From Gulag to Gulag
A pensioner from the Volgograd region, whose father was exiled to Karlag, has been detained for more than ten years during pickets against human rights violations.
On December 12, 2023, Russia's Constitution Day, a 76-year-old woman stood on Volgograd's main street holding a placard. It bore a quote from the Soviet song "Buchenwald Alarm," along with the words "Take care of the peace." It was Galina Tikhenko from Volzhsky—the same pensioner who, in 2012, has become the first person in the country to be detained under the new law on rallies. "I have attended and will continue to attend rallies, I have written and will continue to write posters," said She told journalists back then. Twelve years have passed, and Galina Tikhenko has continued to protest all these years. Journalist Oleg Savelyev met with her and learned about the life of the daughter of a war veteran repressed during the Soviet era, who herself fell out of favor with the Russian authorities for openly disagreeing with their policies.
Author: Oleg Saveliev
This material was prepared in collaboration with the project "New Tab».
Dormitory
"Just look at how terrible our life is. I'll put on my hearing aid now, and we'll be able to communicate well," Galina Fyodorovna says, meeting me in the hallway of the old dormitory in the center of Volzhsky, where she's lived since the early 2000s.
The five-story dormitory was built during the Soviet era for specialists working at the Volzhsky Pipe Plant. The town itself emerged in the early 1950s, when construction of the Stalingrad Hydroelectric Power Station began on the Volga River, just north of Volgograd. Around 20 prisoners from the Akhtubinsky Correctional Labor Camp were involved in the construction of the power station and all of Volzhsky's infrastructure—from residential buildings to water supply and sewerage systems.
Broken and boarded-up windows, bricks falling out of cracks in the walls, chipped tiles in the communal showers, rusty toilets—these are the conditions that mostly pensioners and large families remain in this dormitory. Most of the rooms have long been empty.
The entire courtyard of the house is littered with garbage, and in some places you can see ashes from fires.
"There's no playground nearby, so the neighbors' kids collect all sorts of papers and burn them," explains Tikhenko, pointing to a bed hidden behind the front door. "And homeless people sleep here every winter. It's completely unsanitary."
The dormitory building was deemed unfit for habitation back in 2001, but 11 years later, the city administration removed the building's status. When Komsomolskaya Pravda's Volgograd editorial team visited Galina Tikhenko in 2012, they presented She was a pensioner who wasn't interested in politics and was protesting only because of the dilapidated dormitory. It wasn't until September 2024 that Galina Fyodorovna and her neighbors received letters from the mayor's office, confirming that the dormitory had been declared unsafe, but they didn't specify a timeframe for relocation.
In the room, Galina Fyodorovna starts bustling about—she puts the kettle on, slices apples, takes out the pre-prepared photos, and begins applying eyeliner and mascara: "I'm 77 years old, and at my age, I want to look my best! It's good that I at least managed to curl my hair with curlers."
Радио
Galina Fedorovna spent her childhood in the Kirov region, where her father was born. After school, she went to visit her mother's relatives in Kazakhstan for the summer. She liked the place, and she entered medical school in SemipalatinskShe soon met her future husband, Viktor Tikhenko. After their wedding, the young couple moved to a small town near Karaganda: he worked in a mine, and she found work as a pediatrician. The couple had two sons, and in the late 1990s, the Tikhenkos moved to Russia to live with Galina's parents. By then, they had moved to Volzhsky and were living in an apartment in an old wooden house.
In her new place of residence, Galina Tikhenko had to leave medicine.
"When we arrived... there were rallies, flags everywhere, communists everywhere, shouting everywhere. Factories were closed, people were hungry and unpaid. I went to the clinic, thinking I'd find a job, but they told me, 'There's plenty of work, we'd be happy to take you. But we can't pay wages,'" Galina Fyodorovna recalls.
Galina's husband had to remain in Kazakhstan for about two years due to his work. He came to Volzhsky to join his family after retiring. Galina sold fruit from her dacha and, on the advice of friends, started a business: she bought shoes and clothes from Chinese sellers at the Volgograd market and brought them to Volzhsky to resell them at a slightly higher price. A few years later, having saved up some money, she, her husband, and their children moved from their parents' home to a dorm room—a 14-square-meter room.
