Russian opposition: Interview with Vladimir Kara-Murza, December 2021
This is a very long-read interview which answers many questions about Russia, chekist regime, Russian opposition figures, protests's activity and why Alexey Navalny has returned to the country
In the following interview are mentioned:
Vladimir Bukovsky, Andrey Sacharov, Natalia Gorbanevskaya, Yuri Shchekochikhin, Anna Polikovskaya, Alexey Navalny, Boris Nemtsov and dissident samizdat The Chronicle of Current Events, and others.
which are described in other articles of Freedom Files’s blog. The list with titles you can find at the end of this article.
Today, September 7, is the birthday of Vladimir Kara-Murza.
Now Vladimir is in prison in Russia, he was convicted under three articles of the Criminal Code:
207.3 is an article about the so-called discrediting of the armed forces and the alleged dissemination of deliberately false information about the Russian army (new law introduced after the invasion in Ucraine 24.02.2022, so called military censorship).
284 of the Criminal Code for alleged participation in the activities of an organization deemed undesirable, and in
in October 2022, Kara-Murza was charged under article 275 - high treason.
Few days back he was moved in another prison. From the last news it looks like he is in transition to Omsk.
Prologue
In the interview, Vladimir mentions the events of December 2011. Those were the mass protests for "Honest elections" that took place throughout the country and which were provoked by the indignant reaction of Russian citizens to massive fraud at polling stations.
Precisely, it concerns the demonstration scheduled for 10 December 2011. The venue for the demonstrations should have been in Revolution Square (the request sent by the organizers to the Municipality indicated that place), but following an agreement with the Kremlin by some members of the Russian opposition, the venue was moved to Bolotnaya Square, where the protesters found themselves in a mousetrap....
On the side of the Kremlin were Moscow police chief Vladimir Kolokoltsev, and Moscow deputy mayor Alexander Gorbenko which instructed Alexei Venediktov (Gazprom-sponsored radio station ECHO, which was a fence for the liberal opposition, to show everyone the West as a "test of democracy and freedom of speech" to continue to stay in power and trade in stolen natural resources from the people) to contact Boris Nemtsov to urgently coordinate the tactics of changing the venue of the rally. At the same time opposition politician Vladimir Ryzhkov and activist and journalist Sergey Parkhomenko made deals with the head of the presidential administration Alexey Gromov. After reaching an agreement with the Kremlin, the opposition-traitors contacted Ilya Klishin, the activist in charge of managing the protest pages on social media and he had changed the location.
None of the people named above were the organizers of this December 10 meeting. Meeting was planned and organized by two women Nadezhda Mitiushkina and Anastasia Udaltsova who did not participate in the negotiations and did not know anything about what was happening.
After the agreements with the Kremlin, several impostors merged in the protests of the opposition, "controlled and agreed opposition": father and son Gennady and Dmitry Gudkov ("opposition politicians" - deputies of the State Duma (photo twitter)), Ksenia Sobchak, Ilya Ponomarev, Sergey Mironov, Alexey Kudrin and Mikhail Kasyanov. Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar had written a propaganda book of these events “All the Kremlin’s men” (Вся кремлевская рать) which tells the lies and falsified events. Why he did this remains unclear. But it wouldn't be the first time for him.
In the following interview, Vladimir Kara-Murza quotes the words explaining this decision of Boris Nemtsov as "the time has not come yet." Three years and a few months after those events, Boris will be killed and the chekist regime of the Kremlin will introduce extraordinary measures of repressive pressure on civil society. Video where Boris Nemtsov explains why he made the agreements with the Kremlin (twitter).
More than 500 people were arrested during "Honest Elections" demonstrations.
Dozens received prison sentences. Alexei Navalny was in prison at that time and did not take part in those events.
Irine Kuklina
07.09.2023
The following is a partial translation of the interview :
"Середина 20-х будет интересным временем". Владимир Кара-Мурза о настоящем и будущем оппозиции в России
| Nikolay Neliubin | Noviy Prospekt | 14.12.2021 |
Leggere la traduzione in italiano: L'opposizione russa: L'intervista con Vladimir Kara-Murza, dicembre 2021
"The mid-20s will be an interesting time." Vladimir Kara-Murza on the present and future of the opposition in Russia
Politician who personally was fighting for sanctions for those who violate human rights in Russia; a man who was twice poisoned with the same poison as Alexei Navalny and miraculously survived both times; a historian who is sure that everything that is yet to happen to Russia has already happened in the past; ally of the murdered Boris Nemtsov, who is sure that the former deputy prime minister and Nizhny Novgorod governor would inevitably become the president of the country if he were alive, Vladimir Kara-Murza (recognized as an individual foreign agent) visited St. Petersburg and gave a long interview to Novy Prospekt about about their struggle, about the current authorities in the Russian Federation and about those who are watching what is happening with our country here and now.
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— vladimir putin has been in power for 22 years. There is no such area of his activities that the world would not know about.
We probably still remember how he came to power? Explosions of houses, the war in Chechnya.
On February 27, 2015, in the center of Moscow opposite the Kremlin, the leader of the Russian opposition, Boris Efimovich Nemtsov, was shot in the back - the most notorious political assassination in modern Russia. To this day, the organizers and customers remain in complete impunity, under the full protection of the highest officials of the Russian Federation.
— Just the other day we were watching your film about Boris Efimovich...
— The film is not about death, but about life. This film is the most difficult thing I have done in my life, because Boris was not only a colleague and comrade, he was my close friend, he is the godfather of my youngest daughter. Nothing was harder than making a film about a close friend who was murdered. But it was important for me to show the real Boris Nemtsov, and not the caricature image that the Kremlin propaganda blinded and continues to mold.
