First came the blackmail and death threats to secure cooperation, then came a series of tasks, each more sinister than the last: to inform on fellow activists, to elicit personal information from protest-minded artists and – eventually – to help with a plot to kidnap and murder a Kremlin enemy. That is how Rita Flores, a 29-year-old Russian artist, activist and former member of the Pussy Riot collective, described her recruitment and three-year handling by officers from Russia’s FSB security service, a cooperation she only broke when she fled the country last month. Flores made details of her collaboration public in a video discussion with her lawyer, Dmitry Zakhvatov, published just days after she left Russia at the end of August.
She explained she was coming clean in the hope that others in a similar situation might feel emboldened to break their ties with the FSB. Now, in her first media interview since leaving Russia, she gave further detail on how she was recruited and run by the FSB. All this time I was dreaming about getting out and being able to talk about it all,” she said.
The Guardian could not corroborate the details of Flores’s account, but there have been numerous cases of the FSB infiltrating opposition groups over the past few years. Flores, also known as Margarita Konovalova, has been associated with Pussy Riot since 2020, when she was detained after a performance near the Kremlin. She had served several short stints in jail and been subjected to surveillance and house searches on numerous occasions, which intensified after the domestic crackdown that followed the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
She was recruited after one of these police searches in February 2023, when two men stayed behind and introduced themselves as FSB officers, she said. They threatened to open a criminal case, under wartime censorship laws, over an Instagram post she had made criticising Russian killings in Ukraine. They also suggested they could arrange for her mother to be killed if she did not sign cooperation papers.
I believed they could do everything they said they would … My fear was too great. I was so worried for my family and also for myself,” she said. As a reward for signing, she was given a one-off cash payment of 30,000 or 40,000 roubles (£266 or £355), she said.
Her first tasks were to gather information about other opposition-minded artists in the same circles as her and report back to the FSB. The two FSB officers who recruited her became her regular handlers, she said, organising frequent meetings and largely sticking to a classic good-cop, bad-cop routine. She saw the senior officer only occasionally, a crude man in his late forties who introduced himself by a series of different names.
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