‘A cry of shame and despair’

How a dissident couple who protested the war with graffiti split up when tried by a Russian court

The Russian artist Lyudmila Razumova and her husband Alexander Martynov shared a love of nature and outdoors, a free-spirit lifestyle, and liberal convictions. When Russia invaded Ukraine, the couple traveled from Tver region to Moscow to take part in mass protests. When they saw the police decimating the small crowd of courageous people who had come out to protest the war, Alexander and Lyudmila were disheartened. On their return home, they began to come out at night to spray protest graffiti around their small town and the nearby villages. Within a month, they were arrested and charged with vandalism, and later with spreading disinformation under the new Russian law against “fakes” about the Russian military. Unexpectedly, the pressures of confinement and the court trial drove a wedge between the couple who had planned to spend the rest of their lives together. The Russian outlet Verstka published the story of two activists who loved one another but parted ways while a Russian court tried them for having an opinion. Meduza in English has translated it.

The arrest

On March 23 last year, a month from the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the 64-year-old Alexander Martynov stopped at a gas station to fill the tank of his taxi cab. Several police operatives approached him and told him to come with them to the local police station. Around the same time, another police squad rang the bell of Martynov’s apartment. His 55-year-old wife Lyudmila Razumova opened the door. Half an hour later, the husband and wife met at the police office and learned they were being charged with vandalism and spreading “fakes” about the Russian military.

The detectives confronted them with the testimonies of property owners who complained about the couple’s antiwar graffiti on their buildings. While being questioned, neither of them realized that they would not be coming home that day, nor that year. From the police station, the husband and wife were sent off to two different pretrial jails.

Writing to the Verstka correspondent Anastasia Musatova from jail, Alexander told her he had always been a liberal. During Gorbachev’s perestroika, he embraced the changes. In the 1990s, he was hopeful about Russia’s new democratic future. As books by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Vasily Grossman, and Andrey Platonov became available, he plunged into the new Russian literature. For a while, he made a good living by woodworking, but after 2010 commissions began to dry up: the people were getting poorer. He abandoned his craft and started driving a cab.

In her own letters, Lyudmila describes her happy childhood in the Taiga, where she grew up in a small village of Russia’s far-eastern Khabarovsk region. When mentioning Khabarovsk, she passes greetings to her people, describing them as “brave and noble romantics” and urging those who might read her letter “not to leave their motherland till the end.” Her dream, Lyudmila writes, had been to become a costume designer. She showed her sketches to someone at the Moscow MKhAT theater company, but he wasn’t impressed. For a long time, Lyudmila’s life was taken over by family: as a military wife with a young child, she moved to Poland, to live at a Russian army base with her then-husband.

Lyudmila remembers Poland as clean, bright, and comfortable. Somehow, her stay in Poland made her embarrassed for her home country and the propaganda that continued to present Russia as Poland’s liberator. The Russians stationed at the army base drank, littered in the streets, and treated the locals with contempt. She was disillusioned, and divorced her husband later.

In 2018, she met Alexander. They began traveling, hiking, and camping together, and later moved in.

Refusing to keep silent

With the arrest of the Khabarovsk Governor Sergey Furgal, the couple started discussing politics more often. Instead of photos and artwork, Lyudmila was often reposting Alexey Navalny’s investigations and interviews with opposition leaders on her social media. She openly criticized the government for its indifference to the country’s citizens, for destroying Russia’s barely nascent civil society, for annexing the Crimea, and for the war with Georgia. Alexander had been more reticent, but when Russia invaded Ukraine he couldn’t keep his views to himself, either.

The war thrust both of them into a state of shock. After spending the first day of the invasion in disbelief, they resolved to go to Moscow to take part in antiwar protests. No police force could possibly measure up to the number of people who would pour into the streets, they thought. But they soon realized their mistake. Lyudmila describes what she calls “one of the most dreadful scenes” she saw in her life: the empty carousels turning to the sound of a nostalgic song in the Red Square, while the police operatives shoved the protesters into the police buses standing ready.

It was then that the couple made their next fateful decision. They would not be silent. They would try to convince the people around them that Russian aggression was real, contrary to the propaganda that denied the atrocities against civilians in Ukraine. Once they made up their minds, their social media pages began filling up with stories about destroyed Ukrainian cities, civilian killings, and Russian POWs who talked about the country’s real losses in the war.

Determined to open up the eyes of their own community, the couple began to come out at night and leave graffiti around town. They would pick the most visible landmarks, like shops and bus stops, and scrawl slogans in black spray-paint. A stencil they made looked like Putin and Hitler at once. Their last graffiti was an inscription on the pedestal under a Katyusha rocket launcher turned into a military monument. “Forgive us, Ukraine,” they scrawled on its pedestal, on the night before arrest.

Writing to Verstka from jail, Lyudmila explained the feelings behind those words: “I couldn’t eat or sleep thinking about soldiers on both sides, and that they were somebody’s children, born of someone’s labor pains and loved by their mothers.”

She had hated war since childhood. Her grandfather, Iosif Orlov, told the family about the battle of Dnipro that he took part in during World War II. As a commander, he did everything in his power not to lose any of his men, and succeeded. For the rest of his life, he received letters of gratitude from his men’s families, scattered around the Soviet Union, in Georgia, Tajikistan, and Ukraine. Lyudmila believes her grandfather would not have forgiven her if he were alive and she’d sided with those who invaded Ukraine.

Unlike the detective, who insisted that the phrase “Forgive us, Ukraine” desecrated a World War II monument, Lyudmila thinks of it as a message of repentance before the Ukrainian people, who had also done their part in defeating Nazism. The graffiti she and her husband spray-painted around their community was “a cry of shame and despair that couldn’t be expressed in any other way.” Lyudmila believes that “if all the Russians realized what kind of future awaits an aggressor country, they would have poured into the streets and city squares without fearing prison.”