— We met in 2007 at the "March of Dissent" here in St. Petersburg.
— He was then the first time he was detained at the protests, yes.
— He was detained, like other "untouchable" candidates for the State Duma, for example, Nikita Belykh, when it became known that Leonid Gozman (recognized as an individual foreign agent) had been detained. Then his arm was broken...
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As for the poisonings, thanks to a series of brilliant investigations by journalists from Bellingcat and The Insider, we recognized specific people with specific names.
You know, sometimes it's good to take a step back. We are getting used to the reality in which we exist. Take a step back and say out loud that in a European country in the 21st century there is a group of professional killers whose task is the physical elimination of political opponents. This is done in the old proven KGB way. In a way that has been used for decades since the beginning of the Soviet regime. Everyone remembers the infamous Mairanovsky laboratory, everyone remembers the case of Georgy Markov, who was pricked with an umbrella.
Under the current government, this was simply put on stream, starting with Yuri Shchekochikhin. Then the poisoning of Politkovskaya in 2004, when she went to Beslan, Alexander Litvinenko, Viktor Yushchenko. The list could go on and on. And now, thanks to brilliant journalistic investigations, we learned the names, saw photographs: the second service of the FSB for the protection of the constitutional order and the NII-2 FSB, the institute of criminalistics. Orwellian!
Remember what George Orwell did? The Ministry of Truth, which was engaged in propaganda. The Ministry of Peace, which dealt with the war. Here we have in Russia today as well.
This is a whole series of assassination attempts, including successful ones, as, for example, with regional activists and Nikita Isaev. The target of this death squadron was Alexey Navalny, Dmitry Bykov, twice your obedient servant. And that's just what we see. How many people do we not know about? How many of them died due to suddenly low blood sugar, or "drinking too much moonshine", drinking the wrong pills, from Lyell's syndrome ... I do not invent, I name the "reasons" that State propaganda has justified and explained strange deaths or illnesses all these years . And when Boris Nemtsov was shot by an acting officer of the internal troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation, everything became clear to everyone at once. It took a few more years for the OSCE report to be published, but it was clear right away. And who is the end customer, it became clear immediately.
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Everyone was poisoned for different reasons. I was hounded for my work under the “Magnitsky law” (a series of legislative initiatives by a number of foreign states, which led to personal sanctions against Russian citizens involved in human rights violations and, in particular, the death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in the Matrosskaya Tishina pre-trial detention center in 2009. - Note "NP").
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For many years, the people who are in power in our country have been accustomed to stealing in Russia, but hiding and spending the stolen goods in the West.
And this is monstrous hypocrisy on their part, but it is also complicity on the part of those Western countries, banks, financial institutions, and so on, which condone this import of kleptocracy and corruption.
Not my phrase, but I fully agree that the biggest export of the Putin regime to the West is not the export of oil and gas, but the export of corruption.
But in order to export corruption somewhere, someone there must want to accept it.
About the very “Magnitsky laws” that I worked on (and we started this work together with Boris Nemtsov in 2010): everyone laughed at them and us, saying that interests [pro-putin] were too strong, nothing would work. Years later, we are sitting in St. Petersburg and we can state that 34 states and jurisdictions around the world have this law and have imposed such sanctions. This is about the possible and the impossible.
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— So after all, it is common for us to believe that sanctions do not work. What kind of feedback do you have from those involved in the sanctions lists?
— I received this feedback twice (Vladimir Kara-Murza, recognized as an individual foreign agent, was first poisoned by an unknown substance in 2015, he lost the ability to move and spent several weeks in a coma before he was able to be transported to the USA for treatment; in 2017 In 2005, he was poisoned again with similar symptoms, in both cases, Denis Protsenko was treated in Russia. -NP)
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Apparently, therefore, in the first hours after his inauguration on May 7, 2012, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin signed an instruction to the Foreign Ministry with a list of main tasks. So, one of the first places was "prevention of the adoption of the Magnitsky law." As it says, "US extraterritorial sanctions." Is it because they don't care so much? In 2016, they sent Kremlin emissaries to Trump. The infamous meeting at Trump Tower in New York. Perhaps that is why there was such a hysteria then?
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The late Boris Efimovich Nemtsov always said that the main problem with those people who are in power in Russia is not in their political views, but in their human ones. They don't follow the commandments, you understand? With all their hypocritical ostentatious Christianity. In fact, when the current government tries to pretend that they are believers, they stand with candles in front of the cameras ... I also try to be a Christian. And, as far as I remember, do not kill, do not steal - this is in the commandments.
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Many years ago, Vladimir Konstantinovich Bukovsky wrote that the main problem with Western politicians is that for so many of them the opportunity to fry bacon in the morning on Soviet gas is much more important than human rights. Unfortunately, now change the word "Soviet" to "Russian".
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It is very important that Alexei Navalny received the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, which is awarded by the European Parliament, this year. This is a very important symbol that the EU sees what is really happening in our country.
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And there are different hypostases. It is unacceptable for an opposition politician to make any contacts with the current regime, I would never go. But, thank God, they don't call me. I take it as a kind of confession
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We know even from Soviet history, especially from recent history, that such direct intervention can save people, can at least alleviate conditions. And the same applies to conversations at the international level. I devote a significant part of my work to international affairs. In addition to the sanctions under the Magnitsky law, I deal a lot with the topic of Russian political prisoners. According to the latest data from Memorial (a human rights center that maintains a list of political prisoners, was included in the register of NGOs acting as foreign agents, then liquidated by a court decision), there are 426 political prisoners in Russia. And this is an underestimate, because this is only what human rights activists have studied. And these are only those people who fall under the accepted international criteria of a political prisoner.
