On February 12, 1999, Yura Diversant died. He was a Soviet and later Russian hippie, artist, and anti-war activist. In the 1980s, he published the samizdat magazine Svoboda and distributed leaflets in Moscow calling for the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan. His daughter, filmmaker Sima Truevtseva, barely knew her father, yet now, while living in Germany and working with Animators Against War, says she feels a deep inner connection to him.
That connection became the basis of her short animated documentary We Will Be Together, shown in Yerevan as part of a program from the Rudnik festival school. In the film, Sima reconstructs her father’s image through his photographs and diaries. She says that the more she read his writings, the more clearly she understood that she was “not just his child” but truly “some part of him.”
Yura Diversant entered the Moscow hippie scene in the late 1970s. Historian Irina Gordeeva says he was not only a colorful subcultural figure but also a civic activist. After the June 1, 1983 action in Tsaritsyno, where leaflets were handed out against the death penalty and the war in Afghanistan, he was again sent for compulsory psychiatric treatment. He was released only in 1987.
The diaries preserved by Sima include drawings, poems, pacifist notes, and reflections on war. In one text, Diversant asked why every war brings such terrible losses; in another, he wrote that people know not how to fight, but how to die. Between 1988 and 1991, he published the journal Svoboda; according to the researcher, at least 12 issues appeared, each with a print run of no more than 30 copies.
Sima says that as a child she resented her father for his early death and addiction, but later came to accept him as he was. In her account, on the day he died he planned to visit his daughter with gifts, earned some money unloading a barge, and then lost consciousness after likely taking drugs. Doctors at the hospital could only pronounce him dead.
On December 7, 2022, Sima left Russia, taking her father’s diaries with her. She says she emigrated because the space for life and work was narrowing and open anti-war activity had become dangerous. She now works with like-minded colleagues and Memorial on animated projects about political prisoners. In her view, what her father left behind was not material wealth but a moral inheritance: a sense of pain, loneliness, and at the same time a desire to change something.