Silencing the opposition

After being charged with 18 offences, and told to repay some 5 million rubles (€53,300) to cover the costs of policing unsanctioned pro-Navalny protests in Ufa, Komleva was eventually tried for charges of extremism and spreading disinformation about the Russian army and sentenced to 12 years in a penal colony. She has since served 18 months in multiple detention facilities, where, due to her poor treatment, she has gone mute. 

Unspeakable

Bashkortostan’s Supreme Court had been due to hear Komleva’s appeal against her sentence on 28 October, but the hearing was rescheduled without any official explanation. A possible explanation could have been Komleva’s condition, as she had been unable to speak due to stress for six weeks. Olga and her husband, Vyacheslav, submitted a note to the court asking that they take her condition into account. 

According to Komleva, she has been unable to speak since 8 September. “I hope my voice comes back at some point; I’ve only been able to make a few involuntary sounds a couple of times, but when I try to speak nothing comes out.”

Komleva has so far spent five months in two Moscow pretrial detention centres and seven months in one in Ufa itself. She is currently serving her sentence in the town of Dyurtyuli, an hour and a half’s drive from the regional capital.

This is not the first time something like this has happened to her, though. She first went mute during the pandemic in 2020, then again the following year after she was arrested at a protest in Ufa. Then, when she was arrested again on extremism charges in December 2024.

Earlier this year, Olga was subjected to a particularly invasive search in her pretrial detention centre in Ufa, which she says verged on harassment, accusing the female prison guard of inappropriately touching her breasts and buttocks several times. 

Komleva made an official complaint to the Prosecutor General’s Office, and found herself unable to speak again. A similar incident occurred after she was moved to her fifth detention centre. “Olga has some kind of neurological condition. When she experiences particularly strong emotions she tends to faint,” her husband Vyacheslav says. 

“In everyday life, she can cope with this quite effectively. In Dyurtyuli, to the best of my knowledge, nothing happened that could be construed as harassment. The search simply reminded her of what had happened in Ufa, and how certain liberties were taken.”  

According to Vyacheslav, his wife’s conditions are currently satisfactory, or at least, as good as they can be for somebody with Type II diabetes in a Russian prison colony. He says that he regularly sends her medicine and diabetic-friendly food, so that she can at least manage her blood sugar levels. 

Komleva is currently being held in solitary confinement in Dyurtyuli, which means that she has an abundance of free time on her hands, which she spends reading and drawing. She has also begun learning Korean. Her letters from prison are often accompanied with sketches. 

“One of the most difficult things about being in a detention facility is not being alone with your thoughts. If you don’t find something to occupy yourself with, over time your doubts start to eat away at you and you begin to spiral. You can end up in a very dark place mentally,” she wrote to her supporters.

A record fee 

Before her arrest, Komleva had also been involved in activism for many years, passionately campaigning on environmental issues. In 2017, abnormal levels of radioactivity were detected in Ufa’s rainwater, which ecologists suggested were likely due to emissions of the isotope Ruthenium-106 from the Mayak Production Association, one of Russia’s largest nuclear facilities, in the neighbouring Chelyabinsk region. 

Komleva successfully campaigned for the Prosecutor’s General’s Office to investigate the officials accused of covering the incident up, though, despite the case going to court, no convictions were ultimately secured.

As a journalist for independent media outlet RusNews, Komleva reported widely on the legal consequences Ufa residents faced for mounting any form of political protest. In particular, she focused on those who took part in demonstrations against the 2024 conviction of Bashkir activist Fail Alsynov. 

Alsynov was sentenced to four years in prison on obviously trumped-up charges of inciting ethnic hatred over comments he made during a public appearance that appear to have been mistranslated from his native Bashkir into Russian. His conviction sparked some of the biggest demonstrations in Russia since the war in Ukraine began and led to the arrest of at least 75 activists.

