Rita Loginova: “I screamed when I found out that my brother had gone to war”

Rita Loginova is a journalist and activist. She was born and worked for a long time in Novosibirsk, collaborated with independent Russian media: Taiga.info, Vorstka, Meduza . Among the main topics of her work are HIV, drug addiction, Russian prisons and xenophobia.

After emigrating, he lives in Prague. Now she is the editor-in-chief of Glasnaya magazine and the author of the podcast “ Only Pluses ” .

Tell us about yourself.

— My name is Rita Loginova. I'm a journalist. I'm from Novosibirsk. I was born in Siberia in 1988 and until recently lived in Novosibirsk and grew up there too. As a journalist she worked in Taiga.info, in Such Affairs, in Layout, and wrote for Mediazona. I also did my own podcast, it is closely related to one of the main topics of my journalism - HIV infection. The podcast is called “Some Pluses.” And there I also talk a lot about how Russia is fighting or not fighting the HIV epidemic, but not only. This is my terrible passion for this topic.

How did the war affect your life?

- Smeared it. Well, first of all, I left Russia, of course, which I did not intend to do, because my central identity was that of a journalist from Siberia, who understands something about the region where she lives, primarily in the social situation. In addition to HIV, I wrote quite a lot about how the support system for children left without parental care is structured, about how palliative care is organized for terminally ill people with severe pain syndrome. I wrote a lot about how our people are in prisons, and what kind of hell drug users and chronically ill people also face. This was a large pool of my interests. And, to be honest, I was sure that I would work in this field for the rest of my life. Because there is always a lot of work there, but there is something to tell. People are faced with such trash, with such injustice towards themselves, being in some terrible life and social situation, that writing is impossible to rewrite.

But after the twenty-fourth, accordingly, topics of war with Ukraine were added. I remember one of the last reports that I did from Novosibirsk - it was a trip to Toguchin near Novosibirsk. There is such a settlement, there is a colony there, and Prigozhin came there to recruit boys. And we went there, which was surprising, in fact, because there wasn’t much of any kind of protest left that could be thought of. Quite quickly, a bunch of relatives, wives, mothers, some other people, close prisoners went to this colony in order to dissuade them from being recruited and going with Prigozhin to do what the RF Armed Forces are doing.

And it was amazing to see that people in general were so ready to fight for their relatives, to come to the colony in huge crowds. Of course, there was no pressure on the colony administration so that this would end in a clash with the guards, or the cops were not called either. But it’s in itself to watch this in Novosibirsk with your own eyes, how women fainted when they found out that after all, the man for whom they had come here and were shaking had signed a contract with Prigozhin, how they were pumped out, how many tears there were. I think that this, of course, is a very great success for a journalist to see such things with his own eyes and describe them.

And since I was not going to somehow stop doing what I was doing due to the outbreak of the war, and this was increasingly going against what the state was doing and insisting on, I had to leave. I don’t have a criminal record, I’m not even a foreign agent yet. Although, probably, all the publications with which I have worked exist with one or another label. I'm getting through it for now, thank God. But it's like Russian roulette. And I have two children. I wouldn’t really want their fate to grow up without a mother. The eldest is 15, the youngest is seven. They are here with me now. I went to the Czech Republic, to Prague, and have been living here with them for the last 3 years. I’m trying to establish some kind of life so that they have more prospects for living in a society like here, at least to compare it with a home, to stay alive, to choose some kind of future that is not connected with militarism. I hope they have more opportunities to do that here.

And I can continue to engage in journalism remotely in many ways, because how else, but it seems to me that my role in this sense - searching for new topics, connecting with authors in the regions, simply being curious about what is happening there - is important. Here, in relative safety, I can manage this somehow. By the way, I don’t think I’ve completely cut myself off from my roots. They often try to inject us somehow, which we understand, those who have left. It seems to me that this is just bullshit, because we and those journalists who remain inside, with whom we cooperate, and I primarily now mean the Glasnaya publication, where I am the editor-in-chief, we are doing the same thing. We just support as much as we can, and live on the sly.

Your younger brother Maxim went missing during the war. For those who have not yet listened to your podcast about this tragedy, tell us how it happened.

— I have two brothers, we all grew up in Novosibirsk. I am the eldest sister among them. And my middle one, he’s actually only a year and a half younger than me. I am 38. He was, accordingly, a year and a half younger. An ordinary person, if I were telling someone about him, I would say in a friendly way that he’s a gopnik from the area, but kind, kind of unlucky, in trouble. What seriously shaped my brother’s life and personality was drug addiction. Due to his drug use, he was caught by the police more than once, but he was never imprisoned; he somehow managed to get away.

