The Moscow Times, Russia
July 28 2005

Willing Darling of the Hateful

By Masha Gessen

Alexandra Ivannikova is a busy woman these days. Just in the last
week she has had to attend two ceremonies at which she received
awards. At the Golden Palace Casino on July 21, she was handed a
voucher for a tour of a country of her choice, awarded to her by a
jury of journalists who named her their news hero. A few days later,
Ivannikova attended the third-anniversary celebration of the Movement
Against Illegal Immigration, where she received 50,000 rubles
($1,700) “for courage in defending her honor.”

So who is this hero? She is a 30-year-old Moscow housewife who is
facing trial on charges of killing a man. Some facts of the case are
not in dispute: She admits that she stabbed a man with a knife she
carried in her purse. She hit an artery, and he died of blood loss.
There were no witnesses. She stabbed the man in his car, after, she
claims, he tried to force her to engage in oral sex in exchange for a
ride. She maintains that as soon as she stabbed him, she jumped out
of the car and screamed for help. The police who detained her say in
fact she was trying to run away from the scene of the crime and told
them what happened only after they questioned her about the blood
stains on her clothing. As often happens with Russian court cases,
the investigators did such a sloppy job that teasing out the facts —
a very difficult task in the absence of witnesses under any
circumstances — seems next to impossible.

But the facts of the case have become unimportant to Ivannikova’s
public persona, which emerged in the spring as a result of her
lawyer’s and supporters’ publicity efforts. In May, Ivannikova became
a media star, giving several interviews a day. Demonstrations in
support of Ivannikova took place in front of the courthouse where she
was tried. (She was found guilty and given a suspended sentence, but
her conviction has since been overturned by a higher court and now
she faces a new trial.) Television and radio personalities called her
a hero. Ultimately, even the City Prosecutor’s Office, in apparent
violation of procedure, said that the case should be dropped. Here
comes the really ugly part: The single biggest reason Ivannikova
garnered all this support is that the man she killed was an ethnic
Armenian. Here is what the Movement Against Illegal Immigration
writes in its announcement of Ivannikova’s award: “This young
beautiful woman should serve as an example of what should be done to
brazen foreigners who attack the honor of a Russian woman.”

About a month ago, I spent several hours interviewing Ivannikova. I
asked her in detail about what she thought of the sort of supporters
she had attracted. She explained that she couldn’t be choosy: Before
these people came along, no one would step up to defend her, and she
had begun to fear that she would actually go to jail. And then she
and her husband added something that has stayed with me ever since.
They explained to me that every political organization has its own
platform. That her supporters just happened to be ultranationalists,
and this was their prerogative. Hey, she said, if feminists had come
out in her support, she would have taken all comers.

This is what I find most frightening about the Ivannikova story.
Every country has a certain quantity of political scum. But what
really measures the health of a nation is the number of people who
are willing not only to tolerate the existence of hateful
ultranationalist organizations, but to go along with them when it
becomes expedient, accept their support and even their money. I am
pretty certain that Ivannikova is just a very ordinary woman who
carelessly got herself into a stupid situation that turned horrific.
But then she became the willing darling of the worst kind of people
there are in this country. What I fear is that many, many people in
this country are just like her — and when hateful ultranationalist
politicians offer them an alternative to their current bleak
existence, they will easily, even happily, go along.

Masha Gessen is a contributing editor at Bolshoi Gorod.