Tuesday, May 07, 2013

Bolotnaya - May 6

Among the events and speeches broadcast from the large and well-attended demonstration on Bolotnaya Square yesterday, the contributions by Alexei Navalny and Oleg Kashin stand out as particularly memorable. 

A complete English translation of Navalny's speech (http://www.interpretermag.com/alexey-navalnys-speech-at-bolotnaya-square/) has been published by The Interpreter magazine. Excerpt:
I don’t have another country; I have nowhere to go. I don’t have another country. I don’t have another Moscow or another family or another people except you. And I don’t need anything else in fact except the support of my family, and your support, I am sure that like me, you won’t go away, and I congratulate you with the coming holiday of Victory [Day on May 9], a great victory.
I know, if our relatives and our ancestors at one time kicked out of the country those who wanted to enslave us with the force of arms, with tanks and planes, then our task is to free the country from those who want to enslave us, with the help of falsified ballots, with the help of sell-out journalists, and the help of crooks and thieves in police uniforms.
Oleg Kashin's rough and ready rendering of Yegor Letov's "Все идет по плану" was moving in its directness and passion, as was his concluding statement that
"Our leaders are not here and not under house arrest, our leaders are Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, Letov".

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