I want to thank Lyubov Sobol for ending her hunger strike.
I was already preparing to publicly demand that she do so, since she had not accepted the arguments in my private notes asking her to stop the hunger strike.
The whole situation had become quite nerve-racking. After 30 days, people on hunger strike are hospitalized with serious complications. And this was not just a hunger strike, but one combined with active work, plus regular detentions and searches—things that are exhausting in themselves. Both I and everyone at the ACF (Anti-Corruption Foundation) knew for certain that Lyuba’s hunger strike was absolutely real—and her medical tests showed it too—so we were very worried about her, and now we are very glad that she will gradually return to full-fledged work. Sobol has become a well-deserved leader of this period of the protest movement and one of the opposition’s true leaders; she needs to be strong, including in the purely physical sense.
I have to say, her 32-day hunger strike made a strong impression on me. I take things like this very seriously in general. And anyone who sneers at or jokes about declared hunger strikes goes straight onto my list of “not very bright people.” A hunger strike is an extraordinarily powerful act of self-sacrifice. Many great figures—from the suffragettes fighting for women’s rights to Gandhi and Sakharov—achieved results through hunger strikes as well. And they remained quite alive in the process, which naturally gave the not very bright people of their time an excuse for sneering and mockery.
A hunger strike is both a gesture of despair and a demonstration of complete conviction in one’s ideas and in one’s own rightness.
And by the way, every hunger strike I have seen in my lifetime—from Shein to Sentsov, from the Novosibirsk hunger strike by Leonid Volkov and Sergei Boyko (vote for him in the Novosibirsk mayoral election) to prison hunger strikes against torture—has been for a just cause. In every single case, these people were 100% right, and they were standing up against lawlessness, injustice, and all manner of scoundrels.
You have to admit that in Sobol’s case, that is exactly what is happening.
Please, for heaven’s sake, do not take this post as a call to go on hunger strike. You cannot urge people to do that, and in any case it would not work—it has to come from within.
I am simply glad that our Lyuba will return to work without any serious medical complications—I very much hope. And I am very glad to see the emergence of a new, fully fledged political leader. I am happy that the ACF has this kind of “human caliber.”
While almost all the other independent candidates—who have also shown themselves to be brave and honest politicians—remain under arrest, a great deal now rests on Sobol: from campaigns in defense of those unlawfully detained to continuing “Let Them Run” and, of course, Smart Voting—our current main plan and an effective lever against this government.
I am carefully reading all the responses to my post arguing that Smart Voting is the main strategy until September 8 (which of course does not cancel out everything else; these are interconnected campaigns). Both the positive and the critical ones. On Monday I will post detailed comments and replies. But for now, here are three must-reads. Or rather, two must-reads and one must-read/must-watch:
an excellent interview Leonid Volkov gave to Meduza about Smart Voting, answering many important questions. Everything is laid out clearly and systematically.
a wonderful interview with Sobol on Echo of Moscow (a Russian radio station). I listened to it yesterday and kept thinking: “She’s really impressive.”
a superb article by Grigory Golosov about the current moment. Do not read all the nonsense in newspapers from the usual “on-duty political analysts” who comment on every event. Read Golosov instead—he is a genuinely intelligent scholar and sees the bigger picture.