Galina Tikhenko has lived alone in these square meters for several years: her husband died of cancer, and her sons have moved out. Besides a closet, her small room contains only a bed, a refrigerator, and a low coffee table. On the closet is the very same poster from last year's Constitution Day protest, bearing the quotation, "People of the world, be three times more vigilant. Protect, protect, protect the world." The other posters, which Galina Tikhenko carried at pickets, disappeared when she spent several months visiting her son in Moscow and the room was occupied by tenants.
"I came back, and they [the posters] were nowhere to be found. Perhaps the tenants were Putinists, that's why they threw them out," the pensioner laments.
Galina Tikhenko says she was a Pioneer in school and, like most children of that time, grew up "with faith in a bright communist future." Everything changed during her student years, when she began learning about events in the country and the world from sources other than the Soviet press. Before she began medical school, her aunt gave her a radio. One day, Galina picked up a foreign station on it and from then on began listening daily to Voice of America, Radio Liberty, Deutsche Welle, and the BBC. Radio remained her favorite source of information right up until closing in 2022 "Echo of Moscow".
Galina Tikhenko also heard an invitation to her first rally on the radio, in the late 2000s. She no longer remembers the reason for that protest in Volgograd, but she says that on the way there, she saw a man on the bus with posters in a bag. It was a human rights activist. Anatoly EldyrkinThey met and since then have been going to rallies together for many years. For example, have spoken in defense Article 31 Constitution and required to find the mastermind behind the murder of politician Boris Nemtsov. Passersby reacted differently: some supported it, while others called "fifth column." Interfering with the picketers tried and activists of the Young Guard of United Russia.
In 2012, when the protests on Bolotnaya SquareOn June 12, the Volgograd opposition organized a similar rally at the foot of Mamayev Kurgan. Galina Tikhenko stood near the crowd of protesters and wanted to unfurl posters with slogans like "Russia without Putin" and "Election fraud is a seizure of power." But she didn't have time: the 64-year-old woman was surrounded by police and taken to a police van. The van took a long time to leave, so Galina showed her posters to journalists through the open door of the Gazelle van—it hadn't been locked due to the heat. At the police station, the pensioner felt ill, and her blood pressure rose. The next day, Tikhenko was hospitalized, where she spent over a month.
"In 2012, there was such a wave of inspiration. It seemed like all it took was a little more effort and life would get better. Then we went to her in court and supported her," recalls Alexander Efimov, a politician from the Volga Yabloko party, who met Galina Tikhenko at that rally.
A few days before the protest in Volgograd, a new provision appeared in the Code of Administrative Offences new article, which toughened penalties for violations committed during mass protests. Galina Fyodorovna became the first person arrested in Russia under this statute. The trial attracted the attention of many media outlets, and Galina Tikhenko enjoyed considerable support at the time. The judge merely issued a verbal warning.
The pensioner disagreed with being found guilty for her opinion and attempted to challenge the court's ruling. This was unsuccessful in Russia, and Tikhenko decided to file a complaint with the European Court of Human Rights.
"I went to law firms, but none of the lawyers [in Volgograd and Volzhsky] knew how to file an application to the ECHR in 2012. They advised me not to waste my time on it at all," recalls Galina Fyodorovna.
After reading online about how to file complaints with the ECHR, she decided to do it herself. “I didn’t have the money to print all these sheets, so I wrote the complaint [by hand] and sent it to the ECHR,” the pensioner says, showing off her impressive a stack of sheets, written in beautiful, even handwriting.
The ECHR sided with Galina Fedorovna and awarded She was awarded 3750 euros in compensation. However, the pensioner never received this money. The complaint was considered for 11 years, and the court issued its decision in the summer of 2023. By that time, Russia had ceased to comply with ECHR decisions, having withdrawn from the Council of Europe in 2022.
Galina Fedorovna wants to outlive Putin and wait for reforms in Russia to receive this compensation. She hopes that "when everything changes," she will again launch an initiative to reduce the time it takes to review complaints at the ECHR.
She diligently collects all the documents confirming her persecution: court decisions on fines, arrest reports. "I'm saving these papers!" she says. "When the government changes, they'll come in handy!"
Galina Tikhenko keeps several hundred photographs of her protests in her closet, neatly organized in envelopes by year. She admits that in recent years, she's been afraid to go to the copy shop to print the photos taken with her old camera—the same one used to film her 2012 picket. She's worried that a staff member might call the police when they see the slogans on her posters. She glues some of the photographs onto sheets of paper, creating collages, and next to them, writes about the progress and consequences of each protest.
Bulk
Galina Tikhenko boldly calls herself a Navalny supporter and emphasizes that she has always supported the politician and held pickets in central Volgograd in his defense.