And in those moments when he had some problems with the law, it was possible, I thought that in addition to some of my sisterly efforts to help him with a lawyer, with someone else, I always thought that now we were communicating and it was time to tell him that there were opportunities for rehabilitation. There are some possibilities for addiction, ways to take control of it. There are such methods, and there are groups of anonymous drug addicts, you can visit them. There are other communities where they can provide some kind of medical and social assistance. And I, as a journalist who worked on this in Novosibirsk and knew, relatively speaking, people, it seems to me that I had a little more information at least about this to provide it.

The problem with addiction is that in order to do something about it, a person must still do it himself, his desire is primary, and he did not immediately have this desire. He basically denied for quite a long time that he had a drug problem. Well, apparently, at some next moment, when he went to buy, they slapped him again with weight, and offered, as his girlfriend told me, such a simple choice: either sit down or sign a contract. This is also a very common practice, as we know. People are literally being vacuumed up; those who for one reason or another come to the attention of the police are sentenced immediately, without waiting for a trial. What to expect? How would you solve all your problems at the same time?

And since I did not have the opportunity to directly discuss this with my brother, but this particular legal situation, he refused to talk about it at all. At some point, he simply told me and my mother that he was going to the Northern Military District and left. Why is he going? For what? All attempts to find out rested on his answer: “This is my decision. I’m a man, I decided so.” Well, he went out on his first combat mission and did not return from it last year, it turns out, this happened last summer. He has been missing since then, although somehow the unit has already begun to move towards declaring him dead.

I haven’t found any other way to deal with this story other than to make content out of it and tell it. And I made a podcast, a new season of the podcast “Only Pluses,” partly about my brother. Partly, even more than half, about what phenomena, events, trends in the life of Russia, including, led my brother and, I think, many thousands of other people like him to war. Besides the fact that it was his completely stupid decision, and he faced the consequences of that decision pretty quickly, and so did we all. Besides the fact that I am terribly indignant that he somehow decided to use this chance to go to war against Ukraine in order to avoid criminal punishment, but could have sat quietly.

Besides the fact that I understand that his own choice also weighs, but I can’t, as a journalist who has been writing a lot about drug policy in this regard for the last 15 years, I can’t leave my probably already dead brother alone with this responsibility. A drug-phobic state that did not in any way seek to pay attention to the large cohort of people who use drugs as anything other than criminals who need to be isolated. It is desirable that they simply do not exist both on earth and in the country. And this, of course, is a very large heterogeneous group that is seriously ill and needs support first of all, and not punishment.

The conversation that people who use drugs need support, not punishment, is ongoing in our country, but rather quietly. It doesn’t have very many stakeholders who could influence something at the level of state policy, that’s why it’s like this. I just know that those people who went to this war, like my brother, that, of course, this is their choice, of course, and I am terribly indignant about this, but we must not forget that all this has a powerful basis in the form of government policy related to the fight against drugs. She is quite disgusting, inhumane, and absolutely unworkable in Russia. And nothing has been done about it for many years.

We often hear that Russians go to war for money. Why do you think some material goods seem more important to people than life?

- Well, yes, because of the money. And this, of course, who did I read from, that this is such a devilish idea of ​​the Russian authorities, Shulman, in this way to simply buy up some of the excess male power. So because of the money, of course, yes. I talked to a lot of people, besides my brother, who were trying to sign a contract or were already leaving. And in general, it’s not like I see a lot of reflection on whether it’s good or bad. I would like to ask around about these things. But people often see this as some other way of moral change in themselves, or perhaps spiritual growth. This is strange to me. But the truth is expressed in the words: “But I will not die like a dog, but like a hero.” One of my friends, by the way, a drug user, also said so. I don't think that happy people, satisfied with their lives, go to war, you know? That's it. Because why? You will die there.

And unhappy people who are dissatisfied with their life or don’t see much meaning in it, of course, can take advantage of this, which we see in large numbers. But I was also very worried, and I really wanted to just yell at my brother, just grab him by the chest: “You’re an idiot.” That's the first thing I told him. Then, when the emotions subsided, I realized that I needed to invest in something in order to cling to something, to convince him. Not yet knowing that the impetus for this decision of his was clashes with the police and, in general, the fact that he had a choice either to sit down or this. Well, idiots, okay, what should we do about it? Nobody wants to be the last person, this greatly influences how people make decisions, how they generally think about their future, whether they see it or not. And poverty, just constant pressure that you have nothing to live on and there is no light at all, it doesn’t make people smarter, it doesn’t make people more empathetic, it doesn’t make them at all. But the soldier does well in the end.

