On March 18, 2018, Mikhail Podivilov, a student at the Kolomna Polytechnical College, happened to hear that it was election day in Russia.
“I considered myself to be apolitical and thought all that had nothing to do with me,” he said. “I only went there because they told me at the college: ‘Go vote.’ I got there and wondered, ‘Who should I vote for?’ I wound up voting for Putin.”
Soon afterwards, big changes occurred in Podvilov’s life: a year later he went to his first protest rally, began to serve as an election observer, and then, one of the first activists in Russia to stage a one-man picket: he stood alone with a sign reading “No to War.” Soon he found himself hiding from the authorities in a remote village while simultaneously doing IT work for Yandex and eventually sneaking across the border into Georgia, now under a new name: René Coignard. His amazing story – part arthouse noir, part Hollywood mystery – was published by Vot Tak, a Polish-based broadcaster producing material primarily in Belarusian, but also in Russian.
Coignard was born in the small Moscow Oblast town of Ozyory, home to just over 20,000, mostly retirees. The town’s claim to fame is the Ozyory Souvenir plant, which produces a famous candy brand. It’s a two-hour drive from Ozyory to Moscow, but the district center of Kolomna is much closer.
In Ozyory, Coignard and his mother had their own house. He had no desire to leave the town, but in 2017 he had to move to Kolomna for school. Otherwise, he would have had to get up at five every morning to make it to his programming class at the Kolomna Polytechnical College. Back then, all of his classmates and acquaintances knew him as Misha, and he spent his evenings out on the ancient (almost one-thousand-years-old) town of Kolomna. That was when he started to think up a new name for himself, since it seemed unfair to him that he had had no voice in selecting the one currently listed in his passport.
Coignard said that he grew up in a very religious family: until he turned 18 he attended church regularly, and throughout his childhood he was read the Bible instead of fairy tales.
“This may have had something to do with it, because I never tried to figure out how exactly the world worked,” he said. “The picture changed radically for me [in 2019], when I read Albert Camus. He has a wonderful essay, ‘The Myth of Sisyphus.’ At that point, I found consolation in Camus. He has a wonderful phrase: he felt that life is absurd and existence itself is devoid of meaning – I completely agree. All we can do is rebel against this absurdity.”
Soon, not a trace of Coignard’s former apoliticism remained. During the summer of 2019, when the opposition was working to help get independent candidates elected to the Moscow City Duma, he started attending protest rallies and then became an election observer. While in college, he wrote a letter to Alexei Navalny, who was then in prison, and published the response on his social media feeds. This earned him a reprimand from the administrators of his college, although they stopped short of expelling him.
“All of my acquaintances, all of my friends, were mostly from Golosa [a movement to defend the rights of voters]. I went five times to observe elections, and that’s when I got to know them. I had nothing to do with the political organizations. Even when I was protesting, I always preferred pickets [holding up a sign with a protest message] to rallies – even though that was the fastest path to arrest. For me that was normal.”
“Whaddayou sitting here for?” a police officer asked.
“I’ve been detained,” Coignard replied.
“What did they detain you for?”
“For a protest sign.”
“What sign?”
“I won’t say. Article 51 of the Constitution.”[1]
“Huh? You go picketing with the Constitution? A real smartie, I see.”
This conversation between Coignard and a police officer took place on February 22, 2022 – two days before Russia invaded Ukraine. He said that he “could see where things were heading.” That day, he printed a “No to War” poster and took it to the Ozyory city administration. Since there was almost no political activism in the small town, local law enforcement didn’t immediately know how to react, and Coignard stood with his sign for 40 minutes. He was then detained and taken to the police station. There, he was given the workover for three hours, after which – to his amazement – he was released without any record being written up. They even gave him back his sign.
On February 24, the day of the invasion, Coignard made a sign reading “Putin, Stop the War with Ukraine” and took it to Moscow. He had now decided to picket the administration of the Russian president rather than of his hometown. He managed to stand “eight whole minutes” across Staraya Square from the building that houses the presidential offices. For this picket, he was fined R15,000. He’s protesting the verdict with the European Court of Human Rights.
