Ex-Pussy Riot activist Rita Flores says Russia’s FSB forced her to inform on performance artist Pavel Krisevich. He found out from her interview and wrote to tell her she’s forgiven.

Former Pussy Riot member and activist Rita Flores (real name Margarita Konovalova) said on August 24 that FSB officers recruited her in early 2023. According to Flores, security officials threatened to kill her family, and under that pressure she agreed to cooperate and gather information on contemporary artists and political activists, including Pussy Riot members. Among other things, Flores was ordered to draw information out of street artist Philippenzo (Filipp Kozlov) and performance artist Pavel Krisevich and to inform on them. Flores claimed she tried to hint to Krisevich and his wife, Elena, that a new criminal case was being prepared against him, and that she played an indirect part in his departure from Russia in late 2025. She was not able to leave the country herself until mid-August 2026. Meduza asked Krisevich about his friendship with Flores and what changed when he learned of her ties to the FSB.

Warning: This text contains profanity.

— Did you know Rita was planning to give an interview about her recruitment?

— That was news to me. Even after I left, Rita and I kept messaging each other as if nothing had happened. I didn’t know anything.

It was only lately that she dropped out of sight for a long stretch and stopped answering messages. It seemed like either something had happened or she was just offline for a while — which she’s been doing sometimes lately.

It hit me pretty hard — that this is how things really are.

— Before the interview came out, did she consult you at all, ask your advice, or say she was planning to reveal something like this?

— No.

— Did you have any suspicions that something was wrong? Were there rumors?

— Not until the very end. I could understand Rita’s position — that she stayed in Russia even in 2025. Well, not everyone wants to emigrate. We talked, we met up in person. Rita said she didn’t want to leave at all, despite the pressure. She’d given up activism, she said, and wanted a quiet family life, a child, that sort of thing.

I stayed in Russia until 2025 myself. There was an understanding: if you keep a relatively low profile and don’t stick your neck out, you still have some room to live your life. So I didn’t see anything suspicious.

Though people did say, “Look, Rita’s been in Russia this whole time, it’s all very strange.” It didn’t seem strange to me — I was in exactly the same position [there] before I left, even with the constant arrests. But I never suspected Rita.

— Flores says in the interview that she tried to pick a fight with you, and when that didn’t work, she used your wife, Elena, to do it. According to Rita, this was her way of trying to persuade you to leave together. How did it look from your side?

— I don’t remember Rita picking a fight with me at all. And my wife never told me Rita had written her anything like that either. That part of the interview sounds a bit strange to me. Maybe there were hints that I should leave, and I just didn’t pick up on what Rita considers a fight.

There was never any serious information in our messages, not even details about the performance at the missile [monument]. I told Rita about that in person, and it all lines up [with her account in the interview].

You can imagine what Rita’s role was. She told her handlers that something was being planned, though it wasn’t clear where. And then her handlers filled in the rest with some kind of FSB surveillance once I actually went to the site.

— So you don’t recall Rita Flores communicating with you in any unusual way after your release in 2025?

— The only thing that seemed suspicious to me after Rita’s interview came out was that she kept telling me I should get in touch with [Marat] Gelman and sell paintings through him, that kind of thing. I told her that contacting Gelman while I was still in Russia was dangerous and would end badly. But Rita kept coming back to it.

Given the context of the search in the Marat Gelman case in April 2025, it all came together for me. FSB officers didn’t find anything that time and left me alone. I wrote to Rita just now and asked her — was she trying to push this somehow? I suspected she might have been doing it deliberately, on her handlers’ orders, to get me connected to Gelman. But now that she’s free, she denies doing anything of the kind. I’ll trust that, since I have no other information right now.

Other than that, it was typical conversation among anti-war Russians. These days, everyone in Russia is careful not to reveal much. Mostly we talked about fairly trivial things: how people were doing, how they were coping, what their plans were.

— What were relations like within the art scene in Russia before you left? How strong was the mutual suspicion, the fear that someone might inform on someone else?

— I think it’s the same as with everyone. People don’t tend to suspect acquaintances and friends they’ve known a long time.

I don’t interact much with the art crowd, because their main problem isn’t suspicion of each other over cooperating with the cops — it’s mutual envy and hatred.

