With Mouths Sewn Shut

HOW ARTISTS PROTESTED IN RUSSIA DURING THE FIRST THREE MONTHS OF THE WAR

A solitary picketer stood in the center of Yekaterinburg on May 4, 2022, carrying a sign that read “War Is Not Peace! Silent No More!” Her name was Nadezhda Saifutdinova, and her lips were stitched through with red thread, her mouth sewn shut in protest. From where the threads entered the skin hung tiny drops of congealed blood. Saifutdinova was arrested by police and carted off.

People have also been detained for doing other, less shocking things, such as tying a green ribbon of peace on a fence, wearing the colors of the Ukrainian flag, or standing on the street dressed in mourning and holding a rose. And this is because the current context, dangerous yet simultaneously absurd, is poised to elevate practically any form of expression into performance art. A new kind of protestor, wry and sarcastic, has appeared and seems to be competing to find the most elegant way of underscoring this anti-utopian reality. There have been arrests for holding up a blank sheet of paper or for wrapping sausage in packaging that has the word “peace” as part of the brand name. There have been arrests for wielding signs featuring antiwar quotations from Lev Tolstoy, Putin, and Leopold the Cat (once a beloved Soviet-era cartoon character, now a meme, whose tag line is “Guys, let’s all just get along!”). But all that might have gone unnoticed had there been no arrests, because the arrests were the very thing that transformed the brandishing of those quotes into works of conceptual art.

Yet no one remembers these protests for more than a couple of days. Not only the tamer ones are soon forgotten: a blank piece of paper is one thing, but surely a blood-smeared mouth should have an impact? However, in the week of Saifutdinova’s demonstration, the headlines on antigovernment blog sites were all about the fighting, while the social media mavens were eagerly parsing the anti-Semitic statements made the day before by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Virtually no one had anything to say about that bloody mouth in Yekaterinburg. By way of comparison, when Piotr Pavlenski sewed his mouth shut in support of the Pussy Riot members arrested in 2012, literally everyone was talking about that. It happened, though, in a completely different country, where the machinery of repression had barely begun to function, the independent media outlets hadn’t been annihilated, and, most important of all, there was no war.

Ten years on, the metaphor of a sewn-up mouth has taken on additional meaning. On the one hand, as tradition has always held, it symbolizes silence, censorship, the suppression of protest. But now it also seems to speak to the impotence of those very acts of protest. However powerful or bold, they are not only incapable of stopping the war but, rather, go all but unnoticed, even within the stratum of oppositionally inclined intellectuals, to say nothing of other segments of society.

“The media space is overcrowded,” says artist Alisa Gorshenina. “When my last piece – photos of me – was published on Instagram, I went in to take a look at how it was being received and saw that it had collected a trail of five or so posts about the horrors of the war. People simply have other things on their minds. Even the resounding fuss over Marina Ovsyannikova seems to have quieted down fairly fast.” On March 14, 2022, Ovsyannikova, a TV journalist who used to work for the pro-Kremlin Channel One, burst onto a live set and stood behind the news anchor holding an antiwar sign.

Gorshenina has authored what may be some of the most beautiful acts of protest (however inappropriate that adjective may appear in these terrible times). In early April, the social networks abounded with photographs showing her in a long black cloak inscribed with the Tatar, Komi, Bashkir, Karelian, Chuvash, Udmurt, Altai, Khakas, Buryat, Kumyk, Avar, Moksha, and Yakut equivalents of the “No to War” slogan. The use of languages other than Russian was motivated, first of all, by safety considerations, since a law criminalizing antiwar statements passed in March had outlawed the very word voina [war]. Secondly, though, it prompted thoughts of what might lie in store for the various nationalities residing within Russia’s boundaries.

“People for whom Russian is not a native language began speaking out in their own languages from the very beginning of the war,” Gorshenina (born, raised, and still living in the Urals) explains: “It was as if the war with Ukraine had brought to the surface the longstanding problem of ethnic discrimination inside our country... I was also seeing propaganda banners saying things like ‘I’m Kalmyk, but today I’m Russian.’ With all that’s going on, the government’s taking an even harder line on Russifying the entire country. As though we were all Russians and all fighting for some kind of Russian truth. It seemed important to me to talk about the problems faced by the national cultures.”