“February 22, 2022, was my first detention – before that I hadn’t actually ever picketed,” he said. “In other words, for me, that was a rather radical step, because I didn’t know what the consequences would be. After the second detention, on February 24, I gathered my thoughts and decided: 'So that’s how it is? I guess we’ll battle on,'" he recalls.
In late March of 2022, Coignard flew from Yekaterinburg, where he had been observing municipal elections, to Moscow. It was a weekend evening, and the presidential administration was closed, so Coignard decided to stage a protest next to the Lubyanka metro station. He stood at the station entrance holding a bank card with the logo of the Mir [Peace] Russian payment system over his head. The police were thrown for a loop, because what Coignard was doing didn’t match any of the definitions of the sorts of protests being done by others. After about an hour, Coignard put the card in his pocket and calmly returned home.
His final picket took place on September 21, 2022 – the day Russia launched its mobilization. By then, he had finished college and gotten a job doing IT work for Yandex. After work that day, Coignard made a sign reading “No to War! No to Mobilization!” and went to stand with it outside the Ozyory city administration. Law enforcement did react, but not right away. Coignard finished his protest and went home.
On September 24, 2022 Coignard traveled to the neighboring town of Stupino to buy a new laptop: his old one had very inconveniently stopped working. When he returned home, the woman next door told him that while he’d been gone, the police had shown up at his house looking for him. The police stuck around for a while, but then got sick of it and left.
Coignard didn’t wait for them to return: he packed a briefcase and decided it was, as he put it, time “to skedaddle” [in the Russian idiom, «делать ноги»]. He returned to Stupino, spent the night there, and planned his escape route.
At five o’clock the next morning, he went to the train station and traveled deep into rural Moscow Oblast (changing trains eight times to cover his tracks) to acquaintances he had “heard about once in his life.”
“I thought I’d better try; I had to take the risk. I warned my acquaintances that I’d be coming, and they said ‘fine.’ I took as few things as possible: some underwear and shirts, a winter jacket, winter boots, my notebook and my international passport,” he said.
The impulsive decision to leave, as it turned out, was wise. Subsequently, according to Coignard, the police came to his home “almost every day” and waited in their car.[2]
“At some point, our neighbor couldn’t restrain himself and walked up to them and asked ‘Did you forget something here? They replied: ‘A certain citizen has been violating the law and spreading extremism,’” Coignard said.
Later, on October 4, his mother was brought in for questioning. She was asked why her son was engaged in activism and who was paying him. Two things struck Coignard’s mother as odd: first, when talking among themselves, the police officers referred to some mysterious “Magistral,” and second, they asked her whether her son had friends in Chelyabinsk.
Upon hearing his mother’s description of her interrogation, Coignard realized that he had been placed on the “Rozysk-Magistral” wanted list, which enables authorities to track the movements of suspect citizens within Russia.[3] A few days before the interrogation, Coignard had bought a ticket to Chelyabinsk, and from there, to the city of Petropavlovsk in Kazakhstan. His planned route out of Russia now had to be changed.
Coignard still doesn’t know if criminal charges have been filed against him.
Once he reached his remote rural destination, Coignard and his friends settled into a wooden hut. Almost every day they had to fire up the stove, haul and chop wood, and draw water from the well, since there was no central plumbing or central heating. The only place they could pick up a cell or internet signal was the attic, which was closest to a directional antenna installed on the roof. Coignard would bundle himself up in warm clothing and climbed to the attic to work: he still had clients through Yandex.
“I woke up early every morning and, in winter, I’d go clear the snow,” he said. “We had a big yard, and if you didn’t shovel it out, you’d be trapped. After that, I’d fix some food, mostly buckwheat kasha. After breakfast, I’d broadcast my radio show.”
The radio show Coignard referred to was his most engaging activity in the village. He set aside some of the money he was making and asked people he knew to use it to buy two-way radios – enough for the entire village (Vot Tak is not revealing the village’s exact population at Coignard’s request). He then gave everyone a set: at first, since there was no signal in the village, people used them as telephones, just to chat with one another. Then Coignard decided to start up his own improvised radio station for the villagers, with two daily shows that he himself produced.