Did the war somehow affect the situation with HIV in Russia?

— Lately, already during the war years, Russia has been buying a lot of medicines for HIV-positive people. That is, in recent years, the volume of medications has been greatly increased, which allows almost everyone who wants to be treated, being HIV-positive, to take therapy. Previously, the volume of purchases did not imply such a number of people in therapy; there were interruptions all the time. Therefore, it is interesting that already during the war years, including thanks to the activity of non-profit organizations and activist groups of some patient communities, who never complain to the Ministry of Health about interruptions in treatment and any general complaints about how AIDS services are organized in our country, people began to buy more drugs. But there was no normal prevention that would prevent 30,000 new cases detected in the country every year.

And judging by what they are now doing in connection with the demographic situation, such as lowering the age of marriage or reducing the opportunity to have abortions, this whole policy of reproductive pressure on women and the constant drilling into the ears of “let’s give birth, give birth, give birth,” it goes a little against the measures that need to be taken due to the fact that there is an epidemic of generalized HIV infection in Russia, in some regions already. People need to be taught from a fairly early age about safe sex, about condoms, putting aside shame, somehow calmly, choosing words and information according to their age, telling children how to practice safe sex so as not to get pregnant and not become infected with HIV. To do this you need to use a condom. If everyone uses a condom, how will the birth rate increase? No way.

That is, although in general, in some normal situation, especially before the war, I often liked to say that these two models of prevention - the first is very strict, traditional, like “let’s all have one marriage for life, no fornication” - is a surefire case of protection from AIDS in a situation if you are unique partners with each other, you know that you do not have HIV infection with each other and you do not find yourself in situations where you can get it. In principle, a working option. Indeed, in a couple where people are faithful to each other and neither of them has HIV, it is important to know this too, because people are not tested for HIV, they do not know their risks and will not find out without a normal information program.

Do you see her on the street in Russia? I don't see. I personally once in Novosibirsk, together with the local Ministry of Health and NGOs, organized one such program so that billboards with information about HIV would hang on the roads. But she was alone for several years. And since nothing in Russia now foretells that suddenly such sex education programs will appear for the entire population, because there are other tasks inside - so that women give birth, then, accordingly, in this sense we are not blocking the path of HIV infection in any way.

And there are even more specific methods of prevention in addition to communicating with a wide audience on the topic of safe sex, safety in a broad sense. It's not just about sex. Relationships in general are a matter where you need to understand your own boundaries, where they end, what you can and cannot do with you. This is a large pool of issues that Russia is not interested in resolving. We also see this because the law on domestic violence is not being adopted. Why am I jumping from topic to topic: domestic violence, HIV, drug addiction prevention, which in our country is mainly associated with catching them, imprisoning them, sending them to war - these are all links in one chain. In all of this I see an absolutely disregardful, cynical attitude towards the well-being of our own citizens of modern Russia.

You had a husband with HIV. How often have you personally experienced astigmatization of this problem?

“There weren’t very many people like that in my circle until we left.” It seemed to me that I was quite an adult; it took me a long time to select the people with whom I communicated closely. This is my environment. Thanks to him that it absolutely did not resist some of my very furious HIV activism, I could talk about it in a bar while drinking, I was carried away, I did not stop. But if you go beyond your surroundings, then, of course, the stigma is strong. In theory, discrimination should be measured. It is possible, there are assessment tools that even patients can conduct - these surveys to find out what the current level of stigma and discrimination is. Maybe in the regions, by the way, I don’t exclude it, they measure it somehow, it’s just not super well known yet.

But the most amazing thing... Let me tell you about Duda. When the film was released in 2020, I had some alarming expectations that the information that the father of my youngest child was HIV-positive would affect, perhaps, the eldest. Because everyone will see Dudya, everyone is watching him, and at school the older one will also look and find out that his mother is having sex with some drug addict with HIV. They could very well say that. No one said anything, two people wrote from the parent chat to take a look, thank them very much for this educational work. If someone from this middle circle wanted to say something bad, I didn’t come across it.

