It feels like I saw Pasha Sheremet only recently. He came to the march in memory of Nemtsov, and then a couple of days later we had dinner with our families among friends — he had two already grown children.
Every time I saw him, we talked about what we between ourselves called the “Last Autumn prophecy.”
In September 2011, Zhenya Chirikova and Pyotr Verzilov organized the forum “Last Autumn.” There were no protests anywhere on the horizon then, and politics was even drearier than it is now. Everyone was discussing what to do about the elections, and the forum’s main event was a debate between Nemtsov, Kasparov, and me.
So Sheremet and I sat down somewhere, and he was talking about Belarus and said that soon things would be the same in our country. I argued passionately and gave him 101 reasons why Russia was not Belarus.
- the country is bigger;
- the internet is more widespread;
- there is more money;
- the elite is more corrupt and more oriented toward the West;
- Putin has no one left to fight a war with (not Ukraine, haha);
- large independent online media outlets still existed, and so on.
To that, Pasha replied sadly: “Alexei, we were saying roughly the same thing about our country a few years ago. We had plenty of arguments about why it was impossible to establish an authoritarian regime in Europe in the 21st century. But it was established. And soon you will see how your internet is tightened up, how the major online media outlets are taken over, how business goes to ground, how someone to fight a war with is found, how journalism reaches a level of corruption that is impossible to imagine, and how corrupt pro-Western elites become the most patriotic of all, while keeping their homes in Spain.”
I listened and thought: Sheremet seems like a smart man, yet he’s talking such nonsense.
After that, starting in 2013, every time we met I admitted that he had been right with his stupid prophecy. And that he had a better feel for the inner nature and secret thoughts of a former Soviet apparatchik, no matter what country he was in: Belarus, Russia, or Ukraine.
And the authorities knew that he understood them, and they never liked him for it: Sheremet was imprisoned in Belarus, harassed and fired in Russia, and followed in Ukraine.
Pavel was an intelligent and courageous man, an excellent journalist, and simply a good person.
That is how we will remember him.