RIP Pavel Kushnir: The lonely death of a jailed Russian pianist who opposed war
excerpt from tribute to Pavel:
“The greatest tragedy of Pavel’s life is that only now are we beginning to realise what a wonderful artist, writer and thinker he was.
We simply did not know him.
This reminds us that the perverse ‘selection process’ of law enforcement leads to the most remarkable and fearless people being thrown into prison, often the best people in a sick nation,” the letter said.
“We bow to those heroes and visionaries who, in their desperate loneliness, sacrifice themselves for humanity and pay the ultimate price,” the letter continued.
A video of Kushnir performing Rachmaninov, a composer Vladimir Putin is known to favour, was added to the text.
frankk comment
I hope he landed in a better place that deserves him.
I copied the top 3 articles, pasted below in order of quality.
If you're short on time,
Pick a 4 min. piano performance of his from here,
and read the first article "facing down death".
I really admire his character, conviction, bravery, and integrity.
If it was me, I would have emigrated to a free country and THEN do the protesting and criticizing.
People who live in free countries don't fully appreciate the value of free speech.
I made an mp3 of his performance of Beethoven's piano concerto #5 (36 min.) here:
His wiki has links to videos of his music performances
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavel_Kushnir
Facing down death
Who was Pavel Kushnir, the pianist who died on hunger strike while protesting against the war in Ukraine?
Milana Ochirova, exclusively for Novaya Gazeta Europe
Facing down death
Pavel Kushnir.
Photo:
Kurgan Philharmonic / VK
There is a barely noticed channel on YouTube which, until recently, had just five subscribers.
Now it has more than a thousand.
Called Foreign Agent Mulder, in reference to David Duchovny's character in The X-Files, the channel has just four videos.
The shortest, entitled Life, is just 51 seconds long, and all the comments beneath it concern the death of the person who made it.
The man in the video is dressed in a black jacket reminiscent of a prison uniform.
He has a sailor’s vest on and tinsel draped across his chest.
A badge saying FBI is attached to the vest, hand-drawn in blue marker.
“There will never be life under fascism,” he says.
“Putin is a fascist, and the peoples of our country gave up millions of their best lives to ensure that there was no fascism.
We will not accept it.
We will not worship this beast.
Down with the war in Ukraine, down with the fascist Putin regime, freedom to all political prisoners, freedom to all prisoners, freedom for everyone.”
Pavel Kushnir — the man in the videos — would be arrested and charged with “publicly calling for terrorism” in May, five months after uploading Life.
There is video footage of the arrest itself, with large, masked law enforcement agents leading a thin man in a black shirt away, ultimately to his death.
The funeral of Pavel Kushnir in Birobidzhan.
Photo:
anonymous
The funeral of Pavel Kushnir in Birobidzhan.
Photo:
anonymous
Going to his death
The small town of Birobidzhan, with a population of 68,000, is the administrative centre of Russia’s Jewish autonomous region, an area of the country’s Far East that was established for Soviet Jews in 1934, but which is now notable mainly for its absence of a Jewish community.
It’s a fairly gloomy place, full of identikit prefabricated apartment buildings, which was captured expertly by Norwegian photographer Jonas Bendiksen in a series of photos in 1999. Nothing much has changed since then, locals say.
Kushnir, who was 39 when he died, only lived in Birobidzhan for a year and a half, moving there from his hometown of Tambov, in central Russia, at the invitation of the local philharmonic orchestra in late 2022.
A graduate of the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory joining a small-town philharmonic orchestra was a big deal in Birobidzhan, and almost all local state media outlets ran pieces on him, describing him as “smart and talented”.
More stories
Tribute to late Russian pianist signed by world’s leading classical musicians
Kushnir is wearing a plain black shirt in all the footage, the same shirt he would eventually wear in his coffin, emaciated after his hunger strike, with a bruise under his eye and blood on his lip and between his teeth.
“We are a family of musicians.
His father, grandfather, grandmother and I were all musicians,” Kushnir’s 79-year-old mother Irina Levina told Novaya Europe.
She had tried to discourage her son from moving to Birobidzhan, saying she had a premonition she couldn’t explain.
“It was just a feeling… I literally begged him.
‘Stay! Stay!
