‘I go to prison first, then you defend me’

Defense attorney Alexey Liptser is in jail, after representing Alexey Navalny in court. His friend Pavel Kanygin explains why Liptser and his family stayed in Russia, despite the risks.

Three defense attorneys who had, at different points, represented the Russian opposition politician Alexey Navalny were all hit with organized extremism charges this week, in what appears to be a concerted assault on Navalny’s (and other political prisoners’) right to defense. The politician’s associates at the Anti-Corruption Foundation call these arrests a deliberate attempt to isolate Navalny as the Russian authorities prepare to transfer him to a high-security penal colony. The legal community has already objected to the arrests of Navalny’s legal team, voicing alarm over what appears to be the start of mass repressions against defense lawyers who work with critics of the regime and other politically inconvenient defendants. One of the Navalny councils under arrest is Alexey Liptser, who has previously represented Ildar Dadin, Konstantin Kotov, and Krestina Khachaturyan. In a first-person piece written for the independent outlet Bereg, Lipser’s close friend and Novaya Gazeta journalist Pavel Kanygin writes about his friendship with Alexey Liptser and what kept the attorney in Russia, despite the mounting risks. Meduza is publishing this story with Bereg’s permission.

Alexey Liptser’s family was woken up at 5 a.m. by the pounding at their door. “Open up! Police!” they heard from the other side.

A group of Spetsnaz troops crowded into the hallway of the Liptsers’ rented apartment in southwestern Moscow. Their two-year-old daughter Stesha, asleep in her crib, woke up when the masked people started overturning the furniture and scattering the family’s belongings.

Just before letting them in, Liptser’s wife Mila managed to call her mother (hurriedly asking her to pray for them) and Alexey’s aunt, Ksenia Kostromina, an attorney. It was Kostromina who raised the public alarm, Mila says.

The police raid in the Liptsers’ home went on for five hours. The agents sifted through their personal things, taking cash and electronics from the apartment. They wanted to see everything that was in any way related to Navalny. When already on their way out, they gave Mila’s smartphone back to her. “Thanks for that,” she murmurs as she recalls that morning.

Alexey Liptser stopped representing Navalny in summer 2022. Leonid Volkov’s words on October 14, that after the attorneys’ arrests there would be no further tasks for them coming from Navalny, surprised me as incongruent with my friend’s case. He had long since left Navalny’s case, focusing on other legal matters and on his family. Still, I could never shake the worry that the authorities wouldn’t forget about him. But my friendly exhortations to consider leaving the country met with his unchanging answer that he was safe in Moscow.

“Look, I’m a lawyer,” he’d say. “Do you think they’ll shutter the law offices, like in Belarus?”

“I think they will.”

“Well, that’s not happening anytime soon.”

“But who wants to be the first.”

“Come on. I’ll be really amazed if I’m the first to get shuttered. Thanks for the compliment, of course.”

“Just remember our agreement back when we were young. I go to prison first, and then you defend me.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“You really are an ass.”

I’m scrolling through our messages from the moment when I left Russia for the Netherlands, immediately after the start of the war, while Liptser remained in Moscow. I last messaged him from the U.S. at 10:21 p.m., attaching some silly reel. It was 5:21 a.m. in Moscow: police agents were already searching his apartment.

Alexey Liptser is 36 years old. He comes from a well-known Moscow family: his mother, attorney Elena Liptser, was involved in the Yukos trial — the biggest trial of the aughts — at the end of which both Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev were sentenced to what seemed like outrageous prison terms at the time, also losing their business in Russia. Alexey’s grandfather, Lev Ponomarev, is a well-known Soviet (and later Russian) dissident, the first person to be declared a “foreign agent” by the Russian Federation.

As a fourth-year student in a law college, Alexey was already working as a legal assistant to the Moscow attorney Sergey Brovchenko.

We became friends through an online Harry Potter community, at a time when there were no messengers or social media, and you could only get a LiveJournal account by special invitation. We were 17.

I wandered into that Harry Potter group in 2004, as an intern for Novaya Gazeta. I had just come to Moscow to study in Moscow State University’s journalism department. When the editors heard about my favorite book, they gave me my first assignment: a reportage on Harry Potter fans and what they’re up to. Although I was a fan myself, I had no idea about the online goings-on.

I met Alexey under splendid circumstances: Moscow-based Harry Potter fans were meeting with the fan group from St. Petersburg. Drinking started before we even left the platform at the Leningrad train station. It turned out that Russian Harry Potter fans are up to the same things as any other group of young people is up to: we talked about music and movies, went to museums and concerts, and visited one another. As for Harry Potter, he gave a pretext for having a good time, or perhaps an image of a dream life: a life of integrity, where it’s clear what you stand for — and in the end, there’s a miracle.

Politics was a cringe topic for us young people at the time. Few of us, for example, understood the importance of what the Novaya Gazeta reporter Anna Politkovskaya was doing with her journalism. Two of thee of us understood this, including Liptser. On that dark October Saturday when she was assassinated in 2006, we got together at someone’s apartment. This became a landmark moment for our friendship. Liptser did not seem overly emotional — but he was there, and this meant something important.

“Alexey is a very level-headed person, but he is never indifferent,” says an attorney who agreed to talk about his experience of working with Liptser on condition of anonymity. “A very genuine, reliable guy,” he adds to this description, “and completely sane, even though he takes things close to heart.”

“He keeps his feelings to himself, and only shares them with the people he’s closest to,” says his aunt and mentor in the profession, Ksenia Kostromina. “You know very well how brilliantly he expresses himself when he wants to,” she reminds me.

