Participation in Russian elections confirms the appearance of the regime’s legitimacy and the occupation of Ukrainian territories. Part of the Russian opposition fails to see this or ignores it.
I have translated two texts for you that shook me and continue to shake me every time I read them again. They are written by Russians for Russians, ashamed of the electoral farce and the stance taken by their colleagues—opposition politicians in exile.
The author of the first is Dr. Andrei Volna, a Russian traumatologist, volunteer doctor in Ukraine, and representative of Russian democratic forces in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe; the second was written by Katia Margolis, a Russian artist who supports Ukraine, including its armed forces and the national liberation movements of regions and republics occupied by the Russian Federation.
Andrei Volna: An Open Letter to Vladimir Kara-Murza, politician and member of the Russian Democratic Platform in PACE
Dear Vladimir!
This letter is not about the Yabloko party—it doesn’t matter whether they appeal or not, whether they are readmitted or not. In the context of this letter, it does not matter. And this letter is not even about the “elections.”
I would like to speak about our responsibility, our responsibility as members of the Russian Democratic Platform in PACE. Responsibility not only toward all Russians, but above all toward the younger generation, toward the young people, many of whom were born under Putin; responsibility toward the youth who delighted many of us so much with their active, fearless chanting and songs right in front of the court building.
You wrote on Facebook: “Looking at the photos and videos of the spontaneous gathering at the Supreme Court, I thought that these young men and women who sang, chanted, and laughed in the faces of the police represent the Russia of tomorrow. And the aging, cowardly dictator in his bunker now belongs forever to yesterday.”
And I agree with you. They truly are the “Russia of tomorrow.” Only, from a historical perspective, this tomorrow might not arrive tomorrow…
But now I am talking about something else. And about others. I am talking about the Russian yesterday and today. I am talking about myself and my generation. I am talking about you and your generation.
The main thing that unites us—and not even us specifically, but our generations—is that we have lost our country. We have lost our lives, there, in Russia.
By believing in the power of non-violent resistance, in the very possibility of some kind of “elections” first under an authoritarian and then a totalitarian fascist regime—by believing in the power of peaceful protests, we have lost everything, or almost everything. Nemtsov and Navalny paid for this belief with their lives. You personally paid a terrible price for it—poisoning, prison, exile. For me, it is much simpler—just exile (though leaving at sixty with three children is quite something…), being labeled a terrorist, arrested in absentia… But in the end, we are all speaking and writing from abroad. We lost.
But the most terrible price for our defeat was and is being paid by Ukraine—and it pays in blood. And that is not just a figure of speech, as you know. It pays with hundreds of thousands of lives. It pays with millions of people driven from the country. It pays with divided families. It pays with devastated cities. It pays with daily bombings. It pays with destroyed lives.
But let us return to the Russian youth.
We speak and write from abroad. We speak from abroad precisely because we lost, I repeat it again and again.
Do we then wish the same fate for these young people? I hope not. And does it not seem to you that by emphasizing the need to participate in “elections,” by engaging in this “non-violent resistance” with all the “Smart Voting,” “Noon Against Putin” walks, and other such defeatist trappings that we have already experienced, we are essentially asking them to follow our path? We are suggesting to them that this is real resistance. Don’t you think that in the end, we are pushing them toward personal tragedy? Toward repeating our failed path?
In my opinion, there are two messages that we in exile cannot communicate to Russia. We have no right:
- To call for violent resistance in any form while we are here in relative safety. Especially when all the desperate and brave heroes of the partisan resistance and volunteer fighters have found and continue to find everything they need without our advice;
- To call for the repetition of our already well-trodden and utterly failed path.
And while most of us agree with the first point, for some reason many representatives of the political exile—I repeat for the tenth time, people who have lost everything in Russia—consider it possible and even necessary to communicate and promote their own path to Russians. A path that led to catastrophe.
