By Álvaro Peñas
Interview with Tatiana Kungurova, a Russian oppositionist who together with her husband Alexey Kutalo, recognised as a political refugee in the US, lives in Argentina.
When did you leave Russia?
I left Russia in 2012. My husband and I belonged to RONS (Russkiy Obtche-Nacionalnyi Soyuz – Russian All-National Union), an organisation oriented towards Orthodox Christian and patriotic values that was banned by the government. We were very active members and that had consequences.
What did the organisation do?
On the street we directed most of our activism to the fight against abortion, which is a terrible problem in Russia. We were also running candidates for elections at the local level, and we tried to join a coalition for the Duma, the Russian Parliament. We couldn’t because our organisation was banned in 2011. We were not the only ones, Putin eliminated all independent opposition, left or right. And despite all this nationalist populism of Putin’s and this supposed defence of family values, the reality is very different, it is mere populism. In Russia, nationalism is banned and branded as “extremism”. When it is in Putin’s interest, he uses all the left-liberal rhetoric to eliminate any nationalist opposition, collective or individual.
What did the ban mean?
We started to have serious problems. In December 2009 we had a visit from the police, general and riot police, early in the morning, accompanied by an officer from the FSB’s Service for the Protection of Constitutional Order and the Fight against Terrorism. A section historically linked to the KGB and the NKVD, and considered the successor to the Fifth KGB Directorate, dedicated to the fight against dissent and “ideological sabotage”, and later transformed into the Directorate for the Protection of the Soviet Constitutional System. They came in under the pretext that they were looking for explosives and took our computers, books, anti-abortion leaflets, etc. This started a case against us because, according to the FSB, there were extremist texts and this was the reason given for the ban.
After the ban we stopped our activities, but we continued to publish news from our website, and the FSB started a criminal case against us. A 282, which is the code commonly used against the right-wing opposition, for “incitement to hatred or enmity, as well as humiliation of human dignity”.
What are the penal consequences of this code?
If you collaborate and denounce your comrades and friends, nothing happens to you, and you can even be recruited to work for them. If you refuse, you face up to six years in prison. We refused to cooperate and suffered four more searches and several interrogations. To put pressure on us, they did the same to our brothers and relatives, even though they had never been part of the organisation. We never did anything illegal, but they make it seem otherwise.
What did the interrogations consist of?
They intimidated us and urged us to collaborate. I never suffered physical violence, but my husband suffered physical violence at the hands of other prisoners during his last detention. They also asked us why we did not follow the Moscow Patriarchate. We are not part of the official Russian Church, we are part of the Orthodox Church Abroad, an independent church that emerged when White Russians left their homeland in the face of the Bolshevik victory. I do not recognise the Patriarch of Moscow, I am anti-communist and I do not like a red church that participated in the persecution of the new martyrs.
And what happened next?
In 2012 my husband was arrested and sent to prison. I left my home and went to Moscow, there I hired a lawyer to defend my husband and from there I went to Ukraine. There I received a lot of help from other Christians who understood what we were going through and I raised funds to pay for my husband’s defence. So for me Ukraine is the country that saved me. The evidence against my husband was not very strong and he was released, so he left Russia and joined me in Ukraine and then we went to Argentina.
Did you receive political asylum in Argentina?
No, political refugee status here is only for leftists. When they saw that we were against Putin, that we were conservative and Christian, and that we were enemies of Kichnerism, they rejected our application. The objective reality of Russia did not fit their narrative. My husband did get political refugee status in the US in 2019, as did the former president of our organisation, Igor Artiomov.
Do you maintain contact with other Russian refugees?
Yes, we even tried to create an international organisation of political refugees, it lasted a couple of years but did not succeed. In 2014 we abandoned our organisation because it was in favour of the invasion of Crimea and Ukraine, although they are still illegal in Russia. Many believed Putin’s nationalist propaganda to justify that invasion, as they do now, but Ukrainians are entitled to their dignity and freedom, and they have their historical path. Ukrainians are not Russophobic and when I was there I never had any problems. They saved my life and I am very grateful to them.
Many in the West believe that Putin is a conservative and a defender of Christians.
Putin has no principles and uses what suits him best, for example, to fight Ukraine he uses nationalist rhetoric and spoke in 2014 of the “Russian spring”, of uniting the Russian world and all Slavs. But in reality, what is really there is a Soviet base. The Bolsheviks also used nationalism to fight the Whites and Tsarist imperialism, but then they crushed all nationalists to create the Soviet Union. Putin is the same, he wants to return to the former borders of the USSR and for that he must subjugate Ukraine, and he uses nationalist or communist rhetoric as it suits him. Putin wraps himself in the Russian flag and it is very difficult for a foreigner to relate that this Russia is essentially the same as the Soviet Union. There was no decommunisation and the former party members are all in power.
Or even the church.
Yes, the Moscow Patriarchate was created by Stalin in 1943, during World War II. The Patriarch and the council of bishops were chosen by the Communist Party and many were even agents of the KGB. The current Patriarch, Kirill, has also been accused of being a KGB agent. (According to The Times, all three candidates running for Patriarch in 2009, when Kirill was elected, were linked to the KGB).
Do you think the images of what happened in Ukrainian cities can damage Putin’s government?
Unfortunately many Russians do not have access to information, and even there there there is no talk of war, but of a peace operation. There is a very strong pressure of ideology and propaganda, as in the Soviet Union, and that makes it very difficult to react. There are people who are against the war and demonstrate in the streets, but they have no tools to defend their position. Demonstrators are arrested, even children. You can’t protest. Russia is one of the countries where human rights are least respected, it is totalitarianism, the Soviet Union in a new format.
Vir: El Correo de España