Pavel Kushnir: Lonely death of jailed anti-war Russian pianist

Kushnir was born in Tambov, central Russia, where his father Mikhail was a pianist and educator, and his mother a music school teacher.

He started playing piano at the age of two and, at just 17, gave a remarkable two-and-a-half-hour concert featuring the 24 preludes and fugues by composer Dmitri Shostakovich.

Later that year, he was admitted to the Moscow Conservatory, where classmate Julia Wertman says he cultivated a “dissident image”, often wearing a shabby coat and black clothes, with a half-litre bottle of vodka sticking out of a pocket.

Asked in a 2005 interview what composition he would never perform, he replied: “The Russian national anthem.”

After graduation, Shkrygunova says Kushnir deliberately took jobs in smaller cities, believing he would have more musical and personal freedom outside Moscow.

He moved to Yekaterinburg, then Kursk, and spent three years in Kurgan, a city to the east of the Ural mountains, before he lost his job at the philharmonic orchestra there in 2022.

Shkrygunova does not know exactly why he was dismissed, but adds: “This was a cog that didn’t fit any machine, and it had been that way since his childhood.”

After four months without a job, he became a soloist with the Birobidzhan Philharmonic, telling local television: “If I’m not imprisoned, drafted into the army, or fired, then I hope to spend the next 12 years with you.”