I’ll help you, I’ll support you financially, just don’t go!’
But he wouldn’t listen and went to his death.
That’s all I can say.”
The funeral of Pavel Kushnir in Birobidzhan.
Photo:
anonymous
The funeral of Pavel Kushnir in Birobidzhan.
Photo:
anonymous
Kushnir was indeed a very talented musician.
He could perform all 24 Rachmaninoff preludes in one sitting, or all of Shostakovich’s preludes and fugues in a single evening, which is very difficult even for an experienced musician.
“It’s literally like running a marathon for a pianist,” explains musicologist Anna Vilenskaya.
“But he could do it in an evening.
It was important for him to perform it in one big cycle.
It might give some idea of the kind of person he was,” Vilenskaya continues.
“He didn’t want to break up the monumental cycle that Shostakovich had in mind.
And maybe he didn’t want to break his life up into sections either.
He somehow saw his life very holistically.
He didn’t want to betray his views,” she adds.
The funeral of Pavel Kushnir in Birobidzhan.
Photo:
anonymous
The funeral of Pavel Kushnir in Birobidzhan.
Photo:
anonymous
No to war
Kushnir was a dyed-in-the-wool pacifist.
He took part in the protests against Putin’s re-election on Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square in 2012, and had opposed the war in Ukraine ever since the tragic events in the Donbas began to unfold in 2014. His family also knew his political views, though they didn’t share them, which sometimes led to bitter conflict.
“I knew his views, and we used to argue.
But there was no point,” Levina says.
“I told him a hundred times that it was dangerous to believe what he believed.
A hundred times!
And I could see he was afraid,” she recalls.
The war in the Donbas, which began in 2014, played heavily on Kushnir’s mind.
He even wrote a book on the subject, “Russian Mash-Up”.
It was published by ZaZa, a small publishing house in the German city of Düsseldorf, that made it available online in a print-on-demand format.
But there was no demand, at least not until its author died, that is.
The book was eventually published in Germany in early August, with all proceeds from book sales to go to the Kushnir family.
“How long can Putin’s life on earth and his illegitimate rule last?
Can he achieve Márquez-like longevity in the face of such fucking brutality?”
Kushnir wrote.
But that’s not why they came after him.
They came after him for four videos on a YouTube channel with five subscribers.
Pavel Kushnir.
Photo:
Kurgan Philharmonic / VK
Pavel Kushnir.
Photo:
Kurgan Philharmonic / VK
The truth is out there
“Don’t get used to fascism.
Don’t get used to war.
Even if there’s no future, let’s believe in the present.
But there is a future.
Putin will die.
Putin’s fascist regime will collapse.
My love will live on.
Let’s keep fighting.
Let’s go all the way, and stay loyal to our past,” Kushnir said in another of his videos, A Message to Anti-Fascists.
He often used the phrase “The truth is out there” — the tag line from his favourite TV series, The X-Files.
Even in small-town Birobidzhan, where, as the locals say, “everyone is afraid and nobody says anything”, the security forces had a quota system and needed to crack down on people every now and again.
There may not have been any public protests in the town, but there was a pianist with a YouTube channel.
Few people noticed in Birobidzhan, let alone the rest of Russia, when Kushnir was detained in May.
He was charged with publicly calling for terrorism on the internet, a crime punishable by up to seven years in prison.
He went on hunger strike the day he was detained.
More stories
Stepping up
The fearless Russian activist who turned his village store into a bastion of anti-war protest
It was not the first time he had protested that way.
He had already gone on hunger strike against the war in Ukraine in 2022, while still a free man.
That time, almost nobody knew.
Kushnir mentioned the protest in an interview his friend and fellow pianist Olga Shkrygunova posted on Facebook in August 2022. She didn’t say which journalist or media outlet had interviewed him, and it only appeared on her Facebook page.
Very few people noticed the interview, and it got just 10 likes.
That time, Kushnir refused food and water for 20 days.
“I have no trouble dealing with the hunger physically.
I chose this form of protest when I thought people had begun to get used to the war, to accept it, in order to set an example, to attract attention,” Kushnir said in the interview.
The second time he went on hunger strike for 100 days.
He didn’t eat, but he drank fluids.
He worked throughout and performed concerts.