She also reports on the impression made on her in those days by the broad-based discussion of a piece written by the antigovernment media manager Ilya Krasilshchik, who by that time was no longer in Russia. Krasilshchik’s article in The New York Times spoke of Russia’s failure as a nation. “I was bewildered by the word ‘nation,’” Gorshenina says. “What was that all about? Can Russia be called a single nation? Well, of course not: 190 nationalities live here.” She finds it unfair, too, that Krasilshchik had not used his media outlet to help people in Russia. “He has had plenty to say about collective guilt but has never said, for instance, how fast, how lightning fast, the antiwar organizations came into being. FAR, the Feminist Anti-War Resistance, was up and running the day after the war started. There are lots of people here who are still fighting and aren’t giving in, no matter how horrible the conditions are. Some are in prison, some have got away, but even so, there are people who are still doing something.” Gorshenina does, however, acknowledge that Krasilshchik eventually responded to the criticism and began talking about the protests in Russia, in particular giving a voice on his site to members of FAR.

The women’s movement and just women in general have become the real face of antiwar protest. This astonishing phenomenon has been impossible to miss, because at a time when protest art is a maximally dangerous fringe undertaking, its principal actors are women. “All the journalists, and others too, are saying how astonished they are right now about how powerful feminism can be, but I’ve been seeing it for years,” says activist Darya Apakhonchich. “Years that saw the gradual acquisition of agency. We have, for example, an annual Women’s History Night, when women in various towns and cities come out onto the streets and put up flyers about famous women. Not much to that, you might think, but when dozens of women are doing it in every region, that’s real resistance in action. It is quite simply what we’ve been building up all these years finally kicking in. We’re more able than ever before, and that’s especially noticeable when contrasted with the absence of men. In my volunteer work, it has always surprised me: An eco-protest – where are the men? Animal rights activism – where are the men? We’re collecting money for people with autoimmune diseases – where are the men? Now I realize that this is, among all else, a result of Russia having opted to adopt a neopatriarchal strategy.”

Apakhonchich has long been an antiwar activist. She was among the first individuals (as opposed to an organization) to be included by the Russian Federation on the list of “foreign agents.” Her home was searched during the protests in the fall of 2021, after which she decided to leave the country. But even from far away, she found a way to express her protest inside Russia. She started writing antiwar messages across the financial reports that she, as a foreign agent, has to submit to the Ministry of Justice every month. “I wanted to come back, so I continued sending those reports in regularly, but when the war started, I realized I couldn’t do that anymore. It’s impossible to play by the rules of a terrorist state. I’m sending them a report, and they’re dropping bombs...”

Evgeniya Isaeva of St. Petersburg may have performed the bravest artistic act of all in the first months of the war, standing on the steps of the City Duma and dousing herself in red dye that represented blood. On that very cold March day, in only a flimsy white dress and with her hands raised in surrender, Isaeva repeated over and over again “The heart bleeds, the heart bleeds.” At her feet a length of fabric was unrolled, with the following written on it: “I feel that it is useless to call upon reason. And so I am appealing to your hearts. Every day in Ukraine, women, children, and old people are dying. From bombing, from hunger, from the impossibility of getting out from under the rubble or finding medications. Marked with makeshift crosses, their graves lie black in courtyards and children’s playgrounds. Thousands of wounded and maimed, millions of lives ruined. If you can find a justification for this, your heart must have gone blind. Find within yourself the strength to be merciful and compassionate. Do not support bloodshed!”

Isaeva’s standout performance, the first of its kind, seems to have inspired many others. Since then, activist artists have burned a Russian soldier in effigy, have chained themselves to railings in front of a television with “Z TV” spray-painted on the back, or have stretched out on the sidewalk, face down, with head bagged and hands tied behind, like a murdered resident of Bucha. But the problem with any of this is that it can last only so long out on the street and, when put out on social media, affects only the likeminded. The same happens with art originally designed for online dissemination: any number of photographers and illustrators are posting antiwar pieces that their followers rave over but do hardly anything to advance the cause.

