With this publication we are hardly going to alleviate the situation of lawyer Maria Bontsler, who is being held in solitary in a cell in Kaliningrad’s Remand Centre-1, charged with collusion with a foreign state. We will return to the essence of the accusation, but before the verdict is in, we will attempt to draw a portrait of this remarkable woman through the stories of her children, friends, and clients.
The figure of Bontsler embodies above all the qualities of a human rights activist [pravozashchitnik]. This is a clumsy word, though, which arose among Soviet dissidents in the 1960s and marked the one thing that united that motley ‘contingent’: the demand that the law be observed. This word in no way characterizes any of the ‘human rights activists’ in their entirety, and our heroine especially does not fit into its frame.
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Her Friend Katya
Lawyer Ekaterina Selizarova spent her entire professional life—about forty years—in property and family cases, but she managed to get to know a few judges back when she would come see her mama at work as deputy chair of the oblast civil court. Katya is also attractive in her own way, and she tries (tried?) to look after herself, never missing a concert or exhibition, that is, managed to have a social life in Kaliningrad.
In March 2022, Selizarova decided that property disputes would wait and now she had to do something else. Digging around on the Internet, she found that nearly everyone who had spoken out against the SVO [special military operation] was being defended in administrative and criminal cases by her colleague Bontsler. She found her telephone number, introduced herself, and offered her assistance.
This was timely. That spring, cases for pacifist statements were raining down by the dozen. In March, Bontsler and Selizarova were running from one building and floor to another, working off administrative fines, and were participating together in criminal cases that reached the investigation stage. The most famous of them was the ‘fake news’ case of Igor Baryshnikov, who was sentenced to seven and a half years’ imprisonment despite having a catheter for a cystoma in his abdomen.
The judge didn’t seem malicious, she did not take Baryshnikov into custody before the verdict and allowed him to get treatment, but she was pressured, evidently. And the doctor who made Baryshnikov’s diagnosis, with which in theory he might not have been sentenced to prison, was forced to leave the country after obstruction arranged for him by colleagues.
‘How can we help accused like these?’ Katya says (she and I communicated on Telegram). ‘Maximum, bring a hamburger, and that’s only if the investigator isn’t a monster’. Actually, they got along with investigators as a rule: Bontsler’s were ‘all good’, and they never played tricks on each other on purpose.
Very different lawyers, Masha and Katya quickly became friends and became especially close in late 2023, when Volodya died. For the last few months, Bontsler would have to drop her cases and run to spoonfeed him; because he had Parkinson’s, Volodya developed a tremor and could barely do anything himself anymore.
Given his condition, death was a blessing, but Masha fell apart completely and stopped taking care of herself. Katya took her to a fashionable salon, dressed her, and forced her to redecorate her apartment.
She forgave her her quirks and begged her about just one thing: be more careful. Bontsler had already been given two fines in June 2022 on a complaint from two judges: while representing defendants in an administrative case in a hearing she called the SVO […]. More human rights activist than lawyer, she was speaking not so much to the judges as to the activists and journalists in the courtroom and corridors. At one time this kind of thing helped, but times had changed, and Selizarova tried to convince her friend that now it was better to cool her engine and make the necessary motions at the right time.
On 28 May, a search was conducted in Bontsler’s apartment, which she also used as her law office. She was arrested and the next day sent to the remand centre. ‘Inspections’—which are also searches, essentially—were also conducted at the home of Selizarova and a third lawyer taking part in the Baryshnikov case—Roman Morozov. I met with Morozov, who took over some of Bontsler’s unfinished cases, in Kaliningrad, while Selizarova decided not to tempt fate and left Russia. Figuring in the first official report on Bontsler’s arrest was the article on state treason (275), and all three luminaries formed an ‘organized group’, but in the end there was only the less serious ‘collusion’ (275.1). Katya believes that they left open the window for her flight abroad out of respect for her mama.
In emigration, Katya found herself without work and nearly without support. The foreign funds and UN Human Rights Committee know only the name of human rights activist Bontsler but not lawyer Selizarova, whose professional strategy did not involve publicity.
Russia: Leonid Nikitinsky: On the case of lawyer Maria Bontsler