During Soviet times, she wasn't a member of the Communist Party, and when she returned to Russia in the 1990s, she didn't join any opposition parties. The first political leader who caught her interest was Alexei Navalny.
Galina Tikhenko was at a meeting with Navalny when he came to Volgograd in 2017 to open his election headquartersThen about a hundred of the opposition leader's opponents came to the office of his supporters, including activists of the Young Guard and Cossacks, who tried to disrupt the meeting. Galina Fyodorovna recalls how a crowd of pro-government activists knocked her off her feet and she fell.
"I still have photos of those Red Guards! When the government changes, I'll publish their faces so everyone knows what they did under Putin," the pensioner shares her plans. She hopes that if she later brings these people into the spotlight, they'll lose the social standing they acquired thanks to the regime's support.
After Navalny's death In February 2024, Galina Fedorovna cried for several days, looking back at the photos she'd taken during his visit to Volgograd: "It was as if something inside me had snapped after the news of his death. I felt like things would never get better."
Dozens of her protests were connected with Navalny: she demanded that the politician be acquitted Kirovles case, handed out leaflets in his support in the center of Volgograd, got out with a poster reading "A poisoner cannot be president" after Navalny's return Galina Fyodorovna keeps photographs of her surrounded by police officers at protests in a separate envelope: "So much strength for one grandmother. What other country has that?" the pensioner says with surprise and pride.
When rallies in support of the arrested Alexei Navalny took place in Russia in early 2021, Galina Tikhenko has come At a protest in Volgograd. Standing at the edge of the crowd, she unfurled signs reading, "Putin! Better leave yourself!" and "Today they came for Navalny, tomorrow they'll come for me, the day after tomorrow they'll come for you." The police began to brutally detain those gathered, and Galina Fyodorovna was taken to a police van along with her signs, including a piece of poster paper with the slogan, "No to the Gulag!"
"And I took a photo with this poster in the paddy wagon, and then it went viral," Galina Fyodorovna recalls the old days with nostalgia. "Now there aren't even any rallies. The country is full of repression and denunciations. Did I ever think I'd live to see this? I was born back under Stalin." KarlageYou see how my life went: from GULAG to GULAG.
Gulag
Galina Tikhenko was born in a camp for exiles near Karaganda, where her father, Fyodor Kuzminykh, a frontline soldier, was exiled after the war. During the retreat of troops on the Belorussian Front, he was captured by the Germans and taken to a prisoner-of-war camp in Mogilev. Galina Fyodorovna shows a photograph of her father as a young woman and recalls how he feared being mistaken for a Jew because of his black hair.
After Germany's surrender, Kuzminykh, who found himself in the American occupation zone, asked to be handed over to Soviet troops so he could return home. But the Soviet command sent him to the Far East to fight Japan. In September 1945, when World War II ended with the Japanese surrender, Fyodor Kuzminykh traveled home to the Kirov region by train, via Kazakhstan. Near Karaganda, the train was stopped, and after lengthy interrogations by the NKVD about the reasons for his capture, Kuzminykh was sent to Karlag, where he was assigned to work on the construction of underground mines.
The camp was guarded, but the exiles were able to interact with city residents working on the mines. This is how Fyodor met his future wife, a free woman named Irina Grechko, who worked in the mines with documents. The young couple married, and their daughter, Galya, was born in the camp. After the child's birth, the family was given a corner of the exile barracks.
Galina's parents were reluctant to answer her questions about the years she spent in Karlag. "Dad didn't like to discuss the topic at all—apparently, it was too difficult to talk about. And Mom only told me that during his exile, due to stress, Dad started eczema"Then she tormented him his whole life: she'd get a little nervous and an inflammation would start," the pensioner says. She blames herself for not trying to get her father to talk and ask him about his youth.
"Every day, my father had to report to the NKVD office. A very kind man worked there; he understood that my father had been sent into exile unfairly, so he often counted one day's work as several. This allowed my father to be released early," Tikhenko recounts.
Fyodor Kuzminykh was released in 1947, when his daughter was eight months old. The family moved to his homeland in the Kirov region. Galina's father began working in a sawmill, but due to his criminal record, he was forced to report to the police every month. This only ended after Stalin's death.
"I remember the day Stalin died well, even though I was very young," says Galina Tikhenko. "All the neighbors were crying, people in the street were sobbing. I didn't understand why. But I remember my mom and dad didn't cry. They must have understood."