It seems to me that our task, the task of people and political forces in exile, is to tell the truth. Use all possible resources, your authority and political weight (which you do not lack), and tell Russians every day the truth about the terrible and bloody war being waged by Russia (not just “Putin’s army,” but Russia itself), about the tragedy of the Ukrainian people, about dictatorship, about fascism, about Nazism. Tell the truth and do not raise unfounded hopes in them. Tell the truth and do not push them to follow our already lost path, which leads to defeat for them as well.
I believe that this, dear Vladimir, is our responsibility today. Responsibility toward the younger generation, first and foremost.
And they, the young people, will make their own right decisions. When (if) their time comes. It is not for us to teach them. We can only ask. Ask them not to repeat our path. Ask them not to participate in lies.
P.S.: For obvious reasons, I am not opening the comments. If you feel it is possible to reply to me, the format is at your discretion.
P.P.S.: I deliberately do not speak about what the political emigration should do for Ukraine. I chose my path long ago. But that is not the subject of this letter.
Sincerely,
Andrei Volna, doctor, member of the Russian Democratic Platform in PACE, volunteer.
Katia Margolis: “Whoever causes one of these little ones to sin…”
What do I think about when I see very young Muscovites jumping with the Russian tricolor in front of the “court” building, where the party of professional, licensed losers—the liberal lightning rod of the last three decades—is being removed from the “elections”?
No, I am absolutely sure that these are wonderful, sincere young people. And that they believe and take risks. And that they do not understand whose games they are actually playing—after all, they are very young, and the pickled Yabloko, whose reputation has long been “tainted” by the ferment of Yavlinsky’s collaborationism, does not even exist in their recent historical memory—amidst total public amnesia and a fragmented consciousness based on the principle of “nothing like this ever happened—and here it is again,” which has become almost the main principle of existence for this population, precisely for this reason incapable of becoming a society.
For them, this shriveled apple is a form of hope. “Freedom while we burn…” (Pushkin, “To Chaadayev,” editor’s note)
Even within the limits of what is currently permitted—but under a dictatorship, even this is an act.
And so all these several hundred young faces shine and wave the fascist tricolor, while adult resettlers compete in admiration; they do not want to acknowledge their own responsibility for this monstrous scene.
While other young faces have long since rotted behind bars.
I spent a month in our pavilion of (non)consent (at the Venice Biennale 2026, editor’s note), looking into those faces every day and reading the files with the stories of each of them. (Thanks, Nadya Tolokonnikova)
Veterinarian. Tattoo artist. Student. Scientist. Artist. And then the crimes: science. Or “anti-fascism.” Support for Ukraine. A story about Mariupol. Poetry. A post. A few words.
And at that very moment, failed adults are using them, buying indulgences and even freedom with them.
Who exactly was exchanged? (International prisoner exchange at the turn of July and August 2024, editor’s note). Not these unknown boys and girls. Not those who supported Ukraine and set fire to military registration and enlistment offices. Not those who painted anti-war graffiti or wrote poems and told people the truth about the Mariupol theater. Not those who spoke of guilt and responsibility or looked for ways to defend Ukraine. Not those representatives of colonized nations who fight against imperial violence, Russification, the exploitation of their people in colonial wars, and the destruction of their own identity.
Yes, Sasha Skochilenko and Kevin Lick (a German citizen, 19 years old) were exchanged. Yes, Oleg Orlov was also among those exchanged.
But the others—adult, hardened, and often simply corrupt people who call themselves the Russian “opposition”—are unable to offer these young—still relatively free—people anything better, even theoretically, than their own long-rotten “Jabloko.”
The same “elections.” The same protests. The same tricolor. The same beautiful Russia of the future, which for some reason must emerge from the hideous Russia of the past without practically rethinking anything in it or in themselves.
After decades—and one could even say centuries—during which this path has already proven its perniciousness, it is not a mistake.
It is a crime.