Kushnir also produced leaflets saying “Putin is a fascist” and distributed them around Birobidzhan.
Pavel Kushnir.
Photo:
Kurgan Philharmonic / VK
Pavel Kushnir.
Photo:
Kurgan Philharmonic / VK
Kushnir sent emails to friends during that second hunger strike in 2023, telling them he demanded “the dissolution of the fascist regime, an end to the war in Ukraine and the release of all political prisoners”.
Kushnir said the Bucha massacre early in the war was a turning point for him.
When asked who knew he was on hunger strike, Kushnir said just his close friends.
“Tell me, should we change your name for security reasons?”
the interviewer asks.
“No need.
Whatever happens happens, and may God help us,” he replied.
Kushnir spent his final days in a prison medical unit.
He died on 27 July, his mother was informed the following day, and Olga Romanova, who heads prisoners’ rights organisation Russia Behind Bars, shared the news with the world on 2 August.
Birobidzhan Philharmonic.
Photo:
Kurgan Philharmonic / VK
Birobidzhan Philharmonic.
Photo:
Kurgan Philharmonic / VK
The prison service gave “dilated cardiomyopathy and congestive heart failure” as the official cause of death.
Kushnir had never previously suffered from heart problems.
Photos of Kushnir in his coffin show a bruise above one eye and blood on his lips.
His mother refused to give her permission for an independent autopsy to be carried out, which means the cause of her son’s death will never be known for sure.
Farewell
Kushnir’s funeral was held in Birobidzhan on 8 August.
Neither his mother nor his brother attended the ceremony.
There were 11 people in total:
two journalists, two Philharmonic employees, two fans, a friend, a poetess, two activists and a schoolchild.
One attendee told Novaya Europe that even some of those there were afraid to attend.
One of the Philharmonic staff members came in large sunglasses and refused to talk to journalists.
Attendees were initially reluctant to say any parting words.
An activist from the city of Khabarovsk, 200 kilometres east of Birobidzhan, eventually spoke and remarked that Pavel’s face had been “beaten up”, to which nobody voiced an objection.
Pavel Kushnir.
Photo:
Kurgan Philharmonic / VK
Pavel Kushnir.
Photo:
Kurgan Philharmonic / VK
“We could all see it.
He had been beaten up.
He had a bruise above one eye and traces of blood between his teeth, which we could see as his mouth was slightly open.
I said this was the death of a martyr, and we needed to make sure it never happened again,” the activist told Novaya Europe.
He didn’t know Kushnir, having first heard about him after his death, but still came to pay his respects.
Time passed and everyone remained silent.
He approached people and asked them to “say something”, because it would be “uncivilised” if nobody said anything.
Finally, the activist himself stood up to speak.
“People have only discovered what a wonderful person he was after his death, which is terrible, of course.
People in Birobidzhan knew him for the musician and interesting character he was.
Beyond that, nobody else knew him.
Not in Khabarovsk, where I’ve come here from, nor in Vladivostok, not even in towns closer by, not to mention Russia as a whole… But his death came as a shock to all decent people.
Now people know him.
But at what price?”
he said.
“I spoke to the person in the shop when I bought flowers.
I said, ‘A local guy was tortured to death’.
But he didn’t know.
And the other people I spoke to either didn’t know or pretended they didn’t know,” the activist continued.
Kushnir’s body was taken to Khabarovsk to be cremated as Birobidzhan doesn’t even have a crematorium.
His mother insisted he be cremated.
The urn was then flown to Tambov for burial.
Nobody talks about Kushnir in Birobidzhan.
In fact, only a few people locally know that he lived and died there at all.
More stories
Inside the exchange
Memorial chairman Oleg Orlov describes his ordeal in prison and the run up to last week’s prisoner swap
Join us in rebuilding Novaya Gazeta Europe
The Russian government has banned independent media.
We were forced to leave our country in order to keep doing our job, telling our readers about what is going on Russia, Ukraine and Europe.
We will continue fighting against warfare and dictatorship.
We believe that freedom of speech is the most efficient antidote against tyranny.
Support us financially to help us fight for peace and freedom.
