Fighting for the Light

After Russia initiated the Ukraine War, Russian citizens fell into one of two camps: those who support the “special military operation” and those who do not. A multitude of restrictive laws was added to the Criminal Code (see Patching the Holes, page 20), and people began to inform on one another. It was as if the country had returned to the Stalin era.

In Penza, students informed on their teacher after she voiced opinions on the Ukraine War that deviated from the official line. As a result, a case was brought against her under the article targeting anything deemed to be “fake news” concerning the special military operation. Another teacher was informed on by co-workers after he removed posters featuring the pro-war Z symbol from the doors of a local business.

Tatyana Savinkina, a retiree in Karelia, was recently fined 30,000 rubles ($475) for “disparaging the armed forces of the Russian Federation.”

Savinkina is 77 and well known in Petrozavodsk as a human rights activist. She had a career in the Ministry of Internal Affairs (which oversees police, migration, drug trafficking, road safety and efforts to battle extremism). Part of her job there involved rehabilitating victims of Stalinist repression. When Russia launched its Ukraine War, Tatyana began hanging up flyers in hopes of “waking people up.” Soon enough, security personnel showed up at her door. The head of her residents’ association had informed on her to the police.

We asked Tatyana Savinkina to tell her side of the story.

I was born in Ukraine, even though my entire family is from Karelia. When the Second World War began, my family was evacuated to Saratov Province. There was a horrible famine there; people were scrounging roots from the fields. My older brothers barely escaped death.

My father was sent to the front when Soviet troops invaded Finland. He went missing, and anyone missing in action under Stalin was declared a traitor to the motherland. The wife and children of such soldiers were not entitled to a kopek from the state. It was very difficult for Mama. When Eastern Ukraine was liberated, she took her sons to a village there, so that they would be fed. She recounted how the locals took care of them, how they shared everything. They are the only reason my brothers survived.

In 1945, I came into the world in the city of Romny (in northeastern Ukraine). And in 1947 our family returned to Karelia.

May 9 was always a day of remembrance for my family. There was nothing to celebrate – my relatives had lived through so much! On this day we would typically gather at the home of my Uncle Vanya – my mother’s older brother, who fought through the entire war. There was no alcohol at our table. We drank tea.

I loved Uncle Vanya a lot. When Zhukov’s memoirs came out in 1969, I immediately ordered a copy for my uncle. When I received it, I hurried over to his place, “Uncle Vanya, look what I got for you!”

You should have seen the look on his face! He took the book, turned a few pages, then closed it. “Tanyushka, don’t be offended, but it would be better to give this book to Syoma (my other uncle). I’m not going to read Zhukov. You won’t find an ounce of truth in there. At the front, when we heard Zhukov’s name spoken we understood one thing: there would be an offensive. And that meant that there would be nothing left of us.”

That was the first time that Uncle Vanya had said even the slightest thing to me about the war. In general, neither he nor Uncle Syoma ever spoke of it.

For me, the horrors of war truly sank in when, in 1973, I visited Valaam. I had only just begun working at MIA and had been sent on a trip to Sortavala (Karelia). And I really wanted to see Valaam. So I asked my boss. He got a military guy to agree to take me over on a small boat. But they didn’t warn me what awaited us there. It was simply, if this is what you want, let’s go!

As we approached the shore, I saw people gathered there. One of the sailors asked, “Did you bring anything?”

“Was I supposed to?”

“Well, there are lots of people there!”

I disembarked and was stunned. The shore was packed with invalids. Some without legs, some without arms. And they were all closing in on me. They thought I had brought something for them. It was a nightmare! Only later did I understand that they had been specifically brought here, to live in inhumane conditions, these casualties of war… For a long time, I was haunted by visions of those people.

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I graduated from the history faculty of Leningrad University. I was active as a student, and so I was invited to work in the city committee of the Komsomol. From there, I went to MIA, working first in personnel, then in the education department. In my final years there, I worked as a senior inspector in the Political Rehabilitation Division. We restored the reputations of victims of repression. We dug through archives, collected mountains of documents, searched for witnesses. It was emotionally difficult work, but very satisfying.

When I began doing this work, I saw how many denunciations there had been in our country! And how many people suffered as a result. Take just the example of Sandarmokh, where, in 1937-38 political prisoners were shot in the woods. We worked there alongside Yuri Dmitriev, who, as you may know, was put in prison for his activities.

He was warned many times: quiet down. But he was persistent. And prison is where it ended. Of course he is not guilty of what he was charged with. I attended the trials, supported him. My friends, colleagues, and I walked from the train station to the mayor’s office along Lenin Prospekt with placards in support of Dmitriev. To this day, he and I correspond. He needs to be supported. He cannot be left alone.

When they adopted the law (within the framework of the 1991 law “On the Rehabilitation of the Victims of Political Repression”) that people could be rehabilitated through the courts if there were at least two witnesses of the repression, I jumped on it. I was still working in MIA at the time and prepared the cases myself. I brought them all to one judge, Nikolai Varantsev, who had himself suggested I bring the cases directly to him. Varantsev truly sympathized with and understood what a difficult job I was doing. He understood the fear these repressed persons had of the courts – they had been through the system before. He welcomed them as guests and treated them very well. He was a very just person, and together he and I helped many people.