Because the price for this mistake today is paid not only by the young people who were registered by the police yesterday—though they too may face conscription for it—but by thousands and thousands of Ukrainians with their lives. Citizens of another country, a country that has nothing to do with these rotten apples and pseudo-elections.
And by millions of people who feed this war daily. All under the same tricolor.
Corruption of society.
Corruption of minors.
In my opinion, this is not only done by the regime—with its “Conversations about Important Things,” its long-standing militarization starting from maternity hospitals, camouflage uniforms in kindergartens, etc.—but also by Navalnaya, who reads from Volkov’s cheat sheets and declares again in the tone of a kindergarten teacher that the “Kremlin is afraid,” and calls for “voting”—no longer against the party of crooks and thieves, as her late husband, murdered by this regime, used to say, but FOR the approved parties of the state of rapists and murderers.
And Yashin, with his pseudo-Napoleonic complex, is still trying to sell himself and Russia as the center of the world to young people, with kittens and another infantile logo instead of a completely new coordinate system.
A child does not develop and mature unless offered something more. “My mother took me to a huge house—it was St. Isaac’s Cathedral—and I was overwhelmed by the sense of immensity, the ratio between me, a small person, and the enormity of the building’s volume. It is hard to express the essence of this spatial feeling, but it never repeated in my life, and I know I looked for it later; all my life it forced me to seek relationships of forms that could reproduce such a sense of planetary order. A sense of planetary order in a small child! It can be called the experience of living the dimension of life. After all, architecture, for example—if we speak of real architecture—confirms precisely this with its forms: immensity and meaning, not of the buildings themselves, but of something that cannot be named but can be revealed with a clarity that no longer requires names.
If a child remains within the circle of phenomena proportional to their age, they will never truly grow up. (…) Growth happens where something is revealed that they, as they are, are not.”
“They can adapt. Here arises the effort for growth, without which nothing happens: the effort to understand, the effort to compare oneself—with something larger, with a wider coordinate system. (…)
And for the inner life to be born and shaped, these encounters, these moments of perception are necessary—whether they are the vaults and the height of the dome of St. Isaac’s Cathedral or something else. These are the ones that truly define the true dimension of a person, allowing them to see that they are small but can be great, and not in the vanity of empty magnificence, but in connection with a wider dimension of life and immense time, which manifest and are given to us for perception in stone, word, sound.” (K. Petrov-Vodkin)
But those who are themselves petty, limited, and unfree cannot and, above all, do not want to allow growth, the crossing of prescribed boundaries, the rethinking of the entire paradigm. Because it would mean their own collapse.
Both for the regime and the “opposition.” And therefore, their only path is the reproduction of their lack of freedom and moral decay and further corruption.
And in exactly the same spirit, there is a report that has been chilling me for several days.
Oleksandr Mustiatse, a Ukrainian teenager from the village of Krynky in the Kherson region. Russian troops occupied his village two days before his fifteenth birthday. After the occupation, the boy disappeared. Ukrainian authorities added him to the list of missing children. Nothing was heard of him for four years.
Now he is nineteen.
He was found. In a Russian military uniform. In a cap with a Z. In the Russian army, fighting against his own country.
This is the first known case of a Ukrainian child, considered missing after the occupation, who, upon reaching adulthood, found himself in the ranks of the Russian troops. But unfortunately, it will not be the only one…
When Ukrainians contacted him, Mustiatse replied that he does not consider himself a traitor. Russia, he said, “was always in his heart.” This phrase is perhaps the most terrifying for me.
Fifteen years old. The age when a person is just becoming themselves. When ideas about good and evil, about belonging, about one’s own history, about who you are and where your home is formed.
And then—four years in the country that occupies your home.
And at nineteen—a Z on the visor and “Russia was always in my heart.”
I have been looking for words for this news for several days and cannot find them. For the cynicism. The horror. The irreparability.
To steal a child. To steal a child’s family, home. Country. Language. Name. Memory.