“I mostly broadcast make-believe news stories,” he said. “For instance, about something unusual that happened in the woods – I would think something up to take people’s minds off what was happening. Everyone was sick of the war, after all. I got everyone hooked; everyone was listening. In all, I produced more than 100 radio broadcasts – two a day, morning and evening. Other than work, I really had nothing else to do, so I put heart and soul into coming up with all sorts of crazy stuff.”
When he wasn’t busy with chores and his radio shows, Coignard began keeping a diary, where he described literally everything that was happening with him. “This was the only way to stay sane,” he said. Also, after discovering a workshop on the outskirts of the village, he started going there to carve wooden horses using a jigsaw and angle-grinder.
“That winter in the village I got to know what piercing cold is,” Coignard said. “It was -40° Celsius. I would always check two thermometers; they would both show -38°, -40° – somewhere there. In my room, in winter, it was usually around 15° Celsius [59° Fahrenheit]. Sometimes it would go down to 12-13° [53-54°]. I slept fully dressed under three blankets. We could have heated more, but we didn’t have much firewood, so we had to economize.”
In the village, what worried Coignard most was that he might develop health problems. There was no access to health care, either for him or the other villagers.
“I felt like the protagonist of some Dostoevsky novel,” he said. “But at the same time, I didn’t feel afraid; I was fine in psychological terms. At least that was what I thought. But there was always some background anxiety. My body didn’t react well to the move to the countryside. At some point I started having serious stomach pains, and then it turned out to be caused by stress. As soon as I left there, the pains immediately disappeared. I’ve lived like a hermit my whole life, so I felt comfortable there.”
While living in the village, he decided on his new name, the creation of which Coignard calls a “gigantic project” that took five years. By early 2023, Mikhail Podivilov had fully transformed into René Jean-Michel Yves Coignard. Of course, to avoid drawing the attention of law enforcement, he did not formalize his name change with the passport bureau.
“I chose Jean-Michel because I have a close friend named Ivan – and Jean is the French version of that name,” he said. “And Michel is the French version of Mikhail, which is what I am on my passport, so I decided to at least keep that for old times’ sake. Coignard comes from the Latin Renatus, which means ‘reborn.’ I thought that this was the overall best idea for a pseudonym.”
He came up with the surname Coignard when he was chopping wood in the village, deciding that it “fit the structure of the moment very well,” and was similar to the French word for “axe” and “chop.”
“For me, this was very important, because I always felt that a name could be used as a work of art,” Coignard said. “It’s somehow unfair that nobody asks you when you’re born whether or not you want the name you’re being given. And this is the one I want! Of course, this might seem unusual for people – people often think they misheard my name. But nobody’s ever given me a hard time about it. I felt such a sense of freedom: it’s an awesome feeling when people address you the way you want to be addressed.”
Coignard lived in the village from late September 2022 to early March of 2023. During that time his job at Yandex came to an end. That was November 30 of 2022, the day that the former head of the Accounts Chamber, Alexei Kudrin, officially announced that he was joining Yandex. His appointment became the impetus for Coignard’s departure from the village.
After his departure, the village radio station fell silent, but the two-way radios remained. “Now that I’ve left,” he said, “the villagers are constantly using the radio network – the mobile connection is still bad there. They just talk to one another with these radios. If someone goes into the forest, they now take their two-way radios with them.”
The entire time Coignard was living in the village, police continued searching for him, sometimes visiting his mother. One time when they were at their house, they even checked the root cellar, the shed, and under the bed, thinking Coignard must be hiding somewhere nearby.
The police intensified their efforts in February 2023. He knows this because his classmates started writing him, saying that the police had visited the Kolomna Polytechnical College, had been given their telephone numbers, and were getting calls from the police, asking where Coignard was hiding out. That was when he decided to make his second attempt to leave Russia.
