Injustice

Russia’s justice system has long been anything but: for years, the proportion of cases ending in acquittal in Russian courts has been less than one percent. With the latest bouquet of repressive laws criminalizing calling  Russia’s Ukraine War a war, displaying a Ukrainian flag, or even holding up a blank poster, it’s clear that more and more dissidents will be standing trial.

The outcomes of political trials in Russia are mostly preordained, but activists have learned to use them as a way to speak out. Since the 1990s, Russian law has offered defendants an opportunity to deliver a speech before judges retire to make their decision. “The last word,” which can have no time limit or interruptions, has turned courtroom cages across the country into podiums where dissidents can exercise free speech, something that has long been banned by state media. These speeches may not be heard beyond the courtroom, but often they are printed by independent media and picked up by international newspapers.

We have chosen one such “last word,” given in April of this year by Vladimir Metyolkin, the 27-year-old former editor of DOXA, a student online magazine. He and three co-defendants, all young men and women, were put on trial after publishing a video of support addressing student protesters in early 2021. They were accused of “inciting minors to dangerous actions,” which can lead to a prison term of three years. In April 2022, the DOXA defendants were convicted and sentenced to two years of correctional labor. The original transcript was published in Russian by the news website Mediazona (Zona.media):
zona.media/article/2022/04/01/doxa

“The authorities have declared war against youth, but we are youth, and we will triumph no matter what” – this was the concluding statement of our video. We published it over a year ago. Since then, we have been prosecuted because of this video, and that is why we are standing here, in the courtroom. This statement consists of two parts, and my speech will be structured to address both of them separately.

The government has declared war on youth. The metaphor of a war against youth and what that means is obvious and doesn’t need a long explanation: young people in modern Russia have few prospects and hopes for the future: it has been taken from us. If you’re a young and decent person, if you want to grow as a person, get an education and earn an honest living, if you have any sort of ambition, the advice has been to leave Russia – the sooner the better.

Today, a year after we were charged, we can say with anger and even hatred: things have gotten much worse. The government has declared a literal war. We’re no longer talking about some metaphorical war against youth. This is a war that is monstrous in its cruelty, a destructive war against Ukraine and its civilian population. This war has been going on since 2014, a fact that many of us had forgotten. I myself had forgotten and had stopped giving it the attention it deserved. But by now everybody has certainly recalled it, ever since the morning of February 24, when Russia bombed Kyiv following a frenzied nationalistic speech by Putin.

The government declared war on Boris Romanchenko. This old man had survived four Nazi concentration camps, including Buchenwald, but in March 2022, a Russian missile hit his home in Kharkiv and killed him. It declared war on the 96-year-old World War II veteran Boris Semyonov. He has a medal for the liberation of Prague, and now he is in Prague once again as a refugee, because he was forced to leave his home due to shelling. This is where he is waiting for housing, though he has also been offered help in Berlin and will be able to live out his life there.

The government declared war on Mariupol, which has been under a long siege and where over 90 percent of buildings have been destroyed. Its residents are dying without food and water; they are burying their loved ones right outside residential apartment buildings because they have no other option.

It declared war on women and children. Russia is bombing civilian neighborhoods indiscriminately, hitting schools, clinics, maternity hospitals. This has been recognized by journalists, rights groups, and governments across the world. Every day we can see a vast numbers of photos and videos from Ukraine; we can watch this war unfold online. But it seems there is one person who gets his news exclusively from military reports placed before him in thin red folders.

It declared war even against those trying to fight on its behalf. Among those sent to war are draftees. They don’t want to fight, are surrendering to the other side, and don’t drive their tanks forward into attack. In some cases they don’t even know how to operate their military equipment. They are chaotically thrust into the various lines of attack; they die horrible deaths, burning alive in bombed-out convoys. During the first days of the invasion, Russian soldiers didn’t even know where they were – a detail established and documented by a mountain of evidence… They were simply sent to the slaughter, many without adequate clothing, food, and shelter.

I personally heard a story told by one woman whose nephew has to sleep inside his 1974 tank. We have heard reports that soldiers’ dead bodies are not being collected from the battlefield, not properly buried. They are decomposing in Ukrainian fields. Ukraine has offered to hand over these bodies, but the Russians are silent.

