Елена Андреевна Осипова

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A persistent woman (1)

With regularity, photos appear on various social media platforms of an elderly woman being arrested by police in Saint Petersburg, holding one or more homemade placards protesting Russia's war in Ukraine.

The woman in question is Yelena Andreevna Osipova (°1945), and she has been nicknamed «the conscience of Saint-Petersburg» because of the dogged persistence with which she returns to the streets the next day after each arrest, carrying new, self-designed placards.

She no longer gets fined after her arrests though, partly because she has a pension of only 6,000 rubles, or 64 euros, per month, and therefore has nothing to pay the fines with. She also refuses to sell her own work, including her political posters, or accept financial aid, so as not to be seen as selling her beliefs

On the other hand, the government fears public reaction, as bystanders show sympathy during her actions. However, just as in Stalin's time, «fellow citizens» are sometimes called upon in attempts to silence Yelena Osipova. On April 18, 2017, while protesting the wars in Ukraine and Syria, she was insulted and aggressively shouted at by passersby. They tried to tear up her posters, calling her «Navalny-scum» and her protest march a «Jewish-Masonic provocation».

On May 9, 2022, Osipova was attacked by two young men who took her anti-war posters and ran away as she was leaving her house. However, this did not have the intended effect; quite the opposite. The incident was filmed and posted on social media, making her internationally known and even earning her honorary citizenship of the ciy of Milan.

On January 31, 2023, an exhibition of Osipova's political posters opened at the Yabloko party headquarters in Saint Petersburg. However, the following day, the works were confiscated by the police and subsequently sent for psychological and linguistic analysis, with the aim of prosecuting a violation of Article 20.3.3 of the Code of Administrative Offenses, which concerns spreading fake news about the Russian armed forces.

[*] Yabloko is a Russian center-left political party that considers itself a democratic party, largely supporting the political and economic reforms of the early 1990s, but criticising the corrupt oligarchy that gathered around the president. Since 2020, the party has been consistently denied registration for regional parliamentary and gubernatorial elections, giving it little to no influence on policy.