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June, she received a visit from representatives of social services and was told that a complaint had been made about her parenting of Sasha. Searching her flat, the social-service workers “asked why she had
English-language books, why there were cigarettes on the kitchen table, whether the violin aligned with sanitary norms.” Commenting later on these questions, Boronova later said: “That's when I realised I'm in a nuthouse.” Prohibited from leaving Moscow, she continued to be active in protest, feeling that her organizing skills “could help to bring down the power of crooks and thieves.” In July 2012, for example, she helped establish a donation drive after 170 people died in a flood in the town of Krymsk.
152:.” The order read in part: “In the righthand corner of a shoe box, located to the right of the entryway, 86 stickers were found and confiscated with the words, ‘In what kind of Russia shall we live? One of fairness, freedom and justice.'” The order also listed “two books, four laptops, a protest organizer's badge, 31 copies of the opposition newspaper Grazhdanin (Citizen), and exactly 15 'strips of white material 36 cm in length.'” (The symbol of the protest movement is a white ribbon.) Searches were also conducted at other opposition leaders’ apartments.
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result of her case. “She fought for 'Western values,' Baronova says, and now the West is punishing her for it,” reported
Reuters. In an interview after her amnesty, she expressed hostility toward some of her fellow activists and suggested sarcastically that perhaps “the best place to live” was the planet Mars. “On the other hand, maybe because of this insanity, things will be reformed in the next 20 years, who knows.” Baronova has said that it would be a “moral crime” to flee Russia. But she has also expressed the wish to study abroad for a Ph.D.
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Federation released her on the understanding that she would not leave Moscow. State guardianship agents threatened to take away her son. In June 2012, after being formally charged with inciting a riot, she told Masha Gessen that she had been busy “reassuring people,” explaining that it was “like when a loved one dies: you have to let everyone know that things on the inside are not quite as horrible as they seem from the outside.”
178:... So if it's my time to go, I'll go." In summer 2012, she received anonymous phone calls telling her "You will die in three weeks" and "We know that you have moved to a new place, but you won't get away from us." In August 2012, Baronova accused the police of provoking the violence at Bolotnaya Square, and said that Putin was out for vengeance. "We spoiled his holiday and now he is spoiling our lives", she said.
231:(“Rain”), the last independent Russian TV channel. “It is the only work that she, a chemist and once a well-paid sales manager at a chemical-supplies company, could get after becoming a defendant in such a public, politicised trial,” explained Ioffe. Shortly thereafter, Baronova wrote an article, entitled “No One Has Done More for Ukrainian Nationalism than Vladimir Putin,” that appeared in
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this harassment by pretending that nothing was going on. “That's the only way to get used to it,” she said. "Pretend that no one wrote notes on my door threatening to kill me and my son." She also received anonymous text messages threatening to kill her and Sasha. Also, her grandfather accused her of working clandestinely for the U.S. State
Department, "Russia's worst enemy".
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203:... believes all that idiocy about how Russia is a strong, great power and America hates us and how we need to conquer and defeat everyone.” She has affirmed that “we need to go on protests, but we need to do something more, as well. Russians never carry things through until the end. It's a genetic and psychological peculiarity, I guess."
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a whole. The incident that triggered her turn to activism occurred during the parliamentary elections of
December 2011. She witnessed and tried to report an electoral violation but, as she put it, was “thwarted.” The next day, she took part in a protest rally, which marked the start of her life as an activist.
