In autumn 2022, Margarita Murakhtaeva, the daughter of independent journalist Irina Slavina (who set herself on fire outside the Nizhny Novgorod regional Interior Ministry headquarters over two years ago), reported that her older brother had been illegally conscripted. The next day, Vyacheslav Murakhtaev revealed that he had in fact volunteered to go to the front, explaining that he had no intention of “running away like all those Russians who legged it to post-Soviet countries”. Vyacheslav and Margarita each gave independent Russian media outlet Холод their version of events, shared their views on the war, and explained how they each coped with their mother’s death.
At 7 a.m. on 1 October 2020, I got in from St Petersburg and waited for my father at the train station, but he never turned up and he didn’t answer the phone. I later found out that a search of our flat had been going on for an hour by that point. My father’s phone had been taken away, and he couldn’t call me or a lawyer.
The night after the search, my grandma came to help us clean up our ransacked flat, where our belongings and documents were strewn everywhere. Mum was feeling low, so, to cheer her up, I asked her to make me a cake for my birthday, which was in April. My mum loved to make cakes for special occasions. “OK!” she said, but I think by that point she’d already decided what she was going to do, and only said yes to the cake to comfort me.
What happened to Irina Slavina?
Photo by Holod
On 2 October 2020, Irina Slavina, founder and editor-in-chief of the independent website KozaPress, set herself on fire in front of the regional police department in Nizhny Novgorod. Before committing suicide, she wrote on her Facebook page, “I ask you to blame the Russian state for my death.” Her apartment had been searched the previous day. As Slavina herself recalled, twelve rapid response police officers and state investigators had shown up at her flat at 6 a.m. wielding crowbars and power cutters.
Slavina had come under pressure from the authorities for her articles and social media posts. In 2019, the court charged her with disrespecting the government and demanded she pay seventy thousand roubles for something she had posted on Facebook. For another post, she was fined five thousand roubles for having ties to an undesirable organization. Then, in 2020, Slavina was handed a sixty-five thousand rouble fine for posting about the first case of coronavirus in Kstovo.
Margarita Murakhtaeva says she was used to her life being like that. As a teenager, she recalls, she would get upset that her mother could not always be around. Still, Margarita supported her mother’s journalism work, as did the rest of the family. Slavina’s relatives did not judge her, says Murakhtaeva:
When it all happened, we were just trying to deal with our loss. We weren’t thinking about whether to accept [my mother’s decision] or not. Who are we to judge someone for the choices they make? We understood why she had taken such drastic action. A police search is a powerful tool of intimidation, and we don’t know what we would have done in her situation.
Margarita is convinced that her mother committed suicide because of government pressure. Slavina’s relatives are trying to bring security officials to justice. The defence team maintains that there are questions about the legality of the search. The Investigative Committee twice refused to open a criminal case on incitement to suicide, and complaints to the court and the prosecutor’s office have gone nowhere. “We aren’t going to stop,” says Murakhtaeva. “We’re going to go through the courts properly and we’re determined to see it through. I want the people who organized that search locked up. I mean, our lives are the most important thing we have, and because of what they did, they have taken her life away.”
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After my mother died, I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. In the first few months, I found it hard to leave the house or be in the flat on my own. The slightest noise made me flinch, thinking the police had turned up at the house again. I found it really hard early on when social media was buzzing about what my mother had done and lots of videos were being posted. It all really got to me. I was also worried people would judge me by her actions and ignore the fact that, even though we were similar in character and values, we were different people and each had our own path.
Focusing on work really got me through back then. I was dealing with work stuff non-stop and I didn’t have time to think about my mother. But I was twenty years old, and keeping such a major media outlet afloat by myself was proving impossible. We spent four months tying up the projects my mother hadn’t finished, and then we shut the news outlet down. Koza has an impeccable reputation, and I didn’t want to ruin it, being young and amateurish. But that doesn’t mean I won’t go back to it eventually, when I feel ready. I’m proud that I was able to get myself back on track. But Mum’s death is still a living nightmare.
I think my mum did what she did to make herself heard and to get people to understand the consequences of persecuting journalists who are doing an honest job. It was a cry of desperation and a wake-up call—not so much to the Russian society of 2020, but to the future, to the here and now. Lots of people have remained indifferent to what’s going on in Ukraine, though. That doesn’t surprise me. People are more concerned about what to make their children for dinner and how to make ends meet till payday. They don’t have the time, strength, or inclination to think about more global issues or their future, or the future of their country.
