“He looked like a skeleton.” Mediazona speaks with witness who saw pianist Pavel Kushnir before his death on hunger strike in prison

Pianist Pavel Kushnir died after a dry hunger strike in a detention center in Birobidzhan, a remote town near the Chinese border that serves as the capital of Russia’s Jewish Autonomous Region. A week after his death, neither the Federal Penitentiary Service nor the prosecutor’s office has commented officially on the incident. While the local Public Monitoring Commission, tasked with overseeing conditions in prisons, claims the deceased had no complaints, Mediazona has learned that heart disease is listed as Kushnir’s cause of death. A source who met with Kushnir during his hunger strike told Mediazona that the musician knew he was risking his life but was resolute in his protest.

“He had been on a hunger strike for two months, from the first day of his arrest. I asked him, ‘Pavel, why do you need all this?’ He replied, ‘It’s my right to express my opinion. No one wants to listen to me, and this is my position—this is how I protest against the persecution of political prisoners and the misconduct of these bad people.’ He told me he had already lost about 10 kilograms (22 lb). And it was true—he looked like a skeleton,” recounts our source, who saw the 39-year-old pianist Pavel Kushnir shortly before his death in the Birobidzhan detention center following his hunger strike.

By mid-July, Kushnir could barely walk and was in a terrible state. The musician, arrested for anti-war videos, had by then refused not only food but also water.

“I’m on a dry hunger strike, but I’m not totally avoiding liquids. I just wet my mouth and spit the water right out. It’s very difficult to speak with a dry mouth,” our source recalls Kushnir explaining. He remembered noticing a bruise under Pavel’s left eye during their last meeting.

The Federal Penitentiary Service staff “have internal rules” for hunger strikes and “can’t simply indulge” the refusal of food, so they attempted to sustain the detainee’s life with IV drips of “regular glucose and vitamins, apparently,” he continues.

This did not help, and on July 28, Pavel Kushnir died.

Mediazona has learned that the official cause of death is listed as “dilated cardiomyopathy, congestive heart failure.”

Last Friday, the news outlet Vot Tak reported the musician’s death following a hunger strike, citing his childhood friend, pianist Olga Shkrygunova, and the head of the Russia Behind Bars project, Olga Romanova—the human rights activist learned about it from a letter from one of the detainees.

“We are in mourning. On July 27, our comrade died, 40 years old, he was in pre-trial detention with us,” the message said. “The best pianist in the region, Pavel Kushnir, charged under the same article as us, 205.2, dry hunger strike and death, they drove him to it, he didn’t even live to see the trial.”

On Monday, Kushnir’s 79-year-old mother, Irina Levina, confirmed his death to Mediazona, saying she was informed by an FSB investigator on July 28.

Olga Shkrygunova told Mediazona that on Tuesday, Pavel’s friends are promised to receive his body with a power of attorney from his mother, who lives in Tambov in Central Russia, seven time zones away. They plan to cremate him in Khabarovsk, the closest large city, and bring the ashes to Tambov.

“Of course, I tried to dissuade him [from the hunger strike]. But he said, ‘No, this is my position, you won’t change my mind,’ ” recalls our source, who spoke with Kushnir shortly before his death. “Basically, he understood... He said, ‘I understand that this will all end not very well, I just don’t know when, but this is my position, and I’m not going to change it.’ ”

“Don’t get used to fascism.” Terrorism charges for four videos

Pavel Kushnir’s YouTube channel name, “Inoagent Mulder,” puns on The X-Files protagonist’s name and Russian authorities’ obsession with labeling dissenting voices as “foreign agents.” The channel has only four videos. The last and shortest one—less than a minute long—was uploaded on January 4. The thin pianist is wearing a striped navy shirt and dark overalls, with Christmas tinsel around his neck. Behind him, a string of lights blinks on the wall, and portraits of actress Jean Seberg and, as far as one can see, David Duchovny are hanging. The video is titled “Life.”

“The Bucha massacre is a disgrace to our homeland. Fascism is the death of our homeland. Putin is a fascist. The peoples of our country gave millions of their best lives so that fascism would never exist, and we will not accept it, we will not bow to the Beast,” Kushnir says. “Down with the war in Ukraine! Down with Putin’s fascist regime! Freedom to all political prisoners! Freedom to all prisoners in general—and freedom to everyone.”

Vot Tak reported that the musician’s channel, created in 2011, had only five subscribers until recently; after the news of his death in detention, the number began to grow rapidly and reached 700 at the time of publication.

