Eat. Bake. Protest.

* Originally published in cherta.media

Nastya owns a small home-based business. She bakes cakes to order. In the past year, her baking has allowed her to raise R349,000 for charity, almost $5000, helping dozens of organizations while sharing with thousands of subscribers what is actually happening in Ukraine.

In an interview with the Russian journal Cherta (translated and published here with permission), Nastya explained how she organized her fundraising, turned baking into a form of protest, and why she has chosen to stay in Russia. 

How long have you been running a bakery business? 

I have loved to cook since I was a child. For the holidays, I was always given copies of books by Yulia Vysotskaya [an actress and author who has published over 20 cookbooks] or Jamie Oliver. Once, my mother even brought the cookbook 1000 Russian Dishes home from work. I simply adored it, because now I could cover the table with dishes and make all sorts of stuff. And, as it turns out, I rather like multitasking. When you need to fry something here, boil something over there, you feel like a true ninja. 

When I was in eleventh grade, I posted some photos of my cakes. Then some friends wrote, “Can you bake a cake for us?” I baked it. Then I thought perhaps I should bake cakes to order, and so I set up an Instagram account. At first, I was super obsessed with following recipes – how could I make it right? But now this passion for coming up with something new took over. That’s probably why I can’t really call myself a baker. 

In your work, you give considerable attention to rights defenders and humanitarian organizations. How did that come about? 

My charity work began in school. I feel that there should always be a social aspect to work. The first baking I did for charity was in support of rabbits. I had had a rabbit, and I was following a girl on Instagram who was working to rescue them. If you bought a cake with a bunny decoration on it, then I would transfer a certain percentage from the sale of that cake to her.

How do your lotteries work? 

I create several cakes, post them on Telegram, and people pick a number and put it in the comments. For each number chosen, they transfer R100 to my personal account. Lots of people pick several numbers to increase their chances of winning. A lottery usually lasts 6-8 hours. At the end, with the help of a random number generator, I choose the winner and send them their prize. Seventy percent of all the money collected goes to the designated nonprofit. The remaining 30 percent is enough to cover the costs of what I bake for the drawing. 

How did you come up with the idea of helping in an ongoing way through the cake lotteries? 

When Meduza was declared a foreign agent, they began an effort titled “Save Meduza.” And so I thought, “I need to do a lottery.” Since then, I have been unable to even consider doing a lottery without a charitable component.  

So I started doing lotteries in support of various nonprofits. They’ve mostly been for OVD-Info, The Roizman Fund, Nuzhna Pomoshch, Anton Is With Us, Helping To Leave (ОВД-Инфо, фонд Ройзмана, «Нужна помощь», «Антон тут рядом», «Помогаем уехать»), which helps Ukrainians evacuate. I’ve also collaborated with the publication Bumaga. 

Nuzhna Pomosh reached out to me and asked me to talk up their “We’re Staying to Help” initiative and the advantages of making ongoing contributions. I decided to show that R100 is a lot if we are many. 

Generally, I believe that recurring donations will save the world. It is really the most important source of income for any nonprofit – it is money organizations can count on. You know that R100,000 of recurring donations will come in this month. This allows you to budget, which is super important. And I generally love subscriptions and recurring payments. I wish I could subscribe to everything. 

You often react to current events. For example, in early September you made cupcakes decorated with Roizman tweets. How did you get this idea? 

After Roizman* was detained, I got to wondering where I could send donations. I found out he had a foundation, then saw a Twitter post by a Yekaterinburg journalist with a suggestion for a local café: fortune cookies featuring random Twitter responses by Roizman, e.g., “You ate shit.” And I thought that should definitely be on a cake.  

Basically, I started using cakes as protest signs. If you want to say something, you can do it on a cake. So now, I’m constantly trying to come up with something for the lotteries. While I used to see them as cakes I needed to sell, now I come up with new designs for each drawing.

How did your “Cakes are Right Here” project, your collaboration with the “Anton is Right Here” autism foundation, come about?*

This is my favorite story, because I live without goals. The main thing is to have desire.  

I took a course on inclusion at university taught by Oksana Moroz. She gave us a homework assignment to watch the 2012 film, Anton is Right Here (Антон тут рядом). I already knew about the foundation, because when I was in my first year at university we organized a second-hand clothes drive and donated some of our proceeds to it. We offered to give away clothes we didn’t need. Clothes were sorted into three categories: to repair, to give to orphanages, for resale. I set up photo sessions at home, and sometimes in studios. We earned over R70,000 selling clothing, and transferred the money to various nonprofits, including Anton is Right Here.* 

Yet I had never visited the foundation’s Instagram page. And when I did, I saw that they had a real brand, with a color scheme and a bunch of collections. And they had a section where they had quotes from people helped by the foundation – text on a white background. And so I thought that somehow these had to be shared with the world, because when I read these quotes, I understood that they could completely change peoples’ views of people on the autism spectrum. 

