Your Honor, esteemed participants of the process, dear friends!
Today is a joyful day for me. Before the verdict is delivered, our trial has come to its conclusion. It has been an exciting experience. I have listened to wonderful, sometimes emotional words from people who testified as witnesses, read warm letters, and received amazing postcards. At times, it felt like a real celebration, as if I were the guest of honor, not the defendant.
21 months ago, on August 17, 2023, a new fascinating stage began in my life. Since then, I have been through: a search, detention, a temporary detention facility, three pre-trial detention centers, 12 cells, more than 100 cellmates, and 26 court hearings. I cherish this experience greatly, as it has come at a high price. But most importantly, it has given me the opportunity to reflect on my journey and learn much about a world I had previously not paid enough attention to.
I have seen how prison destroys people's lives, depriving them of joy, and therefore happiness. Because the joy of life is true happiness.
Do not be surprised by this word—“joy.” It might seem, what is there to rejoice in my situation, in this darkness of imprisonment, when you haven't seen your loved ones, friends, colleagues for months? It is the joy of becoming stronger through this trial and not losing faith in the cause to which I have dedicated my entire life.
Here, in confinement, I have met many people whom I probably would never have met in ordinary life—people with different life experiences, different levels of education, and convicted under various articles. Every day we have to agree on how to live together: how to arrange duty in the cell, whether to ventilate it or not, where to get a fridge or a kettle. Essentially, we constantly conduct small referendums and reach consensus.
In prison, being an optimist helps me a lot, always looking for something good in any situation, trying to support people. In this, I am close to the mindset of the heroine of a novel—a girl orphan named Pollyanna. Her father, a priest, taught Pollyanna the “glad game”—to find something to be glad about in everything and to look for reasons for optimism—and since then, she taught this game to everyone around her. This does not mean denying problems, but finding ways to solve them, gaining useful experience from them.
Try to play the “glad game” too, because, if you think about it, each of us only has the present moment that we are living, and there is no other time when life would not be “this moment.” And it doesn't matter where you are at that moment: at home or abroad, on vacation or at work, in an apartment or in a traffic jam, at a polling station or in a prison cell—you need to live this very moment with joy and positivity. There is only now, which is why it is called “the present.”
Therefore, the prison period has become very fruitful for me, both as a person and as a lawyer. I enriched myself creatively: I started drawing, making collages and crafts, writing poems. I looked at people, relationships, and processes in a new way.
I began to enjoy the flow of life, work, creativity, intellectual freedom more. After all, you can imprison a person, but you cannot imprison, stop, or take away thought. You cannot take away, cancel my entire journey and what has been and remains my world. Perhaps it seems boring to someone, but without fair laws, clear and useful procedures, the life of the society we all dream of is impossible. I think about this constantly and am sure that I am not alone in this. We are united by an unwavering urge to think about what will make the world better and the will to make our small contribution.
But let's look at joy from another perspective. Can one experience true joy from deceit, from falsifications, from persecuting an innocent person? What joy can there be in handling my case? A case that should have fallen apart at the preliminary investigation stage. A case that no one wanted to initiate, being tossed from one authority to another. A case built not on evidence, but on assumptions and the investigators' ignorance of the basics of civil, administrative, and criminal law. A case in which eight investigators have changed. This injustice of persecuting an innocent person is what drains the joy from those entangled in this case.
But I hold no grudge against anyone. The ability to forgive and let go of the bad, even in situations where you think you can't, makes forgiveness a happy moment in life.
Honorable court!
Investigators have constructed a unique situation. For the first time in the history of our country, they want to make the meeting hall of the Central Election Commission of Russia the crime scene and declare the expert who spoke there a criminal.
As a lawyer, I do not understand why I am here and why I am the defendant in this case. And most importantly, I do not understand why I have to prove my innocence, rather than the investigation proving that I am guilty, as required by Article 49 of the Russian Constitution. This case lacks the very event of a crime. However, I am forced to prove a negative fact: that the movement “Golos” is not a structural unit of the international organization ENEMO, whose activities are recognized as “undesirable” in Russia; and to prove that I did not engage in organizing ENEMO's activities by speaking at a round table in the Central Election Commission.