But the most terrifying thing is to steal the child themselves. Never to allow them to become themselves again. To forge them into a weapon against their own home. It is almost like murder.
And it is no coincidence that the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Maria Lvova-Belova at the same time as for Putin—specifically in connection with the illegal deportation and displacement of Ukrainian children. That is a war crime. Just like execution pits, torture chambers, mass rapes.
And all this is happening under the Russian tricolor.
That is why the fact that the same flag is becoming a symbol of freedom for protesting Moscow youth, for me, is a sign of monstrous inadequacy and indifference—to those thousands of children—to their stolen and murdered lives, to Bucha, Mariupol, Izyum. To the bombs and missiles that flew into Zaporizhzhia today, Odesa yesterday, Kyiv the day before yesterday, and will fly again tomorrow…
And in the same spirit of corruption, another horrific report.
About the “adopted” son of Lvova-Belova from Mariupol, who initially, as she said herself, sang Ukrainian songs and did not want to become Russian, and now, as she proudly announces, has been completely Russified and has begun studying to become a prosecutor.
Perhaps it is hard to imagine a more terrifying rhyme. One kidnapped Ukrainian child ends up in the army of the state that occupied his country. Another is being prepared to become part of its repressive apparatus.
They don’t just steal children. They steal them from themselves—and turn their lives and personalities against their own past and unrealized future. Against everything real in them.
I want our dear liberal Russians, who once planned to “save” and adopt children “from the DPR and LPR,” to know: this is a war crime—I will never stop repeating it.
This is not charity. This is not “rescue.”
And the fact that some of those who were willing to agree to this have now themselves become political prisoners in no way negates the horrific fact of their consent to what is happening to Ukrainian children.
The victim of one crime does not automatically become more perceptive to others. As long as a person is behind bars and holds strong convictions, it is everyone’s task to fight for their freedom. But not to share those views.
And how much of this happened during the Great Terror and later in the era of Soviet dissidence.
But binary thinking and amnesia—and a white dusting of snow covers the eyes and memory…
Perhaps that is why I look at these young Russians jumping in front of a Russian court with the tricolor and cannot bring myself to be moved. And I have no choice but to be horrified by the depth of the abyss that must at least be noticed before one can begin to climb out.
I think about the adults who bequeathed them imperial rot as the norm, and the infantilism of irresponsibility, egocentrism, and lack of empathy.
An inadequate understanding of freedom, the world, their own country, and its place in it—and they call this opposition and a symbol of hope.
For me, it is a symbol of roughly the same hopelessness.
Can you imagine young German anti-fascists writing words about freedom in chalk on the sidewalk in front of the Gestapo building, jumping with a swastika flag and explaining that it is actually their flag, but Hitler stole it and soon “this will end” and they will regain their freedom and glory?
I cannot.
Because a point of no return is reached: you cannot live under a symbol without being poisoned by it. It is impossible to return to the path of freedom without understanding what was happening under it. And without taking responsibility for it.
The bloodstain will not disappear.
Corruption not only teaches a child lies. It makes them immune to them.
The inability to distinguish between black and white leaves an indelible red, bloody smear. Such is the color arithmetic of conscience. And this red smear crosses out everything else. Only repentance can, if not wash it away, then at least give hope that this smear will not continue in the future.
Corruption is a deliberate distortion of perception. Forced colorblindness. The normalization of evil. One’s own irresponsibility and lack of repentance, one’s own interests and narratives presented as truth. You make a victim of yourself and are indifferent to the victims of others—and you pass this on as the norm. It is the inability to imagine another world outside one’s own small one, because there is no need or habit to hear and see others and to see oneself reflected in the eyes of others. This imperial blindness and unwillingness/inability to step out from behind the bars of dogmas, words, and clichés worn down to the point of automatism. The prison closes and opens from the outside. But freedom comes only from within. And without repentance, it is impossible.
“Whoever causes one of these little ones to sin…”
