“Pasha is dead. » The words are perfectly clear, but it takes me a few moments to register the information and above all try to remember who Pasha is. On the line, Anna Ouvarova, Nikita’s mother, a former reporting “hero”. The anarchist and rebellious teenager, “terrorist” in the eyes of the regime, was sentenced to five years in prison for a non-existent attack plan – the vague idea, with his friends, of blowing up an FSB building in Minecraft, a video game in which the user can model buildings.
We went to visit Nikita’s family in Kansk, a depressing backwater in the Siberian region of Krasnoyarsk, in April 2021. Anna Ouvarova had set up photographer Maria Turchenkova and me at her sister’s house. There, there was Maxim, Nikita’s blue-green-haired cousin, and “Pasha”, Pavel Zhevnerovitch. As the pieces begin to fall into place, Anna Ouvarova explains: “Pacha, the boy on the cover…”
This is the iconography service of M The magazine of the World who had made this choice: rather than that of Nikita, already incarcerated, it was a photo full of melancholy of his cousin facing the emptiness of the steppe which had been chosen to make the cover of the magazine. Pacha, the 18-year-old young man who giggled stupidly to hide his shyness. Pasha who only had one dream: to join the army…
Oddly enough, even before I remembered him, I knew that “Pasha is dead” wanted to say “death in war”. There are many ways to die, when you are 20 years old, in a place like Kansk: alcohol, violence, accidents… But, in recent months, in recent years, it is the war in Ukraine that the inhabitants of the marches depressed parts of the empire pay their dues. On one of the Telegram channels listing the deaths of the “special operation” (only those known from open sources), we find forty-two names of those killed from Kansk, eighty-five thousand inhabitants. That of Pavel Jevnerovitch is not there – only two video messages from relatives begging for news, scraps of information.
The search for a body, for official confirmation, is an ordeal in the ordeal experienced by thousands of families of Russian soldiers killed at the front. Anna Ouvarova’s phone call dates back to the beginning of December 2023. She herself had just been informed of the fate of her nephew by a regimental comrade. Pasha had died a few days earlier, hit by a shrapnel in the back, not far from the Ukrainian town of Avdiïvka, in Donbass, which the Russian army seized in February.
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