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It was while she was working for
Ponomarev that Baronova grew to oppose Medvedev and became an activist. “I think most of us who came out were tired,” she said. She accused the leading party of operating a corrupt system using kickbacks and bribes that enriched a few at the expense of the country as
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that devolved into “a police riot, mass detentions, and beatings.” Enraged at the brutality of police officers during the demonstration, she yelled at them: “You violated your oath just as badly as your tsar did!” Facing a line of soldiers, she recited to them
Article 31 of the Russian Constitution,
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Prohibited from leaving Moscow, she was kept under watch by the authorities, who after their search of her flat repeatedly entered it again when she was out, moving furniture around and turning on her stove, which are reportedly "commonplace scare tactics". She has said that she tried to deal with
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Five weeks after the
Bolotnaya Square protests, while Baronova and her son were not at home, agents of the Investigative Committee, Russia's FBI, forced her son's babysitter to open the door and raided it, carrying assault rifles. They restrained her son's nanny to the floor and searched the flat,
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activism.” They even took items of personal hygiene, a medical inhaler, and “ultrasound images from
Baranova's pregnancy.” Apropos of the confiscation of the ultrasound images, Baronova said that she asked them: “do you think my child was planning unrest?” She later said that she found the entire
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punk-rock group, were amnestied. While
Khodorkovsky and the Pussy Riot members were able to travel around the world and to speak about the situation in their homeland, Baronova could not leave Russia. She was unable to secure an EU visa because her name appeared on a Russian police database as a
185:
During the months after the
Bolotnaya Square protests, Boronova was also interrogated at length several times by a special investigative unit. In addition, she was reportedly spied on by social-service workers who issued “a thinly veiled threat that her son might be taken away from her.” In late
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commented that Baronova, once "a young rising star of Russia's anti-Putin activist movement", was now unsure as to whether she wanted to continue pursuing activism. Controversially, moreover, she criticized some of her fellow opposition figures. "At one point", she has said, "I suddenly got the
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saying "The problem is, I know these people very well. They never send threats, they just kill, so there is kind of weird silence around me, but I really think we're on the brink of a nuclear war right now. I'm not exaggerating." In 2024, she blamed Ukrainians for the war, berating them for
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After the protests, authorities threatened to charge Baronova with “organizing disorders,” but she was ultimately charged with the lesser offense of “inciting disorders.” Instead of imprisoning her like other defendants in the Bolotnaya Square case, the Investigative Committee of the Russian
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On the morning of May 6, 2012, Baronova was detained by police at the Zakonospassky monastery, where “she had asked a priest to say a prayer in support of her friends, the three jailed members of the Pussy Riot band.” Released within hours, she organized an instantaneous protest in
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as well as in the opposition movement. When police later searched her apartment, Baronova said that she believed the searches were motivated by her association with Ponomarev, while he suggested that the purpose of the searches was to locate evidence against him.
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She began passing out leaflets, holding interviews with the press, and staging one-person protests that resulted in several detentions, according to Masha Gessen. “Thanks to her charisma, Baronova quickly became a celebrity of the anti-Putin movement,” observed
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seizure order funny, and that later, when she was interrogated, she found that procedure funny too, until she learned that she faced a charge of inciting a riot, the most serious charge yet leveled against any Bolotnaya Square protester.
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that her family began growing its own vegetables at their grandparents' home and stored them for winter. Her mother died of breast cancer when Baronova was 18, and six months later Baronova, who at the time was studying chemistry at
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as “the strangest war I've seen in my 30 years,” and dubbed it Phoney War 2.0, a reference to the so-called “Phoney War” from September 3, 1939, to May 10, 1940. She added that while Putin was being compared widely to
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impression that one-third of the opposition movement was made up of not particularly clever people, another one-third of Kremlin agents and the final third of simply crazy folks." She has said that "half of the country
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posting, Baronova expressed her anguish over the injuries and prison sentences her fellow activists were receiving for their commitment. She stated that she saw “no more sense” in keeping on with the protests. The
115:. Beginning in December 2011, she served as the opposition movement's volunteer spokeswoman. For a time she was one of the most well-known protesters in Moscow. She appeared on a calendar of “12 Dissident Women.”
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movement. Reuters journalist Lucian Kim described her as embodying "the contradictions of Russians who love their country, warts and all, and seek to reconcile it with the rest of the world."
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year,” 1984. The Hez family consisted mostly of politically inactive members who never partook in activism. She was raised by her mother, who was “a theoretical physicist turned actuary.”
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In addition, the agents confiscated family photos, protest buttons, “several booklets about Putin and a DVD of an anti-Putin movie,” as well as “a pin with a pink triangle, a symbol of
38:; born April 13, 1984) is a Russian chemist who has worked as a sales manager of lab equipment, journalist, and political spokesperson. She is known as an activist opposing President
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277:"shitting on the helping hand held out by anti-war Russians when Putin started retaliating against your shit and when your bastard Azov gang started taking hostages."