============================================
Tribute to late Russian pianist signed by world’s leading classical musicians
Novaya Gazeta Europe
https:
//novayagazeta.
eu/articles/2024/08/14/tribute-to-late-russian-pianist-signed-by-worlds-leading-classical-musicians-en-news
“The greatest tragedy of Pavel’s life is that only now are we beginning to realise what a wonderful artist, writer and thinker he was.
We simply did not know him.
This reminds us that the perverse ‘selection process’ of law enforcement leads to the most remarkable and fearless people being thrown into prison, often the best people in a sick nation,” the letter said.
“We bow to those heroes and visionaries who, in their desperate loneliness, sacrifice themselves for humanity and pay the ultimate price,” the letter continued.
A video of Kushnir performing Rachmaninov, a composer Vladimir Putin is known to favour, was added to the text.
The authors of the letter also expressed their support for Russia’s other political prisoners, especially the lesser known ones who, they noted, had less chance of being released in a prisoner exchange.
Kushnir, an accomplished concert pianist who studied at Moscow’s Tchaikovsky Conservatory, was arrested in May and charged with ‘inciting terrorism’ after publishing anti-war videos on his YouTube channel, to which just five people were subscribed.
He died in pretrial detention in Birobidzhan, the capital of the Jewish autonomous region in Russia’s Far East, on 28 July.
=========================================
(BBC) The lonely death of a jailed Russian pianist who opposed war
https:
//www.
bbc.com/news/articles/cj35lk4x86yo
24 August 2024
Elizaveta Fokht
BBC News Russian
Sverdlovsk local history museum Pavel Kushnir sitting in front of a pianoSverdlovsk local history museum
While the US and Russia were busy finalising the biggest exchange of prisoners since the Cold War, a gifted but little-known Russian pianist was dying in silence in jail.
Pavel Kushnir had protested repeatedly against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and began a hunger strike soon after his arrest in May, later refusing water too.
He died, slowly and without publicity, on 28 July - four days before a group of better-known dissidents were swapped for Kremlin spies, sleeper agents and killers imprisoned in the West.
After his lonely death, at a pre-trial detention centre in Birobidzhan in Russia’s Far East, the 39-year-old was mourned by only 11 people at his cremation.
Svetlana Kaverzina, an independent politician in Siberia, said no-one had tried to talk him out of sacrificing himself because they hadn’t been aware what was happening.
“We couldn’t chip in and send him a lawyer - we didn’t know,” she wrote on the Telegram messaging app.
“He was alone.”
Pavel Kushnir plays Rachmaninov’s Prelude in C-sharp minor, Op 3 No 2 at a festival in his home town of Tambov in 2010. Source:
his late father Mikhail Kushnir’s YouTube channel, youtube.
com/@SuperLiahim
'Foreign agent Mulder'
The YouTube channel where Kushnir published four anti-war videos had only five subscribers when he was arrested.
His “Foreign Agent Mulder” posts were a reference to a character in the US TV series, the X Files, which was popular in Russia in the 1990s, and also to a Russian law that allows people considered politically suspect to be declared “foreign agents”.
In one clip Kushnir even appears with a hand-drawn FBI badge.
His final film, released in January, addressed the 2022 massacre of civilians by Russian troops in Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv.
A few months later, a Telegram channel close to the secret services, Operational Reports, posted a video showing masked men leading Kushnir into a white minivan.
It added that a criminal case had been opened, accusing him of making a public call to engage in terrorist activity, which is punishable by up to seven years in jail.
Nothing more was heard until 2 August, when the human rights activist Olga Romanova and the pianist’s friend, Olga Shkrygunova, revealed his death in an article published by online news organisation Vot Tak.
His 79-year-old mother, Irina Levina, later confirmed her son had died.
Anon Pavel Kushnir playing the piano Anon
A friend described Kushnir as a cog that did not fit any machine
Kushnir was born in Tambov, central Russia, where his father Mikhail was a pianist and educator, and his mother a music school teacher.
He started playing piano at the age of two and, at just 17, gave a remarkable two-and-a-half-hour concert featuring the 24 preludes and fugues by composer Dmitri Shostakovich.
Later that year, he was admitted to the Moscow Conservatory, where classmate Julia Wertman says he cultivated a “dissident image”, often wearing a shabby coat and black clothes, with a half-litre bottle of vodka sticking out of a pocket.
