Blue dress and yellow flowers: The story of how the activist Arshak Makichyan got married, spoke out against the war, left Russia and was deprived of

Текст на русском

In 1995, my family left Armenia and moved to Russia because of the economic crisis caused by the war in the Nagorno-Karabakh region: it was hard to feed three children.

I have been an activist for almost four years now. Every Friday I would take part in climate strikes, while additionally organizing the climate movement. As a result, I have been arrested for six days, had a provocateur sent to me who threatened to stab me. And of course, I attracted the attention of the Anti-Extremism Center.

I was not jailed for ten years because I received a lot of international support, I attended international climate talks abroad. After all, it would have made for a pretty bad picture if one of the few Russian climate activists was to be jailed.

The actual reasons for stripping me of my citizenship were my activism in addition to my anti-war stance. I had already received threats of this happening back in 2021, during my nomination to the State Duma. «Yabloko» promised to nominate me and I started the campaign two months before [the registration of candidates]. The campaign was successful enough as a lot of volunteers enrolled to take part and my TikTok videos gathered 150,000 views as well as a lot of likes.

As a result of the threats to strip me of my citizenship, «Yabloko» decided not to nominate me after all. In the end, they nominated a different candidate for the district they had promised to support me in. This other candidate did not even know he would be taking part in the election.

It is a strange story. At that time I didn’t believe it was possible, that someone could be stripped of their own citizenship. Especially since I’ve had it my whole life. There have also been threats against my family, but back then they seemed even less real.