A clip from the documentary *Nemtsov* featuring Alexei Navalny
Text version
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when we were handing out leaflets for
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the Spring March, he and I left together, and I was
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detained and jailed for 15 days. He somehow
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got away from the police, and while I—while we were on
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those 15 days, he was killed. And from this very
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office, we would go out to hand out
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leaflets. He came, and there were lots of
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volunteers here, and right in front of him, in the front row,
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he was speaking. Of course, he was interesting to watch:
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a huge guy, with tons of stories,
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smiling, joking, and at the same time
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flirting a little, putting his arm around the girls,
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shaking hands with ten young people, and around him
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you could literally see something beginning to form,
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something new—you could clearly see how people were
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gravitating toward him, activists joining in, and
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even though, supposedly, everyone should have been going with me,
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he drew a whole crowd away, and they went with him
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to hand out leaflets. He was the kind of
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person who creates a new
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political life around himself.
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But he created new structures,
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did new things. He didn’t just take some
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old, worn-out line—just
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the mainstream idea that, well, Putin has
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usurped power and we are for democracy,
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so let’s fight for
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democracy. He created new structures and
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new issues and new directions
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for struggle. He produced those reports, and now
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lots of people do that, but in fact the whole
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system—and even the infrastructure for it,
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from writing to distribution—was created
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by him. He created new formats for regional political struggle,
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getting into the Duma (Russia’s parliament), creating a faction, and
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effective media and legal battles
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against local corrupt officials. He simply
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created it. There was this kind of
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political vacuum that had been filled with something
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amorphous—some vague notion of democrats
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in general, people who simply don’t like totalitarianism.
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He filled that vacuum with something completely
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concrete, and
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through his work he proved that all those
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stereotypes—
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whether true or false—about how democrats
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and even the old wave of them work in Russia were not
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true. You can begin a new life, a better
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life, simply through your own political
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will, through your own desire. If you want
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to fight for a new, free Russia,
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just start. And Boris—Boris
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showed that it could be done.
People