Catch me if you can

Gusev served on district council of Cheryomushki, in Moscow’s southwest, from 2012 to 2021, first as an independent, and then representing the Communist Party. He ultimately left Russia for Germany to begin work on a doctorate at the department of Eastern European Studies of the University of Münster.

NGE: You were elected to a Moscow district council in 2011 at the age of 22. Even then, that was wasn’t without its dangers. Why did you decide to take that risk?

AG: At that time, district councils were the only bodies in Russia where the opposition could be active. I had previously observed massive electoral fraud in various elections as an observer. That motivated me to run for office myself and fight for change.

NGE: At that time, most media outlets were already in the hands of pro-Kremlin activists and the city parliament was largely made up of members of the ruling United Russia party. How were you still able to become an elected council member?

AG: Getting in touch with people in person was key. I had no administrative or financial support like the candidates from the party in power. I printed posters myself and went from door to door. In three months, I knocked on about 10,000 doors. About one in four people opened the door, and of those, one in six talked to me. That was enough to get the votes I needed in my district. Like many others who had taken part in the same protests as me, I won — and was surprised.

NGE: For an authoritarian state, which Russia already was, such successes are a danger. Were you able to work unperturbed?

There were smear campaigns against me. In 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and installed the eastern Ukrainian “people’s republics”, a free newspaper in my district published a fake interview with me saying that I supported Ukrainian fascists, was paid by the Americans to take part in the Kyiv Maidan and was planning a violent uprising against the government. I had never given the interview, but it was distributed throughout Moscow and had a circulation of around 300,000. None of it was true. And then there was an attempt to open a criminal case against me based on the interview.

NGE: Was there a trial?

AG: No, I was able to prove that I had never given the interview.

NGE: Have there been other incidents like this?

AG: In 2017, there was an attempt to throw me out of the district council by trying to bring me to court for an alleged theft from a post office years earlier. Some media outlets claimed that I had been in prison, because the thief had the same name and, strangely enough, even the same date of birth as me. However, I was an active city councillor during the years they suspected me of having been in prison, so it couldn’t have been me. I went to court and showed my passport with my place of birth listed as Moscow. Alexey Gusev, the actual thief, was born in a small town in the Vladimir region.

NGE: When did you start getting involved in Alexey Navalny’s campaign to become Moscow’s mayor?

AG: It began with the demonstrations against the rigged Duma elections at the end of 2011, which were joined by everyone except United Russia, and then again at the protests against Putin’s re-election on Bolotnaya Square in 2012. Navalny was one of the leading speakers at these demonstrations, and it probably encouraged him to run for mayor in 2013. He needed signatures to be able to run. I was one of the first to sign and then registered as a volunteer to support his campaign. It was more innovative than anything I had seen from Russian politicians. That inspired me. He mobilised many people, we were a movement, we were on the move. It was the best time in my political career.

NGE: What was so new about Navalny?

AG: He realised that he had no chance against the Kremlin candidate Sergey Sobyanin if he used standard strategies. For example, we weren’t allowed to put up election posters anywhere. That’s very different from Germany. The local authorities claimed that all the spots were booked two or three months in advance. Strangely enough, there were still posters for Sobyanin everywhere.

So Navalny did it differently. He invited people onto the street to talk to him. Volunteers distributed flyers beforehand, and we put up billboards with Navalny’s photo and a slogan in every neighbourhood and at metro stations. Thanks to the protests, he was already a little better known in Moscow. Many people came, and one meeting had several thousand people. Even with falsifications, Navalny still got 27% of the vote. No opposition candidate had ever achieved that.

NGE: Navalny continued his political career. He was poisoned after meeting supporters in preparation for regional elections in Tomsk, Siberia, in August 2020. He collapsed on the flight home, was stabilised in an Omsk hospital and flown to Germany in a coma, where he was successfully treated and nursed back to health. When he returned to Moscow in early 2021, you were among the people who came to greet him at the airport.

AG: Yes, I was waiting at Vnukovo Airport, but his plane was diverted to Sheremetyevo and he was arrested at passport control. One thing he was charged with was not reporting to the police — a condition of a suspended sentence he was serving at the time — when he was in a coma in Berlin’s Charité hospital. There were protests in many Russian cities. The police reacted in a manner more brutal than I had ever experienced in my 10 years in politics. As a result, I had to leave my country.

NGE: What did you experience? How did the police react?

AG: There were 13,000 arrests, which had never happened before. People were simply grabbed off the street, often beaten with truncheons, and then put into police vans. Sometimes dozens of people had to spend hours or even a day in these vehicles, without water, without food, without being allowed to go to the toilet. There wasn’t enough space in the police stations to accommodate so many detainees. They were then given 15 days in custody. A large number were taken to the Sakharovo deportation centre for illegal migrants outside Moscow. They put 20 people in a room with four beds. You had to queue to sleep. Instead of a toilet, there was a hole in the middle of the room. The aim was to humiliate them.

NGE: Were you arrested yourself? When did you decide to leave the country?

AG: I was never arrested, but I kept being presented with new charges that I had organised the protests and taken part in them. They threatened me with up to two years in prison. That’s why I left Moscow, where there are facial recognition cameras everywhere. You can be arrested in no time. I went to a smaller town outside Moscow for a fortnight where there were no facial recognition cameras and threw away my mobile phone so that I couldn’t be found. I stopped using credit cards and only paid in cash. I left Russia in March 2021. The police were looking for me in Moscow, but not at the airports.

NGE: How did you know the police were looking for you?

AG: I got calls from them when I was still using my mobile. They told me it would be better if I turned myself in, otherwise I’d be arrested. At the time, I was preparing for an entrance exam to study Political Science in London, which had to be done via Zoom. I rang the police and said I’d turn myself in, but not for a week because I had an exam. They said, no, we’ll arrest you immediately. Then I told them they wouldn’t catch me. They said they would. It was like a bet. I won, and I passed the exam too.

NGE: How do you explain the unprecedented wave of arrests back then?

AG: The political leadership was already preparing for war. It was clear that part of civil society would protest against the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. They wanted to silence those people or make them leave the country.

NGE: Do you feel safe in Germany? Are you still politically active?

NGE: I feel safe and believe I am too unimportant for them to try to poison me. But I can no longer engage in politics outside Russia. The people there have to do that. People have become very cautious and only criticise the regime indirectly. I understand them. They don’t live in Germany and could be arrested and sentenced at any time.