‘Sometimes there are no red flags’

The life of Russian feminist activist Anastasia Yemelyanova, who was killed by her boyfriend in Turkey

In late September, Anastasia Yemelyanova, an activist from St. Petersburg, was killed in Erzurum, Turkey. During her life, she attended rallies against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, was a member of the Party of the Dead and the Vesna movement, assisted the gender equality collective Eve’s Ribs, and ran a YouTube channel about feminism. The 32-year-old’s body was found in her apartment; later, during an interrogation, her boyfriend confessed to injuring her with a shard of glass. By the time doctors arrived at the scene, Yemelyanova had died from blood loss. On September 26, the St. Petersburg outlet Bumaga published a story about Yemelyanova’s life. Meduza shares an English-language adaptation of the article.

The start of Yemelyanova’s activism

Anastasia’s Yemelyanova’s death was first reported publicly by her fellow activist Anastasia Polozkova. “The two of us would argue on the balcony about the list of banned professions [for women in Russia] and listen to true crime podcasts and stand-up comedy together. She loved to sew, cook vegan food, and meet up with friends. She planned to live,” Polozkova wrote.

Yemelyanova moved to St. Petersburg from Novosibirsk in 2013. She enrolled in the mathematical linguistics program in St. Petersburg State University’s philosophy department, and it was there that she first became involved in activism.

Varya Mikhailova

Human rights advocate and activist

Nastya became very interested in politics, political art, and feminism, and she hit the ground running on several projects at once, from official ones such as election monitoring to creative ones like workshops run by the [performance] art group {rodina} (“Motherland”).

At the same time, Yemelyanova was also working with the YouTube channel “Feminists explain,” the Vesna movement, the women’s rights organization Eighth Initiative Group, and the projects Eve’s Ribs and Open Space.

Yemelyanova embroidered original designs about political topics on bags, clothing, and pillows. She belonged to the art groups Urodina and Party of the Dead, and according to her friends, she never missed a single feminist rally or picket protest in St. Petersburg.

Varya Mikhailova

Nastya was a terrible bore! She was the most persnickety person in the world — she would outargue God himself if he was wrong, which he usually is. And she had the most passionate, tender heart, sensitive to all the pain in the world: the pain of her loved ones, the pain of total strangers, the pain of animals, the pain of entire countries, the pain of the whole planet.

Anastasia Polozkova

Feminist activist, journalist

We lived together [in a shelter for activists, then in a shared apartment], and I knew her for a year and a half. She always struck me as a very responsible person. She worked in a research center and would talk about how she was reviewing research and studying English literature. She also knew Italian, and she was studying Turkish in Turkey.

In January 2020, a group of St. Petersburg feminists, including Darya Apakhonchich and Leda Garina, released a book called Fairy Tales for Girls. The volume is a collection of children’s fairy tales without patriarchal stereotypes and with an emphasis on dynamic female characters. In the stories, female characters go through personal journeys, making discoveries and overcoming obstacles, while simultaneously fighting against the patriarchy. Anastasia Yemelyanova edited and revised the book.

Darya Apakhonchich

Activist

She was very brave. Whenever we had any kind of protest performance, like the “vulva ballet” (Note from Meduza: A protest performance in support of Yulia Tsvetkova, who was prosecuted for her drawings of vulvas), she would always participate. She seemed to have a deep inner drive to show solidarity. This was a very important feeling for her.

One of Yemelyanova’s last projects was called Cheat Sheet. Its goal was to defend the rights of schoolchildren as well as their parents and teachers, and it included a chat group where people could ask for advice about how to implement the government’s “patriotic” history lessons or what to do if school administrators were pressuring you for opposing the war in Ukraine.

One of the most important issues in Yemelyanova’s work was domestic violence. “We made several videos about this topic for the YouTube channel,” said Varya Mikhailova. “We discussed it constantly at various events; she had her own original project involving posters about domestic violence, and she organized protests in support of the Khachaturyan sisters.”

‘It became clear that it would be dangerous for her to stay’

In the spring of 2022, Yemelyanova emigrated to Turkey. By then, many of the feminist activists in St. Petersburg had had their homes searched by the authorities, and at least one of them had been declared a “foreign agent.” Many of Yemelyanova’s friends had already left Russia. According to Varya Mikhailova, Yemelyanova hesitated to emigrate for a long time and was one of the last people in her circle to leave.

