“Protest becomes conscious”

The independent media project OVD-Info, which monitors politically motivated detentions, has prepared a report titled "The Man from the Paddy Wagon". From it, in particular, it follows that during the “year of protest” in Moscow and the Moscow region, 5,169 people were detained for political reasons.

OVD-Info statistics is primarily an indicator of the level of repression. Our report, which recorded both rather terrible cases of beatings of detainees and routine procedural violations in police stations and courts, is something of a chronicle of current events, only about us and about today.

Things are still there, only the repressions have become softer. But they remain a cross-cutting theme of our history, and oh, how tired of it, especially to us, at OVD-Info. Therefore, I propose to look at our report through the eyes of an optimist.

For example, out of 228 events that we recorded, 49 were dedicated to supporting political prisoners. This is more than 20% of all shares. A pessimist will say: the opposition is being crushed and only self-defense remains. And an optimist, for example, I will say: society is learning to resist repression and is showing unprecedented solidarity.

For example, more than 60% of the actions and pickets at which arrests were recorded were either spontaneous or organized by independent groups of activists. A pessimist will say: the protest was leaked, the leaders can do nothing. An optimist will say: people are learning to do without a single political leader, and it seems they are succeeding.

Finally, the pessimist will look at the number of detainees since the beginning of the protest and be horrified. Will be right. An optimist will see in this frightening figure concrete people who are now united by similar social experience - concrete, and not from newspapers and blogs, knowledge of how the police work and what the Russian judicial system is.

But only such specific knowledge can lead to the realization of what and how should be changed in the system. This knowledge is cumulative. The protest, as the OVD-Info reports show, is alive and becoming more conscious. The horizontal is getting stronger. Vertical... Let's see.