Her feet stuck in muddy soil on a pitch black October night, Marina Ovsyannikova stopped in despair. For four hours, she and her 11-year-old daughter had been trudging through plowed fields leading to Russia’s border, trying to escape the country.
With no phone signal, they had been navigating by the stars, diving to the ground when the headlights of border guards’ cars approached. They were lost.
“It was real hell,” Ms. Ovsyannikova said, recalling how she sat down in the mud and moaned, “Take me back to Moscow. I’d rather go to jail.”
And prison was a very real possibility for her if she did return.
Her antiwar protest a few months earlier had rattled the Kremlin and earned headlines around the world. In March of 2022, just a few weeks after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had begun, she stormed a live broadcast of Russia’s most-watched TV news program, holding up a sign reading: “They’re lying to you.”
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She was able to access the program’s live studio because Ms. Ovsyannikova herself had long been a cog in Russia’s propaganda machine. For two decades, she had worked as a journalist at Channel 1, a state-run television station whose flagship news program parrots the Kremlin’s views.
“I was well aware that we were creating a parallel reality,” Ms. Ovsyannikova, 44, said of her time spent working for state media. “The war simply became a point of no return. It was no longer possible to keep quiet.”
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Immediately after her extraordinary protest, Ms. Ovsyannikova was detained, interrogated, fined and then later, after another protest, placed under house arrest.
Convinced both that she was innocent of any crime and that she had no future in Russia, she engineered her escape: She cut off her electronic monitor, swapped cars six times on her way to the border, then went the final distance by foot, finally sneaking under a barbed-wire border fence, before ultimately making her way to France, where she now lives in exile.
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The roots of Ms. Ovsyannikova’s protest can be found in her childhood, which gave her both affection for Ukraine and firsthand experience of the horrors of war.
As refugees, Ms. Ovsyannikova and her mother relocated to the outskirts of Krasnodar, in southern Russia. After studying journalism in college and working as a regional TV anchor, Ms. Ovsyannikova joined Channel 1 in Moscow in 2002. Her job: monitoring Western broadcasts to cherry-pick news that showed the West in a bad light to air on the network’s shows.
“In the minds of Russians, there had to be an image that all Americans were L.G.B.T supporters who killed Black people and abused adopted children from Russia,” she writes in “Between Good and Evil,” an autobiography to be released in the United States this month.
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Still, despite her insider’s knowledge of — and degree of complicity in — the network’s propaganda role, Ms. Ovsyannikova stayed at Channel 1, a choice, she said in a video posted after her protest, of which she was now “deeply ashamed.”
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To justify her decision, she said there was nowhere else for a journalist to go in a country with little to no independent press. Besides, her well-paid job allowed her to raise her two children in a gated neighborhood outside Moscow.
When Russia invaded Ukraine last year, the state propaganda apparatus went into full swing, dismissing civilian casualties and portraying the attack as a fight against neo-Nazis.
But on her screens, Ms. Ovsyannikova saw clips from Western media showing villages flattened by Russian strikes and streams of desperate Ukrainian refugees, reminding her of her childhood in Chechnya.
This was the tipping point that compelled her to surrender her privileges for what she knew would be the persecuted life of a Russian protester.
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With no phone signal, they had been navigating by the stars, diving to the ground when the headlights of border guards’ cars approached. They were lost.
“It was real hell,” Ms. Ovsyannikova said, recalling how she sat down in the mud and moaned, “Take me back to Moscow. I’d rather go to jail.”
And prison was a very real possibility for her if she did return.
Her antiwar protest a few months earlier had rattled the Kremlin and earned headlines around the world. In March of 2022, just a few weeks after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had begun, she stormed a live broadcast of Russia’s most-watched TV news program, holding up a sign reading: “They’re lying to you.”
Story continues below advertisement
Continue reading the main story
She was able to access the program’s live studio because Ms. Ovsyannikova herself had long been a cog in Russia’s propaganda machine. For two decades, she had worked as a journalist at Channel 1, a state-run television station whose flagship news program parrots the Kremlin’s views.
“I was well aware that we were creating a parallel reality,” Ms. Ovsyannikova, 44, said of her time spent working for state media. “The war simply became a point of no return. It was no longer possible to keep quiet.”
Image
Immediately after her extraordinary protest, Ms. Ovsyannikova was detained, interrogated, fined and then later, after another protest, placed under house arrest.
Convinced both that she was innocent of any crime and that she had no future in Russia, she engineered her escape: She cut off her electronic monitor, swapped cars six times on her way to the border, then went the final distance by foot, finally sneaking under a barbed-wire border fence, before ultimately making her way to France, where she now lives in exile.
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Continue reading the main story
The roots of Ms. Ovsyannikova’s protest can be found in her childhood, which gave her both affection for Ukraine and firsthand experience of the horrors of war.
She was born in Odesa, Ukraine, to a Russian mother and a Ukrainian father who died when she was a baby. She grew up in Chechnya, where her mother, a chemical engineer, worked at an oil refinery. But she had to flee that home when Russian soldiers crushed the breakaway region in the mid-1990s, during a violent conflict that imbued her, she said, with a hatred of war.As refugees, Ms. Ovsyannikova and her mother relocated to the outskirts of Krasnodar, in southern Russia. After studying journalism in college and working as a regional TV anchor, Ms. Ovsyannikova joined Channel 1 in Moscow in 2002. Her job: monitoring Western broadcasts to cherry-pick news that showed the West in a bad light to air on the network’s shows.
“In the minds of Russians, there had to be an image that all Americans were L.G.B.T supporters who killed Black people and abused adopted children from Russia,” she writes in “Between Good and Evil,” an autobiography to be released in the United States this month.
Image
Still, despite her insider’s knowledge of — and degree of complicity in — the network’s propaganda role, Ms. Ovsyannikova stayed at Channel 1, a choice, she said in a video posted after her protest, of which she was now “deeply ashamed.”
Story continues below advertisement
Continue reading the main story
To justify her decision, she said there was nowhere else for a journalist to go in a country with little to no independent press. Besides, her well-paid job allowed her to raise her two children in a gated neighborhood outside Moscow.
When Russia invaded Ukraine last year, the state propaganda apparatus went into full swing, dismissing civilian casualties and portraying the attack as a fight against neo-Nazis.
But on her screens, Ms. Ovsyannikova saw clips from Western media showing villages flattened by Russian strikes and streams of desperate Ukrainian refugees, reminding her of her childhood in Chechnya.
This was the tipping point that compelled her to surrender her privileges for what she knew would be the persecuted life of a Russian protester.
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Famed Antiwar Protester Was Once Cog in Russia’s Propaganda Machine
For 20 years, Marina Ovsyannikova worked for Russian state TV. What compelled her, shortly after Ukraine was invaded, to storm a live broadcast and tell viewers they were being lied to?
