- Pritzker Fellows
- Current Fellows
- Natalia Pelevina
Natalia Pelevina
Russian Political Opposition Activist
Biography
Born in Moscow, Natalia moved to London, as a child, on the brink of the Soviet Union’s collapse. After receiving BA in Art History, she ventured into writing. Her screenplays were optioned by American production companies, while “I Plead Guilty”, a play based on the events of the Moscow theatre siege, was staged on both sides of the Atlantic, in London, New York and Washington DC, and was banned in Russia.
In 2012 she moved back to Russia to fight Putin’s increasingly vile and dangerous regime. She worked with Alexey Navalny on anti-corruption cases, as well his campaign for the Mayor of Moscow; co-founded a political party and helped put together a wide oppositional coalition. Constant surveillance, smear campaign on state television and criminal prosecutions on made up charges followed. After Putin’s invasion of Ukraine Natalia stood outside Kremlin with a Ukrainian flag, was arrested but later released.
Currently based in Latvia, Natalia is a Council Member of the Free Russia Forum, founded by Garry Kasparov, a Regional Secretary for Eastern Europe and Central Asia of the World Liberty Congress and is working on a Transitional Justice for Russia project. The screenings of her documentary film “Borderline” about the war in Ukraine are taking place in Europe and will be moving to the US in the spring.
Seminars
“Hope, Deceit & Frozen Dreams: My Life as a Russian Opposition Leader”
Natalia Pelevina’s life reads like a modern thriller. A contemporary of Boris Nemtsov – who was assassinated in 2015 while she was working with him – and Alexei Navalny – the Russian opposition leader who died last year – Pelevina has uncovered corruption and terrorist attacks, organized political campaigns and protests and created performance and visual protest art. She and her peers have faced prosecution, smear campaigns, imprisonment and even death. What have been the hard lessons of the life of opposition? Now in exile abroad – she has been given “foreign agent” status by the Russian authorities – Pelevina continues her art and work, volunteers at the Ukrainian refugee center and continues to believe “this page of history will too be turned.”
Fellows seminars are off the record and open to current UChicago students only.
Let’s talk about how we got here. For Russia, the new century began with a lot of hope and significant reforms but also the first warning signs in my home country. Putin’s first term was promising. Many vital reforms were initiated, and the relationship with the West was going strong, but warning signs flashed. Putin used two major terrorist attacks in Moscow and Beslan to begin to tighten his grip. The war with Georgia; ensuing years of power grabs and protests; freedoms disappearing, propaganda taking over; President Obama’s failed “reset” with Russia; and, finally, the dawn of the Tru-Tin era. We’ll take a journey through the time of many hopes and just as many illusions, missed opportunities, dissent and danger.
How real electoral fraud sparked large-scale protests. I will give you my first-hand account of the Bolotnaya square protest, which I helped organize, and which resulted in a major clash with the police. Political prosecutions followed. “Pussy Riot” members were jailed. Dissent and resistance peaked; Crimea was annexed, and sanctions began to pile on; Putin ordered for imported goods to be replaced with the domestic product; and we all watched Russian tractors destroy French ham and Polish apples. In the same but seemingly parallel reality, we were in for the fight of our lives.