On 2 October, Irina Slavina’s day seemed to start like any other. She baked a cake for her mother’s 70th birthday. She went on errands in town. But at roughly half past three in the afternoon, the prominent journalist was dead after setting herself on fire outside Nizhny Novgorod’s interior ministry office. In her last Facebook post, Slavina wrote: “I ask you to blame the Russian Federation for my death.”
In recent years, Slavina, editor of regional website KozaPress, came under constant pressure from Russian law enforcement. She was frequently arrested and dragged through the courts for both her professional and civic activities. On 1 October, Slavina’s home had been searched as part of an investigation into the Open Russia movement - local law enforcement broke down the door to her apartment and confiscated all her computer equipment. She is survived by her husband and children.
Pressure on political activists is nothing new in Nizhny Novgorod. Stories of torture, brutal arrests and fabricated investigations in the city have frequently hit the headlines throughout the country. The city’s anti-fascists, who found themselves “invited” to the local counter-extremism department for “chats” in the late 2000s, tell tales of how the department’s director boasted of his powers, proudly christening Nizhny Novgorod a “red city” - a reference to “red zones”, Russian penal colonies run strictly by the penal authorities, rather than inmates.