Coignard left his telephone behind. Even though there was hardly any signal in the countryside, he was afraid that the police would still be able to track his movements through his cell signal. He set out at one in the morning, traveling to some other acquaintances. In this new location, he bought a phone for cash and was able to get a SIM card registered to someone else.
On March 12, 2023, René Coignard found himself outside the borders of Russia for the first time in his life, after a volunteer organization helped him escape to Georgia. Due to rules the volunteer organization has put in place to maintain security, Coignard is not sharing the details of how he crossed the Russian border. What he did say was that he “left in a way that did not involve purchasing any tickets.”
“One possibility had been to go to Armenia,” he said, “but since it’s not entirely safe there, they evacuated me to Georgia. Plus, I know a lot of people here. Actually, when I arrived in Georgia, I felt as if the whole thing was a dream. A state of derealization. And I thought that everything looked so strange, like a theatrical set. Maybe I was sleeping? Then I got used to the thought that I was in Georgia. I didn’t feel any euphoria: I immediately thought about the fact that I didn’t have a job or a place to live, that I had better get straight to work.”
At first, he lived in shelters set up by organizations that help departing Russians. He managed to pile up debt, but at the same time he solved the work problem: he was hired as a DevOps engineer by a Cypriot IT company. Then he found housing in a building where other Russian emigrants live, not far from the center of Tbilisi.
The job of a DevOps engineer involves a number of responsibilities: administration, software development, quality assurance, and management, as well as automating tasks related to customization and application deployment.
After Coignard left Russia, law enforcement again visited his mother to ask not only about him, but about his brother, who was living in Yaroslavl. They seemed to be trying to figure out whether “he might be the same sort.” On May 22, Coignard met his mother at the airport: he had bought her a ticket to Yerevan and from there to Tbilisi. For now, she has no plans to return to Russia.
“When I left for Georgia,” he said, “I realized that they wouldn’t back off – they would make her life a living nightmare. I decided that I had to bring Mama out. She had also never been abroad. But she listens to Katz[4] and understands where things are headed. It’s just not safe to stay there. And how could I leave her there alone?”
Once he arrived in Georgia, Coignard called the personnel office of Russia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and determined which police officer had come to his college and obtained his friends’ telephone numbers. He then called that local police station and got connected with the man in question, Junior Lieutenant Vladimir Vasilyev. Coignard recorded their conversation.
“It’s Podivilov calling. I wanted to ask why you got the college involved in the search for me?”
“Well, if you meet with us, we’ll discuss it all with you.”
“We’ll definitely be meeting again, but in court, and only after the regime falls.”
“Is that why you called?”
“Yes, and just to find out how things are going for you, how the mood is there in Kolomna.”
“I’m not able to speak with you.”
Coignard really wants to return to Russia, but only “after all this comes to an end.”
“I’ll definitely return, because I want Ozyory to continue developing. After all, I engaged in plenty of civic activism there. In six months, I submitted more than 140 appeals and a lot of residents are grateful, even though the things I was working on was small stuff, things like fixing traffic lights, repairing roads. I had a movement. The Dialogue movement. I was its only member.”
On Telegram, he used to post on «Канал Михаила Подивилова» [the Mikhail Podivilov Channel]. Now he uses Journal de M. René Coignard. And in Tbilisi, he continues to work on “small stuff”: in early May Coignard told his Telegram followers that he had created a bot to help residents of the city find out how soon the next bus will reach their stop. After just a couple of days, the bot had more than two thousand unique users.
[1] Article 51 grants citizens the right to refrain from self-incrimination.
[2] Vot Tak verified Coignard’s route and ultimate destination, however it did not share this information at his request.
[3] Rozysk has no exact equivalent in English but is the term law enforcement uses in designating suspects they are looking for; magistral is a channel, thoroughfare, or line (in the sense of transit or IT). Rozysk Magistral is a system that enables Russian law enforcement to track the purchases and movements of suspects.
[4] Maxim Katz is a popular Russian oppositionist videoblogger whose YouTube channel attracted a large following after the invasion of Ukraine. He lives in Israel.
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