The public defender

Alexander and Lyudmila spent a year in separate pretrial detention centers. For the first six months, Razumova writes from jail, confinement felt unbearable. As she adjusted to life in jail, solitude became its most painful part: although Lyudmila begged the staff for a cellmate, they said that, for her, a four-person cell would be an “impermissible luxury.”

Since no one outside helped the couple find a good attorney, they had to settle for state-appointed public defenders. Razumova’s lawyer, Natalia Gorozhankina (paid 200,000 rubles, or about $2,500, for the whole process) assured her client that she’d “get her a suspended sentence.” Lyudmila would later accuse her of dishonesty and incompetence. Gorozhankina, she says, ridiculed Lyudmila’s opinions and instructed her to look down, feign remorse, and lie about her health to get the court’s sympathy. By the time of her first allocution statement, Lyudmila had stopped listening to her lawyer’s advice.

Although the defender had drafted a speech for her, Lyudmila set those ready-made remarks aside and said to the court:

Putin is proud that our weapons are without equal in the world. Wouldn’t it be better to take pride in healthcare? Or in education, income levels, or pensions? We don’t even need them to be “without equal in the world” — it would be fine if they were merely adequate. But as of today, all we have is “greatness” — and a sea of vodka. Our “greatness” makes us proud, and vodka keeps our spirits high. The dissidents go to jail. People who still have an opinion have their lives broken.

Alexander, who only saw Lyudmila at the court hearings, thought she was out of her mind after spending so long in solitary confinement. He avoided political discussions with the judges, and Lyudmila’s abrupt refusal to demur about the war struck him as simply “catastrophic.”

The court was dragging its heels, admitting new witness testimonies and making the couple repeat their allocution statements. When this happened for the third time, Lyudmila refused to admit any guilt whatsoever. She began talking about a video published by Novaya Gazeta, a media source she trusted completely. “I don’t think that video was a fake,” she said;

I know a few things about video production. If I see Kharkiv that has been shelled from UAV altitude, what I see is Kharkiv after a shelling, no more and no less. I know very well the causes and the consequences of this war, and it frightens me as a woman and simply as a person, a free and honest person who knows that war is the worst thing ever invented by the humanity.

Disillusionment

By October, the couple began to drift apart. At each court hearing, Lyudmila spoke about the war, and Alexander tried to shush her. She took this as a betrayal. “The worst of all things that happened,” she writes from jail, “was seeing how weak was the man I’d counted on to be my strength.” Her feelings for him “burned up” in jail, she says, adding that it was probably for the best. As for Alexander, he thinks that Lyudmila’s political court speeches have only hurt them both.

In December, court bailiffs told Alexander that his mother had died. She had been his only living relation and the only person who brought parcels to him in jail. Meanwhile, Lyudmila’s own mother rejected her daughter’s political activism. Lyudmila’s ex-husband and their children write to Lyudmila and bring her parcels, but they never came to any of the trial hearings. Razumova’s youngest, 17-year-old daughter who lived with her and Alexander before their arrest, now lives with her father.

Unlike Lyudmila, Alexander followed his attorney’s advice, admitting his guilt and trying to impress it upon his wife that the court is no place for heroics. His reasoning was that they weren’t high-profile politicians but ordinary people, unprepared for long prison sentences. At 64, Alexander is convinced that he wouldn’t live to be free again if he went to a penal colony. During the earlier phases of their trial, he hoped that, after release, the two of them might leave the country together. Instead, their relationship fell apart.

At last, the court sentenced them to 6.5 and seven years in penal colonies. Although two OVD-Info specialist attorneys joined their case towards the end of their trial, the case was at that point beyond rescue. Alexander got the shorter sentence. Neither of them had been prepared for this outcome, but they accepted it as calmly as they could.

Hope and friendship

Solitary confinement leaves her very hungry for conversation, Razumova admits. When, because of media coverage of the case, new people began to write to her through the penal system’s correspondence system, she welcomed them as “kindred spirits.”

One of Razumova’s closest friends who now writes to her regularly is Andron Belkevich, an outdoors enthusiast who shares Lyudmila’s love of the Taiga but not her dissident views. Still, he found himself upset by the trial its outcome. He thinks of Lyudmila as a “creative person with an independent worldview, a strong and courageous woman, and an excellent mother.” “It isn’t that long since we became friends,” he told Verstka. “Lately, we corresponded more often and had been hoping to get together. It’s very bitter to see how it’s all turned out.”

Some of the people who help Lyudmila most are the prison staff. She believes that most of them work in the penal system because that’s the one way they can feed their families. In their eyes and faces, she says, she sees “solidarity and support that they cannot express in words.”

In a letter to Verstka, Lyudmila writes that she doesn’t despair and still believes in herself and in the strength of her own spirit. In spite of the verdict, she recalls, the process left her feeling triumphant, thanks to the new defense attorneys’ powerful closing statement that made the prosecution look “pathetic.” In her last allocution, Lyudmila said that, regardless of the time she might spend in prison, she had the advantage of knowing that her children, grandchildren, and their descendants “would never have to be ashamed of her.”

Judging by Alexander’s letter, he isn’t as high-spirited, but OVD-Info’s advocacy and letters that began pouring in thanks to the media coverage of his case have helped him look at the brighter side of things. Finishing a letter to Verstka shortly after hearing his sentence, Alexander quoted Vladimir Kara-Murza: “The dawn is very near.”

Reportage by Anastasia Musatova (Verstka)

Adapted for Meduza in English by Anna Razumnaya