Asked in a 2005 interview what composition he would never perform, he replied:
"The Russian national anthem."
After graduation, Shkrygunova says Kushnir deliberately took jobs in smaller cities, believing he would have more musical and personal freedom outside Moscow.
He moved to Yekaterinburg, then Kursk, and spent three years in Kurgan, a city to the east of the Ural mountains, before he lost his job at the philharmonic orchestra there in 2022.
Shkrygunova does not know exactly why he was dismissed, but adds:
"This was a cog that didn’t fit any machine, and it had been that way since his childhood."
After four months without a job, he became a soloist with the Birobidzhan Philharmonic, telling local television:
“If I’m not imprisoned, drafted into the army, or fired, then I hope to spend the next 12 years with you."
'I'm doing this for a reason'
Kushnir spent his free time protesting against the war.
In emails to friends he described sticking posters around Birobidzhan at night, with slogans angrily denouncing the draft, and describing Vladimir Putin as a fascist.
He also began staging hunger strikes:
first for 20 days in the spring of 2023, then for three months later that year.
Shkrygunova says Kushnir knew the danger he was putting himself in.
"It was his solitary protest,” she says.
“An act by someone who didn't know what else he could do.”
She tried to convince him to leave Russia, or at least to perform in Berlin, where she now lives.
But they never managed to arrange the trip.
In late March, Kushnir spoke to Shkrygunova for the last time, telling her he felt like he was being watched and that he “kept seeing the same person”.
“Whatever happens, happens:
I'm doing this for a reason,” he added.
Operational Reports/Telegram Pavel Kushnir seen being taken into detentionOperational Reports/Telegram
Pavel Kushnir was shown being led away by masked men
'Like a skeleton'
Birobidzhan City Court records contain no information about a criminal case against him, though there is a record of a non-criminal case of “petty hooliganism” submitted on 20 June.
On 19 July, Kushnir was fined an unknown amount, but it is unclear whether he attended the hearing.
The court then sent him a copy of the verdict, but it was returned on 30 July with the note “not possible to deliver”.
By then, of course, Kushnir was already dead.
The independent news site, Mediazona, spoke to someone who saw him shortly before he died.
They described him as "like a skeleton", who by mid-July could barely walk and was "in very poor 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 knew nothing about the case.
'Gentle and funny'
After Kushnir’s death, his mother told another independent news organisation, Okno, that she had tried and failed to influence her son.
“I certainly wanted him to conduct himself in a quieter way and stay out of politics altogether.
“I am very sorry that he gave up his life, apparently for nothing at all.”
Grace Chatto of electronic music group Clean Bandit said her friend Pavel Kushnir had always stood for truth and freedom
But Shkrygunova disagrees, saying that Kushnir knew all along that he was risking his life so that he could express his anti-war views.
“He understood there might have been another way,” Shkrygunova adds.
“But by the time he had realised it, there was no turning back.
He knew he was going to go all the way – so it wouldn’t turn out to be a wasted effort.”
In death, Kushnir has attracted more attention than he ever received in his lifetime.
A book he wrote in 2014 has quickly been republished in Germany.
Grace Chatto, a member of Grammy-award-winning electronic music 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 wrote an open letter to remember a “remarkable artist” they had never met.
Although Kushnir’s YouTube channel had single-figure subscribers in his lifetime, his most popular clip has now been viewed more than 22,000 times.
(nytimes) He Had 5 Followers on YouTube.
It Landed Him in Jail, Where He Died.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/18/world/europe/russia-political-expression-prisoners-pavel-kushnir.html
Among the hundreds of Russians jailed for criticizing the war in Ukraine, the death of Pavel Kushnir in detention has transformed him into an antiwar symbol.
By Neil MacFarquhar and Milana Mazaeva
Sept. 18, 2024,
As a teenager, Pavel Kushnir won a coveted spot in Russia’s most prestigious training program for pianists at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory.
His classmates remember him as a shy, quirky introvert with fluency in not just classical music, but in film, literature and painting.
He made a career playing for provincial orchestras, while on the side he wrote startling avant-garde novels, mostly unpublished.
Long a critic of President Vladimir V.
Putin, Mr.
