There was no introduction, the program was enough. On the empty stage of the small Salle Cortot, in Paris, gathered this Monday, November 18, two world-renowned musicians, Grigory Sokolov and Serghei Babayan, slipped one after the other, silently, behind a grand black piano. Completely masterful, the former interpreted Frédéric Chopin and Robert Schumann, the latter, full of enthusiasm, interpreted Arvo Pärt, an Estonian composer specializing in fine music, Franz Liszt, Franz Schubert and Sergei Rachmaninoff.
Both born in the Soviet Union, in Leningrad (today Saint Petersburg), for Grigory Sokolov, and in Gyumri, in Armenia, for Serghei Babayan (still a naturalized American), thus paid tribute for almost two hours to his fellow man, the pianist Pavel Kouchnir, died at the age of 39 in Vladimir Putin’s prisons. A specialist in Chopin’s mazurkas, the latter imposed an internal exile on himself, retiring in 2023, a year after the invasion of Ukraine, in Birobidzhan regiona Jewish autonomous region created by Stalin located in the Far East of Russia, 6,000 kilometers from Moscow, on the border with China.
Employed as a soloist in the philharmonic of Birobidzhan, the city of the same name in the region, this graduate of the prestigious Moscow music conservatory, the Tchaikovsky School, thought that there he would enjoy greater freedom. Against the war in Ukraine – he had also participated in the major demonstrations in Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square in the winter of 2011-2012 against the re-election of Vladimir Putin – he had started putting up leaflets.
Four videos against Putin
Then Pavel Kouchnir published four videos on his YouTube channel called “Foreign Agent Mulder”. In one of them, he denounced “Putin’s Fascist Regime”. “The war in Ukraine is a shame for all Russians; you don’t get used to fascism; life is what will not be under fascism; hatred is the official ideology of fascism. » The message was almost confidential because it was followed by only five subscribers (more than 175,000 today), but it was enough to lead to his arrest.
Accused of public incitement “to commit terrorist acts”died in detention, officially as a result of the hunger strike. On July 27, his death was announced by his family. A few days later, at the initiative of Russian pianist Alexandre Melnikov, a dozen big names in classical music, including Martha Argerich, Daniel Barenboim and Anne-Sophie Mutter, signed an open letter in the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeinepaying tribute to the anti-war activist and “all the countless unknown political prisoners in Russia and other parts of the world”.
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