11/08/2023
Here’s an excerpt from today’s edition of the courageous Russian indie news source Mediazona (founded by members of P***y Riot, kick-ass activist musicians.) Please forgive the clunky translation, it was written in Russian - Siri did her best, and I did not correct her.
I have hope that the Russian people will stand up to Putin, and these brave truth tellers are helping to pave the way.
🦄🌈💜💪🎤🎯
Hi, this is Masha Shevyreva, Mediazona newser. This is my first newsletter - I've been working not so long ago. I thought for a long time what to share with you, and eventually decided to tell you why I started writing news at all.
The fact is that, in addition to my love of working with texts, I react very sharply to injustice - if I saw someone offended at school, I definitely stood up to defend this person, I can't do otherwise. With age, I realized that there are all sorts of smaller and bigger injustices in the world, the most terrible of them is war. Great injustices often occur at the state level: this repressive machine with the right to violence can crush whoever it wants, only a formal reason is needed.
There is no need to go far for examples: at the end of last week, a Russian court sentenced Alexei Navalny to 19 years in prison in a fabricated extremist case, and his colleague Daniel Kholodny was sentenced to 8 years in prison. We also talked about how the meeting itself was held - it was the same circus. The sound of the broadcast was very bad, as a result, no one really heard the verdict, and the press service of the Moscow City Court skillfully ignored all the questions of journalists. In general, for some time we only had to guess about the terms of imprisonment, not to mention other details of the court's decision.
This week, the authorities persecuted not only politicians or activists, but also human rights defenders and religious figures. And the most ordinary people, who do not have any great influence and are generally far from politics, are persecuted simply for their words - in Krasnoyarsk, an employee of one of the local enterprises was first fined because of anti-war stories on Instagram, and then fired. It turned out that her social networks were watched by colleagues who reported her to the police. By the way, about surveillance - if you use Russian taxi services, such as Yandex, remember: from September 1, the FSB will have direct access to your trips not only around the country, but also abroad.
All this makes me very angry, but what can I change? Unfortunately, I will not be able to stop the arbitrariness of the security forces, release political prisoners and remove Putin from power alone. Stop pro-Kremlin propaganda and swors - too. But I can tell the truth about various Russian injustices every day, that's why I'm writing news for you.
I hope that people, having learned the truth, will decide what contribution they can make to the struggle for a better future - for Russia without fabricated deeds, war and the subsequent madness, violence, discrimination and corruption. Together, it is much easier to achieve a positive result than alone.
Those who do unfairly are afraid of the truth - especially the Russian authorities are afraid of it. That is why they block independent publications and recognize investigative teams as "undesirable organizations", strengthen control over the Internet and interfere with the work of services that help bypass blocks. The authorities do this in the hope that no one will find out the truth. Let's do everything we can to make it never happen.
