|
On April 1, a Moscow court debated the case of four editors from the
student magazine Doxa on trial for charges of inciting minors to
take part in protests. The grounds for the criminal prosecution of
Armen Aramyan, Alla Gutnikova, Natalia Tyshkevich, and Vladimir
Metelkin was the publication of a video in January 2021, in which
they called on university administrators stop threatening students
who were participating in rallies in support of jailed opposition
leader Alexey Navalny. At the hearing on April 1, the prosecutor
asked that the accused be sentenced to two years of correctional
labor. The defendants in the case also delivered their final
statements. The verdict is set to be handed down tomorrow, April 12.
On the eve of the sentencing hearing, Meduza has published the final
statement of Doxa editor-in-chief Armen Aramyan.
Honorable court!
There are not many places remaining in Russia today where I may
speak freely about what is happening in our country. I would like to
seize the opportunity to say a few words at this public hearing. One
month ago, Russia launched its so-called “special military
operation” in Ukraine. Thousands of civilians have died as a result
of these hostilities; according to the preliminary data, 5,000
people have died in Mariupol alone. Before I make my final
statement, I would like to observe a moment of silence in memory of
those who have died in this war. I believe that every public event
in Russia today should begin with a moment of silence.
Honorable court!
It’s already the twelfth month my friends and I have been under de
facto house arrest. The raids that took place at our apartments at
six o’clock on the morning of April 14, 2021 divided our lives into
a before and after.
For an entire year, we couldn’t study, work, meet up with friends,
or live our normal lives. In addition to not being able to work on
our magazine, I could not do my own research, or, most importantly,
see my girlfriend, who was in recent weeks forced to evacuate her
family from Kyiv.
Alla and Volodya had to drop out of their last year of college.
Natasha lost her job. Why did all of this happen?
The answer is a short video that we published in January 2021. A
video in which we merely appealed to the authorities, as well as to
school and universities, with one simple demand: to stop
intimidating students and schoolchildren, stop threatening them with
expulsion for participating in protests. We also delivered words of
support to college students and schoolchildren who, for several
weeks, had been intimidated by the authorities and administrations
of their educational institutions.
I am 24. I only recently got my bachelor’s degree and then, my
master’s. I know how Russian universities work, I know the
atmosphere of fear and self-censorship that pervades them. Even in
the most daring and free universities, young people are
indoctrinated with this mindset: “You are still young, don’t stick
your neck out, don’t risk your life, we will expel you, we will ruin
your life.” I have seen firsthand the way these excessive and absurd
threats affect young people. They rob us of freedom and of the
feeling that we can change anything.
Right now, fear and self-censorship are the main pillars of this
regime. Every time people begin to unite around common goals, every
time they feel like it’s in their power to change something, the
state immediately perceives this as a threat. Any opportunity for
people to freely associate constitutes a threat to the regime
because this regime cannot govern a society, it can only control a
scattering of individuals. The authorities immediately respond to
any attempts of unification with repressions. The main goal of their
repressions is, of course, fear.
But why fear exactly? In general, fear is an effective tool. Fear is
effective because it divides us. When we unite with like-minded
people, we feel that together, we are more powerful, we are no
longer just individuals, we can get so much more done. Fear makes us
feel like we are alone again. Fear severs us from each other, it
makes us regard one another suspiciously. When the state intimidates
us — whether they are call us into the dean’s office to threaten
expulsion or beat us up at the police station to get the passwords
to our phones — the government is doing everything in its power to
make sure we feel like we are always alone.
And the fear really does mean that we are always alone. There is no
society, there are no common interests, you cannot accomplish
anything together with other people. Fear makes you painstakingly
assess the personal risks: I could be thrown in jail, I could be
beaten up, I could be fired or expelled, they could do something to
my family. It’s as though the state is saying: “It’s all just your
personal problems, your personal risks, your personal achievements.
If you just put your head down and focus on your personal problems,
we might not bother interfering with your little life. But if you
decide that you are capable of something greater if you join forces
with other people, we will destroy you instantly.” When Putin’s
regime smashes the last vestiges of independent media, declares our
largest political organizations to be extremists, it’s an attack
against any free association of people.
The terror our state engages in only pretends to be rational. The
state, and we too, often justify its repressions. We say, well, yes,
we shouldn't have been so radical, we didn't need to speak out so
harshly, there's not point in fighting for people who have already
been arrested, they knew what they were getting into. But this
rationality is an illusion. The objective of state terror is to
intimidate all of us so that we feel threatened all the time, so
that we become our own censors, constantly weighing our own actions.