Galina's parents lived in poverty, and the former front-line soldier, who found himself in a difficult financial situation, began to support the German foundation "Contacts", which helps victims of Nazism. The foundation sent the veteran humanitarian aid, and on one occasion, he was paid 300 euros. In the early 2000s, German photographers and historians visited Fyodor Yegorovich to hear his recollections, which later formed the basis of an exhibition about Ostarbeiters.
Fyodor Kuzminykh died in a wooden house with a leaking roof on the outskirts of Volzhsky in 2011. He was 90 years old. A war veteran who had survived German captivity and Stalin's exile, he had repeatedly appealed to the local administration for a housing subsidy, but officials repeatedly told him that his income slightly exceeded the established subsistence minimum and therefore refused to provide assistance.
After Fyodor Kuzminykh's death, the local social welfare center filed a lawsuit against the veteran's grandson, demanding the return of 907 rubles to the budget. The lawsuit alleged that Fyodor Kuzminykh had received excessive compensation for housing and utilities costs from January 2009 to September 2011. The court dismissed the claim.
Police officers against a pensioner
Galina Tikhenko received her biggest fine three years ago when she protested against illegal construction A highway through the Volga-Akhtuba Floodplain Nature Park near Volzhsky. In July 2021, several dozen residents gathered in the floodplain to demand a change in the route of the future highway. Galina Tikhenko arrived with a sign against tree felling, but unfurled it after all the protesters had left, leaving her alone with another activist. They posed with the signs, and Galina Fyodorovna posted the photo on her social media page.
A few days later, the pensioner was summoned to the police station to "verify her information." A lawyer advised her to leave the city for a while, but Galina Tikhenko decided to simply stay home for a few days to avoid the police. However, as it turned out, they had been waiting for her to come out the whole time:
"Three police officers waited for me on the landing for a long time. And then, when I came out, the three of them grabbed me. At first, I resisted and didn't want to go, but what could I do when they started grabbing me by the arms. I asked them to let me get dressed and take my passport, but they kept dragging me along in my pajamas, even without my documents.
According to Galina Fyodorovna, her neighbors interceded on her behalf: they didn't know the reason for the police visit and were simply worried that she was being taken away without her coat. Ultimately, they let her dress and took her to the police station. Galina Fyodorovna says she didn't have time to review the case file before the police chief rushed in and started rushing her to court. "He started yelling at me, 'I'm going to lock you in a cage!'"
A judge found Galina Tikhenko guilty of violating the law on repeated participation in an unauthorized protest and fined her 150 rubles. According to Tikhenko, law enforcement officials saw a photo of her and a second activist holding signs against tree felling online and deemed it an unauthorized mass protest. Residents are trying to save the floodplain from being cut down. failed.
Thanks to widespread publicity on social media and local media, Volgograd human rights activist Ivan Ivanov and environmental activist Mikhail Solomonov raised enough money to pay the fine in two weeks. Galina Fyodorovna herself did not request this donation: she is embarrassed by the conditions in which she lives and does not want to draw attention to them.
While concerned people were collecting money for Tikhenko's fine, pro-government Telegram channels blamed She's accused of "rabid Russophobia." She herself views such publications with a degree of irony: "They wrote that I'm a traitor, that I have a personal photographer assigned to me who films my provocations and sends the pictures to the West. That's ridiculous!"
Caucasian Knot journalist Vyacheslav Yashchenko, who covered this and other protests by the pensioner, says she always had brochures on the Constitution in her hands, with numerous multi-colored bookmarks sticking out:
"She could appear anywhere in the city. She'd busily pull posters from her bags and slowly begin placing them around herself, inevitably attracting the attention of not only stunned citizens but also vigilant law enforcement officers. Her speech during interviews could be halting, but she always maintained clarity of thought and precise demands when speaking to journalists.
Even non-payment of utility bills became a kind of protest for Galina Tikhenko. She says that when politician Mikhail Khodorkovsky called on Russians to go on strike in Italy in March 2022—specifically, to avoid paying utility bills—the calls seemed reasonable to her. Two years later, bailiffs won a court order to collect the debt. Galina Tikhenko's pension is 64 rubles above the subsistence minimum, which cannot be deducted from a debtor's account. "Now I wonder if they'll write off those 64 rubles or not bother," Galina Fyodorovna muses. She adds that she also doesn't pay her utility bills because Russia hasn't paid her compensation for the violation of her rights, awarded by the European Court of Human Rights.
