"I never liked him, as I said. From the very beginning, I didn’t find anything likable about him — neither his Chekist background, the fact that he came out of the KGB, nor his remarks about Russians in Tatarstan, which clearly carried strange and suspicious motives. I was outraged when, during the 2002 national census, he campaigned to divide the Tatar ethnic group into multiple sub-ethnicities. He did it to weaken the Tatars, so they would no longer be the second-largest nation in Russia, but instead fragmented into many small ethnic groups. Of course, I also disapproved of what he did in Chechnya. I vividly remember how my parents listened to Radio Free Europe during the First Chechen War — we constantly had the radio on at home. And when the Second Chechen War began, I immediately suspected who was really behind the apartment bombings in Moscow that served as a pretext for the military operation. His behavior during the Kursk submarine disaster and the Nord-Ost hostage crisis only confirmed it. Everything about him suggested that, on one hand, he was a small, insignificant man — but on the other, extremely dangerous. And every new development only reinforced that idea. When he signed the Dima Yakovlev Law, I realized he utterly lacked empathy and compassion. He is a true cannibal. With every passing year, it became increasingly clear that he was a usurper — especially after he swapped places with Medvedev at the end of 2011 and it was announced that Putin would once again become president. He had seized power, and that fact has been confirmed many times — and will be confirmed again in the future. But when he launched the war in Ukraine, everything about this man became perfectly clear to me. There wasn’t even a shadow of a doubt: he is a criminal, a war criminal. I hated him then, and I hate him now. I remember those days in February 2022, when everyone was wondering whether there would be a war, and I watched in horror his Security Council meeting, his monstrous speeches, his face twisted in anger. There is nothing neutral I can say about this man."
Translated by automatic translator (DeepL)
"Anyway, I have a husband who took up the subject and made a film on the subject, which was very difficult. He tried to explain in it the background, the reasons and the motives that moved people at that time of the Second World War. Why did they act this way and not another way? The film came to the idea that we need to open the archives because many of these people are still being declared traitors. There was also a grandfather, he was 94-95 years old, who was in Idel-Ural and then was arrested, of course, in the Gulag. He died shortly after filming - we managed to film the grandfather. It's clear that the grandfather's life was a nightmare, and every May 9 he didn't know where to go - the veterans didn't consider him one of their own. The general idea was to open up the KGB archives and expose these dark, horrific aspects of history and show. One of the heroes of the film was a grandfather, who was 94-95 years old at the time of filming. He served in the "Idel-Ural" legion and then, like many others, ended up in the Gulag. We managed to record his story - he died shortly after filming. His fate was tragic: every May 9 he did not know where to rank, because the veterans did not consider him their own.
The film raised questions: why did people come over to the side of the Germans? Why did they accept their offers? Why did some of them fight and others refuse? What were their fates after the war? Why were they subjected to repression? All this is still hidden under "secret" and "keep forever". Rustam Minnichanov himself, who was in Moscow at the time, came to present the film to us. It was in 2015."
Translated by automatic translator (DeepL)
"This is the mid- to late 1990s - a time when you could talk about everything: the corruption of officials, criticise the leadership of the republic and even Putin himself. I remember the days when he took office, came to Kazan, and made a very peculiar statement: 'A Russian in Tatarstan is like a Chechen in Moscow.' This was during the time when the second Chechen campaign was either still ongoing or had just ended, and Chechens in Moscow were viewed as people of the 'tenth category.' They were harassed on the streets, beaten, openly hated — there was a strong anti-Chechen atmosphere in society. But comparing the situation of Russians in Tatarstan to that of Chechens in Moscow was completely indefensible. Russians and Tatars had lived side by side for decades, and at worst, it came down to domestic quarrels or xenophobic remarks like 'Tatar scum' or advice such as 'Don’t marry a Russian.' But to be beaten up just for being Russian — that simply couldn’t happen, because in Tatarstan the population was always roughly equal: 50 percent Russians, 50 percent Tatars. And I remember making a rather biting report about how Putin was completely wrong."
Farida Kurbangaleeva is a Russian journalist, television presenter and teacher known for her work on Russian federal television and her active civic stance. She was born on August 27, 1979 in Kazan to a family of Tatar intellectuals. In the 1990s, at the time of perestroika and the collapse of the USSR, the family experienced hardship - her parents lost their jobs and Farida struggled with poverty, which affected her view of the world. She graduated from the Faculty of Journalism, Sociology and Psychology at Kazan State University and became a special correspondent for the Tatarstan State Television and Radio Company. In 2007, Farida became a presenter of the Vesti programme on Rossiya 1 TV channel and moved to Moscow with her family. Since 2014, after the annexation of Crimea, she began to experience internal conflict due to increased propaganda and militarization in the media. In 2017, she left television because she did not want to support state policy. Since 2018, she has worked as a presenter of Novoje vremja on Radio Liberty in the Czech Republic. She openly criticized Vladimir Putin’s policies, calling him a criminal and usurper of power, actively opposed the war in Ukraine and believed that Russia should be defeated in this conflict. She was married to documentary film director Denis Krasilnikov and has two daughters, Sofia and Adéla.
