Not only Yulia Navalnaya, the women of the Russian opposition

ORtoday is the day of Yulia Navalnayathe wife of the Russian opposition leader who died last Friday in an Arctic penal colony, in Siberia (she reports: poisoned with novichok). The widow who yesterday, with a nine-minute video of courage and dignity, announced that she personally wanted to take on the task of continuing her husband’s battle. The world is wondering today how it will change the mosaic of opposition to Putin after Navalny’s deathin a country where those who speak against the President are excluded from electoral politics, driven underground or in prison. In this galaxy of voices that power tries to silence, there are and have also been many female voices.

From Anna Politkovskaya a Yulia Navalnaya. The women of the Russian opposition

As Anna Politkovskaya, the journalist poisoned in 2004 (on the plane, while trying to reach Beslan to deal with the Chechen guerrillas who had taken 1,200 people hostage). She was then killed in October 2006 in the elevator of her building with five gunshots. While her killer, Sergei Khadzhikurbanov, sentenced to 20 years in prison for the assassination, fought in Ukraine as a prisoner conscripted into the Russian army and was pardoned for this in 2023.

As Anastasia Baburovajournalist from the same newspaper as Politkovskaya, la Novaia Gazeta, killed with a shot in the back of the head in January 2009 while walking down the street in Moscow. You investigated the relationship between neo-Nazis and security forces.

Or how Natalia Estemirovahuman rights activist in the North Caucasus region (worked for the non-governmental organization Memorial based in Grozny, the Chechen capital) killed in 2009.

Journalists Marina Ovsyannikova, Alsu Kurmasheva, Masha Gessen

But there are many women’s voices rising against Putin today. As Alsu Kurmasheva, Russian-American journalist arrested since October 18, 2023 in Kazan, capital of Tatarstan, on charges of violating the so-called “foreign agents” law. The status of “foreign agent”, which recalls the Soviet term “enemy of the people”, imposes very heavy administrative constraints and controls on journalists. Kurmasheva works for Radio free Europe/Radio liberty, based in Prague and funded by the US Congress. A candidate for the UNESCO / Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize 2024, she is accused of having spread “false information” about the Russian army.

So too Masha Gessen, Russian writer and journalist who in 2013, after a twenty-year career as a scientific journalist in Moscow, moved to New York (today she is in the editorial office of New Yorker). A non-binary transgender person, you have worked as an activist for LGBTQ+ rights. The Russian Interior Ministry placed her on its wanted list in December 2023 for spreading “false news” about the army. The law on the subject, signed by Putin in March 2022, provides for a sentence of up to 15 years.

And we all remember Marina Ovsyannikova, who interrupted the state television news program by displaying a sign behind her colleague who was broadcasting it live where it was written “Stop the war” and “They’re lying to you”. She was sentenced to eight years and six months in prison in absentia And, one year after escaping from house arrest, he lives with his daughter in France where he continues to express his dissent.

Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the Belarusian leader

A real political leader is Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, at the head of the Belarusian opposition, in exile on charges of conspiracy and political extremism. She is very close to Yulia Navalnaya, born in 1982, she challenged Aleksandr Lukashenko, supported by Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin, in the 2020 Belarusian elections. And she was sentenced to 15 years in prison. She is the wife of Sergei Tikhanovsky, in prison.

There are many similarities with the story of Yulia Navalnaya. “I felt her pain deeply,” she said. «My husband is also held as a political prisoner and I have not heard from him for a year. I don’t know if he’s okay, or even if he’s still alive. Our two children often ask about their father. Yulia Navalnaya also has two children. Yulia showed remarkable courage when speaking in Munich. I’m close to her.”

Evgenia Kara-Murza and the similarities with the story of Yulia Navalnaya

In the aftermath of Navalny’s death, the voice of another woman, another wife, was raised. The husband of Evgenia Kara-Murza And Vladimir Kara-Murza, vice president of Open Russia, was Navalny’s number one ally and among the best-known figures of the democratic movement. Currently it is in solitary confinement in a prison colony in Siberia, he is serving a 25-year sentence for speaking out against Putin’s war in Ukraine. Like Navalny, he survived poisoning attempts with the nerve agent Novichok.

