Alekseeva lesson

I can not be considered either a friend or an ally of Lyudmila Alekseeva. Several times I talked with her on the phone, as is often the case in life - when she needed her help and support for various "human rights" reasons. Regardless of her employment and health status, this assistance came on time and precisely in the format that she was asked about.

Nevertheless, the little that I know about her makes me suggest that the main lesson of Lyudmila Alekseeva is not what the majority sees in - not in the art of struggle with the authorities, but in art to honestly live in Lada with their principles and beliefs.

As it turned out, you can be a Komsomol and a communist, is a lecturer of the regional committee and finish graduate school at the Department of the CPSU, and then survive the worldview crisis, rethink your life and become one of the founders of the dissident movement, one of the pillars of Samizdat and Grandmother of Human Rights.

You can leave under the threat of arrest in the United States, become an American citizen, work at “Freedom”, write reports for the Carter administration, and then return to Russia, resume their human rights activities to grants of foreign governments, to be the first to have officially submitted torture in relation to Magnitsky and at the same time send an angry letter to Bush against the war in Iraq.

You can advocate the immediate withdrawal of the Russian military from the conflict zone in the east of Ukraine, to be an active participant in the Strategy-31, to cause the rage of Yarova and accept Putin at his birthday, take flowers from his hands, enter the tips for rights that are not and, apparently, will no longer, and there will continue to do many useful things to human rights.

Today there are many people who will want to divide Lyudmila Alekseev into parts, and everyone will mourn the part that is personally more expensive to him and pretty. At the same time, bashfully silent about another, incomprehensible and uncomfortable for him Alekseeva. The truth is that there is no and cannot be “two” Alekseevs: both the one that wrote in defense of Magnitsky, and the one who took Putin's flowers is the same great woman.

Because real life is always a compromise, it is a mistake and their correction, it is hope and disappointment, it is error and their overcoming. The prophets, unlike “followers”, are ambiguous, but only this ambiguity makes them real.

The main lesson of Alekseeva: what you fight for is much more important than what and against whom you fight against.

Dissent - universal: it means that one can think not only otherwise than Putin, but also otherwise than those who consider the struggle with Putin the only permissible goal of their life.

Alekseeva showed that life is more complicated and richer than this struggle. And the fact that Putin will come to her funeral (if Ponomarev does not come) is just disgusting, went and stupid, but at the same time absolutely nothing means for history.