The Artist Who Terrifies Vladimir Putin

Among the 16 prisoners released in the swap with Russia last week was a little-known artist and musician named Sasha Skochilenko. She was serving a seven-year sentence for a bit of ingenious guerrilla art. In March 2022, a month after Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine began, Skochilenko walked into a St. Petersburg grocery store and replaced five price tags with anti-war messages. On a label that was supposed to list the cost of a head of cabbage or a box of stationery, a shopper might find a perspective on the war that few Russians were hearing: “The Russian Army bombed an art school in Mariupol where about 400 people were seeking shelter,” read one label. “My great-grandfather didn’t participate in World War II for four years so that Russia would become a fascist state and attack Ukraine,” said a second. A third read, “Stop the war! In the first three days, 4,300 Russian soldiers were killed. Why are they silent about this on television?”

Putin had just rushed through Parliament a new law, Article 207.3, that made it criminal to distribute “false information about Russian armed forces.” Even calling Russia’s massive incursion into Ukraine a “war” was deemed illegal—it was to be referred to only as a “special military operation.” For her grocery-store action, Skochilenko was detained in April 2022, held for 20 months in pretrial detention, denied treatment for a heart defect and the special diet she needed for her celiac disease, then convicted last November under Article 207.3 and given her long sentence. According to Amnesty International, by the time Skochilenko was put in prison last fall, more than 700 people had already faced criminal charges in Russia for anti-war activities, including more than 250 under Article 207.3.

As Skochilenko stood in the glass box where defendants are held in Russian courtrooms, wearing a tie-dye shirt with a heart on it, trying to smile, she said she couldn’t believe that this was all on account of five pieces of paper: “What weak faith our prosecutor has in our national society if he thinks that our state and our common security might collapse because of these tiny papers! What harm did I do? Who suffered because of my act?”

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The headlines last week focused on Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter convicted on trumped-up espionage charges so that Putin could gain leverage to free one of his assassins from a German jail. But it is the story of Sasha Skochilenko that illustrates even more dramatically what everyday reality looks like for Russians. Consider what kind of regime might be threatened by five tiny pieces of paper, and you can appreciate the lead blanket that has fallen over Russia, a place where people risk their freedom (and occasionally their life) to express certain truths, even when they’re whispered.

Skochilenko’s act of defiance reminded me of an extraordinary novel about German resistance to the Nazis, Every Man Dies Alone. Written in 1947, the book was the last from Hans Fallada, the pen name of Rudolf Ditzen, a popular German writer (best known for his novel Little Man, What Now?) who spent the Nazi period in a self-hating state of complicity, a condition he dulled with a serious morphine addiction and stays at mental institutions. After the war, a friend handed him the Gestapo’s dossier on a working-class Berliner couple, Otto and Elise Hampel, who for two years at the height of World War II secretly deposited postcards around Berlin that contained scrawled anti-war messages about Hitler. When they were caught at the end of 1942, they were sentenced to death by guillotine.

In a feverish 24 days, Fallada fictionalized the story into a 500-page novel. The Hampels became Otto and Anna Quangel, who embark on their own subversive postcard campaign after their son, a soldier at the front, is killed. The handwritten messages they scatter in the stairwells of office buildings throughout Berlin uncannily echo Skochilenko’s grocery-store labels: “Mother! The Führer has murdered my son. Mother! The Führer will murder your sons too, he will not stop till he has brought sorrow to every home in the world.”

For Anna Quangel, the postcards feel like a minuscule gesture when her husband first suggests them—an “obscure and ignoble form of warfare”—and no match for the enormity of her grief and anger. She wants to kill Hitler. But Otto insists that there is nothing quaint about this project. “Whether it’s big or small, Anna, if they get wind of it, it’ll cost us our lives,” he tells her. And they begin to dream about how, because their postcards point to a reality that no one else is brave enough to name, they might cause a chain reaction. “Perhaps already there are many thinking as we do,” Otto says. “Thousands of men must have fallen. Maybe there are already writers like us. But that doesn’t matter, Anna! What do we care? It’s we who must do it!”

Fallada turns the story of the Quangels into a noirish tale, following a police investigator on the case as the cards multiply—Otto and Anna make a Sunday ritual out of writing them at their kitchen table. The search offers a human panorama of Berlin under the Nazis: the pervasive fear and suspicion, but also the absurdity of so many resources applied to tracking down a middle-aged couple armed with a pen. Things end for the Qaungels much as they did for the real-life Hampels: capture, trial, and gruesome execution. In an appendix to a 2009 English translation of the novel (by Michael Hofmann), images of the Hampel postcards are included. Written in awkward, blocky print (to avoid recognizable handwriting), full of grammatical errors and misspellings, they seem so small and pathetic, the protest of an ant already in the shadow of a stomping boot. But they are also an artifact of resistance, a reminder of how even in the most repressive of environments, some people will always feel compelled by a different set of values, unable to lie about what they know to be true.

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Skochilenko offers the same kind of hope about Russia, even in this dark moment. Putin has tried to lock down information about the war in Ukraine, and she looked for other ways to make its price known. In the speech she gave in the courtroom when she was convicted, she talked about being motivated by her pacifism, about the sacredness and beauty and brevity of life. And she ended by addressing the state prosecutor directly:

I don’t blame you. You are worried about your career, about having a stable future to provide for your family, to give them food and have a roof over your head, to give your children or your future children a head start. But what will you tell them? Will you tell them how you sent to prison an ailing woman because of five tiny pieces of paper? No, you will definitely tell them about other cases. Maybe you will convince yourself you were just doing your job … Even though I am behind bars, I am freer than you. I can make my own decisions and say what I think. I can quit my job if they try to make me do something I don’t want to do. I don’t have any enemies. I am not afraid to be poor or even homeless.

I am not afraid that I won’t have a dazzling career or of appearing funny, vulnerable, or strange. I’m not afraid of seeming different from other people. Maybe that is why the state fears me and others like me so much and keeps me in a cage like a dangerous animal.

Happily, Skochilenko left that cage last week, headed for Turkey and then Germany, to be reunited with her girlfriend and her mother.

I hope her case becomes as well known as Gershkovich’s. “Each sentence is a message, a kind of a message to society,” Skochilenko told the judge before he sent her to prison. Besides giving us a potent example of courage, her persecution tells us something important about Putin. Not about how strong and powerful he is in smashing the slightest opposition, but about the ultimate weakness and insecurity of his totalitarianism. His fear of an artist and a pacifist like Skochilenko, which led him to lock her up for seven years for the tiniest dissent, reveals Putin’s deep worry about what might happen if Russians learned the truth printed on those five pieces of paper. You silence a whisper only because you fear it might eventually turn into a shout.