I wrote another text about HIV and wrote, wrote, wrote. And I had to come to public hearings, which were devoted to how the AIDS center would continue to live. In addition to my acquaintances from the public organization, who introduced me to the context, there were also a number of people unknown to me, in particular, patients. And one of them stood up and let’s ask the Minister of Health questions, the one with glasses, a tie, and a shirt. Quite civilized, but it seemed to me that it was some kind of mask of his. I approached him to get a comment. And a few days later or a week later, he wrote that he wanted to stir up some kind of protest action, like pickets for access to pills, which were not in very short supply at that time. He says: “Come, Margarita, write.” I say: “Okay, as soon as you get ready to stir things up, I’ll come.” And he says: “Until then we fall, maybe I’ll give you a ride on the rope, we have a lake there.” And I just got divorced, I have a small child, I work like crazy. Which patients and lake to ride? And just at the end of the summer I think: “What do I have to lose? I'll go and meet you. What kind of dude? Well, I went and that’s it.

But I was completely amazed and amused by Eleonora Solomennikova’s column. There is a site called NDN.info. Here is Solomennikova, as far as I understand, she is in the Union of Journalists of the Novosibirsk Region. And she wrote “Aids carriers” on her blue eye, you know? That is, she watched Dudya’s episode, she went through the characters, and separately went over Sergei, my husband, what kind of moral qualities he is as a person. And she was very indignant, how dare we, people who somewhere, once had promiscuous sex with someone, used drugs and led some completely immoral lifestyle, as she considered in all of us who were with Dudya, how dare they ask anything from themselves. How dare they, these people, who earned all their problems for themselves, say that the state owes them something. That was her message. And I remembered the word “AIDS carriers.” Wow.

Are people with HIV taken to the war with Ukraine?

- They take it, they take it. I mean, there is HIV in the Russian army because the same men are there. I think that at the conscription level you may not go into the army if you have HIV infection; you will not be specifically dragged if you have shown a certificate that you are registered. Again, I haven’t been there for a long time and I don’t know, maybe it’s so bad there now that everyone is happy to do it, and in the state military registration and enlistment offices too. Conventionally, when they wanted to go to PMCs, they wrote in the advertisements that HIV, hepatitis - no, but in fact, of course, yes. And now, I think, too much.

And there other situations like this can happen. Another route of transmission is blood. Why are syringes such a dangerous thing? Because there remains blood in such quantities that if you inject yourself with the same syringe and this blood enters another body that is not yet infected, there is quite a lot of it there, especially if the person is not treated, he has a huge viral load, then all this viral load is joyfully transmitted to you. In war, if we imagine some severed limbs, a very large wound, some situations where people with large, fresh wounds come into contact with each other because the situation requires it - someone is dragging someone else - this is also a risky situation. This way you can also catch the virus.

I'm not talking about children, they often ask in kindergartens, if a child is HIV-positive, can he go to kindergarten with ordinary children? Of course you can. And the objection begins: “What if they break their knees and touch their knees? These are wounds, so you can also get HIV.” No, you can’t get HIV that way. There must be a fairly large volume of wound and the volume of intravenous injection of foreign material with the HIV virus in order to become infected. Children's knees in kindergarten are not the way to do it. And in war, everything is beautiful, it seems to me, it blooms.

Another thing is, I think that such an unstable wartime situation, it certainly has a bad effect on any treatment in general, on any chronic diseases and encourages troubles. But with HIV, again, in the Russian Federation, it’s always a bit of a war. And activists are constantly fighting to ensure that they are treated normally, that they are treated without interruption, that health workers who allow themselves to discriminate against people with HIV during their work are trained more, know more, and make less mistakes. But there is simply still a lot of work. To the extent that HIV services are currently supported by money from the state or some other sources, it is now impossible to cope with the epidemic. It will continue. Maybe the years when there was a strong annual increase are behind us, maybe now it will remain at this level, but without a radical increase in the number of preventive measures, and accordingly, the money for them, the situation cannot be turned around.

What is the most difficult thing about immigration for you?

— The most difficult thing is probably... The change of identity does not concern me. I was able to keep my profession, I was able to keep my immediate family, and my children with me. Unfortunately, I was left without a home in a sense, because in Novosibirsk I still had a place that I at least half owned, it was mine. It turns out that it gives you a hundred plus points of confidence in the future if you understand that you have a roof over your head. I don’t have this confidence when it comes to immigration; I’ve been tossing around for 3 years, and I manage to earn money with my labor to support my family. But this is a bit of a shaky confidence. All the time I don’t have a safety net so that I can, I don’t know, get sick and not work for a while if there is a need for it. And this, of course, soars, but may God grant me health and strength.

