Imprisoned, tortured, and killed at the front: The life and death of anti-Kremlin activist Ildar Dadin
When he joined the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Ildar Dadin chose the nom de guerre “Gandhi.” The Russian opposition activist, who was the first person prosecuted under the Kremlin’s 2014 law criminalizing repeated violations of the rules for conducting public demonstrations, spent more than a year in prison before the Supreme Court overturned his sentence and ordered his release in 2017.
Having previously been committed to non-violent resistance, Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine convinced Dadin to take up arms against Vladimir Putin’s regime. In early 2023, he joined the Siberian Battalion, a unit of Russian nationals within the Ukrainian army.
Dadin was killed by Russian forces on October 5, while fighting in Ukraine’s eastern Kharkiv region. His death was first reported by journalist Ksenia Larina and later confirmed by a fellow serviceman. The Freedom of Russia Legion, another unit of Russian nationals fighting for Ukraine, which Dadin joined last December, then confirmed his death to The Insider. He was 42.
‘The Dadin Law’
In a 2015 interview with Open Russia, Ildar Dadin said he started attending protest rallies following the December 2011 parliamentary elections. The accusations of large-scale voter fraud leveled against the ruling United Russia party made him want to see what was happening “with [his] own eyes.” So, during the 2012 presidential vote, Dadin served as an election monitor — a job he would take up 13 more times. “I believe that every citizen should take part in the life of his country,” Dadin said. “There need not be an ‘indifferent population.’”
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Dadin rose to prominence in 2015 as the first Russian citizen to face felony prosecution for repeatedly violating rules for conducting demonstrations. As a result, the media began referring to the corresponding Criminal Code statute (Article 212.1) as the “Dadin Law.”
The Russian authorities introduced this particular law in 2014 and initiated criminal proceedings against Dadin after he received three misdemeanor convictions for conducting one-man protests and attending anti-government rallies. During his trial, Dadin insisted that he was simply exercising his constitutional rights. “I believed and still believe that I didn’t commit a crime. All of my actions during [these] three years of protest activity were exclusively peaceful and nonviolent,” Dadin said at a court hearing in February 2015.
In his closing statement, Dadin sharply condemned the charges and the “gangster officials” who introduced the new protest law. “I was born a free man and no gangster officials enacting anti-constitutional, criminal, political laws can enforce them on me,” he told the court. “ I demand — I do not ask, I demand — that this shameful persecution be stopped.”
Dadin was sentenced to three years in prison in December 2015, but his punishment was later reduced to 2.5 years. At the time, such a lengthy prison term surprised even government supporters. Human rights activists and lawyers decried the article under which Dadin was convicted as unconstitutional, and even Russia’s Presidential Human Rights Council called for its removal from the Criminal Code. The Russian human rights group Memorial declared Dadin a political prisoner.
Another five years would pass before another activist, Konstantin Kotov, was convicted of violating Article 212.1. He was sentenced to an even lengthier term: four years in prison.
‘Intolerable detention conditions’
Dadin initially served his sentence in a prison colony in Segezha, a town in Russia’s northwest. In November 2016, he wrote a letter to his wife revealing the torture he endured there at the hands of the prison guards and the warden, Sergey Kossiev.
In the letter, which Meduza published in full, Dadin recounted being immediately placed in solitary confinement and then tortured for declaring a hunger strike. He said prison guards beat him repeatedly, hung him by his handcuffs for half an hour, and threatened him with rape. “They beat me regularly, several times a day. Regular beatings, bullying, humiliation, insults, intolerable detention conditions — this is happening with the other prisoners, as well,” he wrote.
Other prisoners and their relatives confirmed that the prison staff were torturing inmates. Dadin’s letter provoked public outcry and he was subsequently transferred to another prison colony in southern Siberia. The warden from the Segezha prison, Kossiev, and his deputy were convicted of abuse of office in 2019, but they didn’t serve their full prison terms.
In February 2017, Russia’s Supreme Court overturned Dadin’s conviction and ordered his release from prison. A court in the Moscow region later awarded him more than 2.2 million rubles (about $38,000) in compensation for wrongful prosecution. However, the same court rejected the activist’s lawsuit against the Federal Penitentiary Service and the Segezha prison over the conditions of detention in the colony.
Following his release from prison, Dadin immediately resumed his protest activities. In June 2017, he was fined 20,000 rubles ($350) over a public reading of the Russian Constitution; that October, he was arrested at a rally in support of opposition politician Alexey Navalny. The Boris Nemtsov Foundation awarded him its annual prize for “courage in defending democratic rights and freedoms.”
‘Resist this terrible evil’
In an August 2023 interview with Mediazona, Ildar Dadin said that he now saw nonviolent resistance against Vladimir Putin’s regime as pointless. Peaceful protests, he said, had “zero practical meaning” since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
“What was left for me to do? Either go out [and protest] in Russia, and let them kill me or throw me in jail there, or go to Ukraine and resist this terrible evil by force of arms,” Dadin explained. “I saw [only] these two options. To step aside and live for yourself — I still don’t understand how you can live like that.”
After joining the Siberian Battalion, Dadin chose the military call sign “Gandhi” because he remained inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s principle of nonviolent struggle. “But I have to resist Russia’s crimes — the murder, torture, rape, [and] looting. The last resort for stopping murderers is to kill the murderer. If I don’t stop [this] mass murder, then I’ll be their accomplice,” he told Mediazona.
On October 6, a soldier who served with Dadin told Mediazona he was killed after coming under artillery fire in the Kharkiv region.
Writing on Facebook after Dadin’s death, ex-Russian lawmaker Ilya Ponomarev said the activist initially joined the Siberian Battalion because he wasn’t immediately accepted into the Freedom of Russia Legion’s ranks. “Since the very start of the war he had been trying to get to the front, to fight against Putinism,” Ponomarev said, explaining that Dadin finally joined the Freedom of Russian Legion as the result of a reorganization in December 2023.
Ponomarev also said that details concerning Dadin’s death would be revealed once “combat work” in the Kharkiv region is complete. “‘Gandhi’ didn’t live to see our victory, but I am sure the criminal statute named after him will be abolished and then ‘Ildar Dadin’ streets will appear in Russian cities!”
On Monday, the Free Russia Forum announced the creation of a prize named after Ildar Dadin, to “perpetuate his memory and support all forms of anti-Putin resistance.”