‘Your Task Is to Stay Human’

The courage of some takes the breath away. Or is it recklessness? These things sometimes blend, don’t they? I have asked many a dissident, “Why do you do what you do?” Usually, they can’t answer. They shrug. “I can do no other. I am impelled.”

Here is a story from Meduza, the Russian news organization in exile. It begins as follows:

After Alexey Navalny’s death on February 16, a history instructor at a public Russian university decided to start his lessons with a discussion about politics — despite the risk that one of his students might report him to the authorities.

Personally, I sort of wish the instructor wouldn’t do it. But he might well say to me, “We can’t cower in the shadows all of our lives.” He has told his students, “Your task is to stay human.”

That can be a tall order. Once, a Cuban American told me, “It takes something like a martyr-level courage to live even as a decent human being in Cuba: not to lie, not to steal, not to inform, not to sell your body, not to buy somebody else’s body . . . It is incredibly hard.”

• Garry Kasparov is a great chess champion and also a great freedom champion. He is the chairman of the Human Rights Foundation, based in New York. He is also the co-founder of the Renew Democracy Initiative and the World Liberty Congress. He is a bold critic of Vladimir Putin’s dictatorship — and all other dictatorships. The Kremlin has now designated Kasparov a “terrorist and extremist.”

On one hand, you say, “It’s a badge of honor.” On the other, this is a grave matter. I admire Kasparov and his like (not that there are many) no end. I hope they prevail and that the Putins fall.

• A report from the Wall Street Journal: “Russians Keep Turning Up Dead All Over the World.” Yes, Putin is pretty good about this. So are the Iranian mullahs and other tyrants. Democracies should do all they can to protect the exile dissidents in their midst.

• With Navalny dead (killed), Vladimir Kara-Murza is now probably Russia’s most prominent political prisoner. David Cameron, the British foreign minister, has met with Kara-Murza’s wife, Evgenia, and his mother, Elena Gordon.

• Dmitry Muratov was the editor in chief of Novaya Gazeta, the Russian newspaper. He shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021. Six of his colleagues on the paper have been murdered: Igor Domnikov, Yuri Shchekochikhin, Anna Politkovskaya, Anastasia Baburova, Stanislav Markelov, and Natalia Estemirova. Here is some news about Muratov’s successor, the current editor in chief, Sergey Sokolov:

Why do people do this work? I don’t know. They must be brave and good.

• Another report:

A Moscow court has sentenced journalist Roman Ivanov to seven years in prison on charges of spreading “disinformation” about the Russian army, according to RusNews, the media outlet where he worked.

In his closing statement, Ivanov got on his knees and asked the people of Ukraine to forgive him. “I want to ask for forgiveness from all the citizens of Ukraine who have been made to suffer by our country,” he said.

Ivanov was arrested in April 2023 over Telegram posts he made criticizing the war in Ukraine.

Another name to remember: that of Roman Ivanov.

• Further:

Aleksandr Shtefanov, a noted Russian blogger and the author of a documentary about Ukrainian territories occupied by Russia, fled Russia fearing for his safety. Shtefanov wrote on Telegram on February 29 that he made this “difficult and unpleasant” decision after “the murder” of opposition politician Aleksei Navalny in prison and the imprisonment of anti-war sociologist Sergei Kagarlitsky earlier in February.

For that report, go here.

• One more item. Somehow, the name “Engels” strikes me as just right: