Ilya Yashin, the Activist Who Didn’t Want to Leave Russian Prison

The Washington Post / Mary Ilyushina

15:52 JST, August 26, 2024

BERLIN – After being released from a Russian penal colony this month in a high-profile prisoner swap, opposition figure Ilya Yashin stunned the Western public when he said he would have preferred to stay in Russia, even if it was behind bars.

An activist since his teenage years, Yashin, now 41, said he doesn’t know how to effectively oppose the regime from abroad and has taken his exile from Russia as a kind of personal tragedy.

“I didn’t want to stay in prison itself, but I wanted to remain in Russia, and to live and engage in independent politics there. One has to fight, and unfortunately, prison time is part of that fight,” Yashin said when asked why he didn’t want to be swapped.

“Antiwar resistance is more effective within Russia, especially for a politician. All you have is your words, and people will only believe them if you take risks and suffer for your words,” he said.

Still, his newfound freedom has focused the spotlight – and the hopes of Russians yearning for a unifying figure in the opposition – on him. With many of the towering figures of the Russian opposition dead, such as Boris Nemtsov and Alexei Navalny, thousands of antiwar activists are hoping that Yashin can carry on the legacy of the fight against Vladimir Putin.

Now one of the most prominent opposition figures outside the country, Yashin faces the same problems that have plagued Russian political émigrés throughout centuries – is it possible to build a free, liberal, democratic Russia in exile? For him, the answer is no.

Yashin was sentenced to 8½ years in prison – much of it in solitary confinement – for criticizing the war in Ukraine. In 2022, he posted a video on YouTube to his 1.5 million subscribers looking at the findings of Western journalists and Ukrainian officials on Russian atrocities in Bucha. He sought to debunk the Kremlin line that those reports were staged or fabricated.

He was arrested in July 2022, and authorities accused him of “spreading false information” about Russian forces under a law passed to silence critics. He served two years of the sentence, splitting his time between solitary confinement and the only marginally less strict ward reserved for serious criminals.

One day, masked officers from Russia’s intelligence service, the FSB, whisked him from his prison and took him to Moscow, he said, where he was placed on a bus that slowly filled with others – activists, journalists, many friends – who were part of the sweeping prisoner exchange involving Russia, the United States, Germany and four other countries.

As the bus headed for the special government airfield and the flight that took them to Turkey, Yashin felt a sinking feeling as he realized that his close friend and colleague Alexei Gorinov was not there.

Gorinov and Yashin worked together as elected officials in Moscow’s Krasnoselsky district, and four months before Yashin was detained, Gorinov was arrested for criticizing the war in Ukraine and given a seven-year prison sentence.

Now, Yashin feels shackled by what he calls a hostage scenario: If he returns to Russia after being exchanged, he would erase any chance of similar swaps in the future, even as many still languish in prisons. Gorinov, 63, has a chronic health condition and is missing part of his lung, which has been aggravated by long stints in solitary confinement.

Yashin was enthralled by politics at an early age. The son of Soviet-era intellectuals, he joined the liberal democratic Yabloko party in 2000 at the age of 17, going on to lead its youth wing. It made headlines in the early 2000s with brazen protest actions unthinkable in today’s Russia.

He fell out, however, with party leaders, and in 2008, he was expelled after calling for more radical ways to oppose the Kremlin. He did, however, become close to Nemtsov, an outspoken Putin critic and one of the crucial liberal political figures of the 1990s and early 2000s. Nemtsov was shot dead near the Kremlin walls in 2015.

Yashin was also close to Navalny – whose death this year in an Arctic prison colony devastated the opposition movement – and they worked together in Yabloko. Navalny once called Yashin “probably the first friend” he ever made in politics.

They were propelled to a new level of fame in 2011 to 2012 during the Bolotnaya Square pro-democracy protests, the most significant mass demonstrations Russia has seen since the fall of the Soviet Union. Tens of thousands protested ballot-rigging in parliamentary elections.

