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PRE-TRIAL DETENTION CENTER 5, Moscow — One morning last week the jailer called my name through the cell door: “Be ready in 10 minutes. There’s a commission I want to see you.”
There are many inspections that go through this prison, but this one was different. At the center of a long table, flanked by the jailer and other uniformed officials, sat Tatyana Potyaeva, the Moscow City Human Rights Ombudsman. “Some people have been asking about you,” she said. Flipping through her file, she mentioned Natalia Solzhenitsyna, widow of Nobel Prize-winning writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, as well as Dmitry Muratov, editor of the now-defunct newspaper Novaya Gazeta and co-recipient of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize. “So I wanted to see how you are. “
I was fine, I said, as I do to any visiting commission – adding that my only complaint was that I had been jailed for my political views in the first place. My terms are fine. I know they must surely be better than what my grandfather experienced when he was arrested on “anti-Soviet” charges in 1937 before being sent to the Gulag. He survived that (and continued to serve in World War II, where he received some of the highest military decorations). I can survive this for sure.
However, I have one request for the ombudswoman. Local elections will be held in Moscow on September 11 for around 1,400 district council seats across the city. I am enjoying my right to vote until my conviction. The prison I’m being held in is only a 40 minute drive from my home and my polling station in downtown Moscow – so I said I wanted to exercise my right to vote. The ombudswoman promised to take care of it.
“Right to vote” is, of course, a difficult word in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. For years our elections have been devoid of any real meaning. Politicians who posed a real challenge to the Kremlin were assassinated, imprisoned or exiled. Some opposition parties have been banned. Independent media have been shut down. And to make matters worse, the authorities have introduced a variety of “electoral reforms” clearly designed to allow manipulation of the results.
But even if your vote doesn’t affect the results, it’s still important to raise your voice. Years ago I visited the former Gestapo headquarters in Cologne, which today houses a museum of National Socialism. Among the exhibits is a ballot from one of the many plebiscites held in 1930s Germany to show general support for the Führer. Someone had carefully put a cross next to the word “No” – “No”. I remember looking at that ballot and thinking that the person who used it might not have changed the course of history but took a step to deny the crimes associated with the complicity of the supporting or silent majority were committed.
More than 16,380 Russians have been arrested in anti-war protests across the country since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February. More than 2,400 were charged with misdemeanor charges for speaking out against the war. Dozens, including myself, have been arrested under a new clause in the penal code that punishes public opposition to the war with up to 15 years in prison. Earlier this month a Moscow court sentenced local lawmaker Alexei Gorinov to seven years in prison for denouncing the war against Ukraine at his district council meeting. In the same period since the war began, about 150,000 people chose to simply flee Russia.
But there are many more people in this country who oppose Putin’s war on Ukraine – but are unwilling to risk years in prison by speaking out publicly. (The situation would, I think, apply to most societies.) And that’s why the September elections matter. Just an hour’s flight from Moscow, where cities continue to be bombed and people are dying because of Putin’s imperial ambitions, residents of the capital have an opportunity to take a stand. Putin’s own United Russia party has put support for the war – still euphemistically dubbed a “military special operation” by the state media – at the heart of its municipal campaign platform. Meanwhile, so-called official opposition parties like the Communists or Just Russia appear to be vying for who can voice their support the loudest.
The only exception is Yabloko, Russia’s veteran liberal party. It has managed to retain access to Moscow’s elections and opposes Putin’s war on Ukraine. Some of its leading members, including journalist and historian Lev Shlosberg and Moscow city deputy Andrei Morev, have been fined for making public anti-war statements. Yabloko will field candidates across Moscow in September, and while they can’t say much due to new laws criminalizing anti-war speech, the party’s stance is well known. “Our commitment to peace is a matter of principle,” said Maxim Kruglov, a member of the Moscow City Duma and Yabloko’s campaign coordinator. The word “peace” is still legal in Russia, at least for now.
In a few weeks, Muscovites will have the rare opportunity to say “no” to dictatorship and aggression like this anonymous German did with his ballot. I may have few rights in a Russian prison, but it’s one I definitely intend to exercise.