I think if anyone could have seen the war coming, it was my mum. She saw what was happening to our country with each year that passed and how quickly the government’s patience for people in her line of work was wearing thin. If she was with us now, there is no way she would leave, and neither will I. I don’t see why any other country would want me when my own doesn’t. Lots of Russians have left for Georgia, Kazakhstan, and the Baltic states, but those places have their own problems. And I want to deal with things in my country, where I was born and spent my childhood. Where I met my closest friends. Where I plan to build my future—not only that, but to make it possible for that future to happen at all.
I come to the regional Interior Ministry headquarters every year on 2nd October. I think I have that right, as someone who lost a loved one there. I came last year as well, and I brought a placard with me that read, “MY MUM WOULD HAVE SAID, ‘PUTIN, YOU AND YOUR WAR CAN GO TO HELL’, BUT PUTIN KILLED HER BEFORE SHE GOT THE CHANCE”. Someone took my photo, and the next day they showed up at my house. They ended up giving me a minimum fine for “discrediting” the Russian army. I think they must have decided to leave me alone. They could have given me a heftier fine and charged me with something more serious.
This time, it had been important to me not only to remind people about my mum and what happened to her, but also to tell them what Mum would have thought about the war. Even though she isn’t around any more, I want her ideas to live on. I’m not afraid of anything at all now—not protesting with the placard or calling the war a ‘war’ on social media. The worst has already happened: my mum died and war has broken out. My friend had a miraculous escape from a Kharkiv dorm that was hit by Russian missiles. So many lives have been lost these terrible past months! There’s nothing more to fear.
Just after my protest in 2022, my brother, who had never served in the military because of health problems, told me he’d got his draft papers. The government wants to drag my family through the mud—I wrote about it on Facebook. I approached some journalists I know, too, and asked them to go public with the injustice. But then I found out from the media that my brother had lied to us: he had actually gone down to the military recruitment office himself, as a volunteer.
I suspect he didn’t want to tell the truth because he didn’t want to admit that he went to war to get out of debt. I think he was ashamed to say, “I’ve hit the wall and I don’t know how to sort things out. That’s why I’m going to war”. So he lied to us. He told reporters he was going to war for the sake of his principles and views on the world and that he thought it was a just war.
What exactly did Slavina’s son say?
“I’m the son of Irina Slavina, and I went down to the recruiting office voluntarily and got my draft papers. I passed a general medical exam. The doctor explained to me that time had moved on since I got category ‘C’ fitness, and the ‘tilt angle of my spine’ had changed, so they gave me a ‘B’. [ . . .] This is my informed decision. I’m not running away like all those Russians who legged it to post-Soviet countries.”
My brother has always had problems. He had a stack of debt, to banks and to family and friends. This wasn’t news to us, but no one thought that he would go to war because of it. But he did. I don’t know how things are now, but for the first few months, his salary went towards paying off his debt. Until then, I’d supported my brother, telling him he would definitely come out of the situation with his dignity intact and how I was glad things were improving for him a bit since he’d had a son. But now, I don’t feel sorry for him any more.
I don’t really care that he showed me up in front of people with his lies. What hurts is that he let Mum down and betrayed the convictions she gave her life for. This wouldn’t have happened if she was alive. My brother was very fond of Mum and he wouldn’t have done this to her while she was still with us. I feel awful for his children, too, as he’s left them without a dad. People don’t come back from the war, I’m sure.
What’s really scary is that he’s made himself believe what he told the journalists. He doesn’t like the fact he is the way he is, that he doesn’t have the principles and ambitions his mother did, and that he’s not as driven as she was. And people had a go at him for it—they talked on social media about his backstory, his various court cases and his debts. I think what he’s done is find a way to bolster his self-esteem, and now he’s deluding himself so he can make other people think of him proudly as a hero.
“How did you cope with your mother’s death?” —Vyacheslav
As my mother and I lived separately, I didn’t feel the pressure she was under. Some randoms on social media would just bad-mouth me now and then. Mum and I got on really well, though. We were in touch all the time. We’d talk and share loads of different funny pictures and photos. I was fine about her work. I read her articles all the time and discussed them with her. But I wasn’t massively into all that.