To break this cycle and reach out to the typical television viewership is one of the tasks that the Feminist Anti-War Resistance has been tackling with a striking doggedness and enthusiasm. Daily, the FAR site offers new ideas for thrusting antiwar messages under the noses of ordinary Russians – mock-ups of flyers showing an icon of the Mother of God supplicating for peace, Orwell’s books containing handwritten messages “accidentally” left on the metro, texts written on banknotes deposited into ATMs...

One of FAR’s greatest artistic successes has involved a flash mob carrying crosses in memory of Ukraine’s civilian casualties. Hundreds of memorials (930 by FAR’s count) were placed in courtyards, parks, and playgrounds. They were improvised from random branches and any available bits of wood, which not only made them simpler (and safer) to install but also strengthened their impact, because they seemed to stand over the kind of makeshift graves (mentioned by Isaeva in her own appeal) in which Ukrainians are actually burying their dead. And this is how the scenario of tragedy, “the landscape of war” as FAR founder Daria Serenko calls it, was transported into the space of Russia’s towns and cities.

Street art, the traditional communication medium in urban spaces, has manifestly not been front and center here. In the first months of the war, it mostly showed up in impromptu (“guerilla”) mini-formats – small-scale graffiti, stickers, tiny peace signs. It was how opposition activists gave the nod to each other (sometimes, as might be expected, with assurances that “You’re not alone”). But large murals that could make real inroads into the urban landscape and pique the interest of the man in the street were extremely rare. “In the early days, nobody knew what to do,” says Moscow street artist Philippenzo. His works criticizing police overreach were already well known in prewar Russia, and now he is among those who manage to stay active, the censorship and the growing risks notwithstanding. “Painting ‘No to War’ slogans was a no-brainer,” he continued, “but otherwise it was difficult to get a feel for how to express my protest in artistic form. One time I was walking past my ‘Youth Is Now.’ Earlier [before the war], I had been waiting for the weather to warm up before restoring it, because it infects people with a sort of optimistic energy, and the city hadn’t even painted over it in a whole year. But I felt that in the current context it was absolutely out of place, and I realized that it had to be redone – all the colorful background smudged with a dirty gray and ‘youth’ replaced with ‘war.’ Four hours later, someone had painted over it. After that, people walking in the area felt that their hands had been untied, and the wall took on a life of its own. Someone wrote the letter Z, someone else crossed it out and wrote ‘No to War.’ The wall had started to speak, and now it was covered with graffiti, as it had been before... Despite the fact that we’re all downhearted and afraid to protest, don’t know what to do, the commentaries [on this and similar works on Instagram] are revealing how much people miss public statements like that.”

From a purely technical perspective, dousing yourself with paint, as Isaeva did, is simpler than finding enough time to paint something on a wall before being arrested. Whereas street artists traditionally steer clear of the police, the intentions of a performance artist are completely different: he or she is deliberately trying to be arrested. Police intervention is part of the event. Isaeva stood at her post for only a few minutes, but while she was being arrested, she kept repeating “The heart bleeds,” while the image of that defenseless artist in her delicate dress underscored the state’s brutality.

Evgeniya Isaeva was fined for her trouble and also served eight days in custody. According to the independent human rights media project OVD-Info, in just the first 80 days of the war, some 16,000 arrests were made, with roughly 2,000 people facing non-criminal charges and more than 130 being facing criminal ones.

The government does not care how artistic a political statement is. It treats them all with equal unpredictability, making it impossible to calculate a protest artist’s risks or know in advance how harsh the punishment will be. When, for example, St. Petersburg artist and retiree Elena Osipova takes her antiwar drawings to the streets, she is routinely arrested, has her placards confiscated, and is sent home.

Another famous oppositionist pensioner – street artist Vladimir Ovchinnikov, whose wall art has become a must-see in the provincial town of Borovsk – is only ever fined. Since the war began, Ovchinnikov has taken his protests public several times. In one instance, he drew a girl dressed in the colors of the Ukrainian flag and standing under falling bombs, for which he had to pay 35,000 rubles (more than three times the minimum monthly pension).