So I mostly crossed paths with old acquaintances and friends. I talked more with activists. Activists have their own precautions — they work in human rights, and that requires care.

In my own work, in my performances, I always had to tell someone close to me or an acquaintance what I was planning — to see their reaction. Or to make myself feel that if I didn’t go through with what I planned, I’d be ashamed — since I’d told people about it and then failed to follow through. I had that kind of macho attitude about it. Rita is one of my old friends, someone I’d known since before the war and talked about these things with. Naturally, it never occurred to me to suspect her.

— You left Russia in December 2025, after a series of administrative arrests. In the interview, Flores talks about it as though she was the one who saved you from a new criminal case supposedly being prepared against you. According to her, it’s only thanks to her that you stayed free and were able to leave. She also says she convinced you to leave Russia by messaging with your wife. Who actually convinced you to leave, and did Rita play any part in that?

— FSB officers came to see me at the holding facility and convinced me, telling me straight out: either I leave, or they lock me up.

They took me into a dark room, stood me facing the wall, and the FSB officers practically read off a script about what a bad person I was, saying they’d lock me up, along with all my relatives, and so on, if I didn’t leave. Only then did something click [in my head] that I really needed to go.

When I got out of the holding facility, my wife and I had a serious talk. She’s the one who finally convinced me.

— What’s your overall impression of what Rita said? Is it possible she embellished parts of her account?

— Oh, I think it’s all of that at once. There’s embellishment, and there’s also this [put-on] air from Rita, like she understood everything while the rest of us didn’t.

I only came to understand that I needed to leave the country after a direct message from FSB officers. Every time I was detained, I said: I’m staying in Russia; if you want me to leave, just tell me straight out, “Leave.” And I will. Because obviously, I wasn’t planning to go to prison a second time.

Both the Center for Combating Extremism and the FSB sensed they had that leverage — that I was a convicted man — and knew they could pressure me.

— Does it bother you that your departure from Russia looked somewhat different from how Rita describes it?

— I think she saw it her own way, and over time it took on different shapes in her memory. [Rita Flores’s] interview can’t be a 100% accurate historical record. We’ll probably never really know how it actually happened.

More than six months have passed [since I left Russia], and for me it already feels like some kind of fictional world. It’s hard to imagine how it really was: the pressure, the surveillance, the detention.

For some reason I’m sure [Rita’s] subconscious hid or reworked a lot of it so she wouldn’t completely lose her mind.

What I saw is that I was detained in Istra at the missile, and I hadn’t told anyone about the performance except the journalists who were with me at the time and Rita. Everything spun out from that detention. Maybe she really did [tell the FSB]… We still can’t fully trust her after something like this. Even though I’m trying to overcome that stigmatization in myself.

— In pretrial detention centers and penal colonies, there are usually people who cooperate with the administration. In exchange for privileges, they inform on others and push fellow convicts to cooperate as well. Did you encounter anything like that while serving your sentence in the hooliganism case?

— Of course I saw all of it — I [did time] with all those bitches who ran to the operations unit. In every cell, every barrack, there’s always someone who cooperates with the administration and snitches on everything that happens.

At Penal Colony No. 5 in Metallostroy, in Russia’s Leningrad region, there was an incident. For most of my time there I didn’t work, because the sewing shop where I’d started out and learned to sew had closed down. We also had a fish-processing shop. I was brought to the operations unit. The operations officer said, “You’re assigned to the fish shop, that’s not up for discussion.” I told him, “Fine, I won’t argue.”

But I didn’t want to spend my last two months working in the fish shop — I didn’t want to stink right before my release. I went back to the barracks and started telling everyone that if they sent me to the fish shop, I’d cut myself, that I had allergies, that sort of thing. In the end, of everyone on the list, I was the only one they didn’t send to the fish shop [Krisevich suspects this happened after other inmates reported his remarks to the colony administration].

— After you were released, did you suspect that people around you might be informing too? Did three and a half years in the colony leave you more cautious, more suspicious?

— Only toward people I didn’t know. Rita and I had known each other a long time.

Now my prison instincts kick in, telling me that Rita is, crudely speaking, marked as a “bitch” [prison slang for an informer]. But I still have human feelings, too.