So I connected with their social media manager writing, “I want to make cakes.” That was a year ago October. I sat down and made a presentation of how this would look, we agreed to everything, and I set to work. Then the time came to write my graduation thesis. And I singled out two ways to boost a nonprofit’s brand: lotteries, in other words volunteer fundraising; and where money is raised for a nonprofit through a single person, and a portion of the profits goes to charity. 

I wanted more people to understand that this works. Research shows that people are willing to pay more for goods that support a charity, because it satisfies emotional needs – the desire to help, to feel needed, to feel they’re doing a good deed, etc. And a lottery shows that people are ready to pay the charitable surcharge without even receiving anything. In other words, they buy a “ticket” realizing they might not get a cake. 

I price the Anton is Right Here and Bumaga cakes without a surcharge, so they are less expensive than the other cakes people order from me, because I want to encourage people to order them and get involved. I transfer 40 percent – 720 rubles – from every cake. The Cakes are Right Here I make about 13 times per month, or 149 cakes per year. In all, I have so far transferred  R136,000 rubles (approximately $2000) to the foundation.

How has the war affected your business? 

I began to help more, to conduct lotteries more often. In general, I love to write, and I can’t relax if I don’t write. When the war started, I was unable to write anything, I missed Navalny and his rallies, because without him nothing will happen. And so I sat down and wrote an angry text, about how we will never get anywhere, asking why doesn’t anyone go out and protest? And I posted it to my bakery Instagram account and people supported me. I realized I could write about this here, and, since it is my brand, I could do what I want.  

A bunch of people unsubscribed, but that didn’t bother me, because the brand has a very large following [23,100 at press time], and there is never a shortage of orders. Quite the opposite, actually… The economic crisis has also had no effect, except that there was no sugar for a while. 

In April, I went to St. Petersburg to participate in a fundraising event to support Anton is Right Here, forgetting that you can’t get sugar anywhere. I walked all around St. Petersburg and Murino [a suburb], wondering where I could get sugar, and collected it one little bag at a time from various stores.  

There has definitely been an increase in public support. I felt more connected and began speaking more to other people. People from Ukraine started writing to me. That actually made it harder, because I learned people’s true stories. Meanwhile, none of my friends were following any Ukrainians anymore. It was like a double dose of pain. I sublimated this in my writing, in rallies, I worried a lot. Like Bulgakov’s Margarita, at first I cried a lot, then I got mad. Then the rallies stopped after they started arresting everyone. But I kept talking about the war just like before. 

Are Ukrainians still writing you? For example, with words of support, or to tell you how things are going with them? 

Yes, lots of Ukrainians follow me. It’s a very surprising phenomenon, Ukrainians supporting Russians. They write, “we know things are difficult for you too, and we are sad that you have ended up in such a situation and that everyone hates you.”  

In their propaganda, 80 percent of Russians are just a big herd of sheep. And when they see people who they have followed for a long time and who they trust, they want to defend us. It’s just amazing how they write to us from the other side [of the war]: “let’s keep things good between us.”  

I have seen this with many bloggers, how Ukrainians write to them out of sympathy, “you have your own war there.” And then there is my friend, who decided to go into hiding from the military enlisters. He wrote a letter to his father, “this is not my war, I will not participate in it, I have no intention of killing anyone.” And I thought, yes, this is not my war. But the war with Putin – that one is mine.  

Do you consider what you are doing to be activism? 

It probably counts as activism, but I don’t consider myself an activist. I’ve always been in awe of activists. I didn’t happen to know any, but I really liked them. I thought people like that were so brave. 

Of course, I went to rallies. I couldn’t have it any other way. Everyone asks, “why are you marching?” Because I cannot not march, and it’s the same with cakes.  

What is more, I get that this works, that I can raise funds, and that it helps people feel better when they don’t feel alone. 

Today, anyone who uses the word “war” rather than “special operation” is threatened with prosecution for disparaging the army. Have you had any problems like that with your cakes? 

There was an instance when I thought they [the police] had come. I was in a panic, because in April-May several people wrote me on Telegram, “take down the photographs of your cakes, they are disparaging the Russian Armed Forces,” and threatened me with that [criminal] article.  

Then, every week and a half or so, police come by preventively, because of my attendance at an antiwar rally. I was arrested the first and only time on February 25, before there was the law about “fakes,” so I was only charged under the administrative article (Article 20.2 of the Code of Administrative Offences), but I was very afraid, because I had not yet been to court. And I constantly worried they would come for me based on something else. 

