‘We’re not the goal — fear is the goal’ We talked to the father whose parental rights are being threatened after he went to an election protest with his family

Moscow prosecutors have asked a court to deprive Pyotr and Yelena Khomsky of the custody of their children after the couple was spotted attending a protest for fair elections along with their three daughters on August 3. Following the protest, the state-owned television channel Rossiya-1 aired a segment calling Pyotr Khomsky “the bodyguard of a well-known oppositionist” and accusing him of habitually staging “provocations” during mass demonstrations. The prosecutors attempting to strip the Khomskys of their parental rights have claimed that the couple knowingly allowed their daughters to be in the proximity of a crowd of “aggressive protesters” so that the parents themselves would not be arrested. Meduza spoke to Pyotr Khomsky about the government lawsuit against him and his wife.

We’re a normal, happy family. My wife and I are in our early 40s. I’m an independent contractor — I provide IT support services. My wife is a former social worker — she’s on maternity leave now. We have three kids. Our oldest daughter is 10, so she’s in elementary school. More recently, we’ve had two more girls: One is three, and our youngest is three months old.

It’s true that I’m a civic activist. I care about the fate of my country. I could tell where things were heading back in 1999 [when Boris Yeltsin began handing over power to Vladimir Putin]. Unfortunately, all my worst predictions about the transformation of our society are coming true. I’m politically engaged: I listen to Ekho Moskvy, I watch Dozhd, and I read Meduza.

I’ve helped the FBK a number of times. I’m not one of their employees, but I volunteer. I helped out with Navalny’s mayoral campaign [in Moscow in 2013], the Parnas campaign in Kostroma [during that region’s legislative elections in 2015], and a few other projects. When there are protests, whether they have permits or not, I generally go to those as well. Just because I care. I’ve been arrested a couple of times during protests, but it was a while ago. I’ve never gotten anything more severe than a fine.

I’ve been following the Moscow City Duma election campaign from the very beginning, but this time, I didn’t volunteer or collect signatures [for candidates’ registration petitions]. I didn’t have the chance because I’m really busy right now, and I have to feed my family. But I’ve always supported this group of independent candidates, and I think the fact that they weren’t allowed to run is a total outrage.

Usually, we prefer not to bring our kids to protests. If there’s someone we can leave them with, we do. But there have been times when we brought the strollers to protests — we had precedent. I mean, why not? Especially if it’s a safe, peaceful protest that has a permit.

That’s what happened on August 3: My wife and I walked along the boulevards [near Boulevard Ring] with the strollers because we didn’t have anyone to look after the kids. I wouldn’t say we ended up there by accident, but we went there to walk around, not to attend a protest. We went there just to walk around the boulevards in our own city — we didn’t chant, we weren’t carrying any posters, nothing. And we did our best to stay away from the crowd.

We were crossing the road through an underground passageway, and right at that moment, it seems, the National Guard got a command to force out [the protesters], and they made a human chain. The chain relaxed to give us a chance to walk through with the strollers. We were in a hurry, and the wheels on the strollers twisted around the wrong way, but we ended up making it through. A lot of cameras got a shot of that moment. It was an interesting little picture: National Guard officers stepping aside a bit to let us through.

In the videos, you can see that right then, a journalist came up to me and asked why we had come with our children. And I said we’d come because we’re defending our interests and the interests of our children. We care about the future of the children who are going to live here. I think it’s obvious to everyone that our children’s future depends on how we treat our rights today.

We walked a little further along the boulevards, and then we went to a playground. We didn’t run into the protest again after that. But then they posted the video of us walking with our strollers with the National Guard behind us, and the so-called lawyer Alexander Zorin saw it—he’s this kind of “police lawyer in civilian dress” who goes after Navalny. Zorin wrote that I’m a “bodyguard for Navalny and Kasyanov.” He said that because he saw me during the Parnas campaign in Kostroma in 2015 — I was volunteering on a truck doing sound engineering work for town hall meetings. I was a tech volunteer for the campaign from beginning to end. I think that’s why they said I had ties to Kasyanov even though I’ve never encountered the man in my life.

Back in that campaign, Zorin constantly bullied Parnas candidates, and he had a run-in with me, too. They used that to call me a provocateur. As usual, the people blaming other people for being provocateurs are the provocateurs themselves.

I understand that they’re going to blow this incident out of proportion on purpose. There wasn’t a crush of people on the boulevards at all, and there was no risk to the kids — we don’t put them at risk, and we never will. Parents who jaywalk with their kids are putting them in more danger than we were, but nobody takes their kids away from them. I think the video of the National Guard troops letting us through just got to somebody who’s in charge of dispersing protests and that person thought to themselves, “What if most of the protesters start bringing their kids along?” Because the National Guard wouldn’t disperse them. The soldiers are willing to thrash grown-ups with their batons, but they aren’t willing to do the same to kids. And anyone who tries calling kids State Department agents isn’t going to get very far.

I think they saw us going out there with our kids as a dangerous precedent. That’s why they decided to put a few couples in a pinch by way of example. They want to crack down so that other people won’t want to do the same thing. The message is ‘Leave your kids at home and don’t get them involved.’ I get it — they’re holding onto power and fighting for their interests. It’s a matter of politics, and they need a whipping boy. We’re not the goal — fear is the goal. They have to use us as an example to explain to other people that they shouldn’t be going anywhere.

Judging by this lawsuit, they want to take away our two youngest children. The baby’s still breastfeeding — taking a baby away from her mother at that stage is totally insane. The hardest thing for me right now is watching my wife suffer. She’s in shock, and there’s a risk that her milk will stop coming.

We’re going to put up a fight and do everything we can. Right now, we’re collecting all the evidence that everything’s all right in our family. But I know that the court already has a ruling drafted in advance, and it’s not in our favor. We’re going to appeal and keep fighting it. I think that with help from the media, publicity, society, and the courts, we’ll be able to solve this problem somehow.

It wouldn’t be right to say I regret [bringing the kids to central Moscow on August 3]. Let’s not succumb to Stockholm syndrome here. What we can regret is the fact that we haven’t defended our constitutional rights. That going out for a walk can end like this. Now, we’re paralyzed by the legal retaliation against us. We have to deal with this case — we have to save our kids.