Kushnir took up political activism with added zeal after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. He spread leaflets damning the war while pushing himself to endure ever longer, harsher hunger strikes.
Four blurry, muffled antiwar screeds that he posted on his YouTube channel, which had just five subscribers, landed him in a dark, crumbling jail on Karl Marx Street in Birobidzhan, the remote Siberian provincial capital where he lived.
Now, at age 40, he is dead.
Mr. Kushnir is one among what human rights activists say is more than 1,000 Russians who have been caught in a harsh state apparatus designed to mute criticism of the war.
Some politicians or well-known artists put on trial attract significant attention.
But many prisoners linger in obscurity, with activists struggling to keep track of them.
Image
A group of people playing musical instruments on an ornately decorated stage.
The Malta Philharmonic performing at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory, in 2018. As a teenager, Pavel Kushnir won a coveted spot at the conservatory’s prestigious training program for pianists.
Credit...Yuri Kochetkov/EPA, via Shutterstock
Mr.
Kushnir was one who fell between the cracks, and his lonely death in Russia’s remote Far East has prompted extended soul-searching among prominent Russian political activists and war critics.
Why, they wonder, did a talented performer deeply committed to protesting have to die in order to become an antiwar icon?
“We could not pool money to send him a lawyer — we just didn’t know,” Svetlana Kaverzina, a local opposition politician, wrote in a post on the Telegram app.
“We didn’t write him letters of support — we didn’t know.
We didn’t dissuade him from sacrificing himself — we didn’t know.
He was alone.
Let’s at least symbolically tell him after his death:
‘Forgive us and rest in peace.’
”
Even the exposure of his death was almost accidental.
Olga Romanova, the head of Russia Behind Bars, a nongovernmental organization that defends prisoners’ rights, receives letters from convicts daily.
So she did not consider it exceptional when a group of cellmates from the Jewish Autonomous Region — established under Stalin in 1934 as an agrarian homeland for Jewish people — mentioned in passing that a musician among them had died.
Image
A group of people in an office.
Olga Romanova, far left, the head of Russia Behind Bars, a nongovernmental organization that defends prisoners’ rights, in Moscow, in 2013. She suspects Mr.
Kushnir succumbed to the effects of a hunger strike.
Credit...James Hill for The New York Times
“We are in grief,” the prisoners wrote.
On July 27, Mr.
Kushnir, who had been charged with “justifying terrorism,” had succumbed to a hunger strike during pretrial detention, they said.
Then one of his pianist friends, Olga Shkrygunova, contacted Ms.
Romanova and together they wrote a bleak description of his passing for an online publication.
The article prompted some people to dig up letters from Mr.
Kushnir, who had tried unsuccessfully to gain support from prominent Russians for his hunger strikes against the war.
His death spurred a new recognition of his artistic talents.
Dmitry Volchek, a publisher of avant-garde literature who had ignored Mr.
Kushnir’s request for translation work, praised “Russian Cut,” a novel that Mr.
Kushnir had published privately in Germany.
The author used the arrival of a giant, predatory, eyeless pig as a metaphor for Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea.
Maria Alyokhina, a member of the punk band Pussy Riot who has also used hunger strikes as a political tool, said on Facebook that Mr.
Kushnir had written her many letters, but that she read them only after he died.
Image
A woman sitting at a window looking over a green garden.
Maria Alyokhina, a member of the punk band Pussy Riot, in Iceland, in 2022. She said on Facebook that Mr.
Kushnir had written her many letters, but that she read them only after he died.
Credit...Misha Friedman for The New York Times
In August, a group of more than 20 classical musicians — including Alexander Melnikov, Sir Simon Rattle and Daniel Barenboim — signed an open tribute to Mr.
Kushnir published in a German newspaper.
Russian prison, judicial and law enforcement authorities did not respond to requests for comment about his death, nor did the Birobidzhan Regional Philharmonic, his last employer.
Mr. Kushnir grew up in Tambov, a provincial capital about 300 miles southeast of Moscow.
His father, Michael, wrote a music textbook still used across Russia, while his mother taught musical theory.
At age 17 he was among 25 student pianists accepted into the Moscow Conservatory.
“He was a funny, talented genius who excelled at the different art forms that interested him,” said Ms.
Shkrygunova, who met him when they were both 6.
