The Lonely Death of Imprisoned Russian Anti-War Pianist

While the United States and Russia are busy completing the largest prisoner exchange since the Cold War, a talented but little-known Russian pianist is dying quietly in prison.

Pavel Kushnir has repeatedly protested Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and began a hunger strike shortly after his arrest in May, later also refusing to drink water.

He died, slowly and without much publicity, on July 28 — four days before a group of more prominent dissidents were traded for Kremlin agents, sleeper agents and assassins imprisoned in the West.

After his lonely death in a detention camp in Birobidzhan in Russia’s Far East, the 39-year-old was visited by just 11 people at his cremation.

Svetlana Kaverzina, an independent politician in Siberia, said no one tried to persuade him not to sacrifice himself because they did not know what was going on.

“We can’t join hands and send him a lawyer – we don’t know,” she wrote on the messaging app Telegram. “He’s alone.”

The YouTube channel where Kushnir posted four anti-war videos had only five subscribers when he was arrested.

His “Foreign Agent Mulder” posts were a reference to a character from the US television series, The X Files, which was popular in Russia in the 1990s, and also a reference to a Russian law that allows people considered political suspects 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.

Several months later, a Telegram channel close to intelligence agencies, Operational Reports, posted a video showing masked men leading Kushnir into a white van.

The report added that a criminal case had been opened, accusing him of publicly calling for participation in terrorist activity, an act punishable by up to seven years in prison.

No further information was released until August 2, when human rights activist Olga Romanova and the pianist’s friend Olga Shkrygunova revealed his death in an article published on the online news organization Vot Tak.

His mother, Irina Levina, 79, later confirmed her son had died.

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

He began playing the piano at the age of two and when he was just 17, he gave a remarkable two-and-a-half hour concert of 24 preludes and fugues by composer Dmitri Shostakovich.

Later that year, he was admitted to the Moscow Conservatory, where classmate Julia Wertman said he cultivated a “dissident image”, often wearing an old coat and black clothes, with a half-liter bottle of vodka protruding from his pocket.

In a 2005 interview, when asked what piece he would never perform, he replied: “The Russian National Anthem”.

After graduating, Shkrygunova said Kushnir deliberately took jobs in smaller cities, believing he would have more musical and personal freedom outside of Moscow.

He moved to Yekaterinburg, then Kursk, and lived for three years in Kurgan, a city east of the Ural Mountains, before losing his job with the symphony orchestra there in 2022.

Shkrygunova did not say exactly why he was fired, but added: “This is a cog that does not fit into any machine, and it has been like that since he was a child.”

After four months of unemployment, he became a soloist with the Birobidzhan Symphony Orchestra, telling local television: “If I am not imprisoned, drafted or fired, I hope to be with you for the next 12 years.”

Kushnir spends his free time protesting against war.

In emails to friends, he described putting up posters around Birobidzhan at night, with angry anti-conscription slogans and describing Vladimir Putin as a fascist.

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

Shkrygunova said Kushnir knew full well the danger he was putting himself in.

“It was his solitary protest,” she said. “An act of someone who didn’t know what else he could 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.

In late March, Kushnir last spoke to Shkrygunova, telling her that he felt like he was being followed and that he “kept seeing the same person”.

“Whatever happens happens: I do this for a reason,” he added.

Birobidzhan City Court records contain no information about a criminal case against him, although there is a record of a non-criminal case for “petty hooliganism” filed on June 20.

On July 19, Kushnir was fined an unspecified amount, but it is unclear whether he attended the hearing.

The court then sent him a copy of the judgment, but the copy was returned on July 30 with a note saying “undeliverable”.

Of course, by then Kushnir was dead.

Independent news site Mediazona spoke to someone who saw him shortly before he died.

They described him as “like a skeleton”, barely able to walk by mid-July and “in very bad condition”.

The official cause of death was “dilated cardiomyopathy and congestive heart failure”.

The FSB and the Birobidzhan court did not respond to the BBC’s request for comment. The regional head of Russia’s prison service, Vasily Mikhaylenko, told Mediazona he had no knowledge of the case.

After Kushnir’s death, his mother told another independent news organization, Okno, that she had tried but failed to influence her son.

“I definitely want him to act more calmly and stay away from politics completely.

“I am sorry that he sacrificed his life, apparently for nothing.”

But Shkrygunova disagreed, saying that Kushnir knew full well that he was risking his life to be able to express his anti-war views.

“He understood that there could be another way,” Shkrygunova added.

“But by the time he realized that, there was no turning back. He knew he was going to go all the way – so it wouldn’t be in vain.”

After his death, Kushnir attracted more attention than he ever did during his lifetime.

A book he wrote in 2014 was quickly reprinted in Germany.

Grace Chatto, a member of the Grammy-winning electronic group Clean Bandit, who studied with Kushnir at the Moscow Conservatory, wrote an emotional tribute on Instagram to her “gentle and funny” friend.

And 22 leading classical musicians including Daniel Barenboim, Sir Simon Rattle and Martha Argerich have written an open letter to remember an “extraordinary artist” they never met.

While Kushnir’s YouTube channel had only single-digit subscribers when he was alive, his most popular clip now has more than 22,000 views.