Margarita Konovalova, who went by the alias Rita Flores as a member of the Russian punk feminist band and anti-Putin artist collective Pussy Riot, recently claimed that she was coerced into spying on other dissident artists for the last three years by the Russian national security service (FSB) after they threatened her and her family’s lives.
Having fled Russia with the help of her lawyer earlier this month, Konovalova spoke freely about her experience for the first time in an exclusive interview with an independent news outlet for dissident Russian journalists called Port Media. She explained that after an FSB officer raided her apartment in February 2023, she was detained and threatened into cooperating.
“It was just like in a movie: they sat me down at the table, I couldn’t move, I couldn’t look away,” Konovalova recounted in her interview. “They started recruiting me: they threatened me in every way, mocked me, said unpleasant things, threatened to kill my family, and said I’d never be able to prove who killed my mother.”
The artist and activist said she was also threatened with criminal prosecution over social media posts criticizing the fatalities during the Battle of Bucha — part of the Russian offensive in Kyiv in 2022. She recounted signing a non-disclosure agreement and additional paperwork outlining her cooperation with the FSB, after which she was reportedly assigned to research and write profiles on contemporary artists for the security service. She also claimed that the FSB seized all of her documents, except her Russian internal passport.