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writing out a seizure order that Baronov later laughed at because, she said, it read “like a parody of Orwell or
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696:"Maria Baronova fears 'we're on the brink of a nuclear war' after quitting Russian state-run media over Ukraine"
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76:, took a job selling laboratory equipment. Later she worked as a sales manager for a chemical distributor.
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magazine in June 2012 that "at a certain point, an activist is more useful to the cause from behind bars.
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reported on February 5, 2014, that Baronova was now working as a science correspondent for
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s issue of March 3, 2014. In the article, Baronova described the then-ongoing war in
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During the economic downturn of the 1990s, Baronova's mother was destitute. She told
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on May 6, 2012. In February 2019, she joined Russian government television network
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88:, she worked as business manager, assistant, press secretary, and spokeswoman for
583:"Pussy Riot is the tip of the iceberg – 'there's a lot of intimidation going on'"
349:[Opposition activist Maria Baronova starts working for RT] (in Russian).
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In early March 2022, Baronova resigned from Russia Today after she condemned the
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539:"Maria Baronova Charged with Inciting Disorder at Bolotnaya Square May 6 Rally"
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521:"The Raids That Backfired: How the Russian Police Helped to Swell a Protest"
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Kicking the Kremlin: Russia's New Dissidents and the Battle to Topple Putin
258:. She was not supported by a registered political party, but rather by the
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In December 2013, Baronova and several other opposition figures, including
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Baronova (née Tchebotareva) describes herself as having been born in “
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magazine, have praised her activist work and fortitude in supporting
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677:"No One Has Done More for Ukrainian Nationalism than Vladimir Putin"
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In February 2019, she joined Russian government television network
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18:
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347:"Оппозиционер Мария Баронова перешла на работу в RT"
473:"Putin Clamps Down: A Chilling Report From Moscow"
497:"Liberal activist charged with "calls to riot""
92:, a member of the Duma, the lower house of the
775:"Putin's Moscow is anxious, gilded and hollow"
631:"Putin's Moscow is anxious, gilded and hollow"
413:"Russia's Opposition Movement Starts to Crack"
42:and, in particular, for having organized the
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269:to work on a charity project called "DDBM".
604:"Putin's opponents feel the heat in Russia"
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439:"A Face of the Russian Protest Movement"
96:. Ponomarev was a leading figure in the
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658:"The Loneliness of Vladimir Putin"
367:Bennetts, Marc (6 February 2014).
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495:Kuzmenkova, Olga (Jun 21, 2012).
471:Reitman, Janet (April 30, 2014).
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773:Kim, Lucian (October 25, 2014).
285:Several publications, including
274:2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine
754:Ioffe, Julia (August 2, 2012).
675:Baronova, Maria (Mar 3, 2014).
519:Shuster, Simon (Jun 13, 2012).
411:Nemtsova, Anna (Nov 14, 2012).
581:Elder, Miriam (Aug 23, 2012).
437:Gessen, Masha (Jun 25, 2012).
50:to work on a charity project.
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731:(in Russian). Archived from
656:Ioffe, Julia (Feb 2, 2014).
629:Kim, Lucian (Oct 25, 2014).
254:In 2016, she unsuccessfully
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256:ran as a candidate for Duma
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694:Rutz, David (2022-03-07).
319:"Speaker - Maria Baronova"
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28:Maria Nikolayevna Baronova
837:Russian women in politics
373:. Oneworld Publications.
119:Bolotnaya Square protests
44:Bolotnaya Square protests
36:Мария Николаевна Баронова
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723:"Maria Baronova 🦄 on X"
54:Early life and education
842:Russian women activists
832:Politicians from Moscow
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477:Rollingstone Magazine
125:Bolotnaya Square case
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808:at Wikimedia Commons
785:on October 28, 2014.
353:. February 28, 2019.
208:Mikhail Khodorkovsky
852:Russian journalists
637:on October 28, 2014
299:Russia's opposition
189:In a November 2012
164:Later developments
94:Russian Parliament
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847:Russian activists
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417:Daily Beast
260:Open Russia
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196:Daily Beast
816:Categories
708:2022-03-08
704:. Fox News
305:References
212:Pussy Riot
157:gay rights
351:RBK Group
328:March 11,
281:Reception
210:and the
191:Facebook
80:Activism
60:Orwell's
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739:27 June
641:Oct 17,
614:Oct 17,
32:Russian
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561:May6
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