Rita went through a lot to escape Russia, ended up free, told this whole story, and is trying to help other people who are also entangled with the FSB… She shouldn’t be stigmatized. You have to feel for the person. Because we’re not to blame for having lived in a vile system that literally breaks people to make its future crimes possible.

— Were you surprised that FSB officers took such an interest in the art scene — that they planted agents there, that they recruited Rita?

— Hell if I know. I think there are some ancient prejudices in the security apparatus. An artist is considered a lunatic, someone who can’t be controlled. For people who try to control everything, to keep everything in their own hands, an artist with strange ideas is the main enemy.

It probably also played a part that [Pyotr] Verzilov went off to fight on Ukraine’s side. They think all of us are future militants of that kind.

For most artists, the principle of nonviolence and the principle of conveying their worldview through art come first. Very few would ever take up arms.

It’s a single step, in some sense, from an art performance to blowing up a lawmaker. But I’m sure artists won’t go down that road. And at a time when the FSB should be fighting real terrorists, catching whoever attacked the Crocus City Hall concert venue, it was recruiting Rita Flores.

And now, in Paris, they’re watching me and leaking data of some kind. They’re watching other artists, carrying out the killing of [artist Semyon] Skrepetsky. At a time when they should be fighting real terrorists. But they won’t do that. It’s easier to hit their numbers with artists who won’t fight back. In the physical sense, I mean.

— You’re saying you’re being watched in Paris?

— Rita says there’s someone in my circle running an operation on me.

— Is this something she told you now, after the interview with the outlet Port?

— Yes. Well, I wrote to her that I understand the whole situation, that I forgive her for this first transgression. That the country is vile and can do whatever it wants with a person’s fate if the system decides to. It’s built for that — to break people into whatever shape it needs.

Of course, [thanks to Flores] it was in some ways easier for FSB officers to keep tabs on me. And that may be part of why I ended up emigrating from Russia. What Rita did to other people is on her conscience. It will stay with her, and it will weigh on her too.

— Do you think that now, after this interview, after what Rita told you about the surveillance, artists will be more anxious? Will there be a wave of spy mania?

— I think all artists tensed up the moment Skrepetsky was killed. Though it’s clear the bigger factor there was the Chechen angle and his blunt remarks about Ramzan Kadyrov — that’s a more sensitive topic.

Still, I think everyone will tense up even more now. And that’s also the state’s goal: to keep everyone on edge, to burn people out faster. To drive people into depression with the feeling that “enemies are everywhere, you can’t trust anyone.”

But somehow I keep believing in people… even after all this. And of course I understand that if the state wants to, it will kill me too: poison me, hit me over the back of the head with something heavy while I’m walking through Paris. Because those are the only methods Putin’s state has left. It has no other way to exert influence. Its soft power is gone.

There’s no way to portray us, the artists, as fringe figures in Europe, even after what Pyotr Pavlensky did there.

I’m going to keep going. If I gave up on everything, that would suit Vladimir Vladimirovich just fine. And I want Vladimir Vladimirovich… well, actually, not even him — he doesn’t give a shit, none of this reaches him — I want some security official with stars on his shoulders, maybe some colonel, to be the one who tenses up. To think: there’s Krisevich, still out there saying things, even in Paris.

And maybe get through to the French that [Russia] is a completely sick country. That it does the kinds of things it did to Rita and to me — this exile from Russia — and the things it does to other artists and public figures who disagree with the authorities, don’t want war, and don’t want to live in an authoritarian state with no place for human rights.

— Will you keep in touch with Rita now?

— We exchanged some messages, tried to clear up a few questions. I’ll definitely need to talk to her in person again.

Even after statements like that, after everything that’s happened, we need to talk in person. I want to understand her position fully, now that she’s someone who isn’t locked up, whose passport hasn’t been confiscated, and who isn’t facing the threat of a criminal case or constant FSB pressure. I’ll just meet up with her — if the chance comes up — and talk. But that probably won’t happen soon.

— Do you stay in touch with Philippenzo (Filipp Kozlov), whom Flores was also ordered to inform on?

— We’ve crossed paths a few times. We message occasionally, discuss ideas for street art.

— And now, after Rita’s interview?

— We had a joking exchange, something like: “You seem awfully suspicious. Why are you asking so many questions?”