“Then there will be ATD-Info”: the column of Alexei Polikhovich on the anniversary of May 6

The defendant of the “Swamp business” and the participant of the OTD-info Alexei Polikhovich tells why on May 6, 2012 he would still go to the action-even knowing about the consequences.

I give you a riot police tooth to cut off that if not for May 6, 2012, I would never have married in my life. I don’t know if that day could change the life of the country, but this is what he greatly changed mine was for sure.

If today I could say something to myself at that time in the square, then he would say: "Take off this fucking medical mask."

Take it off. She prevents breathing ten minutes after you put it on. She all the time goes to the chin. She looks stupid and you look stupid with her, buddy. And she will not hide you from the cameras of the Investigative Committee. I know this because I am sitting behind the laptop screen not far from the Moscow City Court, in the basements of which you will spend the summer and autumn 2013, in today's 2019.

This is the only obviously useful advice that I can come up with, possessing all the experience gained. After all, the evidence and the need for other tips depends on the angle of view. You can advise yourself to leave immediately after the start of the batch - but you can not leave. You can advise you not to get into that very bunch of small ones with that dude in a green T -shirt - but you can get climb. You can advise yourself to act a little more careful - but why. You can, in the end, advise yourself to not let yourself be photographed in the police department.

One way or another, May 6, 2012 greatly changed my life. I went to jail. I married an old friend who always loved - to hug her on the wedding day and then they would be allowed to date. I got into newspapers and news releases. He wrote a preface to a bad book about prison. Interested and did not write his own book about the prison. I realized what to write, mainly about the prison, is my path. Freed from the colony. Distributed with a friend who always loved. He stopped putting medical masks on rallies - now they are completely prohibited by law. I realized that it is not worth giving yourself photographing yourself in the police department.

And in the end he wrote one important letter to info@ovdinfo.org marked "Work".

And they took me. Without relevant experience. Without education. Without skills. Of course - thanks to the prison (well, I also want to think that I joked well a couple of times in that motivational letter).

And I was taught. Pyramidal structure news. The ability to join in a dialogue with a person at any time of the day and night, from anywhere in the world, regardless of the situation in which a person got on the end of the wire. They taught them to calmly explain that our hot line is not a hot line of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, not the hot line of the headquarters of Alexei Navalny, not the hot line of Google.

What is there, they taught to relate to the caller as if he had no Internet and he cannot google the address of the police department, where his brother was taken over Spice.

I was taught to respect and love numbers. In the ATS Info, a little obsessed with numbers. 3727 News on political persecution in Russia is written in 2018. 233 hours 15 minutes of the accepted calls on the hotline. 661 people were helped in the police department. More than five thousand people took advantage of the legal bot of the OTD-Info. More than 36 thousand people read our instructions.

I was taught to work in a large team during mass vintage with volunteers, journalists, analysts, lawyers, lawyers, programmers and one cat. They taught how to be a screw of a well -established mechanism for the reaction of society to the detention of hundreds of people. Yes. OVD-Info is an institution of public immunity, reacting to hostile cells of state stupidity, stupidity and malice.

I was taught to worry about unfamiliar or even unpleasant people, for those whom I will never see. Wake the coordinators of our legal service at three and four in the morning. To get up at six in the morning, leaf through groups on VKontakte and news feeds in anticipation of Windolov in Vladivostok or Khabarovsk, Sakhalin or Yakutsk. Search urgently in social networks of the human contacts, which is located in the police department under the threat of a criminal. Hit on the phone from 9 a.m. to 6 pm, accompanying anti -guard protest activists from their apartments, where they came with a search, to the departments of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, endlessly clarifying the information, coordinating lawyers: go to them either, to go there or to it, and where to find 10 people taken from the searches, and there were 10 or more.

After May 6, 2012, of course, a lot of bad things occurred, and we got used to a lot. They are used to distributing the 318th (an article by the Criminal Code on the use of violence to a police officer-ATS-info) after each dynamic opposition rally. Accustomed to war with Ukraine. To the fact that Nemtsov is dead. To the idea that rallies do not change anything by and large, and Putin will not just leave.

I got used to life after the prison, to the Troika map, torture of the FSB and the fact that I had a friend with a friend who I always loved.

Every year, at least one journalist at the end of April and early May asks me the same question. "Alexey, and knowing what will happen next, would you go?" The journalist of Medusa, Novaya Gazeta, Rain, Radio Liberty or something else asks me. And I answer. Yes, Maria. Yes, Egor. Yes, Katya. Yes, Margarita. I would go.

Knowing that all this confused experience after four years will lead me to a small project for helping detained at demonstrations. Knowing that after three years this project will turn into a whole editorial for 28 people, with a thousand various kinds of tasks, small and large, for a week and for a year. That here I recognize all these smart, funny, charming and sympathetic people, truly devoted to their work, really chopped for what they believe in. That after three years of work I will burn out and get tired, a hundred times by a fracture of the phone calling at three in the morning, I will leave the news on the texts, and I will return to the news, realizing that I can’t write more about torture. Or I almost can't.

Knowing that my actions in Bolotnaya will bring me to jail, and the prison will bring me to the ATS-Info. Knowing that I will become a part of a truly visionary project, which predicted that mass detentions will turn into routine, the romance of 2012 will go away, and people will remain in the autozaks.

I would go. And in this case, what can I say to myself now?

Think less about form, buddy. Be it a form of policemen or a form of relationship between a man and a woman. This is not as important as what is inside.

And finally take off this fucking mask.