He had 5 followers on YouTube. It landed him in jail, where he died

As a teenager, Pavel Kushnir won a coveted spot in Russia’s most prestigious training program for pianists at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory. His classmates remember him as a shy, quirky introvert with fluency in not just classical music, but in film, literature and painting.

He made a career playing for provincial orchestras, while on the side he wrote startling avant-garde novels, mostly unpublished.

Long a critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Kushnir took up political activism with added zeal after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. He spread leaflets damning the war while pushing himself to endure ever longer, harsher hunger strikes. Four blurry, muffled anti-war screeds that he posted on his YouTube channel, which had just five subscribers, landed him in a dark, crumbling jail on Karl Marx Street in Birobidzhan, the remote Siberian provincial capital where he lived.

Now, at age 40, he is dead.

Kushnir is one among what human rights activists say is more than 1,000 Russians who have been caught in a harsh state apparatus designed to mute criticism of the war. Some politicians or well-known artists put on trial attract significant attention. But many prisoners linger in obscurity, with activists struggling to keep track of them.

Kushnir was one who fell between the cracks, and his lonely death in Russia’s remote Far East has prompted extended soul-searching among prominent Russian political activists and war critics. Why, they wonder, did a talented performer deeply committed to protesting have to die in order to become an anti-war icon?

“We could not pool money to send him a lawyer – we just didn’t know,” Svetlana Kaverzina, a local opposition politician, wrote in a post on the Telegram app. “We didn’t write him letters of support – we didn’t know. We didn’t dissuade him from sacrificing himself – we didn’t know. He was alone. Let’s at least symbolically tell him after his death: ‘Forgive us and rest in peace.’”

Even the exposure of his death was almost accidental.

Olga Romanova, the head of Russia Behind Bars, a nongovernmental organization that defends prisoners’ rights, receives letters from convicts daily. So she did not consider it exceptional when a group of cellmates from the Jewish Autonomous Region – established under Josef Stalin in 1934 as an agrarian homeland for Jewish people – mentioned in passing that a musician among them had died.

“We are in grief,” the prisoners wrote. On July 27, Kushnir, who had been charged with “justifying terrorism,” had succumbed to a hunger strike during pretrial detention, they said.

Then one of his pianist friends, Olga Shkrygunova, contacted Romanova and together they wrote a bleak description of his passing for an online publication. The article prompted some people to dig up letters from Kushnir, who had tried unsuccessfully to gain support from prominent Russians for his hunger strikes against the war. His death spurred a new recognition of his artistic talents.

Dmitry Volchek, a publisher of avant-garde literature who had ignored Kushnir’s request for translation work, praised “Russian Cut,” a novel that Kushnir had published privately in Germany. The author used the arrival of a giant, predatory, eyeless pig as a metaphor for Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea.

Maria Alyokhina, a member of the punk band Pussy Riot who has also used hunger strikes as a political tool, said on Facebook that Kushnir had written her many letters, but that she read them only after he died.

In August, a group of more than 20 classical musicians – including Alexander Melnikov, Sir Simon Rattle and Daniel Barenboim – signed an open tribute to Kushnir published in a German newspaper.

Russian prison, judicial and law enforcement authorities did not respond to requests for comment about his death, nor did the Birobidzhan Regional Philharmonic, his last employer.

Kushnir grew up in Tambov, a provincial capital about 300 miles southeast of Moscow. His father, Michael, wrote a music textbook still used across Russia, while his mother taught musical theory. At age 17 he was among 25 student pianists accepted into the Moscow Conservatory.

“He was a funny, talented genius who excelled at the different art forms that interested him,” said Shkrygunova, who met him when they were both 6.

Grace Chatto, an English musician and singer for the band Clean Bandit who studied with him at the conservatory in 2004, said he introduced her to the films of Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni and Andrei Tarkovsky. On most days, she stayed up long into the night to hear him play Sergei Rachmaninoff, Franz Schubert and others. “So kind and so gentle and funny, and he played with such deep passion always,” she wrote on Instagram.

He once amazed his fellow students by writing an analysis of an obscure German pop artist for an online journal, said Maria Nemtsova, another classmate. As for his piano playing, she said, he “was very free and honest,” ignoring the school’s rigid prescriptions that the students emulate the interpretations of renowned musicians.

That attitude got him in trouble. When the panel evaluating him for graduate study asked him to play an excerpt from Robert Schumann’s “Fantasy,” he said he would either play the whole piece or nothing, his friends recalled.

Similar clashes set him on an odyssey of playing for one provincial orchestra after another.

Along the way, he became increasingly politicized, returning to Moscow in 2011 to participate in anti-Putin protests.

In early 2023, he was hired by the Philharmonic in Birobidzhan, the capital of the Jewish Autonomous Region, which had fewer than 1,000 Jews living there since most had emigrated to Israel.

He kept his handwritten novels in a drawer, he said in interviews, and expressed admiration for the daring performances of rock musicians like Kurt Cobain and Janis Joplin. He organized a weekly radio program to explain Frédéric Chopin’s folk compositions, greeting listeners with “No pasaran!” a political slogan drawn from anti-fascists in the Spanish Civil War that translates to “They shall not pass.”

“The truth is out there!” he would say.

He named his YouTube channel after Fox Mulder, the FBI agent hero of “The X-Files,” and wore a hand-drawn FBI badge pinned to his clothing in his videos. In one, he endorsed LGBTQ+ rights, now largely banned in Russia. In another, he called for protests and revolution.

“Scatter leaflets, post flyers, write huge posters, put them up on benches, leave them somewhere, paste them on the walls of buildings,” he said. Last January, the Philharmonic fired him, Shkyrgunova said.

She had emigrated to Germany in 2012, but they exchanged emails every few months. His overflowed with emotional anguish about the war, she said, and he could not let go of events like the Russian massacre of hundreds of Ukrainian civilians in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha. “He was a man processing every death as his own personal loss,” she said.

Kushnir began to encourage people to go on hunger strikes to demand Putin’s resignation and an end to the war. A slight figure, he had undertaken them periodically himself after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but had continued drinking liquids until the last one.

Prison protocol mandates medical monitoring in such cases, Romanova, the head of the prisoner rights’s group, said, but there was no indication that any monitoring took place in his case. She suspects Kushnir succumbed to the effects of the hunger strike, but his 79-year-old mother, Irina Levina, refused an independent autopsy.

Levina told a Russian reporter that the Russian Federal Security Service, or FSB, had informed her that her son had been on a medical drip at the end. Neither his mother nor his brother attended his cremation; his criticism of Putin had estranged his family, his friends said. Kushnir’s father died four years ago.

“I certainly wanted him to conduct himself in a quieter way and to stay out of politics altogether,” Levina told Okno, an independent news organization. “I am very sorry that he gave up his life, apparently for nothing.”

A local reporter who attended Kushnir’s funeral said only two musicians came. The 11 people at the funeral were mostly admirers, and no one delivered a eulogy, said the reporter, who declined to use her name for security reasons.

Kushnir did not seek recognition for himself, said Nemtsova, the classmate. Instead, she said, he concentrated on feeling the pain of others. Even close friends did not know that he was protesting by starving himself to death in jail.

“Pavel definitely sacrificed his life for us; it is almost a biblical story,” she said. “He was trying to scream, but it was so muted.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.