Maria Baronova

Maria Nikolayevna Baronova (; born April 13, 1984) is a Russian chemist who has worked as a sales manager of lab equipment, journalist, and political spokesperson. She is known as an activist opposing President Vladimir Putin and, in particular, for having organized the Bolotnaya Square protests on May 6, 2012. In February 2019, she joined Russian government television network RT to work on a charity project.

Early life and education Baronova (née Tchebotareva) describes herself as having been born in “Orwell's year,” 1984. The Hez family consisted mostly of politically inactive members who never partook in activism. She was raised by her mother, who was “a theoretical physicist turned actuary.”

During the economic downturn of the 1990s, Baronova's mother was destitute. She told Rolling Stone that her family began growing its own vegetables at their grandparents' home and stored them for winter. Her mother died of breast cancer when Baronova was 18, and six months later Baronova, who at the time was studying chemistry at Moscow University, took a job selling laboratory equipment. Later she worked as a sales manager for a chemical distributor.

It was while she was working for Ponomarev that Baronova grew to oppose Medvedev and became an activist. “I think most of us who came out [and became opposition activists] were tired,” she said. She accused the leading party of operating a corrupt system using kickbacks and bribes that enriched a few at the expense of the country as a whole. For a time she was one of the most well-known protesters in Moscow. State guardianship agents threatened to take away her son. In June 2012, after being formally charged with inciting a riot, she told Masha Gessen that she had been busy “reassuring people,” explaining that it was “like when a loved one dies: you have to let everyone know that things on the inside are not quite as horrible as they seem from the outside.”

Later developments Baronova told Time magazine in June 2012 that "at a certain point, an activist is more useful to the cause from behind bars.... So if it's my time to go, I'll go." In August 2012, Baronova accused the police of provoking the violence at Bolotnaya Square, and said that Putin was out for vengeance. "We spoiled his holiday and now he is spoiling our lives", she said. In an interview after her amnesty, she expressed hostility toward some of her fellow activists and suggested sarcastically that perhaps “the best place to live” was the planet Mars. “On the other hand, maybe because of this insanity, things will be reformed in the next 20 years, who knows.” Shortly thereafter, Baronova wrote an article, entitled “No One Has Done More for Ukrainian Nationalism than Vladimir Putin,” that appeared in The New Republics issue of March 3, 2014. In the article, Baronova described the then-ongoing war in Crimea as “the strangest war I've seen in my 30 years,” and dubbed it Phoney War 2.0, a reference to the so-called “Phoney War” from September 3, 1939, to May 10, 1940. She added that while Putin was being compared widely to Hitler, he was in fact “closer to Stalin.”

In 2016, she unsuccessfully ran as a candidate for Duma. She was not supported by a registered political party, but rather by the Open Russia organization.

In February 2019, she joined Russian government television network RT to work on a charity project called "DDBM". In 2024, she blamed Ukrainians for the war, berating them for "shitting on the helping hand held out by anti-war Russians when Putin started retaliating against your shit and when your bastard Azov gang started taking hostages."

Reception Several publications, including The New Republic and Rolling Stone magazine, have praised her activist work and fortitude in supporting Russia's opposition movement.