In emigration, I began to take more care of myself, in fact, because before I worked like crazy and thought that I, too, was invulnerable, or something. I used to think that this was some kind of superpower of mine - to constantly work like this, to encounter such stories where people almost die or die. My cemetery is large. I thought that it somehow didn’t affect me, that I was resistant to it. Now I have no such illusions. I continue to engage in journalism, writing about, plus or minus, similar things. In "Glasnaya" there are stories about women. They are often faced with the fact that just you are reading the news, as my colleague says, how you were hit on the head with a frying pan. These are the effects my profession produces on me. And now in immigration I understand this. Therefore, I give myself the opportunity to recover; from a five-day work week, I do 2 days of something pleasant on Saturdays and Sundays. This has never happened to me before. I think this is a good purchase. And at what cost?

Well, that’s why I’m a little scared all the time, but in the end I’m glad it’s like this. In fact, I don’t suffer much in Novosibirsk, except for the fact that my beloved, dear friends are there, whom I have been collecting for so long, and I have not been able to see all of them over the past 3 years. I don't know when I'll see you again. But it’s hard to live in Novosibirsk. This is a big, gray city, dusty, which is not really for people. And the social infrastructure there is also so-so. It was necessary to overcome it, it is an eternal life to overcome. When, to get from home to the bus stop, you have to fall four times because snow piled up, no one cleared it, and that’s it. Just an impassable winter. Then you spend another 20 minutes freezing at the bus stop, waiting for the bus, it’s not a fact that it will come to get you somewhere you need to go to work or take your child. All these Siberian vibes make me feel, of course... Prague is cool in this sense. I feel much better here in terms of infrastructure convenience.

I am very glad that my children were well received at school. That they don’t miss school or kindergartens at all. There was Putin on every floor and all these marches, so in the end everything was fine.

How did the children adapt to the new country?

- The eldest, when he arrived, how old was he - 13, 14, 15 years old, it’s harder for him than for the younger one. Well, in general, it seems to me that he is coping very well in the sense that he goes to this school, he understands something, he retells to me some events, scenes with classmates, conversations with teachers. From which I conclude that integration is generally at a fairly good level.

And the youngest one is like a glove, it seems to me. He ended up here even earlier, went to kindergarten, studied Czech there too, and now he’s like the most local in the end, because soon he’ll spend half his life here. I like that my youngest's fierce nature is treated with understanding here. I think that I would have more problems with him in the Novosibirsk educational institution, he is quite energetic. And the local teacher aunts fully support me in this difficult motherhood of mine with my second child. Therefore, I’m not exactly calm for them, we are close together and seem to be healthy, everyone is settled in, everyone is doing their job. And this is the most important thing. I think that life will be so tense for another 10 years, then the children will completely fly away to do their own thing. And then it will become completely good.

What are you most afraid of?

“You’re afraid that you’ll somehow let your children down, that I’ll do something that will somehow critically affect their standard of living in the future.” Or right in the moment now. We recently discussed what to do if I die, where will they go? It is clear that they have fathers, they will not be left unattended. But leaving them is scary. It’s so scary that I don’t even think about it. But now I’m thinking that I can write some kind of will, some kind of order for any fireman if you get stuck. Otherwise, I’m not really afraid of anything, I guess.

What are your dreams?

— I dream that the war will end. In fact, that is, I have some personal dreams of my own. I understand that I want to live in the forest, pray to the wheel and rarely go out to people and engage more in some kind of relaxed intellectual activity, write books, memoirs, something else, poetry, record podcasts, new awesome stories. It’s all the better to do this when you have more strength and a quiet place. Again, you are not afraid that next month you will have nothing to pay the rent with.

I dream that there would be some kind of stability that would allow me to develop as a creative person, including. Because now I’m very busy surviving, and sometimes it seems to me that my brain is more congested than it needs to be in order to burst out with cool creative ideas, new seasons of podcasts, write poetry, texts, including a book. Busy with the operating system and current affairs. Actually, I want the war to end. And just if it ends, then my modest dreams of some kind of peace of an adult mature woman who has raised her children and is doing what she wants, loves and knows how to do, will come true. If there is no war, all this will be much better.