Hoping to build on the momentum of the protests, Yashin tried politics, building an online following and running in municipal elections, eventually becoming a lawmaker in the Krasnoselsky district. He worked to continue Nemtsov’s work, writing research papers on how life under Putin has worsened for Russians.

After he was imprisoned, Yashin adopted Navalny’s tactic of turning his court appearance into a political speech, highlighting that the last public platform available to opposition activists was from a glass box next to a bailiff.

While other freed prisoners took time to reunite with their families and recuperate after years in the Russian penal system, Yashin got a new iPhone and a few pieces of clothing to replace his drab prison garb and sprang into action. In the first two weeks after landing in Germany, he barely had any time off, filling his days with meetings, interviews, a visit to the Bundestag and a rally in a Berlin park where he addressed about a thousand Russian supporters living in exile.

“The problem is that there are few examples of opposition politicians that became successful even in exile, and the examples that exist are not very much to my liking,” he said, referring to Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and Russia’s Vladimir Lenin. “You cannot build the Russia of the future from abroad. Only the Russian people can build a democratic society.”

The release of political prisoners has been a rare bit of good news to an exhausted and exiled opposition that has been trying to keep up momentum and struggling to connect with Russians inside the country.

But the long-term path is less clear. Yashin lacks the stature of Nemtsov, who held powerful government roles, or Navalny’s network of offices in nearly 40 Russian cities before his group was dismantled. He does have a significant web presence, with more than 2 million followers online, but Russian restrictions make Western social media increasingly difficult to see inside the country.

Yashin’s address to Russian opposition supporters in a Berlin park this month was energetic but offered few specifics, and his platform remains ill-defined.

“I want to see more action from the opposition; I think we haven’t seen enough decisiveness,” said 18-year-old David, who described himself as a “Yashin fan” and came from Israel, his home of the past two years, to support the politician at the park rally. He spoke on the condition that only his first name be used because he still has family in Russia.

Yashin, in turn, says he is afraid of losing touch with Russian realities and falling prey to echo chambers that form among those whose only window into Russia is favorite bloggers and opinion makers.

Russians who fled the country in the early days of the war have largely tired of the bickering between dissidents, broadcast through long threads on X and angry YouTube videos. Many have gradually lost faith that change in Russia could happen during their lifetime and have become exasperated at the lack of a clear plan.

“The main request to me that I gleaned from letters and conversations with people is ‘please don’t quarrel with anyone,’” Yashin said. “I hear this ask and understand it very well, so I made a public promise then to do just that.”

He attributes the bickering to the pressure the opposition is under, from the government and frustrated public opinion. “Everyone is tired, everyone is irritated. There are no success stories, but there is apathy.”

In prison, Yashin got to see aspects of life that those in exile can’t access, as he paced through the prison yards or shared bland, greasy meals with Russians from all walks of life, from petty criminals to disgraced lawmakers from Putin’s party to veterans of the Ukraine war who committed crimes after returning home.

These experiences, he said, taught him how to talk freely and without prejudice to people on the opposite side of the ideological spectrum, a skill useful for someone aspiring to a political career in a post-Putin Russia.

“The basic work that will need to be done in Russia is a lot of therapy, reducing the level of aggression, establishing communication between people. This is going to be a tough job, and the person who will be leading the country will face a difficult path, and I sympathize with whoever it’s going to be.”

He’s coy about whether he could be that person and prefers for now to focus on three main tasks: helping hundreds of political prisoners who remain in Russia, including those who never made the headlines; educating Russians on how the war in Ukraine is based on lies; and touring diaspora hubs abroad.

“I have little choice but to stay abroad and try to become a politician in exile,” he said.

On Friday, Yashin posted a selfie with Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, who has vowed to continue her husband’s life work, with a cryptic caption hinting at a potential joint project. “We met in Berlin and came up with something good, interesting and useful. You will like it, but Putin won’t.”