Let me remind you that these are the criteria adopted by the OSCE and the Council of Europe, and they apply to our country. Russia is a member of both the Council of Europe and the OSCE. And only according to these very conservative criteria - more than 400 people.
This is twice as much as it was in the later years of Soviet power.
In 1987, at the Vienna meeting of the CSCE (as it was then called the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe), the Soviet Foreign Ministry acknowledged the presence of 200 political prisoners. The number, of course, was underestimated, but nevertheless now it is already twice as much.
It is very important to talk about these people: talk about Alexei Navalny, talk about Andrei Pivovarov, who faces 6 years in prison for posts on Facebook (reference on the Memorial website. - Approx. "NP" ). Andrei is my colleague, my friend.
Now this story has generally acquired new colors, after the Serbian history. It is very important to talk about Alexey Pichugin, who has been in prison for nineteen years. The last hostage of the Yukos case, he has already won two cases in the ECHR against the Russian authorities. The Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe called repeatedly for his release. Alexei is still in prison. It is important to talk about Yuri Dmitriev - a historian who returned the names of thousands of people. Thousands of people lying in Sandarmokh and Krasny Bor. He returned to their relatives the opportunity to put flowers and light a candle on the grave of a loved one.
It is important to speak and not forget about these people. We know from Soviet history how Vladimir Bukovsky, Alexander Ginzburg, Anatoly Sharansky or Yuri Orlov and other prisoners of conscience of the Soviet era were released thanks to the personal intervention, personal intercession of Western leaders. It is important to speak and not forget about these people. And this also applies to modern times.
They said the same thing about Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Oleg Sentsov that they are now talking about Alexei Navalny: they will be in prison while Putin is in the Kremlin. Merkel stood up for the first, Macron for the second. It works. The fact that a special rapporteur on political prisoners in the Russian Federation is now working in the Council of Europe, in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, shows that this problem exists at the official level. Sunna Evarsdottir from Iceland is due to prepare a report by the summer of 2022 and submit it to the Assembly.
Intercession is very important. It saves lives in the truest sense of the word.
If you look at the list of "Memorial", then many of them have invented crimes. And this is also the reality of Vladimir Putin's Russia, like the death squads: 6 years in prison for posts. Andrey Pivovarov here, in St. Petersburg, has a five-year-old son.
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And Andrei is in prison because he criticized Vyacheslav Makarov (Chairman of the Legislative Assembly of St. Petersburg in 2011-2021, State Duma deputy since 2021. - Approx. "NP"), the Federal Security Service and amendments to the Constitution on Facebook. It's right there in the indictment, you know?
I know that Boris Vishnevsky and other people in St. Petersburg are trying to ensure that Andrei's case is considered in St. Petersburg. Boris wrote another guarantee for Andrey, another demand to transfer the case from Krasnodar. Andrey has nothing to do with Krasnodar from the word at all. It is clear that he was put there in order to avoid public attention as much as possible. They don't let people in, they don't let journalists in.
So just the other day it became known, it was published by the Serbian newspaper Danas [red. - ARCHIVAL LINK - Vulin i Patrušev: Srbija i Rusija zajedno protiv obojenih revolucija - https://www.danas.rs/vesti/politika/vulin-i-patrusev-srbija-i-rusija-zajedno-protiv-obojenih-revolucija/], that in mid-May, the head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Serbia, Alexander Vulin, came to Moscow, where he personally handed over the transcripts of the tapped conversations of the participants of the seminar for Russian municipal deputies in Belgrade into the hands of Secretary of the Security Council Nikolai Platonovich Patrushev, which Andrey Pivovarov and I held in early May.
In March, we tried to hold a forum of municipal deputies in Moscow.
— This is when everyone was arrested?
— Yes. 300 people were detained - the whole hall, every one. We then took people to Belgrade, simply because you can’t go anywhere, everything is closed, vaccines are not recognized, but you can go to Serbia. For several days there were lectures on the municipal economy, on the legal support of the election campaign, on election observation, on work in social networks. I hope that Nikolai Platonovich Patrushev will be interested to know all this.
An amazing timeline: we hold a seminar with Andrey in early May; the Serbian state security is listening in on this whole thing; in mid-May, Vulin rushes to Moscow, transmits transcripts; 2 weeks later Andrey is removed from the board of the Polish plane here at Pulkovo.
— Do you want to say that for Pivovarov's problems you should say thanks to the little brothers?
— These are Kremlin brothers, not Russian brothers. Filmed in Belarusian style from a Polish plane.
— Why can one fly away even from house arrest, while others can't?
— One of the main characteristics of the current government is paranoia. And do not forget that the current government of Serbia is in the past the associates of Mr. Milosevic (the president of Serbia in 1989-1997, the president of Yugoslavia in 1998-2000, died in 2006 at the age of 64 in The Hague, while under an international tribunal. - Note . "NP"), a dictator who was overthrown in the first color revolution. And last week, this Serbian minister came again, talked to Patrushev. Families, probably, are friends ... They announced the creation of a "working group to combat color revolutions" - I quote.
Our government generally has a paranoid fear of street protests. We all remember how they got scared 10 years ago when Bolotnaya began just these days. In the current Serbian government, this is generally a birth trauma. Both the current President of Serbia Vučić and the current Interior Minister Vulin are all former associates of Milosevic.