Loneliness
"She's a wonderful, courageous, and honest person who cares deeply about what's happening to the country. But at the same time, she has absolutely no understanding of what's happening to her and what will happen next. She thinks everything is simple: that there are crooks and thieves who need to be kicked out, and then we'll live happily ever after," says her friend, Alexander Yefimov of Yabloko, about Galina Tikhenko. He praises her actions, but believes they won't change anything.
Because of the local residents' passivity, Galina Fyodorovna calls Volzhsky a "depressive city." She recalls how, during a picket, a woman approached her and began throwing her posters around, tearing them up, and insulting the pensioner. Tikhenko called the police, but the aggressive woman left, and the police didn't bother looking for her.
"I'm Ukrainian on my mother's side, I bear my husband's Ukrainian surname, and what strikes me most are the ethnic Ukrainians who support Russia's actions in their country," the pensioner laments, recalling the passersby who, in arguments with her, appealed to their Ukrainian heritage.
Vladimir Telpuk from Volgograd, who met Galina Tikhenko at these protests, calls her "the driving force of the Volgograd protests":
"At these rallies, I saw people who cared about what was happening in the country. Galina Fyodorovna told me that we needed to hold pickets because the law didn't prohibit them, and they didn't require approval. And she stood up with a sign, showing that there was no need to be afraid."
Galina Tikhenko is certain that if her husband had lived until 2022, he would have sided with her, despite their previous differences of opinion. She says Viktor watched a lot of television in recent years, supported Putin's policies, and advised her not to go anywhere with posters: "We argued, but we always respected each other."
After Viktor Tikhenko's death, his brother, who emigrated to Germany with his wife in the 1990s, stopped communicating with Galina. According to the pensioner, they support Putin and criticize her for her opposition.
"I don't understand how one can live in Europe, enjoy all the benefits of a democratic world, and yet still have such caveman-like views," Galina Tikhenko marvels.
Since 2014, she has been holding protests against the annexation of Crimea and military operations in Donbas. During these pickets, Galina was attacked by passersby, called a traitor, and tore Her homemade posters. The police and Cossacks standing nearby usually remained silent and tried to ignore these conflicts, the pensioner says.
When Galina Tikhenko walked out onto Volgograd's main street on Constitution Day in 2023 with a peace quote on her poster, two of her friends, Galina Zabolotnova and Natalya Dorozhnova, stood nearby to support her. The pensioners, who were reporting on Tikhenko's picket, they said, that the Constitution is being violated everywhere in Russia, and 73-year-old Natalia Dorozhnova spoke out against the deployment of Russian troops to Ukraine. Passersby the correspondent spoke with disapproved of this action and supported Putin. After standing in the cold for over an hour, the women left. The next day, when the video with the pensioners' comments went viral, Galina Tikhenko and Natalia Dorozhnova were taken to the police. Tikhenko was given a statement of explanation, and a criminal case was filed against her friend. administrative protocol about "discrediting the Russian Armed Forces."
Galina Tikhenko's sons are the only relatives who share her position, but she doesn't want to talk about them, worried about their fate. She tries to avoid interacting with her neighbors, fearing denunciations. According to the pensioner, those living in the dormitory don't know about her protests because local newspapers don't cover them, and they don't read online media.
"So many posters—and all in vain..." Galina Tikhenko sadly states, putting photographs from her protests into envelopes.
Last winter, she fainted in a store near her home and hit her head hard. Her health has deteriorated, so Galina Fyodorovna has rarely left the house lately. Many of her activist friends have left the region or live in Volgograd, where the pensioner is over an hour away from the city center.
Now, according to Galina Fedorovna, she dreams of two things most of all: an end to the war in Ukraine and a trip to Germany. She wants to meet the descendants of the German who once helped save her father's life. From a prisoner-of-war camp, Fyodor Kuzminykh was sent to work for the family of an elderly farmer named Karl, who lived with his daughter and five young grandchildren in western Germany. The German, according to Tikhenko, wholeheartedly hated Hitler and the war he unleashed, but was unable to resist it. In the last year of the war, the farm owner's son-in-law, fighting on the Eastern Front, returned from the front for a couple of weeks on leave. The two front-line soldiers, who had fought on opposite sides, found much in common: they recalled the difficult battles and hoped that peace would soon be restored.
"Right now I feel like that Karl," says Galina Fyodorovna. "I'm also against everything that's happening, but I can't do anything about it."