In his videos, Kushnir reflected on the nature of fascism, quoted dystopian novels, spoke out against the war, regretted the "missed moment" when opposition leaders in 2011 suggested protesters disperse peacefully (Pavel participated in those rallies), insisted that Russia needs a revolution, demanded equality for LGBTQ+ people, and, as a refrain, repeated the motto from The X-Files: “The truth is out there.”

“Don’t get used to fascism, don’t get used to war. And even if there is no future, let’s believe in the present,” he said in the video “Appeal to Antifascists.” “But there is a future. Putin will rot. The fascist Putin regime will collapse. My love will live on. Let’s continue the struggle. Let’s go all the way, stay true to our past.”

It was because of these videos that Pavel Kushnir was accused of public calls for terrorism via the internet (Part 2 of Article 205.2 of the Criminal Code).

In late May, the law enforcement-affiliated Telegram channel Operativnye Svodki reported the musician’s detention in Birobidzhan. The post mentioned that during the arrest, a “homemade FBI agent ID” was found on him; possibly the same one pinned to the pianist’s striped shirt in one of the videos. The same post was copied and published on VK by the Atypical Birobidzhan page. Now users are leaving condolences under it and calling the artist who died in detention a genius.

On the website of the Birobidzhan District Court, Mediazona found a record of an administrative case for insulting a government representative on the internet, which was apparently filed against Kushnir after his arrest. The protocol was only reviewed on July 19. The card states that on July 30, the sent copy of the decision “returned with a note of impossibility of delivery.”

According to the person who met Kushnir shortly before his death, he did not deny the facts and confirmed during the investigation that he had indeed released videos against Putin on YouTube.

Despite the hunger strike, Kushnir was “of sound mind and sober judgment,” notes our source.

Officially, the Federal Penitentiary Service Administration for the Jewish Autonomous Region has not reported the death of the detainee. Mediazona tried for several days to get official comments from both regional and federal agencies, but officials of the Penitentiary Service, Investigative Committee, and the Prosecutor’s Office refused to say anything over the phone and did not respond to written inquiries.

On Saturday, August 3, the head of the regional Federal Penitentiary Service Administration, Vasily Mikhailenko, told a Mediazona reporter that he knew nothing about Pavel Kushnir. “I don’t know such a person. There are many of them, knowing each one is not part of my duties,” Mikhailenko said curtly. On Monday, he refused to speak, citing that he cannot answer questions over the phone.

The regional Public Monitoring Commission learned about Pavel Kushnir’s death from the media and social networks. “I only heard about it today. No one has informed us,” Olga Mikhna, the head of the regional PMC, told Mediazona on Monday. She added that she planned to visit the Federal Penitentiary Service to find out everything and “look at the documents.” After visiting the detention center, Mikhna told Mediazona on Tuesday that the musician had recently been in the medical unit but had not complained about anything.

The Birobidzhan Regional Philharmonic, where Kushnir worked until recently, refused to comment on his fate.

Following the news of Kushnir’s death, a spontaneous memorial in his honor appeared at the monument to victims of political repression in Novosibirsk.

“We couldn’t pool money and send him a lawyer—we just didn’t know. We didn’t write him letters of support—we didn’t know. We didn’t dissuade him from sacrificing himself—we didn’t know. He was alone. Let’s at least symbolically tell him after his death: ‘Forgive us and rest in peace,’ ” wrote local deputy Svetlana Kaverzina.

“He was a man of freedom.” Pavel Kushnir’s life and plans

“The true ideal of an artist is actually a rock star. Not so much a rock star as a punk rock star,” Pavel Kushnir said in an interview with RIA Birobidzhan a year and a half before his death. “So for me, the ideal artist is Kurt Cobain, Ian Curtis, Yanka Dyagileva, Janis Joplin."

He moved to the Jewish Autonomous Region in 2022. According to the publication Okno, Kushnir told friends that he decided to live “far from the capitals” so that he wouldn’t be forced to play at concerts celebrating WWII Victory Day during the war in Ukraine, which the musician openly protested against.

After auditioning at the Birobidzhan Philharmonic, the pianist, in his own words, decided to stay there for a long time: “I had another audition, I canceled it—decided to risk staying and... work here for about 12 years. If I’m not put in prison, drafted into the army, or fired, then I hope I’ll be with you for the next 12 years.”