Milosevic was overthrown in a democratic revolution in 2000. He was sent to The Hague. He ended his days in a cell in the Dutch prison Scheveningen. I will add as a historian: the patterns have long been understood and known. When sufficient potential is accumulated in a society to resist dictatorship, totalitarianism, no wiretaps, working groups, cooperation in the field of security, as they call it, will help. Someone, but the current Serbian authorities should be well aware of this. It is important that this applies not only to Serbia, but also to Russia, and in general to all countries. It's fun to watch and listen to. And, of course, it is amazing that the seminar for municipal deputies is being discussed at the level of heads of special services.
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— By the way, after all, there are ordinary people who actually think that you are working with the West to harm them, and not those who kill and persecute people for views that are wrong for the authorities. “He is against ours, which means he is working against us.”
— This is the line of official propaganda, and it does not extend to the minds of normal people. This is one of the key problems for the regime. What is the important point about the sanctions under the "Magnitsky law" - these are sanctions not against the country, but against specific villains.
There is a propaganda line that Western politicians are only busy thinking how to annoy the Kremlin. The reality is exactly the opposite. When we started this work with Boris Nemtsov, we simply hit a wall in the West.
Returning to the conversation about accomplices: after all, many people in the West are interested in this, banks, politicians. Financial interests.
I will never forget how a British parliamentary delegation came to Moscow. I met with them at the request of the ambassador. There were many official meetings at the Foreign Ministry, in the Duma, and so on. And the ambassador asked me to make sure that they heard the point of view of the opposition.
I will never forget how one of these deputies literally began to shout at me when I started talking about the “Magnitsky law”.
His face turned red. “How dare you advise us such things! Why should we deprive the City of London of multimillion-dollar income because of some human rights there!” - this quote.
This was shortly after my first poisoning.
I was sitting there with a stick.
I could barely speak at all, move around, recover.
It was all across the river from the Kremlin at the embassy, just a few hundred meters from the place where Boris Nemtsov was shot.
There were flowers and candles burning, just like today, and I sat and listened to this British MP.
And there were many.
Returning to Bukovsky's phrase about gas and bacon.
And Boris and I just ran into a wall because of these Western interests.
I had to prove, convince. It was a colossal job.
Without Boris Nemtsov, there would be no "Magnitsky law" in the United States. I didn't say it, it was said by the late Senator John McCain as one of the initiators of the law.
I can confirm this as a person who has been involved in this at all stages.
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One of the key phrases of Boris Nemtsov, which he repeated at these meetings, is that the principle should be the following: do not touch the country, punish the villains.
And this is the peculiarity of this law, that it really does not punish the country, but punishes the scoundrels who rob this country and violate the rights of citizens. That's the whole point.
When the Magnitsky law had already been passed, when Boris Nemtsov and I were sitting on the guest balcony in the US House of Representatives and watching them vote, when it became clear that the law had been passed, it was November 2012. Boris turned to me and said that this is the most pro-Russian law ever adopted abroad.
And with all the resources and sophistication of the Kremlin propaganda, it is very difficult to imagine that when the next oligarch is banned from flying to his villa in Miami Beach, this is “anti-Russian activity”.
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I believe that it is fundamentally wrong when people trample on the basic values of a civilized society here, in Russia, deny our citizens these values, while they themselves love to enjoy the benefits and privileges of a democratic society in the West.
The fact that these people receive compensation from the state does not mean that hypocrisy should continue, that they should continue to enjoy the benefits of a democratic society, buy villas there, open accounts there, buy yachts there. And then the question is for the authorities who do this, and not for those who do this on principle.
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We have not had elections in the country for more than 20 years. This is not my opinion, these are the assessments of the OSCE observers.
As for public sentiment, I remember very well the end of 2012, when the “Magnitsky law” was adopted. At that time, a survey by the Levada Center was published (included in the register of organizations performing the functions of a foreign agent). And then the relative majority of Russian citizens (I remember the figure - 44%) expressed support for a ban on corrupt officials, violators of human rights from among the highest representatives of the Russian government, to travel to the West and own apartments there.
Australia has recently become such a country. This is very important work. It is important for me that now there is a personal principle of sanctions. This is a revolution. In previous eras, sanctions were imposed on entire countries, and it turned out that people who already suffer from dictatorial regimes received such a blow as well.
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Saltykov-Shchedrin [wiki ENG] wrote that our problem is that many people confuse the concept of "fatherland" and "your excellency."
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— Autumn 2021, and now winter, as a premonition of a big war in Europe. Tension around Ukraine, dialogue between putin and Biden. Is the Kremlin successful in forcing Washington to do what Russia wants?
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— vladimir putin is seeking attention from Biden. And he got it, you rightly said. It's not the first time. In the spring, troops were drawn up in the same way ...
— But now they didn't remove them
— The result of spring was the summit in Geneva, a personal meeting. The result of the new situation was a personal conversation. It seems to me that this is an attempt to get attention. But not everything is limited to this. This should be looked at through the prism of the problem of 2024 (the end of the term of office of President vladimir putin, however, on November 30, he recalled that the amendments to the Constitution gave him the right to continue to remain president. - Approx. "NP").
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— That is, blackmail in Ukraine is a way to protect against these claims?
— A way to divert attention, and double distraction. First, at its own population. I travel across the country. The mood outside the capitals is even more protesting. Not even protest... Exhausted? Exactly, that's the word. We have many people in Russia who were born, went to kindergarten, went to school, to college, even graduated from it, all the while watching the face of the same person on TV. Do you understand? It is not normal. In America, five presidents have changed during this time, from different parties. A whole generation has grown up with us, which knows nothing else but Putin! We were born in the early 80s, we still remember how real elections were held in Russia, there was free television. And young people do not remember this at all.
