Paul
Goble
Staunton, December 27 – 2018 is likely
to be remembered as a time of intensified Kremlin pressure on Russia’s still-weak
civil society and one in which Lyudmila Alekseyeva passed from the scene; but
despite those setbacks, it managed to produce some genuine heroes, people who
stood up to the powers that be and showed what is possible, Zoya Svetova
says.
Such people, the Moscow journalist
argues, deserve “particular attention” because all too often their displays of
courage and heroism are meteor-like, appearing briefly and then disappearing as
the Kremlin would like (zen.yandex.ru/media/mbkhmedia/itogi2018-chto-proishodilo-s-grajdanskim-obscestvom-v-rossii-5c22a7e7905c3800aa302598).
Svetova focuses on four cases, each
of which displays something important about the state of civil society in
Russia and about the ways in which its members are capable of achieving victories
against the seemingly all-powerful state, victories that consist not only in
survival but in showing the way forward to others.
She chooses as her “hero of the year”
Alkesey Malobrodsky, the director who was swept up in a case so absurd that
even now no one is sure why it happened.
He was under arrest for 11 months and then was released on his own
recognizance. But what makes him a hero, Svetova says, is his insistence on the
difference between two Russian words.
His interrogators kept asking him for
“correct” answers, and he kept responding that he would give them “truthful”
ones. In Putin’s Russia as in Stalin’s, those are not the same thing; and by
responding again and again with the truth, Malobrodsky demonstrated that the “correct”
answers aren’t “true.”
Svetova chooses as her human rights
activist of the year Oyub Titiyev, head of the Grozny office of Memorial. He
has been working in that most difficult of places for 17 years, and if he is
convicted of the absurd charge of possessing drugs – something no one can
believe not even his judges – Titiyev will continue his work behind bars.
The Muslim activist is the epitome
of a human rights worker, Svetova continues, “modest and effective.” Such
people “devote their lives to the service of others and even real danger does
not stop them.” Titiyev has said that “if
in the course of 17 years, by my efforts even a single life has been saved,
then it has not been in vain.”
As NGO of the year, the journalist
chooses Public Verdict, a group that has worked quietly and tirelessly to
expose and end torture in Russia’s penal system. Its efforts as reported by Novaya gazeta have certainly saved many
whose lives might otherwise have been stunted or even destroyed.
“The history of ‘Public Verdict,’”
Svetova says, “is the history of the
success of a public organization which year after year beats on one point, not
seeking publicity and praise for its achievements but winning the trust of
people. Thus, from a small organization,
it has been transformed into a powerful structure, capable of resolving systemic
tasks.”
And even the label
“’foreign agent’ has not interfered” with its efforts to make things
better.
. And
finally as “the discovery of the year,” Svetova points to Oleg Sentsov whose 145-day
hunger strike not on behalf of himself but for the liberation of other
Ukrainians held in Russian prisons achieved what seemed impossible, the result
of his willingness to “die for the freedom of others.”
“It is
not so important that in this year, his hunger strike did not lead to the freeing
of Ukrainian political prisoners,” Svetova says. “What is important is that the
entire world found out about he existence of Ukrainian political prisoners
doing time in Russia” because of what he did.
Summing up, the Moscow journalist says
that for her, the real trend of 2018 is not the increasing number of arrests
but the increasing ways in which “a real artist is capable of creating even when
imprisoned.” That was something human rights activists displayed in Soviet
times; it is something they are displaying once again.
It is no small thing.
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