Authorities have refused to approve a rally in downtown Moscow in support of three teenage sisters accused of murdering their abusive father, charges that have sparked calls to address Russia’s domestic abuse problem.
They offered to approve a protest in the city outskirts, but activists said protesters on Saturday will instead stand in line near the Kremlin to conduct single-person pickets, which can be held without permission.
“We are also suggesting people hold pickets near their own flat blocks, because domestic violence is happening in in these flat blocks, and so abusers … won’t feel they can act with such impunity,” said organiser Darya Serenko.
They will try to hold a full protest later this month.
After 57-year-old Mikhail Khachaturyan was maced, hit with a hammer and stabbed 36 times by his three teenage daughters at home in Moscow’s northern outskirts last July, investigators hit the girls with the toughest murder charges on the books. They face up to 20 years in prison.
But behind closed doors, the prominent local businessman and churchgoer had insulted, humiliated, threatened and “subjected his daughters to physical and sexual violence,” according to state commission findings reported by Russian media.
The lurid case has since prompted calls for reform in Russia, where female victims find little sympathy amid Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric on defending traditional values.
In 2017, lawmakers decriminalised domestic violence unless it leads to broken bones or occurs more than once a year.
Last year, parliament declined to take measures after MP Leonid Slutsky was accused by three female journalists of sexually harassing them.
Alexei Parshin, lawyer for one of the Khachaturyan sisters, argued that the girls acted in self defence after their father frequently threatened to kill them.
Ivan Melnikov, a prisoner rights monitor who was the first outsider to see the sisters after their arrest, said they had been “desperate” in the conditions of abuse and de facto slavery.
“Appeals to the police didn’t lead to any result, they thought there wasn’t any way out of this situation and he could murder them,” he said. “This needs to be taken into account.”
But self defence arguments can be fraught here. In the Zabaikalye region on Friday, a woman with prosthetic legs was sentenced to 18 months in prison for stabbing her drunken husband to death when he continued to attack her after two police visits. The court ruled she had used excessive force in defending herself.
In 2016-18, 80 per cent of all murder charges against woman in Russia were connected with domestic violence, according to judicial news site Mediazona, yet only one in 20 was acquitted.
This week, Mr Putin’s human rights council said it had drafted legislation to allow restraining orders to be issued against abusers and establish shelters for victims. The head of the council called the Khachaturyan sisters’ case an “example of what state indifference to violence within the family leads to”.
Human rights council member Yekaterina Schulmann said attention around the Khachaturyan case offered a chance to win over the Kremlin, “because when you talk to decision-makers they ask … ‘Is this just a Western fashion?’”
On Thursday, human rights ombudswoman Tatyana Moskalkova, who is believed to have raised the issue during a meeting with Mr Putin last month, called on the court to take into consideration the “violence and humiliation” they reportedly suffered.
A recent survey found nearly half of Russians believe the state shouldn’t interfere to stop domestic abuse, but activists hope public opinion will be influenced by the discussion around the Khachaturyan sisters’ case.
More than 229,000 people have signed a petition to throw out the charges against them, and Russian and international celebrities have spoken in their defence.
Darya Ageny, a 19-year-old who was charged last year with assault after stabbing a man she said was trying to rape her, has started a social media campaign around the phrase “I’m Not to Blame”.
“We have a stereotype that if a girl is in skirt, if it’s nighttime, if God forbid she’s drunk, then she herself is to blame (for violence against her),” she said. “The goal of this action is to show and explain everyone that in any case the abuser is to blame.”