Self-censorship is not simply a directive bestowed from above by the
university administrators. Self-censorship is something that we do,
not them. It is how we react to fear. Political terror is only
effective if we agree to these rules of the game, only if we are
truly afraid. The state cannot repress all of us, it needs people to
make examples of.
Society's only defense against this fear is solidarity. The
mysterious and similarly irrational feeling that we are actually not
alone. Even when we act individually, thousands of like-minded
people are standing with us. They believe that this is a common
cause, and that they will be supported even if they are expelled,
even if they are pressed, if they are kidnapped and tortured by the
police.
Solidarity — this was precisely the point of our video. In it, we
certainly did not call for any rallies. We simply wanted for other
college students and schoolchildren to feel that they are not alone,
that they have support. So that these threats from school and
university administrations would not sow the destructive seed of
self-censorship in them.
Our magazine has never censored itself or made compromises because
ultimately, self-censorship leads to impotence. Out of irrational
fear, you yourself abstain from taking action and making an impact .
When you constantly compromise with a powerful adversary, you
retreat little by little, until eventually you find yourself on the
edge of a cliff. Then, in the end, there is no other way out — you
can either jump off of it yourself or wait to be pushed.
We have learned a lot in these past twelve months. Thanks to the
Investigative Committee who put together the case against us, we are
finally seeing the true scale of the pressure on young people in our
country. We are seeing that it’s not simply individual universities
or schools that threaten their students, that there’s a state system
of terror against the youth. “Preventative conversations” about
rallies, propagandistic lectures about the war, calling student
protesters into the office — in Russian universities and schools,
all this has long been delivered on a conveyor belt, the scale of
which we cannot imagine. As we said in our video: “The authorities
have really declared war on the youth.”
And we have also learned that, once again, we are not alone. That
it’s in the authorities’ interest to convince us that we are in the
minority, that the protesters are far from the “common people.” This
belief is deeply ingrained among many, even among the opponents of
this government. But the witnesses for this trial, the young people
who were arrested at the protests in January, are regular teenagers
from regular families. One has a mother who works at the post
office, one’s father is a veteran, another’s is a bus driver. We are
society. Our actions speak for our society, unlike the poll results
obtained at an imagined gunpoint.
Twelve months of prosecution, house arrest, dozens of
interrogations, dozens of hearings, a 212-volume criminal indictment
that we were forced to read — all of this was a rather harsh test of
our concept of solidarity, of the idea that we can accomplish a lot
if we stand together. But I think we rose to the challenge. From the
very first day, we saw how hundreds of thousands of people support
us, how despite the intimidation they face, students and instructors
from Russian universities have come out in support of us; how
hundreds of people continue to come to our hearings a year after we
first got detained. We survived, we stayed sane, we didn’t give up.
Now that our state has launched the so-called “special operation,”
the stakes have gotten much higher. Our state is no longer a
deadbeat cop twirling his club, it is now a genuine dictatorship. It
is a war criminal. The state has succeeded in intimidating a lot of
people, forcing them into silence, into not speaking out about this
war by any means. The only thing I can think about these days is how
to take a stand against such strong fear. How to continue to act and
support other people when we all want to run away, hide in a cocoon,
or pretend that all of this doesn’t exist. Russian citizens do not
support the war. They are so strongly opposed to this war that some
of them cannot even believe it’s taking place right before their
eyes.
I could tell you my thoughts about our case. That what we are
charged with makes no sense, that it is theoretically impossible to
prove. The prosecution did not find a single teenager who watched
our video, went to a rally, caught the coronavirus and died, because
none exist. But it's never been clear to me what I can say in this
courtroom that would actually have a chance of being heard.
And so, no matter the verdict, I turn to the young people throughout
our country with a plea, the very same plea an expert for the
prosecution deemed a call to attend specific rallies: Do not be
afraid and do not stand aside. Fear is the only thing that allows
them to divide us. In recent weeks, we have seen many examples of
heroism, young people, often young women, continuing to take to the
streets and protest the war, despite tens of thousands of arrests
and searches. People being tortured in our police stations, but not
giving up and continuing to fight. Today, we do not have the moral
right to stop, or give up, or get scared. Every word must be strong
enough to stop bullets.
The fundamental question of our generation is not just how we can
remain decent people under fascism. How to do the right things and
not the wrong things. It is a question of how we can build
solidarity and unite in a society that has been ruthlessly destroyed
over the course of several decades. “The youth — that’s us, and we
will definitely win” — these words resound at the end of our video.
And truly: if not us, then who? |
