On Friday, we presented the book Michnik. Navalny. Dialogues. These really are dialogues: the remarkable Adam Michnik—a Polish public figure, one of the founders of Solidarity (the Polish anti-communist social movement), and editor-in-chief of Poland’s best-known newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza—came to Moscow, and we spent three days talking.
He was curious about my views on Russia’s development, the war with Ukraine, and nationalism. I, in turn, wanted to understand how Solidarity was built, what parallels could be drawn with today’s Russian opposition movement, how Poland responded to post-Soviet challenges (lustration, for example), and how it is responding to the challenges of the present day (such as relations between the state and the church).
We recorded the conversations and then published the most important parts.
The book is slim, but for me it turned out to be important—almost a manifesto. In it, I set out my position on many fundamental issues, including some I’m not often asked about and hadn’t spoken about before simply because there was no occasion to do so: the role of the church, for example, or oligarchs and the media.
Here is the table of contents:
Unfortunately, the book does not yet include the notes we prepared—fairly detailed explanations of every person and event mentioned in the text. They are very helpful for understanding the context, especially the historical parts about Solidarity and related matters. Well, perhaps we’ll add them in a second edition, if this one sells well.
English and Polish editions are in preparation.
For now, Michnik. Navalny. Dialogues can only be purchased at Falanstere, but the list of retailers will probably expand—unless they receive some special ban from above.
If you have any questions for me, read it—there’s almost certainly an answer there.
Thanks to Pavel Puchkov and Roman Golubev, who came up with all of this, persuaded everyone, and organized everything.