Those who won’t

Taranushenko managed to leave Russia swiftly, guided by her former students, who advised her on the safest border crossings and places to stay. After moving through four countries, she finally arrived in France, where she applied for political asylum.

An act of aggression

Having worked as a teacher for 44 years in Protvino, a small science hub near Moscow, Taranushenko always enjoyed a warm and trusting relationship with her pupils, keeping in touch with many of them even after graduation — which wasn’t too difficult in a town of around 37,000 people.

After Vladimir Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Taranushenko’s eighth-grade students began asking her questions: “What do you think about this? Do you agree with what Russia is doing?”

“And how should I have answered them?” she asks rhetorically. “I told them that it was an act of aggression. That Russia was behaving like Nazi Germany.”

At first, these conversations took place informally — during breaks, between classes, and in the absence of any official instructions on how teachers should discuss the war. But by April 2022, the government had ordered schools to hold a so-called Lesson of Kindness, in which teachers had to explain what the “denazification” of Ukraine meant and encourage their pupils to send postcards of support for children in Donbas.

“I prepared a lesson with the message that war is always a terrible thing,” she says. “I spoke about World War II, about the Siege of Leningrad.”

Crucially, Taranushenko did not voice her support for Russia’s actions in Ukraine, drawing the unexpected ire of two of her pupils — twin sisters who recorded the lesson on their mobile phones and showed it to their parents. After they reported Taranushenko to a Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) hotline, local police officers gave her a “warning talk”, and she was summoned to the Protvino mayor’s office to explain herself.

Taranushenko believed that the situation had been resolved, but hadn’t reckoned with the girls’ father, Dmitry Naavgust, who continued filing complaints with law enforcement and government agencies about her anti-war views.

Nevertheless, Taranushenko continued teaching at the school for almost another two years, even though she had to be more cautious when it came to discussing political issues in class.

“Of course, I didn’t start saying that war is good,” she explains. “I just stopped talking about it. And the students stopped asking. But literature is full of war. How can you talk about Tolstoy and say war is good?”

Everything changed in June, when Taranushenko discovered that a criminal case had been opened against her. Without hesitation, she began formulating an escape plan with her daughter, who had been urging her to leave the country since the war began.

Help came from Taranushenko’s former pupils. Upon seeing the news about the case against their old teacher, one of them reached out to a classmate now living in Poland. With experience in emigration from Russia and connections to human rights organisations, the classmate quickly stepped in to coordinate her escape.

Vitaly Soldatskikh, a journalist with independent media outlet Proekt and the husband of one of Taranushenko’s former pupils, also offered to help. He researched the sentences others had received after being charged with the same offence and warned her that there were “no acquittals” to be had. Despite her fear, Taranushenko made the difficult decision to leave Russia.

The escape

Her journey began in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, as almost no border checks operate between the two countries, which are technically part of a so-called Union State. Taking the advice of her “guardian angels” — as she calls her former pupils and their friends — she reached the city in a car registered to someone else to avoid being tracked.

“Vitaly told me that in total, around 30 ‘angels’ helped me”, Taranushenko explains. “Words travel fast these days and journalists have large circles.”

Leaving her phone at home to make it even more difficult to track her, Taranushenko took only essential documents and promised her family to call from a new phone once she had safely reached Minsk.

On the way to Minsk, it rained heavily, she recalls: “You know, people say that things that start in the rain always go well. Maybe it’s just a way to calm ourselves.”

Before reaching Minsk, Taranushenko’s daughter turned off for the airport, where they bought a new phone, a new SIM card, and a ticket for the next flight to Istanbul. “Now I can laugh about it, but at the airport, my daughter and I said goodbye as if it were forever,” Taranushenko recalls.

After staying in Istanbul for a few days, Taranushenko booked a ticket to Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, where she was able to rent an apartment.

Meanwhile, problems began for Taranushenko’s daughter, Olga, an elementary school teacher. In early July, as the teachers were finishing administrative work for the school year, a police unit came for her. Four officers escorted the 39-year-old woman from the building and took her in for questioning.

