With her PlayStation and her pet rat: how one member of Pussy Riot fled Russia

On the last day of March, Lusya Shtein rose early. On most days she wears a hoodie and loose-fitting trousers when running errands or meeting friends. That morning she put on the lime-green uniform of Delivery Club, a company that couriers food around Moscow. The outfit, ordered online, had come with the company’s delivery bag, along with a beanie and a face mask. Dressed head-to-toe in neon green, she smirked at herself in her bedroom mirror and took a selfie.

This was not the first time that Shtein had disguised herself to dodge the police. An activist and critic of President Vladimir Putin, she had been under some form of house arrest for over a year. The 25-year-old had to wear an electronic ankle tag and a GPS tracker that monitored her location, and was barred from leaving the house after 10pm. Police officers watched the entrance to her building. But she had noticed on a couple of occasions that the officers did not respond when she forgot to take the GPS tracker with her when she went out. She could leave it behind without detection. On occasion she would walk to her girlfriend’s flat in a big coat, hat and glasses.

Shtein had thought she could withstand the increasingly harsh repression that Russian authorities meted out to its critics. She had been arrested and jailed briefly several times, and was sentenced to house arrest last year in the wake of a massive anti-government demonstration. She still hoped to continue protesting within the shrinking space available for activism under Putin. But when Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24th, Shtein couldn’t stomach it any longer.

She put her phone, passport and wallet into the food-delivery bag, slipped her pet rat into one of its pockets and closed the door

“I couldn’t bear the thought of continuing to live in the invaders’ country, or of living in Moscow just a few kilometres from the Kremlin, among people who support the war,” she says. “I realised that there was nothing left to wait for in Russia.”

Taking a last look at the apartment that she’d lived in for 18 months, she put her phone, passport and wallet into the courier’s satchel, slipped her pet rat into one of its pockets and closed the door behind her.

Putin has suppressed his critics since his early years in power. For a long time the crackdowns came in waves. Sometimes specific groups or opposition figures would be pressurised. But for the most part, civic life in Russia persisted, even progressed. Independent media outlets emerged, as did support networks for activists. In the past few years, however, the Kremlin has intensified its war on entities it regards as “foreign agents”, restricting the work of many such organisations, activists and journalists.

During that time, Shtein was able to carve out a small role for herself as a local-government representative and a feminist activist. Born into a middle-class, liberal family in Moscow, she gave little thought to politics in her youth – she briefly tried modelling, then journalism. Then, in 2015, when Shtein was 18, Boris Nemtsov, one of Russia’s most prominent opposition figures, was shot four times in the back while walking on a bridge near the Kremlin. “His murder shocked me. It showed that the supposedly impossible – to kill an opposition politician in central Moscow – was possible,” she says. “Everything changed.” Shtein fell in with a circle of young liberals, artists, independent journalists and human-rights activists. She began to join their demonstrations and electoral campaigns.

In 2017, when she was helping out with a local election campaign, someone suggested that she run for office herself as a deputy on a Moscow municipal council. At the age of 21 and with barely any experience, she won a seat representing Moscow’s hip Basmanny district. “In Russia, you often hear people saying that opposition figures only go out and protest, without offering anything concrete,” Shtein says. “So we decided to actually try and do something real.”

In reality, the role gave her little authority. But Shtein found other ways to make a mark, joining the ranks of young, often female Russian activists who harnessed their platforms on social media to draw attention to political issues – one of the few tools of subversion at their disposal. In 2020 Shtein joined Pussy Riot, a feminist performance-art collective and punk band, and began to participate in its events, which doubled as protests. She started dating Masha Alekhina, the group’s veteran activist, who had received a two-year jail sentence for “hooliganism” in 2012 after an obscenity-laden performance directed at Putin in a Moscow cathedral.

In recent years, ahead of a planned protest or performance, police would wait outside the homes of Shtein and her fellow activists. The threat of arrest was implicit. Shtein says her situation was better than that of some of her comrades because she knew she wasn’t putting her family in danger: her father died when she was ten and her mother lives abroad. And her punishments tended to be light – a fine or a short stay in jail, at worst.

“I couldn’t bear to live in the invaders’ country. I realised that there was nothing left to wait for in Russia”

The political environment became far more oppressive after the imprisonment in January 2021 of Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition figure. Navalny had survived an attempt to poison him with a deadly nerve agent in August 2020, but was put on trial as soon as he returned from treatment in Germany to Moscow, prompting large anti-government demonstrations. Thousands of people were arrested, including Shtein, who was eventually charged with inciting others to break covid-safety rules. She was sitting in an unheated cell on a freezing-cold evening in an infamous prison once used by the KGB, when she heard on the radio a judge sentence Navalny to nearly three years in a brutal penal colony. Since then, the government has obliterated the vast activist network that Navalny had established across Russia.