Interviewed by ABC in the aftermath of Navalny’s deathhis wife said he was «been on the brink of a situation like Yulia Navalnaya at least twice,” she said. «I was horrified at the news of Alexei’s death, of course, but unfortunately not surprised because political assassinations are something Vladimir Putin has been doing for years“, he said. As in the case of Navalny, who according to the Russian authorities died from “sudden death syndrome”, «I too have heard ridiculous things after my husband’s poisoningspoisonings in which he was twice given a 5% chance of survival.”

Zhanna Nemtsova, Boris Nemtsov’s daughter: “Let’s fight the absolute evil that Putin represents!

However, his father died Zhanna Nemtsova. Boris Yeltsin’s former deputy prime minister, liberal, Boris Nemtsov was shot and killed on 27 February 2015 while crossing the Bolshoi Moskvoretsky Bridge, near the Kremlin. He was organizing a protest march against military intervention in Ukraine.

Zhanna Nemtsova said she considered Navalny’s death a murder and agreed with Yulia Navalnaya that «we must fight the absolute evil that Vladimir Putin represents». But it’s difficult for her take the field openly: «It’s too risky. And the outcome is uncertain. That is why there are very few Russian opposition politicians. “We are on the Red List, a species close to extinction,” my father always said that. We are all on the red list.” And decades of Kremlin repression, he added, “have thinned the ranks of those willing to oppose Putin.”

The women of soldiers enlisted in Ukraine: “We are tired of being good girls”

How difficult it is to oppose in Russia must make us appear even more courageous the women who, in the square, march against Putin to ask for their children and husbands to return home from the war front, the 300,000 Russian men enlisted in September 2022. As Maria Andreeva34 years old, one of the unofficial leaders of a new popular movement. «We’re tired of being good girls»these women say in theirs public protests and in open letters challenging the official narrative on the need for civilian conscription in Ukraine. Among them, also many women who supported Putin but who were exhausted by the war.

Protests historically led by women in Russia

Russia has a history of women-led protests during war. Wives and mothers became active, for example, during the first Chechen war in 1994 and contributed to the Kremlin’s decision to stop the fighting. Women were organized into well-managed groups such as the Committee of Mothers of Russian Soldiers (CSM), which had hundreds of regional centers across the country and, crucially, their message was broadcast on Russian television at a time when the media was not fully subordinated to the state.

But since Putin took power in 1999, Russian authorities have adopted systematic measures to dismantle opposition movements, also taking control of independent media outlets. After the invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin went further, effectively criminalizing all voices against the war and inflicting severe punishments on Russian citizens for even small acts of civil protest against the invasion.

Andreeva communicates with other wives, sisters and mothers of soldiers on Telegram, one of the last platforms hosting independent voices. Most of their work is coordinated across the channel Put Domoy (The Way Home), which has amassed more than 35,000 members since it was founded in September.

The feminist resistance against the war

But many female voices are rising from abroad and from underground, against Putin. And it is particularly interesting the feminist resistance against the war (Feministskoye Antivoennoye Soprotivlenie, FAS) which seeks to combat the violence of Putin’s regime bringing together 45 existing organizations in different sectors. More dozens of anonymous activists in 60 cities of Russia, not counting those who are in exile.

Between them Daria Serenko29, who lives in Paris and is one of the few public figures of the movement: «Vladimir Putin is the dumbest representation of Russian masculinity. Unfortunately he is a role model for some Russians, but he does not represent us. We laugh about it, even if it’s difficult to laugh in a dictatorship.”

Serenko, who is an artist and poet, reacted to the news of Navalny’s death via social media. «If this is true and he is dead, then the truth is that they killed him. Everybody knows. They will know. They killed him. I don’t want to see black and white photos, this is unnatural for him, his photos are always in color, bright, like his words, which break through the grayness of the prison. His intonations are lively and strong.”

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