Portraits of Strength 4th Edition: Olga Borisova Craig, Russia (exile)

Olga Borisova Craig was selected to be portrayed in the fourth edition of the “Portraits of Strength” photography series by Index on Censorship (United Kingdom), a member of the Network of Human Rights Houses. 

The portrait of Olga Borisova Craig was taken by Sarah Cresswell  in London, United Kingdom, in July 2026.

Why did you become a human rights defender?

I joined the Russian police when I was eighteen. At the time, I naively believed that if I wanted to help my community, I could do it from inside the system. 

I thought public service meant protecting people. I understood quite quickly that this was not what the system was built for. Its purpose was not to protect the citizen, but to protect the state. 

I saw sexism, misogyny and injustice everywhere, both towards people outside the institution and towards people inside it. For the first year, I thought leaving would mean weakness. I thought it would mean I had failed, or that I had not managed to become strong enough to survive in that world. 

In my second year, I realised something more important: I would not forgive myself if I became like them. I left after a year and a half. After that, I began to see injustice around me with a different clarity. In the same year that I decided to become an activist, Boris Nemtsov, one of the most prominent Russian opponents of the war against Ukraine, was murdered a few hundred metres from the Kremlin.

I began working on human rights campaigns, especially in support of political prisoners. I spoke to their families, helped draw attention to their cases, and looked for new cases of repression that were being ignored. That’s when I understood I didn’t need a uniform to help people.

Today, in Russia, I have been sentenced in absentia to 8 years in prison for my anti-war work and activism.

What is the nature of your work, and what challenges do you face as a woman human rights defender?

If I were in Russia today, I would be in prison. In exile, I believe I have a responsibility to use my voice for people who were not as lucky as I was. Every day there is news of new criminal cases, new arrests and new sentences. The machinery of repression never rests. 

For more than ten years, my work has focused on political prisoners. I have campaigned for them, spoken to their families, helped document cases, and tried to make invisible repression visible. I also know a great deal about what happens to women in Russian penal colonies: forced labour, humiliation, threats, isolation, and the use of children and family ties as instruments of pressure.

As a woman human rights defender, the challenge is not only the state. It is a patriarchal and punitive system that treats independent women as a special threat. Women who speak publicly are often attacked through misogyny, sexualised abuse, threats to their families, and attempts to portray them as immoral, unstable or foreign-controlled.

The hardest part is watching the system quietly destroy people. A person can be tortured, isolated or broken in a prison colony, and the world may never hear their name. That is why documentation matters. It records what happened, names the perpetrators, and refuses to let the state erase its victims.

Of course, many of us hope that one day this documentation will become evidence for justice after the regime changes. But even without that hope, the work must be done. It is our duty to bring light into the places where the state depends on darkness.

What is the current situation with human rights in Russia?

The current situation in Russia is not only authoritarian repression. It is a wartime system of political punishment. The state has turned speech, solidarity, identity and even private moral judgement into potential criminal offences.

To oppose the war can mean years, or decades, in prison.

To read anti-war poetry –  torture and 7 years in prison (Artyom Kamardin).

To sing an anti-war song – 8 years in prison (as in my own case with Pussy Riot).

To express an opinion about the war during a private medical appointment – 5,5 years in prison (Nadezhda Buyanova).

To call the war a war  – 7 years in prison (Alexei Gorinov)

To help Ukrainian civilians – 22 years in prison ( Nadezhda Rossinskaya).

To replace supermarket price tags with anti-war messages – 7 years in prison (Sasha Skochilenko).

To run or work in an LGBTQ+ venue can now mean prison under “extremism” charges. In the Pose bar case in Orenburg, the owner, manager and art director received prison sentences of up to 7 years.

The key trend is the expansion of criminal law into ordinary civic life. Anti-war speech is treated as “fake news” or extremism. LGBTQ+ identity is treated as extremism. Solidarity with Ukrainians is treated as treason or terrorism. Civil society organisations have been destroyed, independent media forced into exile, and the courts turned into instruments of political discipline.

For civil society in other countries, the important point is this: repression in Russia is no longer only about well-known opposition leaders. It now reaches doctors, artists, municipal deputies, volunteers, teachers, journalists, lawyers, LGBTQ+ people and ordinary citizens. The message is deliberate. No one is supposed to feel safe.

What kind of human rights situation in Russia would you like to see in the next 30 years?

My hope is not only for the fall of Putin’s regime, but for the dismantling of the system that made it possible. Putin did not create this culture alone. He inherited and strengthened a society shaped by fear, hierarchy, imperial nostalgia, cynicism and obedience to power.

The first step must be the immediate end of Russia’s war against Ukraine, followed by reparations and accountability. But that will not be enough. 

Russia will also need a serious national reckoning: with the war, with imperial violence, with Soviet repression, and with the political habits that allowed so many people to accept the trade of freedom for the illusion of security.

I would like to see independent courts, free media, real political competition, protected civil society, and a police force that serves the citizens rather than the state. I would like to see prisons opened to public scrutiny, torture investigated, and judges, police officers, investigators and prison officials held responsible for political persecution and abuse.

If Russia gets a chance to change, it must not waste that chance in euphoria. The temptation will be to move on too quickly, to say that everything was the fault of one man, one party or one historical accident. That would be dangerous. We will need to remember the mistakes, name them honestly, and build institutions strong enough to stop them being repeated.

A better Russia would not be a country that simply changes its leaders. It would be a country where human dignity is no longer conditional on loyalty to the state.

Do human rights still matter?

People whose rights are not being violated often forget how fragile freedom is.

But when you have seen lives destroyed by a system that recognises no limits, the question of whether human rights matter almost answers itself. 

Human rights matter because they are not a favour from the state. They are a boundary that power is not supposed to cross. 

They protect the person from the state, but they also protect society from itself: from fear, revenge, hysteria and the temptation to decide that some people do not deserve protection. Rights are meaningful precisely because they apply beyond people we like or agree with. They apply to your neighbour, your colleague, your opponent, and even someone you may personally dislike. That is what stops a society from sliding into totalitarianism, where every protection becomes conditional, and every life depends on political loyalty.

Human rights are also a responsibility. They remind us that we cannot defend our own freedom while accepting the destruction of someone else’s.

What motivates you as a human rights defender?

I do not want to claim that I am “making the world a better place”, but I do this work because, a long time ago, I chose to follow what I believed was right, and although I have lost a great deal because of that choice, it has kept me true to myself, close to extraordinary people, and fully alive.

About Portraits of Strength

Women human rights defenders (WHRDs) work to protect and advance freedoms while facing discrimination and stereotypes about their role and participation in society.

HRHF’s “Portraits of Strength” photography series honours the vital role that women play in defending human rights, and portrays women human rights defenders from across the Network of Human Rights Houses.

The exhibition, now in its fourth edition, shares portraits taken by local women photographers and tells the stories from WHRDs working on a variety of issues, including the documentation of human rights violations and alleged war crimes, rule of law, women’s rights, political prisoners, freedom of expression, and more.

Find out more here.