At 5am on February 24th, Shtein woke up to a flood of notifications on her phone: Putin had just invaded Ukraine. Alekhina, a preternaturally deep sleeper, barely stirred. Shtein endured the first shockwaves of despair and disgust alone. “Living in Russia is very emotionally difficult. You get used to the fact that everyday there is some new, terrible, trash development,” she says. “If you follow events constantly you start to lose it. I learnt to distance myself from the news cycle. But in the case of Ukraine, that immunity fell away.”

In the early weeks of the war she was glued to her phone, following the coverage from dawn until dusk. She thought often about the story of a make-up artist killed by Russian forces in Bucha, near Kyiv, and the image of the dead woman’s greying hand, with her red and white acrylic nails still bright. “You understand that behind every person who is killed, is a full life and an individual story,” she says.

She was also furious with Western governments. “Our activists and opposition politicians told the West for a long time that Putin is a fascist and that they should bring sanctions against him,” she says. “They didn’t listen.”

Shtein quickly understood that the invasion would deal a mortal blow to the last vestiges of free expression in Russia. In early March a new law established a 15-year jail sentence for “spreading fake news about the actions of the Russian armed forces”. A longer, harsher stint in prison was now a real possibility. Under the terms of her house arrest, Shtein was barred from leaving Moscow. She had some difficult choices to make: would she be able to leave for a short period, wait for things to calm down, and return? How many more months or years in prison would she get if she did so? She eventually accepted that if she left, she would not be able to return to Russia while Putin remained in power.

“You understand that behind every person who is killed, is a full life and an individual story”

Friends and activists helped her sketch out an escape plan. Many airlines had stopped flying to Russia, and several neighbouring countries had closed their borders. If she went to the airport, she knew she’d be arrested on the spot. She concluded that the fastest way to leave Russian soil before the authorities noticed was to drive through Belarus to Lithuania. (Shtein asked 1843 magazine not to publish the specific details of her route, so other Russians can continue to use it.)

A few days before she left, Shtein packed a suitcase of belongings for a friend to collect from her flat. In it she put her Sony PlayStation, some mementoes and several books, including Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism” and William Shirer’s “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich”.

The morning of March 31st was brisk, perfect for wearing a courier jacket. From the balcony of her apartment, Shtein could monitor the police officers’ movements below. When the street was clear, she set off. Once she was out of her neighbourhood, Shtein was picked up by a driver who took her to the Belarusian border, where a second driver drove her to the crossing with Lithuania. The journey took around ten hours. Despite the high stakes, Shtein says there was only one moment of tension: two hours after she’d left, Shtein’s case officer turned up unannounced at the apartment to find Alekhina alone and Shtein’s GPS tracker lying in full view on the kitchen table. Alekhina came up with some excuses to buy her girlfriend some time.

Shtein is one of hundreds of thousands of Russians who have left the country since the invasion. After she arrived in Lithuania, she posted on Twitter a video of herself in a hoodie cutting off her ankle tag with scissors. “Parting is a small death, but I am forced to prematurely break off relations with the Russian Federation,” she tweeted. She had worn the symbol of state repression every day for a year – and decorated the tag with stickers and anti-police symbols. Nevertheless, severing the tie felt strange.

A month later, Shtein’s girlfriend Alekhina staged a similar escape, wearing the exact same outfit (Shtein had taken it off when she switched cars and handed it to a friend.) The pair were reunited in Vilnius in late April. On May 16th the Russian authorities put Shtein on a wanted list. She responded by uploading a picture of a breakfast tray on Twitter with a note on it that read, “Hooray! You are wanted!”

What did it feel like to leave Russia, I ask Shtein by telephone? “Well…I am always happy when I fuck over the cops,” she says with a laugh, characteristically deflecting with humour. Then, she relents. “In that moment I felt it was no longer my country,” she says. “If your country is your friends, most of my friends had already fled or were planning to. If it’s your parents, then my parents had left Russia long ago. If it’s common values and shared vision with the government, then I never had this anyway.”

Now she is concentrating on the future, looking for ways to help from outside Russia: “All of a sudden those familiar streets and buildings where I had many important, precious memories, just turned into a place where I could get arrested. Somewhere I would live in prison.”■

Francesca Ebel is a journalist covering the war in Ukraine. Lusya Shtein was featured in The Economist’s broadcast documentary “Fearless: The Women Fighting Putin”, winner of a BAFTA TV award in May. You can read the rest of 1843 magazine’s coverage of the war in Ukraine, here

PHOTOGRAPHS: PIOTR MALECKI / PANOS