But the activist Alexandra Skochilenko, for example, will be tried under a criminal statute for merely replacing store price tags with antiwar messages. Skochilenko is being charged with “spreading false information about the Russian Armed Forces” pursuant to that entirely new statute, an allegation that comes with a maximum sentence of fifteen years. At the time of writing, she was in her second month of pretrial detention, where she has been harassed and denied the gluten-free diet she needs, causing irreparable damage to her health. “Skochilenko’s story is astonishing,” says Alexandra Baeva, head of OVD-Info’s legal department, “because it wasn’t even a public statement, not even performance art. Thus far, the criminal cases we’ve seen have involved, for example, the young artist who tried to crucify himself near the Lubyanka in 2021. Or Piotr Pavlenski nailing his scrotum to Red Square, and so on. But this was a completely low-profile protest involving price tags... And then the court decided to hold her pending trial, although what she did had nothing violent about it and she had threatened no one. What’s happening to her in that detention cell also defies any logical explanation. In general, it really is a crap shoot. Many factors may play a role here – the decisions made by specific officials, the instructions from their superiors, the personality of the accused, and who knows what passing moods – but what’s for sure is that those people are not thinking in legal terms.”

Nadezhda Saifutdinova, the one with the sewn-up mouth, is awaiting trial too. She is at home but isn’t being left in peace there. Soon after making her stand, she had a visit from a youth liaison officer, who wanted to inspect the conditions in which her ten-year-old son was living. That kind of pressure is typical. On May 14, Vladivostok resident Olga Bratash, who was also under arrest, had her two minor children taken away. Bratash is under suspicion of pouring paint over a patriotic monument, and meanwhile her children have been placed in a social rehabilitation center. “After every act of protest, we’re hearing about children’s services taking an interest in somebody’s parenting,” Baeva adds, “but until now that leverage has never really been used. It has never gone as far as children actually being removed. Maybe it’s because of the public interest in those cases. It’s hard to say right now where this will go – the Vladivostok story isn’t over yet. Maybe relatives will take the children in, maybe the woman will be let out. It’s too early to draw any conclusions, but this is definitely a scary story.”

Baeva says that, although never in her professional life has she seen people coming out every day over such a long period of time, the movement is presently losing steam. “Acts of protest are still happening every day, but whereas in the early months several hundred to several thousand people were being arrested daily, now it’s more a matter of individual protests, involving one to two people a day, or maybe up to a couple dozen...”

And so, despite all the ingenuity and the attempts to ramp up the artistic impact of these protests, they are having no apparent influence on the situation. But that does not mean that there is none. It would be naïve to think that far-reaching change is possible as long as the authorities have the resources to stifle protest. But any voice raised loud enough sends something of a signal about the mood in society. Many are saying, for instance, that a general mobilization and martial law have not been announced in Russia precisely because Vladimir Putin knows he cannot count on much public enthusiasm for either idea. Besides, antiwar art provides moral support to all the dissenters, helping them stand firm as the regime tightens its hold. Daily disruption of the propagandist myth of wholesale backing for the war might just be the number one mission of the current protests.

Darya Apakhonchich is vocal in her belief in the animating power of art. She herself became an activist after the Pussy Riot protest, not only because of what the band actually did, but even more so because of the harsh and hypocritical response from the state and the Church. The performance event, the picketing, are only the beginning, although the effect they produce can be convoluted and take some time to be felt. “On the one hand, I’m seeing a lot of protests,” she continues, “but on the other, it’s not enough. More needs to be done, by other groups in society. Because it’s less likely that the residents of big cities [who come out to protest] will end up in the army, but we need people who are apt to find themselves on the front lines. Not young girls but young men and the grown women who are their mothers... They’re only now waking up. I know that human rights advocates are swamped with messages from people who don’t want to serve in the military. It’s good that they’re putting in an appearance, but as yet they’re too few and far between.”