Each time they came and read me a citation: “You are aware that it is forbidden to attend rallies, that this could lead to criminal liability.” Yes, I am aware. 

For a time, I was afraid they’d conduct a search, then that too passed. Perhaps I should be afraid of informants. But, since I don’t have any suspicious followers, I don’t really worry. Since the mobilization, fear has been totally replaced by despair. 

Do you think writing messages on the cakes you bake is safer than attending rallies? 

Yes, that’s true. Because if you go out with a protest sign, you will end up in the hands of the police, no question. I do not advertise at all.  

I have almost no new subscribers who are not acquaintances. A certain part of my audience unsubscribed when the war began, and therefore I don’t have any subscribers who would like to see me dead. But recently, when the mobilization began, I got mad and posted “Death to Putin” on the bakery account. That was the first time someone reported me and the post was deleted.  

Do you often get angry or negative comments? How do you react to that? 

If subscribers repost something, then of course all sorts of birds fly in. Recently someone wrote, “I would have you charged for this.” And I thought, ‘You are sitting at home, looking at a cake. How does it even occur to you that you should get someone charged for a nonviolent action? How can you think like that?’ 

Did you really send one of your subscribers a kulich (an Easter cake) with the letter Z on it? 

It was an acquaintance of mine. We don’t speak much, but we went to school together. She is a total Z, but for some reason she does not piss me off.  

In general, she is normal. Something just happened. And she wrote to me in the comments, “I want a kulich with the letter Z.” And so I sent her a kulich with the inscription “Za мир” (“To Peace,” with a Latin rather than Cyrillic Z, which has evolved into a prowar symbol). And on the box I wrote, “Pray and eat this.” 

You not only attended rallies against the war in Ukraine, but also hung flyers in your building’s lobby and encouraged your subscribers to do the same. Do you subscribe to the theory of small deeds? 

Yes, I liked the theory of small deeds before the war began. But when the war started, the entire theory fell apart. [Journalist] Katerina Gordeeva put it well when she asked, “Don’t you think that our small compromises with the authorities led to this? No theory of small deeds can work when everything around us is rotting.”  

This is probably true. Yet I do still believe in the theory of small deeds, because we see individual examples all around. I have a defense lawyer from OVD-Info, Yulia. And I know that when I donate to OVD-Info, she will get paid. 

How did things end with your case? 

I lost. When I met with my lawyer Yulia, she told me I was out of luck, that I would receive the maximum fine. And that’s what happened – a fine of R15,000 ($250). But I didn’t pay it. I think that if I decide I want to travel abroad, then I will pay it. But for now I will not. 

How do you plan to develop your project further? Do you have ideas about new forms of activism? 

I will continue to do charity work, because I can no longer do otherwise. It’s important to me. When I go a long time without doing it, I get very sad.  

I want to popularize this method for a large number of brands. Perhaps there is something I don’t understand about the economics of it, but it is actually working, and it is not losing money.  

It’s just that these efforts are typically only temporary. They go for a month and then end. But I would like to do something so that they were long-term, so that people have an ongoing connection to a foundation.  

I feel it is important that every local brand has a nonprofit that they support in an ongoing way. I am not setting some goal, and am not dreaming that people will just do their thing and everything will work out as it should. At present, if you add up all of my charity work, it comes to about R350,000 in a year. I would like it if somehow someday that figure reached a million. 

How is it you don’t fear continuing to do what you are doing? 

I decided I don’t want to live in fear. Fear simply drives me crazy. I look at my father now and it makes me so angry, because everyone is so afraid.  

This intimidation works. I don’t like being bullied.  

My boyfriend worries about me, and in August he said again that I need to keep a lower profile. I kept silent for about a week and then wrote, “Putin is a cocksucker.” 

Why don’t you leave Russia? 

I really want to stay in Russia. I figured out that my reason for staying is not people, but language. My cultural code is entirely Russian. I have read Russian literature my entire life; every year I re-watch Gruz-200.*   

I am Russian through and through and I never want to leave. But when the war began I realized that I could not raise children in this country, and that really upset me. In general, my mother said that Vanga [a blind Bulgarian mystic who died in 1996] predicted a global crisis, a redivision of the world, and that then Russia would become great. 

At the beginning of the war, that’s how people felt, that this is how Putin would make Russia great. But then I thought, “Maybe not? Maybe Vanga is right, and Russia will become great, but without Putin?” 

In other words, we will do everything here now, and Russia will be great, well not even great, but free and wonderful.  

I don’t give a shit about greatness. 

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