I also worked as an aide to Alexander Lukin, a deputy in the Legislative Assembly. And I was always interfering in things. I spoke out against the Powers That Be if I saw an injustice. And even when I left politics, I remained a defender of human rights and an activist. A few years ago, the journalist Alexander Fuks and I helped a 90-year-old woman, a widow of a war veteran. At the sunset of her life she found herself in a dilapidated hut on the outskirts of the city. You just can’t have an old woman living in such circumstances. So I got the media involved, and in the end we got an apartment for her: the babushka lived a normal life for her final two years.

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I’ve been attending rallies and demonstrations for as long as I can remember. But I was lucky: they never detained me. I landed in jail for the first time in 2007. I was on a business trip to St. Petersburg and found out that there, at noon, there would be a rally in Palace Square, and that Nemtsov, would participate.

They had already assembled on Nevsky Prospect. Cars, buses, soldiers. And suddenly, there he was: Nemtsov! How tall he was. And such a smile! They grabbed him by the arms and legs and dragged him into an armored car. And he laughed. Then Belykh, came out and he was also taken away. The rally continued. I gave an interview to a French newspaper, and to some other… basically to anyone who approached me. And suddenly they grabbed hold of me and took me to a bus. I was so afraid! I said to them, “Guys, I’m one of you! Let me go, I’m here for work!” And they took me behind the bus and said, “Get outta here!”

The next day my daughter called, “Mama, you are on the front page of Novaya Gazeta.” I bought a copy of the paper and there, on the first page, in large letters, it said, “Day One of Totalitarianism!” And a photo: two gorillas hauling me away by the arms. I kept a copy of the paper.

From 2011 to 2013 I traveled to Moscow specially for the “white ribbon protests.” That was such a holiday! The entire square was white. Cars were honking, people were chanting. A sea of people! How much hope there was for a change for the better. If Putin had left power then, this nightmare would not be happening in Ukraine.

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My husband is Ukrainian. We lived in Petrozavodsk, but when we separated, he returned to his hometown, Belaya Tserkov, outside Kiev. The night the war began, he woke up because they had started bombing the airport. The windows rattled in his apartment. For eight days he and his neighbors hid in the basement.

Our daughter tried to get him out, but when everything was arranged, he refused. “I’m staying with my people,” he said. We call each other and I am very worried about him. But I didn’t start putting up flyers because of my husband. I am doing it because I am convinced that our country’s attack on Ukraine is a crime. How can you bomb a city where there are children and old people? Kill civilians? And they even say that they are bombing themselves. Oh, how can that be?

A few years ago we went to a sanatorium in Vinnitsa. How they welcomed us! We traveled around to different Ukrainian cities, and everywhere the people were so good. What Nazis? What fascists? As many times as I have been to Ukraine, I never saw any.

On the first days of the war I wrote on small pieces of paper, “Putin Get Out of Ukraine,” and put them in the elevator. A week later, as I was leaving the building, two officers stopped me. “We’re here for you. You need to come down to the station. We’ve received a statement that you are distributing flyers.”

The statement against me was written by the head of our residents’ association. I never hid my opinions about what was going on; downstairs, the watchmen and I discussed the war, and I said it was horrific. I wrote about it in social media. Well, they must have started thinking about me. I went to the station and admitted these were my notes. I explained that I wrote them so that people would see the light.

The fact that someone informed on me shook me to the depths of my soul. How could this be possible after all the damage done by informants in the past? After my visit to the police station, every day I would leave a note in the entryway for the head of the association: “Unrespected Tamara Grigoryevna! In the 1930s we lost a huge number of people to camps and mass murder, thanks to active people like you – informants.”

Then, a few days later, I come outside and there is a local policeman, holding my flyer in his hands. And it was the “freshest” one, where I wrote in red ink, “Ukrainians are not our enemies, but our brothers.” I had glued these messages on the neighboring buildings. The policeman said to me, “You will now face even more charges in court.”

And I said to him, “Let them, if that’s what they want.” And I added that I had been active in the defense of Yuri Dmitriev. And he said, “Who is that?” All clear. I told him everything, who he was, how much he did, and how they sent him away. Then I went about my business.

It makes me happy that not everyone reacts this way. For example, once my activist friends and I, we had all once supported and defended Dmitriev together, were picketing in the center of Petrozavodsk. The placard was being held by Sasha, an elderly, blind, yet very active fellow. The placard said, “We are against the bombing of peaceful cities.” And a young woman came out of the restaurant and walked up to us. We were afraid that she was going to start cursing us out, but she said, “I am an employee at the restaurant, and I would like to offer you some food.” We didn’t go in, but it was really nice.

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It made me angry when signs appeared on the sides of buses for a concert in honor of those fighting in Ukraine. It is simply horrible. What sort of “defenders of the Fatherland” are these? Those who attack another country are “defenders”? I’ve been talking to people on buses in hopes that they would wake up. Many say, “If we hadn’t, America would have attacked us.” People are addicted to television! I have a television too, but I almost never turn it on; I read the internet. Recently I spoke to some men about Ukraine while standing in line. And suddenly I noticed that a woman next to us was crying. I went up to her and asked, “What happened?”

“They killed my nephew, brought him home in a coffin, and it’s sealed. But he got a medal. I tell the men in the village about this, but they just say, ‘What about it? It’s the homeland! You have to defend it.’”

Going through a trial is no fun, of course. And I don’t have money for the fine. But I am not afraid. I even said to the judge that I believe everything I did is right. I’m scared that people take all this shit sitting down. They don’t understand that we will be washing this off ourselves for a very long time. My daughter, Inga, supports me, but is very worried about me. She’s always saying, “Mama, be more careful!” But I will still speak out against war.