Activist Pavel Krisevich has left Russia after “carousel arrests” and threats from law enforcement.

The artist said that while he was in the detention centre, he received threats from FSB officers.

“They called me out of the cell in the detention centre and asked me to enter a room with the lights off and stand facing the wall. There were two FSB officers there, and as soon as I walked in, they began to speak to me in a threatening manner, saying things like: ‘You were warned,’ ‘You and your loved ones will be the ones crying,’ ‘Pack your things and leave, or we’ll have you jailed.’ In short, in a very theatrical fashion, they hinted that maybe it was already time for me to go,” Krisevich wrote on his Telegram channel.

According to the artist, they are now in a safe place.

“This would have happened sooner or later, or perhaps they just wouldn’t have told me directly and would have simply jailed me. But that unique feeling of euphoria you experience when leaving the territory of dictatorship and lack of freedom is hard to compare to anything else. And I hope that all of us will feel it in the future, in a free Russia,” he added.

At the end of November, the artist was detained in Istra, a town near Moscow, during a photoshoot dressed as a cowboy at a local monument called “Rocket.” This look referenced a character from Stanley Kubrick’s film “Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.”

On 1 December, Krisevich was sentenced to 15 days’ arrest under the petty hooliganism article (Art. 20.1 of the Administrative Code). On 13 December, the activist was released from the detention centre. Police officers drove them to the bus stop, where two men provoked a conflict and Krisevich was detained again under the same article. After this, they were arrested for another 12 days.

• In 2021, Krisevich staged a performance in Red Square. They fired twice into the air with a blank-firing pistol, then shot themselves in the head and fell down. Before the shooting, they read out a manifesto against political repression. After this action, a criminal case for hooliganism was opened (paragraph “b,” part 1, article 213 of the Criminal Code). The court sentenced Krisevich to five years in a general-regime penal colony. They were released in January 2025.
• In the 11 months the activist spent free, they were arrested four times on administrative charges—in addition to December, they also ended up in the detention centre ahead of 9 May and the Single Voting Day. In April, their home was also searched, and in early November they were included on the list of “foreign agents.”