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— I remember that after our 2007-2008 “Marches of Dissenters” in St. Petersburg, it was surprising how enthusiastically people believed that they could fight.
— It's embarrassing to admit ... But there was absolute euphoria then. After all, hundreds of protesters had come out before that moment, and here - more than a hundred thousand ...
— And then the well-known radio and individual leaders did everything to blow this thing away, remove it from the center of Moscow ...[red.-see Prologue]
— We thought that we were winning, that this was the end of the regime. Recently, an acquaintance recalled how in December 2011 there was a round table of experts on Russia in Washington. Someone suggested raising their hands to those who believe that in a month the Putin regime will still exist. So then less than half raised their hands. Euphoria was among many, not only in the Russian Federation. But Boris Efimovich Nemtsov, with his experience of many years of participation in politics, with his knowledge, with his human wisdom, upset us. We even argued with him, but we rarely argued. He said it wasn't time yet. It's great that so many people came out, but the critical mass has not yet been reached, he said. And then he said that real political changes in our country would begin in the mid-20s. He said this 10 years ago. Again, quite recently there was a poll by the Levada Center: the desire to vote for Putin is getting lower and lower
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— Maxim Reznik spoke rather sharply about those who do not want to analyze the political reality of their own country, who are totally apolitical and indifferent in this sense. Do you agree that this is an unsolvable problem, that it is a problem at all?
— … There is a well-known phrase: if you are not involved in politics, politics will be involved in you. We all have friends, good and decent people who are trying to distance themselves from all this. But we know how it all ends. Again I speak as a historian: people, by withdrawing themselves, leave a vacuum for criminals, let's call a spade a spade.
— You are appealing to society. Don't you think that the basic problem is that we don't really have a society?
— It is atomized - a term known since the 50s ... No, we have a society, it's just that this awareness comes episodically. It came in August 1991, it was 10 years ago. There is a stereotype that people in Russia start protesting when the refrigerator is empty. But remember December 2011: economically it was good against the background of the present, quite successful people came out. They went out not for sausage, but for self-respect, to feel like citizens, not a herd. It is very important.
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— In the EU, young daredevils like to call themselves anarchists and draw hammer and sickle on the walls. Anarchists are the hammer and sickle! It's generally comfortable to disagree there.
— Young (laughs). They don't know history, they haven't read The Gulag Archipelago. Please advise them next time. And our Russian attitude to defending our rights is the other extreme.
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Why am I here? Because this is my country. I'm not ready to give its future to the scoundrels.
— Even at the risk of your own life? They tried to kill you twice.
— A few years ago, in one of my past lives, I shot a documentary film about the history of the dissident movement in the USSR: “They chosed freedom.” It is available on the Internet in the public domain. Unfortunately, most of the heroes are no longer with us. Managed to be in time to register them ...
One of the heroines of this film is Natalya Evgenievna Gorbanevskaya, a poetess, one of the famous seven people who took to Red Square in August 1968, protesting against the entry of troops into Czechoslovakia. I asked her a question. Partly on purpose so that she would respond to the camera. I asked, “Why you wente there [to protest]? You had two small children. (Moreover, one was just a baby, she went out with him in a stroller.) You knew how it would end.” There were no other options under Soviet rule. And, by the way, everything ended worse for Gorbanevskaya than for the rest. She did not go to prison, not to the camp. She was locked up in a psychiatric hospital, where she was injected with “drugs”, kept under torture conditions. She and Viktor Fainberg got the most.
And I will never forget what she said to me. “For me, going to Red Square was an act of selfishness,” said Natalya Evgenievna. "What do you mean?" I asked. “I want to have a clear conscience,” replied Gorbanevskaya.
I was not sure I understood it then. I understand it well now. And now I know that it was exactly the same for Boris Nemtsov, that it was the same for Alexei Navalny. This is the case for so many people.
— And it's not water in the sand? Do others see it? Understand?
— Firstly, it is important for the person himself. Having a clear conscience is a very important motivation. I'm not judging anyone, I'm only speaking for myself. If I stand aside, seeing what this government is doing to my country, stand aside and do nothing about it, I am an accomplice. There was no choice for me. Many people ask me why I returned after the poisonings. For me, it wasn't even a question.
My wife laughs, remembering how after the first time I just started moving with my cane, and I was in a coma for three weeks, it’s just that all the functions of the body then left ... I learned to walk and talk again. I remember we drank tea with my wife, she finishes her drink, I want to refill and I can’t even lift the kettle. And she laughs with tears in her eyes. I was only able to take a stick, hobbled towards the airport, returned to my Moscow. Do you understand? Well, sorry. A Russian politician must be in Russia.
When Alexei Navalny came out of a coma and said that he would return, journalists flooded me with calls asking me to comment on the “sensation”, to which I replied with sincere bewilderment: “What sensation? There isn't even news here. A Russian politician should be in Russia.”
— That is, do you consider the act of Alexei Anatolyevich justified when he returned to Moscow at the beginning of 2021?
— I think this is the only possible solution. No one had the right to tell him this, and I was silent, commenting that this was his personal matter, but when he made a decision, I said everywhere that this was the only possible action.
— And what did he give, besides accelerating repressions, new broken destinies and prison for Navalny himself?
