Day of Wrath

Amid the dull everyday life of an endless requiem, when we have been driving from the bazaar for ten years and every month we lose something along the way, and the sands of timelessness bring the ruins of reforms, October 30 is the day of our anger. Dies Irae. Mobilization Day. Day of grief and day of squares. Day of the political prisoner of the USSR. Now is the time to revive the very catalog of political prisoners, which was once published by the founder of this memorable day, a prisoner of conscience Kronid Lyubarsky - the catalog was called "News from the USSR" ("List of Political Prisoners"). Irina Ratushinskaya, Tanya Osipova, Anatoly Marchenko and many others who were tried for anti-Soviet activities; Jewish activists who fought for the right to leave the country; Lithuanian Catholics who replicated the Gospel in the forest farms... This was a new GULAG, a GULAG not of victims, but of dissidents.

Gulag - from the future collection "News from Putin's Russia" - filled up again. And here is the catalog for you: the intelligent and mocking face of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who refused to betray Platon Lebedev and leave the country; the stern face of Alexei Pichugin, who refused to slander Mikhail Khodorkovsky and received a life sentence for this; the young beautiful face of Zara Murtazaliyeva, sentenced to eight and a half years for an imperfect crime because of the pathological hatred of the security forces for Chechens, who decided to get another shoulder straps cheaply; the intelligent face of Igor Sutyagin, who never recognized himself as a spy; young faces of the National Bolsheviks. This is the worst. Even if the people reject freedom, Putin's autocracy cannot be tolerated taking hostages.

Even our prisoners of conscience are being taken away from us. Just as instead of elections, freedom of rallies and the press, a multi-party system, liberal capitalism and a federal system, they are throwing dummies and fakes at us, having long ago put the Constitution on wrapping paper for presidential portraits, so on October 30, they are once again slipping us in the pluperfect - in the form of an irrelevant story , in the form of the Day of long-gone repressions, when there is no one to blame, no one to punish and curse. When you can hang around the Solovetsky stone without condemning Stalin too sharply (he, according to Putin, won the war), and, after thanking Mayor Luzhkov and super-president Putin for our happy old age, go to the city hall for lunch, not forgetting to first ask the police to take away who came to the Stone slogans in defense of the Yukos.

The political prisoners of 2009 are far more infringed on their rights than the political prisoners of the 70s: they sit in criminal camps, follow the criminal stages, as in Stalin's times, and the political camps in the Perm region are hypocritically closed and turned into museums. There are so many political prisoners that they can be classified. Such is Putin's herbarium. Scientists. Yukos. Entrepreneurs. National Bolsheviks. And the mournful shadows of those executed for political and human rights activities: Galina Starovoitova, Sergei Yushenkov, Anna Politkovskaya, Natalya Estemirova. Where is Herzen? It's time to publish The Bell. Where are the Decembrists? It's time to go to Senate Square. And do not pretend that this is an accident, that these are temporary difficulties; the world was again divided into “we” and “they”, free people and executioners from the same old office. And don't let Mr. Lugovoy to the anniversaries of our radio stations. The bridge between us and them is forever burning.

“Later, friends, later we will end forever with pain. Sing, trumpet, sing, sing and call to battle. With your copper flesh, sing about my Potma. Sing about my brother there, in the icy hollow” (A. Galich).