Grace Chatto, an English musician and singer for the band Clean Bandit who studied with him at the conservatory in 2004, said he introduced her to the films of Bergman, Antonioni and Tarkovsky.
On most days, she stayed up long into the night to hear him play Rachmaninoff, Schubert and others.
“So kind and so gentle and funny, and he played with such deep passion always,” she wrote on Instagram.
ADVERTISEMENT
SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
He once amazed his fellow students by writing an analysis of an obscure German pop artist for an online journal, said Maria Nemtsova, another classmate.
As for his piano playing, she said, he “was very free and honest,” ignoring the school’s rigid prescriptions that the students emulate the interpretations of renowned musicians.
That attitude got him in trouble.
When the panel evaluating him for graduate study asked him to play an excerpt from Schumann’s “Fantasy,” he said he would either play the whole piece or nothing, his friends recalled.
Similar clashes set him on an odyssey of playing for one provincial orchestra after another.
Along the way, he became increasingly politicized, returning to Moscow in 2011 to participate in anti-Putin protests.
In early 2023, he was hired by the Philharmonic in Birobidzhan, the capital of the Jewish Autonomous Region, which had fewer than 1,000 Jews living there since most had emigrated to Israel.
Image
A man sitting at a piano.
An undated screen grab taken from a video of Pavel Kushnir performing.
Credit...YouTube
ADVERTISEMENT
SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
He kept his handwritten novels in a drawer, he said in interviews, and expressed admiration for the daring performances of rock musicians like Kurt Cobain and Janis Joplin.
He organized a weekly radio program to explain Chopin’s folk compositions, greeting listeners with “No pasaran!”
a political slogan drawn from anti-fascists in the Spanish Civil War that translates to “They shall not pass.”
“The truth is out there!”
he would say.
He named his YouTube channel after Fox Mulder, the Federal Bureau of Investigation agent hero of “The X-Files,” and wore a hand-drawn F.
B.I. badge pinned to his clothing in his videos.
In one, he endorsed L.
G.B.T.Q. rights, now largely banned in Russia.
In another, he called for protests and revolution.
“Scatter leaflets, post fliers, write huge posters, put them up on benches, leave them somewhere, past them on the walls of buildings,” he said.
Last January, the Philharmonic fired him, Ms.
Shkyrgunova said.
She had emigrated to Germany in 2012, but they exchanged emails every few months.
His overflowed with emotional anguish about the war, she said, and he could not let go of events like the Russian massacre of hundreds of Ukrainian civilians in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha.
“He was a man processing every death as his own personal loss,” she said.
Mr. Kushnir began to encourage people to go on hunger strikes to demand Mr.
Putin’s resignation and an end to the war.
A slight figure, he had undertaken them periodically himself after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but had continued drinking liquids until the last one.
ADVERTISEMENT
SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
Prison protocol mandates medical monitoring in such cases, Ms.
Romanova, the head of the prisoner rights’s group, said, but there was no indication that any monitoring took place in his case.
She suspects Mr.
Kushnir succumbed to the effects of the hunger strike, but his 79-year-old mother, Irina Levina, refused an independent autopsy.
Ms. Levina told a Russian reporter that the Russian Federal Security Service, or F.
S.B., had informed her that her son had been on a medical drip at the end.
Neither his mother nor his brother attended his cremation;
his criticism of Mr.
Putin had estranged his family, his friends said.
Mr. Kushnir’s father died four years ago.
“I certainly wanted him to conduct himself in a quieter way and to stay out of politics altogether,” Ms.
Levina told Okno, an independent news organization.
“I am very sorry that he gave up his life, apparently for nothing.”
A local reporter who attended Mr.
Kushnir’s funeral said only two musicians came.
The 11 people at the funeral were mostly admirers, and no one delivered a eulogy, said the reporter, who declined to use her name for security reasons.
Mr. Kushnir did not seek recognition for himself, said Ms.
Nemtsova, the classmate.
Instead, she said, he concentrated on feeling the pain of others.
Even close friends did not know that he was protesting by starving himself to death in jail.
“Pavel definitely sacrificed his life for us, it is almost a biblical story,” she said.
“He was trying to scream, but it was so muted.”
Comments
Post a Comment