— Let's not shift responsibility, let's not substitute concepts. It is not Navalny who is to blame for the repressions and tightening the screws, who acted in accordance with his conscience. Those criminals who today sit in the leadership of the Russian authorities and Russian special services are to blame. Alexey made the only possible choice.
The biggest gift we can give to the authorities is to run away from here. Back in the 70s, Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov (Chairman of the KGB of the USSR in 1967-1982, Secretary General of the Central Committee of the CPSU in 1982-1984. - "NP"), a criminal, but not stupid, came to the conclusion that the most effective The way to neutralize dissidents is to send them abroad, although no one has canceled prisons and psychiatric hospitals. Expulsion, on the other hand, deprived a person of connection with reality, which is necessary for everyday work. A person from the outside is deprived of the moral right to call for something. From the mid-70s, expulsions went on a conveyor basis. The same has been adopted by the current government.
………..
— An attempt to liquidate "Memorials" is this kind of symbolism? Open monuments to Sacharov and destroy his living offspring - an organization that gave a huge number of people answers to their main questions?
— The current Russian government is the power of symbols, in the sense that they communicate with society through the signals they send. One of putin's first decisions, even before he became acting president, was to unveil a memorial plaque to Yuri Andropov in the Lubyanka in December 1999. The man who created the "fifth department" to fight dissidents; a man who put people in psychiatric hospitals, participated in the preparations for the invasion of Hungary in 1956, that is, a man with whom all the darkest pages of the post-Stalinist USSR are connected. In principle, all questions immediately disappeared. Remember how the West repeatedly asked the question “Who is mr. putin? Here is your answer. And after becoming president, one of the first things he did was bring back the Stalinist anthem. The signal is clear and unambiguous. It is difficult to think of a more symbolic gesture than in the year of the centenary of Andrei Dmitrievich Sacharov to destroy the organization that the Nobel Prize winner created.
………..
We return to the question of good but apolitical people. In this case, it is no longer about politics at all. There are millions of people in our country whom Memorial has helped to return the names of their relatives. Helped to return burial places, memory; helped me figure out what happened. There is almost no family in our country that, in one way or another, would not have been affected by the terrible crimes committed by the Soviet government. By encroaching on these organizations, putin's Kremlin is encroaching on memory - on the memory of living people, on the memory of the whole people.
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— But, on the other hand, we have the unification of historical science under a "single textbook", there have been introduced a legislative ban on comparing Stalin with Hitler, and it is Stalin's repressions that are the main thing that Memorial is engaged in. Removing "unnecessary memory" is an absolutely logical next step.
— Yes, but they will not delete the memory. They can eliminate the legal structure, but not the memory, and this is the worst thing for them. They feel powerless, they get even angrier.
— You're angry, so you're wrong.
— Right. But they get angry very often lately. Do you know that the government angers more than protests? Return of names. The action, when every year on 29th of October at Lubyanka people read the names of the victims of Soviet repressions against their citizens. Right under the windows of the building, where people were tortured in the basements, where decisions were made, protocols of troikas were signed, and so on. When people stand by the thousands to read a few names. I participated myself. It gives a very strong feeling...
Yes, for two years now, under the pretext of covid, these names have not been heard in Lubyanka, but they are still read every year. I read my names, who died, who was sitting; I read other names that are given to me on a piece of paper - an endless stream. And you feel the back of the anger from the building. They are looking at it. I will not say that covid helps them. Memory is not going anywhere, no matter what they do with formal structures. Society will find a way to remember, no matter how hard they try to roll everything into asphalt. As a historian and as a citizen of Russia, I compare the present with the beginning of the 80s, just the times of Andropov. Both of us were born under Brezhnev. It was dark time. The practically dissident movement was crushed. The KGB stopped publishing the Chronicle of Current Events, and the Moscow Helsinki Group was forced to dissolve itself.
— All rock music in the country was persecuted.
— By the way, yes. All significant dissidents were some in prison, some in a psychiatric hospital, some in exile. Everything was cleaned up. It seemed that there were no prospects, it seemed that it was forever. It was then that the famous dissident phrase was born that the night is darkest before dawn. Then they laughed at those who said so, and they turned out to be right. And we walked with the historian Maxim Reznik around his house on Vasilyevsky Island, on many issues we found a common language. We parted on this phrase. Historical analogies are sometimes very helpful. Everything already happened. And in our country this has already happened. And we know for sure that it will end. We just don't know exactly how and when.
The most important task of democratically minded people is to make this day come quickly.
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the world understands the difference between the regime and Russia, understands the difference between "fatherland" and "your excellency."
The world sees that Russia is not only these people in the Kremlin, whom we have already discussed
………..
I will never forget September 21, 2014. Peace March Against the War with Ukraine. We walked along the boulevards. Sea of people around. And this despite the fact that every day on TV they told how everyone in a single impulse supports putin's policy in Ukraine. Tens of thousands of people came out. He did it [Boris Nemtsov]
………..
— Ivan Safronov [red. - Russian journalist. He was arrested in July 2020 on charges of treason related to allegedly disclosing state secrets] - a man of steel? Do you understand how he manages to remain unshakably confident in his innocence? We know about repeated attempts to negotiate deals by the investigation, about pressure through depriving him of guaranteed options for detention in a pre-trial detention center, whether it be transfers, correspondence or a call to his mother on her birthday. Would you and I break down if we were in his place?
— We do not know this, and this is important: a person learns this about himself only when such a situation occurs. Maybe Ivan did not know this about himself before the situation in which he was placed. He had a good father, I knew him, we worked together at Kommersant at the time. Yes, apparently, Vanya is made of steel ... I can only wish him strength and endurance. If I manage to convey to him, then I would remind him of this phrase that the night is darkest before dawn.