Komleva continued to play an active role in local politics, working as an election observer and attending demonstrations and rallies. When the Navalny Centre opened in Ufa in March 2017, its director Lilia Chanysheva asked Komleva if she would volunteer there.

“Olga did that because she thought something had to change,” Komlev says of his wife’s involvement with the Navalny campaign: “Of course, she never intended to stage any revolutions — she is against violence of any kind and she has always acted according to this conviction.” 

More protests later followed, after which Komleva’s home was searched, along with those of Navalny staff members in 30 other cities, in 2019. “Olga wasn’t especially worried about being arrested,” says Komlev. “They arrested her again and again, but only the first time really left an impression.”

In January and April 2021, Komleva was again arrested and charged with “using social media to organise unauthorised demonstrations” on the eve of large pro-Navalny demonstrations. A record 18 lawsuits were filed in total, with the authorities demanding that Komleva cover the costs of policing the demonstrations which took place on 23 and 31 January 2021. 

They also sought reimbursement for fuel costs, with the total sum coming to 5.6 million rubles (€60,000). Though she managed to pay part of the bill by asking her supporters to donate money, Komleva nevertheless had all her property confiscated and her bank accounts frozen. 

“These lawsuits are still only partially paid off. We, of course, challenged them in the court of appeal, but unsuccessfully,” her husband told us. “The remainder to be paid is around 4 million rubles (€42,700). All of Olga’s shares in our property have been seized, but this hasn’t made things too uncomfortable. We have got used to it. They have persecuted us in so many ways that they’ve run out of options.”

The trial

In June 2021 a Moscow court ruled both Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) and his political team to be “extremist organisations", which led to the employees of both groups being arrested and charged with extremist activity. Lilia Chanysheva was arrested in 2023 and sentenced to seven and a half years in a penal colony, which the court later extended to nine and a half years. Having witnessed Chanysheva’s case, Komleva predicted that she would likely become the state’s top target in Ufa. 

On 27 March 2024 Komleva was taken in for questioning over her own links to the FBK. At first she was treated as a witness, but she was rapidly reclassified as a suspect and placed in pretrial detention. A few months later, Komleva had a fresh charge of spreading disinformation about the Russian army added to her docket, before having her name added to the Russian government’s register of terrorists and extremists in August 2024.

Komleva was only given two days to acquaint herself with the details of her case, and as her trial was conducted behind closed doors, little is known of the specifics. Komleva’s former lawyer Mikhail Lavrentyev has claimed that “there were no specifics, because the investigation provided no evidence,” and that the case “followed Lilia Chanysheva’s example closely”. 

The Prosecutor General’s Office requested a sentence of 13 years — she was ultimately given 12. Undeterred, Komleva wrote the following on her Telegram channel. “A 12-year sentence is no reason to give up. Dozens of court cases have gone against me in my life. My soul is already full, so I just carry on without feeling.”

Komleva had expected a shorter sentence than Chanysheva “because I know for a fact that Olga didn’t actually do anything illegal,” her husband says. “We don’t expect anything from the appeal, but there is still hope that her case will be reconsidered. Everything was so haphazard and so riddled with contradictions that essentially every rule was broken, both procedurally and in terms of the facts of the case.”

In November 2023, the European Court of Human Rights awarded Komleva €4,500 in damages from the Russian state for her 2018 imprisonment, followed by another award of €6,000 the following year. Two more cases her lawyers have brought against the Russian state are currently under review in Strasbourg, and Komleva has been declared a political prisoner by the Nobel-Prize-winning human rights group Memorial. 

“Olga has many supporters,” says her husband. “They write to her, and even approach me on the street to pass on their good wishes. Generally speaking, her arrest and trial has harmed the authorities more than it has her. Pensioners, our neighbours and acquaintances all say that was a lawless act. Maybe some of them have even been inspired to think more critically about what is going on in Russia as a result of her case.”

This article by Yulia Paramanova was first published in Russian by media outlet Veter.