Until 2nd October 2020, I didn’t give much thought to whether independent journalism was worth her making a sacrifice like that. Now I know it’s not worth it. I think the system is to blame for my mother’s death. I’m sorry, but you can’t fight the system and you can’t win when you’re up against trumped-up cases and “lawful” searches with mystery witnesses present but no lawyer. As far as I know, her parents weren’t even allowed to call for one.
It wasn’t so much suicide as self-immolation—a protest, let’s say. I can’t blame her; she did it intentionally. Perhaps there’s something going on we don’t know about and never will. But I think she just wanted to be heard.
I took her death hard. How would you cope with the death of your mother? Especially when they talk about it all over the place. Even now, they still bring it up every so often.
I think she’d obviously take a dim view of what’s going on in Ukraine. How else could any sane person think about the war? I very much doubt she’d have agreed with my going to the front, but it was my decision, and I’ve never once regretted it.
Lots of my mum’s friends judge me. I’ve had a whole load of grief since I left for the SMO. But I don’t think of it as fighting on the same side as the system that killed my mother. The system aside, there are civilians suffering because of what’s happening out here [in the combat zone].
I read up a lot on the war in the Donbas. I read the news and what soldiers had to say. And I spoke to former Ukrainians, who told me what they think about Russian-speaking locals. I once passed through Beslan, and after that I read about the “Alley of Angels”.
The bombing of the Crimean Bridge and the shelling of our country’s borders was the last straw. I’m an experienced truck driver. I know how they work and I can repair cars. I know how to handle a gun and how to shoot, too. I reckoned that would be enough to go and defend my country, my children, and my loved ones. My wife was right behind me because she saw how wrapped up in the war I’d been over the past few months.
I didn’t tell my sister about my decision. I mean, the less you know, the better you sleep. Especially as we completely disagree about things. I didn’t think she’d go sounding off about this idea of hers that I was drafted “illegally”. I went down to the recruiting office myself and said I wanted to enlist. They asked me about my health, and I said it was fine. My military registration speciality was “auto mechanic”, which meant I was in demand, so I was called for a medical exam.
They did the standard medical—it didn’t matter to the doctors whether I was a volunteer or not. I’d been turned down by the doc since I was eighteen because of my osteochondrosis. I’m not cured—I still have osteochondrosis. But the admissions procedure has changed, and the doctor switched my category of fitness from a “C” to an “A”. Now I’m fit, with no restrictions.
As for having gone to the front because of debt, well, that’s just what my sister thinks. And she can just keep thinking it. When I’m back, I’ll tell her what’s going on out here and show her some pictures. Maybe she’ll change her mind. The Ukrainians are mainly hitting kindergartens, schools, cultural venues, hospitals, dorms, and local government buildings. It’s meant to intimidate civilians. We Russian soldiers are treated quite differently here, but we have the people’s backing, mostly.
Russia is fighting the West, and Ukraine is a pawn—just like Georgia in 2008. Whose weapons are in Ukraine? Which countries are supporting it? Whose missiles are flying around? That’s who we’re fighting against. I used to disagree with most of Putin’s policies, but now all I’m interested in is what’s happening in the SMO. The most important thing right now is to know how my family is getting on back home, how our soldiers are doing, and how the SMO is going.
We were in the SMO zone just over a month after I joined the unit. There was training before that. I’m not going to talk about where and what we were taught, for obvious reasons, but the training went on for quite a while. I’m a driver here—I didn’t need any instruction. They taught me first aid, how to fire a machine gun, and how to throw a grenade. We got the equipment ready during training. I’m happy with the conditions here [at the front]. We live in dugouts. The officers helped us to dig them. They brought in a digger, as you can’t get far with a spade. The soil here is a bit different. We were issued building materials and little cookers. We get by. We don’t complain. The troops are well fed and well dressed. We’ve got a warm place to sleep—we even have mattresses. The army issued summer and winter uniforms. They gave us the right clothes, and everyone decides for themselves if they want to buy more clothes or not. They bring us food, so we don’t go hungry.
My convictions have only got stronger. I’ll have to tell my son about it when he grows up. I don’t think about how I might not get back to him, my daughter, and my wife. You’d totally lose it if you thought you weren’t ever going home. We’re all going back, whatever happens, and we’ll go back as winners.