After the start of the full-scale war, she participated — almost every single day — in all of the anti-war protests in St. Petersburg, and she wore yellow and blue symbols when she went to work or walked around the city. At a certain point, it became clear that it would be very dangerous for her to stay, and she went to Turkey. I think she was happy here [in St. Petersburg].

In late June, Yemelyanova said on Twitter that she had started dating a man who had come to Turkey from Syria as a refugee: “War on all sides, and I’m in love once again, what are you gonna do?” she wrote, quoting a song. Her new boyfriend worked as a barista in a coffee shop.

Yemelyanova’s last social media post came on September 20. In previous weeks, she had written about her remote work for the Hannah Arendt Research Center, adjusting to life in a new country, and her plans to get married.

All of her posts about her boyfriend were positive, even when she wrote about their arguments. “I flipped out because Nizar works from 5:00 p.m. until 1:00 a.m., then he sleeps until 3:00 p.m. and spends the night in the basement, and I didn’t come here to never see him. I came to him in tears, with all of my grievances. He promised to take a day off and spend the night with me. He brought me to work, sat me down, and made me a soy latte,” read one post.

“She seemed very happy in this relationship. She said Nizar really supported everything she did and cared for her,” Yemelyanova’s friend Yulia said, according to Kosa.media. “We also knew that he had religious parents, so he couldn’t tell them about Nastya. But as far as we knew, he wasn’t personally criticizing Nastya’s views; they didn’t have any quarrels or fights.”

Darya Apakhonchich

Activist

Nastya didn’t see any danger in this man because he never showed any signs of danger: he was polite and caring. And Nastya’s alarm bells weren’t triggered, because there evidently wasn’t anything to trigger them. In that sense, I think we should reconsider how we teach our children to talk about violence. Because we have this idea that you should look out for red flags [in relationships], and that’s correct, but we also need to understand that sometimes there are no red flags.

In September, Yemelyanova and her boyfriend rented an apartment in Erzurum. On September 20, she stopped responding to her friends’ messages. “Nastya was a very responsible person; she wouldn’t just disappear like that. She especially wouldn’t stop responding to her mother,” Anastasia Polozkova said.

Yemelyanova’s friends teamed up on social media to spread the word about her disappearance, and two of them went to the police in Istanbul to file a missing person report. The police, however, refused to search for Yemelyanova and told them to consult the Russian Consulate. The Consulate initially told the women that they needed a statement from Yemelyanova’s mother, and later stopped responding to their calls altogether.

Anastasia Polozkova

Feminist activist, journalist

We monitored social media and wrote to Nizar’s friends. I asked a friend who knows Arabic to write to him. We figured out his last name and searched for his relatives on social media. Other friends of ours used clues from videos to search for the address of the apartment where they were living. We examined Nastya’s last posts on social media.

On Sunday, Yemelyanova’s friends managed to get an answer from the police: their database indicated that Yemelyanova had been killed three days earlier. According to Anastasia Polozkova, the police later said that when the women contacted the Russian Consulate, the agency already knew what had happened to Yemelyanova.

Varya Mikhailova

Human rights advocate and activist

The Russian Consulate was just doing what it always does; they traditionally don’t give a shit about anything. I don’t think they were intentionally trying to hide anything, I think they just couldn’t care less. The same is true of the Turkish authorities, apparently.

According to the Turkish news outlet Hürriyet, on September 20, at about 11:00 p.m., a fight broke out between Yemelyanova and Nizar that was loud enough for the neighbors to hear. Shortly after, Nizar asked one of the neighbors for help, saying that Yemelyanova had been injured. By the time an ambulance arrived, she had died from blood loss.

At the time of his arrest, Nizar said that Yemelyanova had accidentally cut her leg on a coffee table that had broken during the fight, but he later changed his story during an interrogation and said that he had injured her himself.

Darya Apakhonchich

Activist

It seemed to me that she stood out from many of my other friends in that she had a very defined sense of her boundaries. She would always speak clearly in conversation about a lot of things that the rest of us were still trying to learn how to be clear about. And despite that, she ended up in this situation. But violence happens whether you’re ready for it or not.

* * *

Anastasia Yemelyanova’s friends have launched a fundraising campaign to support her family and to pay for the cost of transporting her body back to Russia, which will cost approximately 500,000 rubles ($5,140).

Story by Anastasia Zhigulina for Bumaga

Abridged English-language version by Sam Breazeale