I’ve wanted to write this for a long time, but kept stopping myself, because it feels like stirring up a scandal. But after appearing, even if only by video link, as a witness at Lilia Chanysheva’s trial and seeing her there—so remarkable and unbroken, yet so alone in that awful closed-door trial in Ufa (and of course it will all end with a huge prison sentence)—I can’t stay silent.
I’ll feel that by staying silent, I’m betraying her.
Lilia Chanysheva was our coordinator in Ufa. One of the best coordinators. But now they’re dragging her through prisons and pretrial detention centers far beyond anything a mere coordinator would face, even though all of them are being seriously persecuted. She is being prosecuted as if she were one of the leaders of an extremist organization. She was arrested before anyone else, held for a long time in a Moscow pretrial detention center (SIZO), and an investigator said to me outright: “Our directive is that Chanysheva is Navalny in a skirt.”
We know this happened because the gangster mafia running Bashkortostan was so enraged by Chanysheva’s effective work—in particular, defending the Kushtau shihan hill and investigating corruption in Governor Khabirov’s family—that they lobbied separately, at the highest level, to have her imprisoned. Khabirov personally handled this, while the ideological groundwork for locking her up was prepared by a particularly vile conman and PR operative named Murzagulov.
Every governor—and really every branch of government—has some well-fed bastard like this on the payroll.
He writes articles—public denunciations that later turn into criminal cases. Usually I don’t even know their names, but I remembered this Murzagulov because he was always trotting after Radiy Khabirov like a pet poodle:
And of course for the especially nasty way he went after Chanysheva and our Bashkortostan штаб (1, 2).
And this is the Murzagulov that Mikhail Borisovich Khodorkovsky hired.
When I was told this, I didn’t believe it. How could anyone do that? This isn’t some Putin-era crook from the early 2000s. He only just recently helped put an honest person behind bars—a person who is on trial right now.
But then I was sent both an appeal from Chanysheva’s husband to Khodorkovsky and other evidence, and above all Khodorkovsky’s own disgusting, smirking comments on the matter—there’s no other way to describe them. The idea, supposedly, is that you have to know how to work with people from the other side, and in general the main and only criterion now is the war: if someone is against the war, then it supposedly doesn’t matter at all what they were doing literally yesterday—they’re still on our side.
I want to say that I am deeply ashamed of Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Ashamed of how he is behaving in this situation. Of his hypocrisy. Of the way he insulted Chanysheva and, through her, our entire organization. Of the fact that he is paying the scoundrel Murzagulov and trying to pass him off to everyone as an opposition figure and an opponent of the regime.
I’ve heard the argument about “having to work with people from the other side” before. From Khodorkovsky himself, in fact, when in 2016 he put some crooks from state TV in charge of election campaigns. Timur Valeev, Maria Baronova—remember them? They failed at everything, got paid, and then went right back to the other side.
As for the claim that “the only thing that matters now is the war and one’s attitude toward it”—that is exactly the disgusting mugging I’m talking about. A successful exercise in “how to out-hypocrite Putin himself.” Just as for Putin “the war wipes everything clean,” here too the war is supposed to erase and whitewash every scoundrel, as long as he writes a Facebook post. Whatever Murzagulov and people like him may say, they are not merely not against the war—they helped make this war happen, doing everything they could to create the conditions for it. Because the prologue to this war was the purge of all activists, above all our headquarters as the only structure capable of organizing anti-war protests across the country.
Chanysheva is in prison because Khabirov and Murzagulov successfully convinced the Kremlin that she was dangerous, and the Kremlin concluded that she could not be left free during wartime.
And separately, let me say this for the idiots who will inevitably show up here and say: “In a crisis, you can’t stand around in a white coat acting morally pure—you have to be pragmatic and unite with everyone.”
Okay. For your sake, I’ll put on the filthy, stained, torn, rational coat of political pragmatism. The realpolitik coat.
So what? I’m standing in this coat next to Khodorkovsky, and it makes me sick. And what pragmatic benefits have we gained? What has Murzagulov added to our movement? What advantages have we acquired? Has our support increased? There’s so much grand talk about people from the other side, as if Solovyov and Simonyan had been turned, but so far the only additions to the ledger are the smallest, cheapest, most obscure sellouts.
But we have dealt a blow to activists’ morale. Now any cooperation with Khodorkovsky means bewilderment among regional activists and accusations of betrayal and hypocrisy. It also means the bewilderment of a huge number of excellent journalists left without work, seeing that the only opposition figure with money gave a well-paid job not to a decent person, but to Murzagulov. So in this situation I am definitely taking off the realpolitik coat: it’s disgusting to stand in it, and there are no benefits. And I am ashamed of Mikhail Khodorkovsky. I hope you are too. And I hope that when enough people tell him this directly, he will understand something—and he too will feel ashamed.