His friend, director Tatiana Frolova, who lives in France, told Mediazona that 53-year-old Andrei Akuzhin hanged himself in pre-trial detention center 2 in Komsomolsk-on-Amur, Khabarovsk region.
According to her, Akozin was arrested on April 2 over his comment last year. The day before his arrest, he stopped communicating. Before that, she and Frolova corresponded frequently, including discussing the artist’s possible departure from Russia.
According to his friend, Akozin deleted the correspondence after every conversation with her, but he did not delete the April Fools’ correspondence. In his letters, he repeated the phrase several times that “the only free protest today is suicide.”
Mediazona was unable to find the artist’s arrest card on the websites of the Komsomolsk-on-Amur courts. What exactly he was accused of is unknown. According to his girlfriend, Akozin did not have a lawyer.
On April 7, Akuzin turned 53 years old. The next day, he committed suicide in a prison cell, as Frolova told the artist’s acquaintances in Komsomolsk-on-Amur. To the artist’s list of terrorists and extremists He added Already after his death, on April 10, Mediazona noticed.
“He’s not a terrorist, it’s just funny, he doesn’t want to remain silent – they took him officially because of some sort of like or response to some post,” Frolova said.
Andrei Akuzin is known in Komsomolsk-on-Amur as an artist. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, a personal exhibition of his works was held in the city. He later worked as a production designer at a dramatic theater and opened a digital printing company.
Akuzin can be found in the built-in databases of “opponents”. There are no political statements on his personal Instagram account, except for a post dating back to July 2022. He then posted a video of an orchestra playing a military march in Komsomolsk-on-Amur Square, and signed the video “No to war.”
One of the Telegraph bots, which analyzes the user’s public comments, indicates that Akuzin was interested in “protest” and the “Artpodgotovka” movement, banned in Russia.