He had 5 followers on YouTube. It landed him in jail, where he died

As a teenager, Pavel Kushnir won a coveted spot in Russia's most prestigious training program for pianists at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory. His classmates remember him as a shy, quirky introvert with fluency in not just classical music, but in film, literature and painting.

He made a career playing for provincial orchestras, while on the side he wrote startling avant-garde novels, mostly unpublished.

Long a critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Kushnir took up political activism with added zeal after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. He spread leaflets damning the war while pushing himself to endure ever longer, harsher hunger strikes. Four blurry, muffled anti-war screeds that he posted on his YouTube channel, which had just five subscribers, landed him in a dark, crumbling jail on Karl Marx Street in Birobidzhan, the remote Siberian provincial capital...