this is cringey & made me uncomfortable bc i see that there’s a new effort to make young ppl pour out into the streets to protest navalny’s incarceration & larger extent of oppression under putin but no one questions what will happen when kids are arrested https://twitter.com/maxseddon/status/1352280501764108289

when we protested in russia against putin’s corrupt oligarch-backed regime (& navalny’s incarceration) in the early 2010s some of us were super young & this naive too. some were arrested at protests and this didn’t seem like much, but the grim reality surfaced later.

some were charged with stuff, like protesting, disobedience, etc & put on notice, which would surface every time they went looking for jobs. some still can't find employment bc of it to this day. some friends of friends even committed suicide. but no one talks about it & won’t

people invested in what they call the liberation of russia & belarus have been attacking me for not showing sympathy for navalny when he’s in jail or for exiled tsikhanouskaya while talking about their vested interests & bad politics. but this is an absolutely skewed perspective

my sympathy belongs with the young people, who are corralled to go to the streets by navalny, tsikhanouskaya, well-paid journos & other adults & will probably get arrested there & go in the system, under the watchful eye of the police & special forces

no foreign correspondent will remember about them after the arrests make headlines or go to their apartment in schelkovo/podolsk in a few of years, when the kids, now older, feel desperate enough to end it bc of lack of prospects, security & a life fucked up by that charge

i’m very bitter because i’m disillusioned & all i see around me are grifters who attach themselves to democracy narratives with complete disregard for what effects those can have on the ordinary people because they’re so out of touch

but then again no one who is in touch with the currents in russia, especially outside of moscow & big cities would ever frame the opposition to putin as led by navalny, or pretend that the people at large sympathize with him

i've always believed in a revolution, even if sometimes misguidedly, & this dream of a better world was abused by many, before i was finally able to set myself free by understanding historical & dialectical materialism & learning to see through bad actors (still perfecting this)

i absolutely abhor the false narratives that liberal western grifters project into the heads of the young & the vulnerable, who want freedom but know not what it is or what it entails. these narratives are shiny, attractive, but they’re full of deception

you go out there instead of organizing, building, & planning & dedicate yourself to an early arrest, & then, that’s it. it’s like being drafted into an army that has no strategy, just an attack plan to run at the enemy guns ablaze

i was one such kid but i come from a family that’s comfortable, that wouldn't sink under smth like that even if i were unlucky to be charged, my partner & mother had always told me not to go into the depths, my partner & father often accompanied me to protests & were in control.

with some comrades, we even compiled this leaflet & distributed it among protesters at rallies. it warned against getting arrested & instructed people what to do, including helplines & such. but that’s merely a bandaid on my conscience https://www.ridus.ru/news/14136.html 

we could never guess what the larger set of consequences for people could be. i know that many opposition figures got careers out of it. i concentrated on my literary pursuits. but the clerks, the students of no fancy affiliation or connections, just slipped through the cracks

as i reexamine the atmosphere back in 2010s, i remember that the feelings everyone had were that putin is evil & he needs to go, but few considered what could come next. today i see the same, but i also see some new participants more active, like khodorkovsky & his media empire.

& i feel very powerless because i don’t have a way to stop it from happening again, from new victims being created instead of attention drawn to organizing, although i will not lie, organizing has advanced admirably over the last years & i love it

and this is the biggest project at hand that anyone over 30 should consider: the need to teach youth to create systems of resilience, unity & most importantly economic control in the country. we need to give youth blueprints for a better world, not lead them to arrests or death.

personally, i have been against putin ever since i was a young teen because he let the boys in the kursk submarine sink. they were just a little older than me then, & they all died in the icy depths, & he didn’t do enough. it’s personal between me & him.

but now it’s also personal between me & the russian opposition figures centering navalny who ask people to pour out in the streets given the political reality in russia, in belarus, but without a plan. because they, too, allow the young die, just more elaborately, more slowly.

the kid in the tiktok is also from a comfortable family judging by their english. they can pass for a girl even if they don’t identify. the cops are easier on girls & cause them fewer problems. you’re most fucked if you’re a working class boy: the same kind to die in a submarine

and the liberal media ppl all spin their own story to pretend that navalny is worthy of such human sacrifices despite him saying just recently how germans have a better claim to come to russia without visas than central asians bc their country is rich & central asia isn’t

there is nothing about the navalny angle of the opposition that aims to protect the poor and weak. it’s a movement to toss the old rich guys & instill new rich guys. it has no plans for the majority, like it doesn’t have any plans for those who will be arrested & charged tomorrow

for me since i was a tiny child it had always been about protecting the weak. the post-soviet neoliberal haze successfully concealed communism from me for a long while & made it impossible for me to know that this is what communism is about, as well. so it was easy to dupe me.

it’s easy to convince kids who already subsist on western culture that their liberation, will al their queerness, transness, feminism, mental health issues & quirks may only come if they listen to their western friends with their pinkwashed agendas

it’s the same tactics they use in their own western liberal countries, by creating mass hysterias about some niche issue to garner support for tighter surveillance, more austerity & expansive military budgets & then pay everyone a couple hundred bucks to stay silent

meanwhile, the more western liberals do to instill this false dichotomy that there are just two choices, between putin & navalny, or lukashenko & tsikhanouskaya, the more reactionary the government becomes, and the fewer prospects there are for things to change holistically

i refuse to accept myself or other people as cannon fodder for putin, for navalny, for lukashenko or for tsikhanouskaya because this is not what our mothers gave birth to us for and not what our grandfathers & great-grandfathers died for in world war ii

they gave us life so we could live happy. not just for a moment, when the adrenalin of supporting the cause you care about kicks in, & then dies out as fear displaces it. but for a whole long life that is not cut short by anything.

i will not stop talking about it & will use any platform that will have me to spread the word. & when you see it, please keep in mind that unlike foreign moscow correspondents, i am not employed by any media at all, 100% freelance & represent only myself & humanity.