah, elderly people miss the Soviet Union a lot, maybe because they think there was stability.
Also, we were a country about friendship. There were many, many republics in the Soviet Union, all living happily together. It wasn’t true, of course, but that was the propaganda. Now Russia is isolated. That’s a reason that many people feel nostalgia for the Soviet Union.
In the ’90s and 2000s, did you have hope for the country?
I still have hope that everything is going to be fine one day in my country, because it’s impossible to be an activist or a politician without hoping for a better future. In the beginning — 2000, 2001 — people treated Putin as a democratic leader. And he was behaving like one, more or less. But it became clear to me that he was a dictator and would destroy my country. That was after the presidential term of Medvedev, when Putin took power, formally, again.
Forgetting the human-rights abuses — which cannot be forgotten — do people care about corruption? The immense corruption of Putin and his gang? My sense is that they are indifferent.
Corruption is like the rain. For many people, it is simply something normal. It doesn’t irritate people. Sometimes, I even feel that they envy it, or are impressed by it: “Oh, he managed to steal that much? He must be very smart. What a success he has made of himself!”
In general, I think the problem is that people are indifferent not only to corruption but to everything around them. That’s the problem. It’s like they don’t empathize. I don’t know why. Personally, I feel the things that are happening around me. When somebody is dying, when somebody is in prison, I feel like it’s happening to me.
How to convince people to feel and to live? And not to be so indifferent? I don’t have the answer to this question. But I’m doing my best.
When did you decide it was time to run? Time to flee Russia?
You know, I wanted to leave the day the war started. I can’t even explain how you feel — how you feel when your country is attacking another country, a country you love, where you have relatives. It was just so disgusting. I didn’t want to be there. Physically, I didn’t want to be in Russia anymore.
According to the Russian state, you are a fugitive. You are on the Most Wanted list. Russians are not safe abroad. Escapees from other dictatorships are not safe abroad. Do you take precautions?
I don’t take any precautions — because, you know, if they poison you, they can do it any time. Last year, I was staying at a hotel in San Francisco. I found that the door of my room was open, and there was a strange smell in the room. I got my bag and left quickly. Later, I learned that two other Russians had had the same experience. Both fell sick and went to the hospital. They recovered.
People said, “Don’t use the shampoo in the hotel. They could put poison in it.” Yes, but they can put poison on your pillow or on the door handle or wherever. They can put it in your underwear, which is what they did to Navalny.
What precautions can you take? I don’t know. Maybe install a video camera? I don’t want to live like that.
Can Russian people, in general, be expected to know what’s going on? Or are they prisoners of state media, so to speak?
Absolutely, they can. There are so many Telegram channels telling the truth in Russia. But people just don’t want to look for this kind of information. When they see something that is different from what they hear on Russian TV, they get angry. I have had many conversations in which I say the war is bad, and the reaction is, “You don’t know anything. You left the country, you are betraying us. We are fighting for our country and NATO is going to attack us,” etc.
It is very difficult to convince these people otherwise.
Do you have people who support you privately? Support you in whispers?
Many. Yes. Even children from Russia, who are beaten by their parents for being against the war. Who are bullied at school for the same reason. People write me and say, “Thank you for being brave. Thank you for speaking out. We can’t, but you can. Thank you for speaking for us.”
Why do you think you stick your neck out? Are you simply built that way?
I think it’s about dignity. I’ve read many books. I’m curious about life in different countries, and about the history of different countries. I can’t imagine giving up. When I see injustice, I can’t keep silent. It’s all about dignity. We need to be human beings, not robots that do whatever the boss says.
Vladimir Kara-Murza was a frequent guest on this podcast we’re doing. [Since April 2022, he has been a political prisoner.] He often said that it was insulting — offensive and insulting — to hear, “Democracy is not really for Russians. It is a Western concept, and Russians have their own sense of things.”
I’m smiling when you talk about Vladimir. I miss him so much. He is my friend. We worked together in Open Russia. When I was arrested, he advocated for me. And now I am advocating for him, because he is in big danger.
Of course he is right. We tried to build democracy in the 1990s, but we failed. Every day, I communicate with activists who are still in Russia. They are fighting for democracy. And we are absolutely going to have it one day.
There is a different generation protesting now in Russia — a generation younger than Boris Nemtsov’s, a generation younger than Alexei Navalny’s. The new generation is not afraid of anything. They are smiling even when they are in prison. They don’t have leaders. They don’t watch TV. They use only the Internet. They have this critical thinking.
So I have hope for a better future for my country.