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When I speak in emigrant diasporas abroad, I am often asked about this. Like, how much of everything returned from the USSR: both political prisoners, and censorship, and so on. When will exit visas return? I say never. It is very beneficial for the regime that there is an opportunity to leave. The most active, the most indifferent leave. Easier to manage.
— And the most educated are also leaving. And rockets fly one time yes and another no. Do you understand?
— And then we are back to where we started. To the difference between a regime and a country. The regime really doesn't care about that. I read the official figures of the Russian Academy of Sciences: a monstrous brain drain... And this is terrible for the interests of the country, this is the destruction of our future. But the momentary interests of an authoritarian government that is not accountable to society, which operates on the principle of “even a flood after us,” are viewed by them only through the prism of their own interests. They are so much easier to manage. There will be no exit visas.
— Are you used to being in Russia with the constant awareness of surveillance?
— I try not to think about it, I don’t want to become paranoid. Now, by the way, they are not hiding: a car drives, people walk. It's all at the kindergarten level. But when, as it turned out later, I was followed seven times across the country from Kaliningrad to Tomsk by the very same FSB officers whose names were established by the investigations of journalists, they were not visible at all. By the way, I can’t express in any words my feelings when they showed us their faces and called their names. Theory is one thing, the faces of living people are another... And these officers entered hotel rooms and smeared my underwear, as we now understand... So ordinary surveillance is all for the benefit of the poor. I try not to think about it.
I have a very important precaution for me: my family is not in Russia. My wife and my children are not in Russia. This is the most important thing I had to do. But a Russian politician should be in Russia. This is my fundamental decision.
They won't wait. I know what I'm doing is right.
— Do you think the use of the "Novichok" is further excluded? Or will it become just a tool for routine work, and not work on VIPs?
— I really hope that the brilliant work of journalists made it difficult to apply this all in the future ... At least, we have not heard more about it yet. For them, the main advantage of the method was, as the British say, plausible deniability - the ability to pretend that you had nothing to do with it. We've seen it all: low blood sugar, alcohol, moonshine, and so on. Now it's gone. What kind of plausible deniability is there when the names and ranks, the departments in which they serve are known? They made it difficult for them to work. But it is important that the topic does not leave the agenda. And just what I am doing is that now even an imitation of an investigation into the fact of poisoning does not take place. In the case of my poisonings, the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation does nothing.
— They are occupied by Morgenstern [singer] and Kirill Miller [artist] ...
— I understand, and also Andrey Pivovarov and his posts on Facebook. But for some reason they do not deal with the facts of the use of chemical weapons on their territory. My lawyer Vadim Prokhorov and I are dealing with cases against the UK, just for inaction.
The goal is to reach the ECHR.
There will be a case under the second article of the Convention, on the right to life.
We will seek international proceedings at the level of the European Court.
…
Vladimir Vladimirovich Kara-Murza (recognized as an individual foreign agent). Born on September 7, 1981 in the family of journalist Vladimir Kara-Murza Sr. (1959-2019). Nephew of the philosopher Alexei Kara-Murza, cousin of the scientist Sergei Kara-Murza. Great-grandson of the Moscow lawyer and theater critic Sergei Kara-Murza (1876-1956). Great-grandson of the Latvian revolutionary Voldemar Bisenieks (1884-1938), great-great-grandson of the Latvian politician and diplomat, the first Latvian ambassador to Great Britain Georgs Bisenieks (1885-1941) and the Latvian agronomist and public figure Janis Bisenieks (1864-1923). Since the age of 16 in journalism. He studied at the French special school No. 1216 in Moscow. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees in history from Trinity Hall College, Cambridge University. In 1997-2000, he was a correspondent for the Novye Izvestia newspaper, in 2000-2004, he was a correspondent and columnist for the Kommersant publishing house. In 2002, he was the editor-in-chief of the business magazine Russian Investment Review. In 2004-2012, he was the head of the bureau of the RTVi television company in Washington (USA). Since 2019, he has been running the Edge of the Week program on the Ekho Moskvy radio station, which his father previously hosted. The only Russian journalist filmed the presentation of the court summons on the “YUKOS case” to the Minister of Finance of the Russian Federation Alexei Kudrin, he was the first to take a television interview with businessman Sergei Kolesnikov, who spoke about the “Putin Palace” on the Black Sea. Published in Novaya Gazeta, Nezavisimaya Gazeta, The New Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, etc. Member of the Union of Journalists of Russia. He was fired from RTVI in 2012 after the publication came under the control of Russian shareholders. Boris Nemtsov claimed that the order to dismiss Kara-Murza was given directly from the Administration of the President of the Russian Federation. In 1999-2001 he was a member of the Democratic Choice of Russia party, in 2001-2008 - in the Union of Right Forces. In 2000-2003, he worked as an adviser to Boris Nemtsov, chairman of the SPS faction in the State Duma of the Russian Federation. In 2004, he became a co-founder of the 2008 Committee: Free