“It was terrifying -- I had no idea it was the police,” said Aleksandra Kochanova, recalling how officers of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) rushed into the apartment she shared with her fiance, activist and social-studies teacher Nikita Tushkanov, in December 2022. “I thought some bandits were breaking in.”
Kochanova, 25, recalled the agents telling her, “You are going to learn how to write letters.”
“They could feel their power,” she said. “At first, I thought they would interrogate us and let us go. But the investigator said he was filing two charges against Nikita, and I shouldn’t bother waiting for him. That’s when I understood my life had changed.”
In May, Tushkanov, who lived in the Komi Republic capital of Syktyvkar, was sentenced to 5 1/2 years in prison. He was convicted of “justifying terrorism” through his social media posts about the October 2022 explosion that damaged the bridge between Russia and the occupied Ukrainian region of Crimea.
He is just one of many dozens of Russians who have been caught up in President Vladimir Putin’s historic crackdown on dissent that intensified in the months before Russia’s massive invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and has been accelerating steadily since then.
This year, the prison terms dissenters face have been greatly increased, with an unprecedented number of treason cases being opened.
But persecution and prison are not just life-changing events for dissenters alone: Their relatives and loved ones find themselves unwittingly drawn into a cat-and-mouse game with the authorities as they try to provide support and defense.
“Nikita told me right away – ‘Don’t you dare cry in front of them,’” Kochanova told RFE/RL’s North.Realities. “But I already knew that I couldn’t debase myself. For the first few days, whenever I stopped doing things, I would immediately collapse and begin to cry. I would give myself 10 minutes to cry and then I would work on my plan. Everything was new to me.”
'I Told Her I'd Never Abandon Her'
Almaz Gatin, 43, is the husband of Lilia Chanysheva, a former coordinator for imprisoned opposition politician Aleksei Navalny in the central Russian region of Bashkortostan. Chanysheva was arrested in November 2021 as part of a sweeping crackdown against Navalny supporters and charged with organizing an “extremist” group. In June, she was sentenced to 7 1/2 years in prison.
“The first time I saw my wife put in handcuffs and taken away was very painful,” Gatin recalled. “She said to me, ‘No matter what happens, I will never forget you.’”
“I hugged her and kissed her and told her I would never abandon her and would keep fighting for her,” he added.
Gatin said the first thing he did after his wife was taken away was to clean up their apartment, which had been ransacked during the search. He said at that time he felt such enormous pain that he collapsed.
“Now that pain is concentrated into the struggle to defend her,” he said.
After Chanysheva was arrested, she was taken from Bashkortostan’s capital, Ufa, to Moscow. Gatin followed her there but was told she had been sent to pretrial detention (SIZO) in the city of Kolomna, about 120 kilometers to the southeast.
“I went there and knocked on every door, but they told me she wasn’t there,” Gatin said. “I went back to Moscow and found her in SIZO-6. I showed my documents and proved that I was her husband. And they let me send her my first parcel.”
In a letter, Chanysheva later told her husband how much that first package meant to her.
“She understood that I had not abandoned her, that I had found her, and that I was standing by her,” he said.
Gatin moved to Moscow, found an apartment, and began working full time to support his wife. He compares himself to the 11 wives, sisters, and fiancees of the 19th-century Russian revolutionaries the Decembrists, who have been lauded in Russian culture for voluntarily following their loved ones into Siberian exile and devoted their lives to supporting them.
“I am the husband of a Novembrist -- she was arrested in November,” he said. “I went to Moscow and lived there. The lawyers were doing their work, and I had to solve all the everyday problems she encountered in jail -- food, vitamins, everything she needed to endure.”
Each morning, he said, he would get up and write her a letter. Between the time he sent a letter and the time he got a response, a week or 10 days would pass. Next, he would get in line at the prison to submit a parcel for her.
“You need to get food in there at least once a week -- twice is better,” he said, adding that he would then work remotely for a few hours for his employer in Bashkortostan.
“Then I’d buy Lilia groceries or search for her medicines,” he recalled. “I’d call her parents and my mother. Our parents are elderly, and they need support as well.”
Many of his friends “got scared” when Chanysheva was arrested, Gatin said. He found a new community among the relatives of other detainees and the activists who tried to help them.
Over the nearly 18 months that she was held in Moscow, Gatin was not allowed to see his wife once. After she was sent back to Bashkortostan for trial, he was finally allowed to see her -- on March 18. After that, he was allowed to see her once a month until she was convicted in June, speaking to her via a telephone through glass for strictly one hour.
“When I saw her the first time, it was very painful,” he said. “She had become very thin and was sick. I listened to her for a whole hour without interrupting.”
'I Couldn't Just Sit Down And Cry'
In May 2021, opposition politician Andrei Pivovarov was arrested at the St. Petersburg airport as he was trying to leave the country. Pivovarov had been a top official of Open Russia, a pro-democracy nongovernmental organization set up by exiled former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, which had recently been tarred by the Russian government as an “undesirable” organization. In June 2022, Pivovarov was sentenced to four years in prison.
“We were making plans,” his fiancee, Tatyana Usmanova, told RFE/RL. “But they were completely destroyed on May 31.”
The first few days after Pivovarov’s arrest were the hardest, Usmanova insists.
“Even the day he was sentenced or other sad days can’t compare,” she said. “I understood then that I couldn’t just sit down and cry.”
For the first week after the arrest, Usmanova “gave interviews without a break.”
Pivovarov was held and tried in the southern Russian city of Krasnodar, so Usmanova moved there to support him. She had to come to grips with the seemingly arbitrary rules enforced by his jailors.
“You could send him black tea, but not green tea,” she recalled. “You could send him green apples, but not red ones. And none of this was written down anywhere. On one hand, it is just nonsense. But on the other, it is exhausting. And all this was happening not in my home city but in unfamiliar Krasnodar.”
She said that now she is frequently approached by people “who find themselves in this situation.”
“I immediately put off whatever I am doing and tell them in as much detail as I can how to survive those first days,” she told RFE/RL.
Supporting Pivovarov quickly became the only thing in her life.
“I couldn’t just abandon the one I love in such a horrific situation,” she said. “I was the only one who could help him. And his parents are elderly -- I couldn’t just abandon them in the midst of this nightmare.”
The ordeal has taken a toll on Usmanova’s health.
“I am seeing a psychiatrist and sometimes take antidepressants,” she said. “For two years I have been basically living his life…. My life is built around his. I need him back here with me.”
'Our Strength Is Our Love'
On the 200th day after Chanysheva’s arrest Gatin experienced a breakdown, he said, chastising himself for letting his wife end up in such a situation.
“But after a few days, I felt a huge internal strength,” he recalled. “The crisis just passed.”
Nonetheless, he said, he never felt fear or despair.
“I have felt only one thing,” he said. “Unlimited love. In her letters, she writes that she endures all this only because God brought us together. Our strength is our love.”
Kochanova, the fiancee of imprisoned teacher Nikita Tushkanov, said almost the same thing.
“His letters help me a lot,” she said. “Our love supports me and him. He writes that he thought I would be his weakness, that they could use me to pressure him, But in the end it turned out that only our love enables us to survive all this.”