Pavel’s longtime friend, pianist Olga Shkrygunova, recounted that he participated in Russian protest rallies in 2011–2012, spoke out against the annexation of Crimea, and later against the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

“Radical views ranging from regrets about the overly respectable nature of Bolotnaya protests to hopes for an upcoming queer revolution coexisted in Kushnir, apparently, with a sincere fascination with ufology,” poet and translator Ivan Sokolov writes about the deceased. “The X-Files, in fact, served as inspiration for his creative persona nicknamed Inoagent Mulder—the owner of a fake FBI ID and a devoted listener of Cobain and reader of Orwell, thrown into a country ‘with a soul as black as the Bible, but a golden heart.’ ”

Pavel Kushnir was born and raised in Tambov. He graduated from the Moscow Conservatory, then worked for seven years as a soloist at the Kursk Regional Philharmonic and for another three—before moving to Birobidzhan—at the Kurgan Philharmonic.

“This phenomenal kid just died in prison... His interpretations of Rachmaninoff are incredible. He cleared the music of centuries of accretions,” writes the classical music popularizer Mikhail Kazinik. Kazinik was well acquainted with Pavel’s father, Mikhail Kushnir, a musician and teacher. Kushnir’s father died four years ago.

Pavel also left his mark, albeit unnoticed by the mass reader, in literature: according to counter-culture publisher Dmitry Volchek, he tried his hand at translating contemporary literature, and in 2014 wrote an experimental novel “Russian Cut-up.”

“A significant part of the novel is his diary, going backwards, as if running away from the events of 2014 that shocked the author, which he compares to the arrival of a giant pig,” Volchek writes.

In the summer of 2022, Kushnir finished a new novel dedicated to the German left-wing radical group Red Army Faction (RAF). He specified that the novel was created by cutting up 117 texts “by other authors of all times and nations.” Pavel had been working on this piece for eight years.

Maria Nemtsova, Kushnir’s classmate from the Moscow Conservatory, calls him “an incredibly erudite and multifaceted person.”

“He was a man of freedom, a man of creativity, and, undoubtedly, he believed in art as an incredible driving force,” Nemtsova told the Feminist Anti-War Resistance. “He was very honest, sincere, and never afraid of anything. Pasha, from the very beginning of the war, absolutely openly said that he was against this fucking war and that Putin is a fascist.”

As Olga Shkrygunova recounts, from the very beginning of the Russian invasion, while still working at the Kurgan Philharmonic, Kushnir openly spoke out against the war on social media and distributed anti-war leaflets. The events in Bucha were a “turning point and awakening” for him, the pianist himself noted.

Hunger strikes as a form of personal protest were practiced by Kushnir as early as 2022, as he recounted in an interview published on Shkrygunova’s Facebook page.

“I easily endure hunger physically; when it seemed to me that people were starting to get used to the war, to accept it, I chose this form of protest, maybe to set an example, to draw attention,” Kushnir explained.

At the same time, according to Shkrygunova, the musician continued to work at the philharmonic and gave concerts. In his letters, she says, Kushnir wrote that he only drank water or kefir.

“This is Pasha, you must understand. This is a person who had enormous willpower, who, I think, was capable of great self-overcoming and overcoming of the human body,” Shkrygunova tells Mediazona.

The first hunger strike lasted 20 days. He decided on the second one, the pianist’s friend continues, in 2023. It lasted three months. Then Kushnir sent a message to his friends with his demands: to end the war and release political prisoners.

“Write on walls, write on leaflets, scatter leaflets, paste leaflets. Write big posters, stick them to the backs of benches, leave them somewhere, paste them on house walls. Write on the walls, write on the internet,” Kushnir said in a video he called “Inoagent Mulder’s Noël Address.” “It seems to me that fascism is killing us in the real world. We will die in reality. Let’s fight it in reality too. Declare a hunger strike demanding the resignation of fucking Putin, the removal of the fascist regime, the end of the fucking war in Ukraine.”

By the beginning of 2024, Shkrygunova recounts, Pavel was fired from the philharmonic. He was left without means of subsistence, sold his laptop, and used a dumb phone. His friend helped him with money, although he never admitted to needing it.

Now Shkrygunova is trying to raise money for the transportation of the body and cremation. “His friends from Birobidzhan have joined in and, I think, some deputy who wants to organize a farewell at the philharmonic. Which, of course, is very important for all of us, and he would have wanted that too,” she explains. “These friends, they’ve put so much effort into this poor body now, just so he could be buried next to his father in Tambov... I was telling someone today that his novels and his interviews—all of this makes sense now. And all of this sounds meaningful only because he died, you understand? That’s the tragedy.”

Editor: Maria Klimova