Choice. In May 2007, Kara-Murza (recognized as an individual foreign agent) initiated the nomination of the writer and human rights activist Vladimir Bukovsky as a presidential candidate from the democratic opposition in the 2008 elections. On December 22, the CEC of the Russian Federation refused to register Bukovsky. Since December 2007 - Member of the Federal Political Council "SPS". On September 29, 2008, he wrote a statement about leaving the party in protest against its entry into the Kremlin's Just Cause project. Since December 2008, he has been a member of the Federal Political Council of the democratic movement Solidarity. On March 10, 2010, he signed the appeal of the Russian opposition “Putin must go” (signature No. 4). Since 2011, he has been a participant in protest actions that began under the slogan “For Fair Elections!” In June 2012, at the unification congress of the Republican Party of Russia - the Party of People's Freedom, he was elected to the Federal Political Council. In October 2012, he was elected to the Coordinating Council of the Russian Opposition. In July 2015, he was elected deputy chairman of the People's Freedom Party. He left the party after trying to include the nationalist Vyacheslav Maltsev in the list of candidates from the party. Since May 2016 - Chairman of the Board of the Boris Nemtsov Foundation for Freedom. In July 2019, Kara-Murza (recognized as an individual-foreign agent) took the position of Vice President of the Free Russia Foundation (the organization was recognized as “undesirable” in Russia). He is known as an active lobbyist for expanding the categories of persons "subject to visa sanctions" by the United States under the Sergei Magnitsky bill "On responsibility and the rule of law", which provides for a ban on entry into the United States and freezing of financial assets in the United States of Russian officials responsible for "gross violations human rights". On May 26, 2015, Kara-Murza (recognized as an individual foreign agent) was poisoned with an unknown substance. His internal organs failed. He spent three weeks in a coma. Treatment at the City Clinical Hospital No. 1 was carried out under the guidance of Denis Protsenko, Deputy Chief Physician for Resuscitation, Chief Resuscitator of Moscow. Only in July was he able to get stronger enough to move to the United States for rehabilitation. After returning to Russia, he walked with a stick for some time. On February 2, 2017, Kara-Murza (recognized as an individual foreign agent) was again hospitalized in critical condition at the City Clinical Hospital named after S.S. Yudin. At that time, the director of the hospital was the same Denis Protsenko, who saved Kara-Murza in 2015. On February 19, the politician was discharged, after which he underwent a course of rehabilitation abroad. As Kara-Murza himself (recognized as an individual foreign agent) said, both times after the poisoning, doctors estimated the probability of saving life at 5%.
There is no investigation into the causes of the poisoning. A journalistic investigation published in February 2021 reported the possible involvement in the poisoning of Kara-Murza in 2015 and 2017 and in the poisoning of Alexei Navalny by the same FSB group.
Fine.
Vladimir Bukovsky - Crimes of the USSR: CPSU Central Committee - Letter to comrade Enrico Berlinguer /// Crimini dell'URSS: Comitato Centrale PCUS - Lettera per il compagno Enrico Berlinguer.
Andrey Sakharov - The Russian Opposition: Andrey Dmitrievich Sakharov was born on May 21, 1921 /// L'opposizione russa: 21 maggio 1921 nasceva Andrey Dmitrievich Sacharov
Natalia Gorbanevskaya - The Russian Opposition: May 20, 1969 - the founding of the Initiative Group for the Protection of Human Rights in the USSR /// L'opposizione russa: 20 maggio 1969 - la fondazione del Gruppo di Iniziativa per la Protezione dei Diritti Umani nell'URSS
Yuri Shchekochikhin - "I learned not to deceive anyone and fear nothing" /// Yuri Shchekochikhin: "Ho imparato a non ingannare nessuno e a temere nulla"
Anna Polikovskaya - The crowd of intellectuals under the banner of fashionable wars /// Anna Politkovskaya: La folla di intellettuali sotto la bandiera delle guerre che vanno di moda
Alexey Navalny - Kremlin vs. Opposition: The project to discredit Alexey Navalny /// Kremlin vs. Opposition: Il progetto per screditare Alexey Navalny
Boris Nemtsov - The Russian opposition: March 2014 - protests in several cities against the military invasion of Ukraine /// L'opposizione russa: Marzo 2014 - proteste in diverse città contro l'invasione militare in Ucraina
The Russian Opposition: April 30, 1968 - The Chronicle of Current Events. The birth of the first samizdat gazette in the USSR /// L'opposizione russa: 30 aprile 1968 - La Cronaca degli Eventi Correnti. La nascita della prima gazzetta samizdat nell'URSS
About visas to leave the country - Crimes of the USSR: April 19, 1921 - The beginning of the Iron Curtain /// Crimini dell'URSS: 19 aprile 1921 - L'inizio della Cortina di Ferro
Brezhnev - The Russian Opposition: July 17, 1981 - Vladimir Voinovich's letter to Brezhnev /// L'opposizione russa: 17 luglio 1981 - La lettera di Vladimir Voinovich a Brezhnev
About the explosion of houses in 1999 - The Russian opposition: Sergey Yushenkov was killed on April 17, 2003 - L'opposizione russa: 17 aprile 2003 era ucciso Sergey Yushenkov
The hypocrisy of the West - Sergey Kovalev: "The EU and political hypocrisy", 2008 /// Sergey Kovalev: "L'UE e l'ipocrisia politica", 2008
Ilya Ponomarev - Who is Ilya Ponomarev? From leninism to breivikism /// Chi è Ilya Ponomarev ? Dal leninismo al breivikismo.
Alexey Kudrin - Who created Putin? 1990s - Spain and case N.144128 Who created putin? Anni '90 - Spagna e il caso N.144128 /// Who created putin? 1990s - Case No. 144128. Word of the investigator - Part 3 Who created putin? Anni '90 - Il caso N.144128. Parola del investigatore - Parte 3 /// Who created Putin? 1998 - The IMF credit history - Part 1 Who created putin? 1998 - La storia del credito FMI - Parte 1