According to Taranushenko, they threatened her daughter with criminal charges and told her that if she were convicted, her son would be sent to an orphanage. Shortly afterwards, Olga packed her belongings and drove herself and her son to the Upper Lars border crossing with Georgia before crossing into Armenia to join her mother.

A few weeks later, the family decided to leave Armenia, as Taranushenko’s passport was about to expire, and she feared that, given the close ties between Moscow and Yerevan, she may have been unable to renew it and to leave Armenia safely.

Taranushenko’s fears were not unfounded, and leaving Armenia proved difficult. On her first attempt, border guards stopped her, politely but firmly informing her that she was banned from leaving Armenia as she was under criminal investigation in Russia.

Taranushenko then contacted Russian human rights group OVD-Info, where a coordinator recommended reaching out to InTransit, an organisation that helped her apply for asylum in France. Despite her nearly expired passport, InTransit managed to secure humanitarian visas for the whole family. However, the Armenian exit ban remained a problem.

Ironically, the Russian investigator handling her case inadvertently helped. He had been so determined to pursue prosecution that he officially requested her extradition from Armenia. But since the article under which she was charged — spreading “false information” about the Russian army — did not exist in Armenian law, the Armenian Prosecutor General’s Office was forced to decline the request.

As a result, Taranushenko was free to leave Armenia, and in November, she flew to Paris with her daughter and her grandson.

The commune

Within a few days of arriving, InTransit introduced the family to a Russian-speaking woman in Paris who helped with their asylum paperwork, allowing them to secure their status as asylum seekers in far less time than the three months officially allowed.

Today, Natalya lives in a remote village that’s not accessible by public transport some 70 kilometers north of Toulouse. It’s so small that it barely qualifies as a village — more of a commune — with no grocery store in sight. The refugee housing, perched on a small hill, consists of about 15 apartments.

Nevertheless, Natalya smiles as she describes her new life. She has enough to get by, she says, and her neighbours — refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, Armenia, Georgia, Sudan, Turkey, Ukraine, and Russia — are kind.

Social workers help the new residents to settle in, and twice a week, a bus takes them to the nearest town for them to shop and run errands. Between them, Natalya and her family receive about €400 per month in government assistance.

Before I leave, I ask her about her years in the Russian education system. “My happiest years as a teacher were in the 90s,” Taranushenko says. “Yes, the country was falling apart, but we were left alone. We focused on the kids, organised activities, went on trips.”

By the 2010s, she said, teachers were buried in paperwork, filling out endless reports. Things didn’t get any easier when that all moved online either. People often describe Putin’s time in power as a “golden age” for teachers, arguing that life improved for them — but Natalya disagrees, pointing to how many teachers began to fear expressing their opinions as his rule continued.

“They’d say, ‘We’re state employees.’ And I’d think — what does that mean? Am I a serf? A slave? Can’t I have my own opinion? For the last 15 years, whenever I met new people, I avoided mentioning that I was a teacher. I felt ashamed.”

Schools often double as polling stations in Russia, and some of Natalya’s colleagues would earn a fee of about 5,000 rubles (€50) to work during elections, a relatively large sum for a teacher with an average monthly salary of about 45,000 rubles (€450). But knowing that Russian elections were rigged, Taranushenko never did, choosing to earn extra money through private tutoring instead.

Before I left, we took another walk around her new, albeit temporary, home. As I packed my laptop into my backpack, she asked if I wanted to stay for lunch. After all, we had been talking for a long time, and the drive back to Toulouse was over an hour. I politely declined, worried about returning my rental car on time and avoiding a fine. But honestly, I wished I could have stayed — there was something so warm and comforting about being with Natalya.

As I drove away from her new home, raindrops began to fall onto the roof of my car. I remembered her saying, with a touch of irony, that beginnings in the rain are always good. I don’t believe in omens — but the sound of the rain still made me smile.