In the end, my innocence was helped to be proven by state bodies and stubborn facts. From the first negative response of the Ministry of Justice of Russia, it follows that ENEMO has no structural units in our country. From the second response of the Ministry of Justice of Russia, it follows that the activities of the movement “Golos” were not recognized as undesirable. Also, no judicial or other decisions were made to prohibit or restrict the activities of the movement “Golos.” And finally, the fact that the organization ENEMO and the movement “Golos” are two different organizations is confirmed by the decisions of authorized state bodies, which included them in two different registers: ENEMO in the list of organizations whose activities are recognized as undesirable, and the movement “Golos” in the register of so-called “foreign agents.”
It turns out that the entire accusation is based on unfounded and unreliable information from operational officers, lacking evidential strength, and on the subsequent fabrication of conclusions distorting the content of the documents attached to the case.
And here the constitutional guarantee should work, according to which insurmountable doubts about a person's guilt are interpreted in favor of the accused, which inevitably should lead to an acquittal. Even though today such verdicts are only 0.26% across the country. But this means they are possible, and not always, when delivering a verdict, the court is guided by the rule that guilt is always unquestionable.
Friends!
I am a citizen of Russia, I love my country and greatly value my constitutional rights and freedoms. I am sincerely grateful to our ancestors for these achievements. Today, rights and freedoms may seem mundane, but how differently they are perceived in prison and how acutely one understands here that it is not enough to win them with sweat and blood, they must be constantly protected and defended.
Therefore, I found great joy in working on proposals: how to realize electoral rights in the conditions of a pre-trial detention center. For example, how a detainee in isolation can sign in support of a candidate's nomination, how to make a donation to an election fund, how to receive campaign materials from election participants, how to properly verify the identity of a detainee when receiving a ballot, how to ensure extraterritorial voting, how to effectively monitor. All this is very important because a person in a pre-trial detention center retains the full set of electoral rights until they are in places of deprivation of liberty by a court sentence. This is often forgotten. Over these months of engaged observation and reflection, I have managed to find many good solutions.
I cannot know how much longer my imprisonment will last, but I am confident that sooner or later I will be free and reunited with my loved ones and friends. And this anticipation brings joy to my heart. I am happy that in the conditions of prison I can call my mother, correspond with good people, meet with my defenders, and engage in the work I believe in.
Of course, I am very concerned about the fate of the movement “Golos,” to which I have dedicated 12 years of my life, and I cannot know what will happen to it after the verdict is delivered. But I do know that over these years, hundreds of thousands of knowledgeable and honest people have become observers. These thousands of my fellow citizens, while I am locked up, have not wasted time. They continued to protect electoral rights and observe elections with great benefit to our country, and during this time almost nine thousand election campaigns have been held in Russia. This is a unique experience of citizen self-organization, an inspiring example of citizenship. And I am glad to be part of this community.
There are those who doubt whether honest elections are possible? Doubt whether it is worth participating in them? These are fair questions. In moments of doubt, one should not forget that humans are imperfect, and therefore elections are imperfect. Elections reveal all human vices, which we fight against all our lives. Each of us daily makes a choice between kindness and anger, love and hatred, loyalty and betrayal, strength and weakness, generosity and greed, truth and lies, optimism and apathy, humility and pride, sincerity and self-interest, joy and despondency, participation and indifference.
Making the right choice, raising the level of honesty and common sense—is our path. Without us, elections cannot make themselves honest. Honest elections are made by people. Happy people. Observe, participate, enjoy life more—raise the level of honesty and common sense—drop by drop, step by step, day by day.
Thank you for listening to me so patiently. In conclusion, I want to wholeheartedly thank my loved ones, my defenders, colleagues, and the many kind people who support me and do not let me face injustice alone. For me, this means that people need and value what I have done, and it means everything was not in vain.
Original
Photo: Alexandra Astakhova/Mediazona