Powers Fear Russians aren’t Who They Were 20 Years Ago, Self-Described Member of ‘Deep People’ Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Dec. 13 – The Nakanune news agency has provided a Chelyabinsk pensioner with the chance to speak truth to power after Roza Faizova was arrested and then fined more than her monthly pension for holding a sign outside the regional parliament where she had gone to protest the imposition of QR codes (nakanune.ru/articles/118051/).

            “We are not for Navalny and not for the West,” she says. “We are the deep people. We do not go to meetings or take part in picketing. We aren’t acquainted with the legislature in this oblast. The majority of us are involved instead in heavy work and our own problems and concerns.” We went to the meeting to protest this violation of our rights.

            But “the deputies ignored the people” and blocked them from speaking, something unforgiveable given that they were violating our rights, she continues. “This is my motherland and I must defend it. We are guilty in that we for too long have watched from the side and hoped that someone would come and be concerned about our well-being.”

            Faizova says she left the government building alone and alone carried a poster. But that was enough for the police to sweep down and take her off to the station and file charges. In her view, “this can be called psychological terror, an attempt at restricting any civic activity which is viewed as something dangerous and impermissible.”

            “I do not consider five minutes with a placard to be a violation of the law,” she continues, adding “I am a patriot of my country. For more than ten years I worked in the conditions of the Far North, suffered disabling trauma and then worked another 20 years. I have certificates of gratitude for that. But the powers don’t want to hear my voice.”

            “I don’t consider myself guilty and demand the case against me be dropped,” Faizova says, pointedly noting that “the powers are afraid that we are already not the people that we were in 2001; we are a people who already are tired from the lying and of those who do not want to listen to the opinion of the people.”

            It is abnormal and unacceptable for the powers to arrest two women over 60 for holding signs for five minutes outside a government building especially when they have never violated Russian law before and when all they are doing is trying to express their own positions, Faizova says.