Alexey’s blend of reserve and boyish good looks sometimes tricked people into thinking that they were dealing with a naive, defenseless person. Once, when walking at night by Moscow’s Pushkin train station, we were accosted by a bunch of toughs. Although we were walking with our girlfriends, the hoodlums were determined to start a fight. But before the imminent brawl could get started, Alexey astonished everyone by suddenly tackling the largest of the hoodlums and toppling him to the ground, without losing his signature look of composure even for a moment. This was sufficient to “prompt the opposing party to desist from further claims,” as one might put it in court.

Alexey grew up without a father. This clearly had something to do with his fighting spirit, self-discipline, and workaholism. Those qualities brought us together, but also drove us to compete with one another. Each of us wanted to be the first — to buy a new iPhone, to start a family, to get the coolest birthday present for the other.

He started out in civil advocacy. Political cases only started coming to him later. His first major political trial was the 2016 case of Ildar Dadin, the first person to be convicted for multiple unsanctioned protests, sentenced to a real prison term, and later tortured at the penal colony. Alexey and his colleagues went all the way to the Constitutional Court to get the state to pay Dadin compensation. In Putin’s Russia, this was a singular result and a remarkable achievement.

Here’s how Ksenia Kostromina describes Liptser’s role in the case:

It was my case at first, but later on I asked Alexey to join it. He didn’t just finish the case, but won it with an unprecedented margin. Of course, like any situation, this one had some bits of luck and accident that helped it work out in our favor. For example, Alexey went to visit Dadin at the penal colony at just the right time for Dadin to give him detailed information about torture, which we then published. It produced a shock in society, changing the whole course of the case. It was partly luck, partly an excellent intuition — but these things only help those people who work hard anyway. And Alexey is a hard worker.

When I speak to the founder of Russia’s Center for Legal Help Alexey Fedyarov, he calls Liptser “a top-notch professional.” “I started watching him during the Dadin trial, but I gained a real respect for him during the trial of the Khachaturyan sisters,” he admits.

Alexey represented one of the Khachaturyan sisters, Krestina. In 2019, the country was shocked by the story of the three sisters who spent years being tormented and serially raped by their father, Mikhail Khachaturyan. Their neighbors knew about it; people at the school the sisters went to talked about it; Khachaturyan’s wife and another victim, Aurelia, wrote police reports that mysteriously found their way back to the perpetrator, while the police told everyone to stop bothering them.

In Liptser’s own words,

the importance of this case is about a guarantee of protection for the weakest and the most vulnerable. When a rapist spends years tormenting you with impunity, and there’s no one near who would be legally compelled to protect the victim, that person must have a right to self-defense, a right to protect herself.

The prosecution resisted this argument, refusing to see the Khachaturyan sisters as victims while they were tried for murdering their father. Because the case quickly became fodder for Russian television shows that typically condemned the three young women, the defense team was under pressure from the Russian public. That patriarchal fury didn’t subside even after the medical experts testified that Khachaturyan had serially raped his own daughters.

Alexey doesn’t often doubt himself, but I know that this case weighed heavily upon him. It was touching to watch him change, affected as he was by working on the case. Stupid and crass “guy” jokes and memes were becoming rarer in our messages and conversations. He took the case close to heart and made no secret of it.

From a horror story about violence in one particular family from northern Moscow, the case grew into a reflection of violence at large in the country. Alexey’s argument that each of us has an indispensable right to fight back against oppression, a right to self-defense, could hardly have appealed to the Russian authorities. Khachaturyan’s senseless cruelty and his wish to dominate at any cost was not wholly different from the Russian leaders’ habits of coercing the country to remain in power themselves.

Together, Alexey and I wrote a long investigative piece about the Khachaturyan sisters for Novaya Gazeta. We also recorded a podcast about the case, but never got around to releasing it because next Russia invaded Ukraine. And Alexey’s then-client Alexey Navalny was imprisoned in Pokrov.

Hesitating to release the podcast, Alexey wrote to me in 2022:

“Let’s put it off for a bit. There isn’t any real progress in the case anyway. And I keep having to go to Pokrov.”

“Haven’t you had enough of Pokrov?”

“And where should I go instead? The Netherlands?”

“Why not, I’ve got a spare mattress for you here.”

“A mattress! Haha, great — I’m on my way!”

An attorney who works regularly with Liptser says that his arrest was foreseeable, but still shocked their shared professional circle:

I and many of my colleagues are completely blindsided. It was foreseeable, on the one hand, since sooner or later the authorities would come for the defense lawyers. But, at the same time, it’s totally unanticipated. It’s painful to see this happen to my colleagues, and it’s frightening to think of those who will be left without legal defense — since the signal is loud and clear.

Alexey has a lot of unfinished work in Moscow, but most importantly he has his wife Mila and a two-year-old daughter, Stesha. After they had a baby, Alexey and Mila started thinking about moving, began renovating, and got into debt. Being embroiled in renovating their apartment was one of the things that kept them from leaving Russia. I couldn’t wrap my mind around this — it bothered me, but I couldn’t find any compelling arguments to convince them.

He had always been lucky: he had a knack for landing in good situations, and escaping from bad ones. Some people might say he had a nose, a hunch, or some kind of magic touch. But this time around, there was no magic.

Let’s all help Mila and the other arrested attorneys’ families. And let’s get together to help Alexey Liptser, Vadim Kobzev, and Igor Sergunin.

Story by Pavel Kanygin. Translated by Anna Razumnaya.