(Photo by Silar via Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED)
Note: An earlier version of this article stated incorrectly that Voices of Resistance had met for the seventh time in April 2024. This has been corrected.
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On the evening of April 25, 2024, Montreal’s Café Tuyo was brimming with energy. Fragments of French, Russian, and English were mixing as baristas headed home, and attendees soon settled in for the after-hours letter-writing event hosted by the Montreal chapter of the Russian-Canadian Democratic Alliance (RCDA), “Voices of Resistance.” For the eleventh time in two years, this Russian anti-war community met to write letters to political prisoners in Russia.
In September 2022, Russian Canadians formed the RCDA as a response to the war in Ukraine and the repression of Russian political opposition. I spoke with RCDA’s co-founder Olga Babina to learn more about Russian opposition to the war in Ukraine. “We are just simple people,” Babina tells me, “Russian dissidents who met during the protests on the streets.”
Before forming the RCDA, Babina had organized a protest on Russia’s National Holiday of June 12, 2022, at Montreal’s Russian consulate, just three and a half months after Russia invaded Ukraine. It seemed to her that locals were surprised to see “Russian people who are against the war … protesting in front of the consulate, holding a Ukrainian flag.” Babina was inspired to push back against this “black and white” viewpoint by connecting with other anti-war Russians across Canada and forming the RCDA. “With the war, I feel this necessity to identify myself as Russian,” she says, “to say loudly ‘Yes, I’m Russian and I am against the war. And there are a lot of people that are against the war.”
The RCDA’s original goals, Babina explains, were “our anti-war activities and support of Ukraine.” Adding, “Another important direction and goal for me was to amplify voices of Russian people who are against the war.” At the April 25 letter-writing event, attendees had the option to write to Russian-Ukrainians incarcerated in Russia, political oppositionists connected to Alexei Navalny’s campaign, or other imprisoned activists in Russia. The room was full of activists helping each other decide who to write to and what to write about. One attendee tells me, “It’s not that I’m waiting for an answer or hoping to get a pen pal. I’m just hoping to do whatever I can … instead of spending a few hours on Netflix, [and] maybe I can make someone smile for a second.”
The Criminalization of Political Protest
Before coming to Canada in 2016, Babina had a long career of political activism in Russia. Recalling her younger years, she spoke about local rallies against the Dima Yakovlev laws in the Orenburg region, being a part of the Bolotnaya Square protests in Moscow, and working as an election observer for an opposition candidate. Despite protests being legal back then, Babina adds that it was “not very safe, but still [legal].”
However, times have changed. “Right now in Russia, there is no possibility to protest,” she says before outlining the incomparable scale of Russian law enforcement and military in the country. Trying to imagine an event like Ukraine’s Maidan protest is inconceivable in Russia, she explains, not because there is a lack of opposition, but rather because the consequences for voicing opposition are much harsher. “Even before the war,” she reminds me, “more than 20% … were against the current government. … And this 20% is almost the population of Canada because Russia is a big country. So we cannot just dismiss these people.”
This 20% has been squeezed since the start of Russia’s war in Ukraine. Following Russia’s invasion, new laws criminalized protests and the use of the term “war” to describe the conflict, preventing independent news outlets from accurately reporting on the situation. While Russian authorities under Putin had a long history of blocking non-state-sanctioned media, this new law effectively criminalized any public displays of opposition. Mass emigration followed, with many citizens fleeing to neighbouring Georgia or Armenia in the south Caucasus, or finding refuge to express their discontent in distant countries like Canada.
With this, a sense of stubborn resolve sets the tone for the RCDA’s letter-writing events. At the April 25 gathering, attendees debated who was most important to write letters to. One attendee tells me about the systematic nature of political imprisonment in Russia. “A machine” that got going long before the war in Ukraine began. “It’s not new,” Babina reminds me, “it’s just the numbers skyrocketed after the full-scale invasion [of Ukraine]. Unfortunately, this was a mechanism that was used by the government for anyone who’d be considered as an enemy or threat.” Another attendee echoed these thoughts, confessing: “What’s happening to them is unfair. … They must feel alone [and] forgotten. We [should] show them their work isn’t in vain.”
New Challenges and New Solutions
While most of the attendees at the event in Montreal were using their computers or smartphones to type messages, one attendee tells me that last time they wrote on actual postcards, which were mailed by a friend who was travelling to Georgia. In recent months the RCDA also began collaborating with OVD-Info, a Russian human rights monitoring organization that translates letters sent in English. And while Babina admits that most of those who come to the letter-writing events are Russian speakers, they are making strong efforts to engage locals.
Voices of Resistance, RCDA’s Montreal chapter, has been translating letters from English and French into Russian for the last several letter-writing events. Throughout the previous year, they also hosted trilingual events commemorating victims of the war in Ukraine and organizing a vigil honouring the late Alexei Navalny. “It’s very important,” Babina says, “to show them that somebody from the outside is [seeing] these people. It’s not just moral support… but [it shows] that the whole world is … watching them.”
Recent news has proven that the world’s eyes do remain on Russia. Earlier this year, Montreal’s Contemporary Art Museum (MAC) exhibited Russian activist band Pussy Riot and collaborated with Voices of Resistance for a letter-writing event and film screening of the Oscar-winning documentary Navalny. Less than a month later, when news broke of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s death, the RCDA was quick to organize vigils in thirteen cities across Canada. After a month, the RCDA organized protests and exit polls outside Russia’s Canadian embassy and consulates. It was done with the “mid-day” protest vote that showed united opposition during Vladimir Putin’s recent re-election.
This momentum has helped the RCDA organizers overcome personal challenges brought on by the Russian state. In January, news broke of RCDA co-founder Maria Kartasheva’s challenges acquiring Canadian citizenship, after Canadian immigration services flagged a fabricated charge against her in Russia for voicing her opposition. While the decision was eventually overruled, it spotlighted the RCDA’s ability to build active support for Kartasheva’s anti-war stance.
An Undesirable Future
Momentum aside, the RCDA now finds itself with an uncertain future as a recent announcement by the Russian government labelled the human-rights group an “undesirable organization.” When I asked Babina what this meant for the future of the RCDA and Voices of Resistance, she said it was an unfortunate development, one that would have “real consequences and real threats.” While they used to share photos from their letter-writing events on social media, they have become more cautious in sharing images of people’s faces to protect their volunteers and supporters. “As with everything in Russia, you never know,” she says. “The same mechanism … used to be [used] with Stalin, [meaning] everybody is in constant fear.”
This fear is driven by both the Russian state and Russian prisons, which Babina admits “[are] another awful tragedy.” One attendee at the event echoes this attitude to me before another jumps in to describe a recent back-and-forth letter exchange. “At first it was hard for me to write about how good things are here,” the attendee recalls, “because it might be hard for them to read that. But [then] I was surprised that they were … asking the writer about another life, about good things, about things … unconnected to politics. For them it is like watching a film, [showing] that life somewhere, somehow goes on, and that it can be good.” While a letter from a stranger halfway around the world cannot fix a broken country like Russia, it may still let a political prisoner stop and imagine the world beyond their cell.
Edited by Isaac Code
