Grigory Okhotin has been fighting for a free Russia for twelve years. He accepts the danger that his involvement entails: “In Russia we risk our freedom, we can end up in prison. Outside Russia we risk being poisoned. So far we have not been arrested or poisoned.”
You have to be crazy to get involved politically in Russia! “And most people aren’t crazy.” But Grigory Okhotin is such a madman. So did his friend Daniil Beilinson. At the end of 2011, the two founded an organization that advocates for political prisoners in Russia: OVD-Info.
Legend:
Grigory Okhotin is co-founder of OVD-Info. From 2014 to 2018 he was a member of the board of the human rights organization “Memorial International”. In 2022 it was officially dissolved in Russia.
Grigory Okhotin
Created from a hit-and-run campaign
Okhotin and Beilinson no longer live in Russia. They emigrated to other European countries shortly before or shortly after the start of the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine. They don’t want to reveal where they live today – for security reasons.
Grigory Okhotin, narrow, pale face and firm voice, is 40 years old. He worked as a journalist for a long time. His friend Daniil Beilinson, 33, is a programmer. Both grew up in Moscow and both come from families that were already critical during Soviet times.
They founded OVD-Info in a hustle and bustle campaign at the end of 2011: “We sat at my house for two days and two nights and built the homepage. We had the idea on December 6th, and our site went online on December 10th,” says Grigory Okhotin.
From journalist to activist
At that time, at the beginning of December 2011, parliamentary elections were taking place in Russia. Votes are massively falsified – in favor of Vladimir Putin’s party “United Russia”. People are demonstrating against it in all major Russian cities. In Moscow alone, more than 100,000 people took to the streets in 2011. Grigory Okhotin reports on the protests as a journalist. Daniil Beilinson is there as an activist.
Legend:
«Get tired! Go away!”: On December 24, 2011, tens of thousands of people took to the streets to demonstrate against Vladimir Putin’s twelve-year rule.
Keystone / AP Photo / Mikhail Metzel
The security authorities are taking tough action: hundreds of protesters are being arrested – including a group of volunteer election observers about whom Grigory Okhotin wants to write a report. He makes his way to a police station to check on them.
“At that moment I probably crossed a line: I went from being a journalist to being a human rights activist,” says Okhotin. “At the time I thought: If I come to the police and show my press card, the officers will release the election observers.”
OVD-Info works around the clock
But the officials do not release the election observers – even though it is illegal to hold them. So Okhotin visits other police stations to find out who has been arrested and where. At one of these offices he meets Daniil Beilinson.
The two of them painstakingly create a list with the names of those arrested. When Grigory Okhotin published this list in a Moscow magazine the next day, the reaction was overwhelming: everyone who protested or knew people who had been arrested wanted to see the list.
It becomes clear to Okhotin and Beilinson: There is a need for an organization that documents what happens to political prisoners. The two of them spontaneously decided to found exactly such an organization: OVD-Info.
The project quickly becomes her main occupation. The two set up a telephone hotline: you can call there around the clock and get advice from lawyers.
A new kind of human rights work
Someone who knows Okhotin and Beilinson from their early days is Russia expert Stefan Melle. He is head of the dialogue office for civil society cooperation with Eastern and Southeastern Europe in Vienna. “The fact that the two of them provided information about political repression so quickly and reliably was really a discovery at the time. “It was like opening a door to a new kind of human rights work – and ultimately resistance.”
Today OVD-Info works with around 500 lawyers. They also represent political prisoners in court – free of charge. OVD-Info provides this service throughout Russia. This means they cover an area that includes eleven time zones.
The human rights organization finances its services through private donations. Since its founding, OVD-Info has received donations from almost 200,000 private individuals, say Grigory Okhotin and Daniil Beilinson. Most of the money comes from Russians, both at home and abroad.
A thorn in the side of the Russian authorities
OVD-Info’s permanent team includes around 100 employees. There are also around 5,000 volunteers, most of whom still live in Russia. They all take a big risk. “Until 2021, OVD-Info was a mass phenomenon in Russia, in a positive sense,” says Stefan Melle. The platform was nationally known.
Over the past three years, OVD-Info has also developed an international reputation: renowned German and English-language media regularly quote OVD-Info’s figures. Most recently, for example, after Alexei Navalny’s death in mid-February, when the Russian regime had many people arrested during expressions of mourning.
The Russian authorities have also noticed how popular OVD-Info is: in September 2021, the Russian Ministry of Justice branded the organization a “foreign agent”. Three months later, the Russian media regulator found OVD-Info guilty of “propaganda for terrorism and extremism.” The authorities then blocked the website nationwide – the homepage in Russia can only be accessed via a special internet connection.
“OVD-Info is more resilient than other organizations”
However, the authorities did not completely destroy OVD-Info. Why this is the case is also a mystery to Daniil Beilinson: “I think the regime is trying to find a balance: the repression should not be used to its full extent, but only to the extent that people become afraid. The Russian regime has not yet turned up its repressive machinery to full capacity. Maybe that’s one reason why we still exist.”
Legend:
Daniil Beilinson in front of the Russian Parliament with a petition to abolish the law on foreign agents.
Daniil Beilinson
Stefan Melle from the Dialogue Office for Civil Society Cooperation with Eastern and Southeastern Europe has another assumption: “OVD-Info consists of many individual people in different regions. It’s not that easy to pull out. I believe this makes OVD-Info more resilient than other organizations.”
“We continue”
Even though Grigory Okhotin and Daniil Beilinson live abroad today, they are constantly in contact with OVD-Info employees who still live in Russia. Grigory Okhotin says about the mood there: “People in Russia feel lost – regardless of their political beliefs. People are feeling bad. People are very uncertain about their future. There is no stability there.”
That sounds bleak. Daniil Beilinson fears that the situation could soon get worse for OVD-Info: “To be honest, I don’t know whether we will be able to do our work in Russia tomorrow to the same extent as we are doing it today. But we’ll definitely carry on.”
Despite everything, the two still have hope: “The people in Russia are not bad. There are millions of people there who care about human rights. At some point this will become noticeable,” says Grigory Okhotin. In the long term he is optimistic. “But that the Russian regime will collapse in the next 34 days due to the sanctions – I don’t have such short-term optimism.”
Radio SRF 2 Culture, Context, March 22, 2024, 9:00 a.m.