- Just take a bag with you, just in case, my lawyers told me, and of course they were right.
There’s nothing more foolish than relying on luck and ending up in pretrial detention (SIZO, a Russian remand prison) without any belongings. Then you’ll spend a month trying to wrestle a package with sweatpants and socks out of the administration.
So Yulia packed my bag for me—or rather, repacked it, replacing the expired food in the bag that is always kept ready—and here’s what I want to say.
The verdict could be anything except an acquittal (I don’t believe in that, even though we won at the ECHR in this very case. Cases aren’t fabricated so that people can later be acquitted).
- It could be a suspended sentence;
- It could be a real prison sentence;
It could be a suspended-but-real sentence in the same vile format as in the Yves Rocher case. They’ll let me go, while Ofitserov, who got dragged into this by accident, will be imprisoned out of sheer sadism.
I don’t know what it will be, but I do know for certain that it will not make political activity any easier—neither for me personally nor for other independent politicians and activists. Another act of intimidation won’t work on everyone, but it will work on some people, and that’s exactly why all this is being done.
Standing up for your views will become a little harder still, but for any decent person that should lead to only one consequence: defending your beliefs and your rights even more insistently.
The most important thing we all need to understand is this: There is no clever Kremlin plan for holding on to power. It’s all very simple. The courts, law enforcement system, and media under its control want to force you into submitting to them in advance. On your own initiative. No one is repressing you or coercing you directly, but they’ve created such an atmosphere of fear that you’ve already worked out in your head how you’re supposed to behave so that the system approves of you and has no complaints.
And now you haven’t even written an angry post on Facebook. You didn’t come to the rally. You kept silent in conversation. You voted the way you were supposed to (what if they really can check, after all). And that’s it.
You submitted to injustice of your own accord, and in doing so you made your contribution to evil’s victory over good.
Exactly as the formula says: All that is necessary for Evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.
The good news is that the formula for resistance is just as simple: do not submit voluntarily and in advance. Not everyone is ready to throw themselves at a tank, but you certainly shouldn’t be rolling out the red carpet for that tank—or pushing it from behind when it gets stuck while running someone over.
Everything else is tactics: elections, boycotts, rallies, and so on. At the heart of it all lies a refusal to submit on your own initiative. When a sufficient number of people refuse—not necessarily even a majority—any authoritarian regime collapses. Because at its core there is always the lie of yet another naked king.
Whatever lies ahead, I refuse to submit voluntarily. And I urge you to do the same.