Ulitskaya about freedom

The publication “BUT” (the project “Novaya Gazeta” in Russia) publishes the text of Lyudmila Ulitskaya “Notes by the writer of freedom”.

“... Freedom begins with the awareness of its own lack of freedom. <...>

In 1991, freedom came. But there were no free people. Or there was too little to keep her. And then no one realized that there was no freedom without free people. My friends were in great enthusiasm. They stood in that square - all. And I did not stand in that square - my legs did not go there. “I will be with you when they will carry out lustration and ban the Communist Party,” I said. This did not happen.

The worst of everything that could have happened was the will of the people, accustomed to the "firm hand", the authorities from the party passed to the KGB. It was a conditionally free choice of conditionally free people. <...>

Freedom just consists that a person takes responsibility to solve life issues of various complexity, based on his own ideas about the world, and not from the instructions of the authorities of different ranks. And the creation of our own ideas is a difficult life -long work of acquiring knowledge and the development of human culture. But it is this work that makes us free. ”