Voices Putin Should Listen To

Alexei Navalny (b. 1976), the Russian opposition leader and anti-corruption activist, was arrested in January 2021. His arrest and trial inspired the country’s biggest protests in years. Navalny was poisoned in 2020 by the nerve agent novichok which is believed to be Putin’s preferred method of assassination. Navalny has recently been given a nine-year prison sentence in a “strict regime penal colony,” replacing his current three-and-a-half-year sentence on seemingly trumped up embezzlement charges. Navalny tweeted on March 22 that “the best support for me and other political prisoners is not sympathy and kind words, but actions. Any activity against the deceitful and thievish Putin regime. Any opposition to these war criminals.”

Marina Ovsyannikova (b. 1978) was an editor at the Russian Channel One television station. On March 14, Ovsyannikova burst onto the set of the live evening news program shouting: “Stop the war. No to war.” She held up a sign behind the news presenter saying: “Don’t believe the propaganda. They’re lying to you here.” It added in English that the message was from “Russians against the war.” Ovsyannikova was fined $280 for this protest. She said in an interview, “I could see what in reality was happening in Ukraine. And what we showed on our programs was very different from what was going on in reality.” In the last few days Ovsyannikova has been accused of being a British Spy by Kirill Kleimyonov, head of Channel One’s news division.

Garry Kasparov (b.1963), the famous chess grandmaster, was jailed for five days in 2007 by Putin’s regime and beaten by police in 2012. He has been one of the most outspoken Russian critics of Vladimir Putin for years. Kasparov warned the world in early 2021 that “Putin is not just a Russian imperialist. He has a much bigger agenda. He is an existential threat to the free world.” As he said in an interview in The Guardian : “In the west there is a lot of self-deception, multiplied by business interests and apathy, about Putin’s true intentions.” He warned, long before the war in Ukraine started, “no one wants confrontation. But people need to recognize that Russia is a fascist dictatorship, which has no restrictions when it comes to destroying political opponents – in and outside – of Russia.”

Svetlana Alexievich (b. 1948) won the Nobel prize for literature in 2015. Alexievich has spent a lifetime reporting and writing about Russian wars and their effects, criticizing the political regimes of the Soviet Union, Russia and Belarus. Her books The Unwomanly Face of War, The Last Witnesses: 100 Unchildlike Stories and The Boys in Zinc all deal with the disastrous results of war in the Russian sphere of influence. “If you look back at the whole of history,” she says, “both Soviet and post-Soviet, it is a huge common grave and a blood bath – an eternal dialogue of the executioners and the victims.” Alexievich recently called Putin’s order to put Russia’s nuclear weapons on high alert an indication of an “insane” person.

Anna Akhmatova (1889 – 1966) was one of Russia’s greatest poets but her work was suppressed by the communist regime of the USSR. The infamous Soviet police known as the Cheka executed her husband Nikolay Gumilyov in 1921, and her son Lev Gumilyov was jailed as a warning that she not speak out about Soviet oppression. In her most famous poem, “Requiem,” she wrote that war “was a time when only the dead could smile.”

Nadezhda Mandelstam (1899 –1980) was the wife of the poet Osip Mandelstam. Osip was imprisoned and exiled for writing the poem “Stalin’s Epigram,”in which he called Stalin a “murderer and peasant slayer.” Osip died in 1938 on his way to a Gulag (or forced labor camp). In Nadezha’s memoir, Hope Against Hope, she wrote of the trauma of living under Stalin’s authoritarian regime and being exposed to its terrors, including this line: “the only good life is one in which there is no need for miracles.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), the theorist and author of War and Peace, became one of the world’s most famous advocates of pacifism and non-violence. He regularly attacked the Russian government for fighting wars. He called on his fellow Russians to say no to a government that wished “to make me a participator in murder; you demand of me money for the preparation of weapons; and want me to take part in the organized assembly of murderers.” In words that seem meant for today,he wrote: “No arguments can take away this plain fact, that a man with any sense of his own dignity cannot enslave himself to a master whose business is killing.”

Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) was a philosopher exiled by Stalin. Bakhtin was perhaps one of the greatest advocates for freedom of expression. He believed that “two voices is the minimum for life.” For Bakhtin, truth can only exist in a society if people are allowed to speak their minds.

Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) was one of the great liberal thinkers of the twentieth century. Born in Riga when it was part of the Russian Empire, he lived most of his life in England, and the message he brought back concerning Stalin’s regime was this: “those who believe that such a system is simply too heartless and oppressive to last, cruelly deceive themselves … The governed, a passive, frightened herd, may be deeply cynical in their own fashion, and progressively brutalised, but ... they will, be able to find their lives just – if only just – sufficiently bearable to continue to exist and toil and even enjoy pleasures.” Sanctions, Berlin might have argued today, might not be enough to bring Putin down.

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