Musician and anti-war activist Pavel Kushnir died in a pretrial detention centre in Birobidzhan, the publication Vot Tak reported on 2 August citing the head of the project “Rus Sidyashchaya” Olga Romanova and the activist’s friend, pianist Olga Shkrygunova. According to their information, Kushnir died on 27 July. He was 39 years old. The Federal Penitentiary Service did not comment on this.
Olga Romanova said that Kushnir died after he declared a dry hunger strike. “His body couldn’t take it,” Romanova told the publication, without giving any other details. The Insider, without citing a source, writes that the hunger strike lasted five days.
Olga Romanova clarified in an interview with Current Time that she learned of Kushnir’s death from a letter from his cellmates in the pretrial detention centre. “It was not officially announced. We received a letter from his cellmates and generally received letters from this pretrial detention centre, so there is no big doubt that he died,” she said.
Pianist Olga Shkrygunova told Vot Tak that she learned of Kushnir’s death from his mother. Shkrygunova emphasized that his family does not want wide publicity. She admitted that the family could have been intimidated by representatives of the security forces.
FSB officers detained Pavel Kushnir at the end of May. A criminal case was opened against him under the article on public calls for terrorist activity (Article 205.2 of the Criminal Code). The public page “Atypical Birobidzhan”, which was the first to report Kushnir’s detention, claimed that the case was opened because of videos on a YouTube channel in which Kushnir “called for the violent overthrow of the constitutional order in the Russian Federation through revolution.”
Journalists from Vot Tak have established that Pavel Kushnir ran the YouTube channel Foreign Agent Mulder, where he published four videos from November 2022, in which he poetically criticized the policies of the Russian authorities, the laws adopted, and the war in Ukraine. Vot Tak notes that during the entire existence of the channel, created in 2011, five people subscribed to it. At the time of publication of this note, the channel had just over 100 subscribers.
Pianist Pavel Kushnir is a native of Tambov. He graduated from the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory. He worked as a soloist at the Kursk Regional Philharmonic for seven years, and then three years at the Kurgan Philharmonic. In 2023, Kushnir became a soloist of the Birobidzhan Regional Philharmonic.
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