Yesterday I was at Anti-Seliger.
In two words: simply excellent. I've seen a million of those "gatherings of civic activists," and they always come with chaos, confusion, piles of cigarette butts, and plenty of crazies. At Anti-Seliger, everything was impeccably clean, the organization was top-notch, and there were lots of genuinely pleasant people. zyalt in his photo report: Emergency Situations Ministry staff came to inspect the camp's fire safety in a Porsche convertible
Too bad Varlamov didn't post the photo with the open ID badge in front of the car. He has it—I saw it. It would be interesting to dig into the biography and sources of income of this modest civil servant. World champion in no-holds-barred fighting Pavel Boloyangov gave a kind of improvised master class. Foolishly, I doubted that the "escape from choking" move he was demonstrating would really work if someone was holding you tight. "Hold tight," Pasha suggested. I held him for about a second and a half, and this morning my ribs on that side hurt badly. Hopefully nothing's broken. You can see the episode in the video oleg_kozyrev from 3:00 There are lots of photo reports online; the link to Varlamov's report is above, and Oleg Kozyrev's big report is here. Once again, thanks to everyone who took part in yesterday's discussion, listened, asked questions, and so on. Special thanks to the RosPil staff who gave the project presentation: info_rospil sobollubov ipasserby and fil_defense, who joined them. Update: Oh, and I finally de-virtualized and met the famous Lev Sharansky. Lev is a great guy. He treated everyone to real Scotch whisky (secretly, of course—Anti-Seliger had a "dry law," i.e. a no-alcohol policy). Looks like he'll be speaking today right after Parfyonov.