It declared war against activists and journalists that want to speak openly about what is happening, since it is impossible to be silent. Years later, we will be asked what we were doing during this time, how we resisted. We will have to answer to future generations. Meanwhile, repressive measures are having an effect: there are over 200 administrative-law cases in the works and several criminal ones. New criminal charges have been invented for the war. Lawyers rightfully call this wartime censorship. The authorities continue to use scare tactics, hinting at an end to the moratorium on the death penalty. There are people who are not silent, but we are few.

Now to the second part of the statement. “We are youth, and we will triumph no matter what.” What does this mean? I’d like to avoid the standard interpretation of these words, one of a generational conflict, where the young inevitably replace the old, and supposedly everything always becomes better. That would be a simplification.

To me, these words mean that the future will come one day. We don’t know what it will be like; we cannot see anything definitive from our current standpoint. But there is no doubt that Putin’s regime will end sooner than its main (at least so far) actor would like it to. His attempt at a lifetime presidency is destroying the country.

The most awful event in Russia’s modern history is unfolding before our eyes – perhaps, the most awful in Russia’s entire history, its “thousand-year” history, as propaganda likes to cast it. A key theme of propaganda is that, throughout this history, Russia has only engaged in just wars, wars of liberation.

I’m not going to go into historical details, but the photographs alone suffice: those of Kyiv, Mariupol and Kherson after February 24. They are sufficient to understand that the narrative about Russia the Liberator simply no longer exists. Today we are bombing women, children, and the elderly; we are bombing them with cluster munitions and air fragmentation bombs. Russians react to this as they can – rather weakly – but the world is appalled. Life in Russia after the beginning of war and new sanctions has taken a sharp turn for the worse, and this is not going to change soon. Politics, the economy, culture, education – everything is destroyed. With the passage of time, everything changes, but now a single person is hastening the pace of change through his insane actions.

On denazification: Russia has come up with the letter “Z” as a symbol of the war. Many people liken it to a semi-swastika. Some countries are close to legally classifying this symbol as a Nazi symbol. You can’t call it anything else; it’s a new swastika and a new Sieg Heil. Russian college students, schoolchildren, and even preschoolers are being ordered to form human swastikas.

Russian propagandists have been screaming about Nazis in Ukraine since 2014: by their account, first, they were giving speeches at the Maidan and then found themselves in power. We were shown torch processions, which do indeed look eerie. But where is Ukraine’s extreme right now? Even after they united, they couldn’t make it into Ukraine’s parliament, only taking 2 percent of votes in the last elections. Certain individuals that are nationalist veterans of the conflict in Eastern Ukraine managed to get into politics and held posts in the security sector under Poroshenko, but there has been little evidence of their political influence in recent years. Meanwhile, Zelensky has charted a course toward reconciliation of Ukrainian-speaking and Russian-speaking parts of the country.

We, on the other hand, have far surpassed the Ukrainian nationalists. We are the ones who need denazification and decolonization in Russia, who need to reject imperial chauvinism and mockery toward other languages and cultures, of the symbols of other countries and of the peoples of Russia. Wars begin when one country ceases to feel empathy toward its neighbors.

We go to Yerevan and Tbilisi and we expect people to speak Russian to us; we expect to be treated just as we would in Moscow and that everybody will be happy to see us. We look upon these places as fragments of the larger Russia. That is the very definition of imperialist thinking. Russia, as we can see, doesn’t do anything for the benefit of neighboring countries. We need to take a long hard look at what it means to be Russian. We have to be strict with ourselves.

We have stopped taking responsibility for what is happening in our country, and our country has started the worst war in its history. We must correct these mistakes and understand that there is nothing more important than politics right now. By politics, I mean participating in our own lives, self-governance, the willingness to take responsibility, to show concern for what is happening around us. That is the foundation on which we must build a new Russian society. Fleeing authoritarianism into cozy little worlds of private interests and consumerism has had terrible consequences. It must stop once and for all.

The community of activists, journalists and scholars of which I am a part knows what to do about this. We are ready to work hard, to go through hardship, and to hope: change will come, but we all must prepare for it. We must be free to do this.

I would like to make a small change to our video’s concluding statement… I would like it to sound like this: the government has declared war on the civilian population and represents a substantial threat. But the real power lies with us, and we will definitely put an end to this horror.