Egor Cherniuk doesn’t always feel like a liberal—even though he’s so passionate about liberalism that he’s been to prison on its behalf.
“By Russian standards, I’m as lib as one can get,” says the 28-year-old. “I’m against the war. I’m pro-Western values.”
He was also the youngest campaign manager for the face of Russia’s democracy movement, Alexei Navalny, whose fight against Vladimir Putin’s dictatorship ended only when he died in a gulag in 2024.
But in the context of Brooklyn, where Cherniuk has lived since 2025, he doesn’t identify with the tear-it-all-down, fuck-America libs.
“Russian liberalism is a more classic liberalism; we care about building institutions that allow for freedom to thrive in a society,” he explains. “And so, as an activist, to bicker about pronouns when you don’t have a free press or when you don’t even have independent courts sounds so fucking ridiculous.”
