What was going through Marina Ovsyannikova’s head last week? Such little bravery as I’ve shown has always come in moments where I had no time to think. But in the days before she took her anti-war placard on to the studio floor of Russia’s Putin-compliant Channel One, Marina must have been agonising about whether to commit the act and then planning how to carry it out. Her courage was cold. She knew she’d lose her job, disadvantage her family (she is a mother of two), face possible imprisonment, be subject to state harassment, public denunciation and that in all likelihood, despite all those risks, her action might have little consequence.
And then she went ahead. Stood in the wings, waited for the moment, walked on. In her video, made before her demonstration, she took responsibility for having been part of a lying propaganda effort which, in her words had, over the years “allowed the zombification of the Russian people”. She was ashamed. Not least of having failed to protest at the treatment of the poisoned and then imprisoned Russian opposition figure, Alexei Navalny. Navalny’s spokeswoman tweeted: “Wow, that girl is cool.”
For the time being the authorities in Moscow seem to have decided not to martyr Ovsyannikova. The minor charges so far mean a fine, a possible short spell in clink for “hooliganism”. But there is the implied threat of worse to come, especially if she transgresses further. Little wonder she fears for her safety.
Navalny, on the other hand, will be properly martyred. On Tuesday the state prosecutor asked for a 13-year sentence for him (he has been in prison since February last year) on fraud charges. Navalny had returned voluntarily to Russia to publicise a film he had made about Putin’s own personal corruption. A judge will issue a verdict next week. One wonders whether the judge has been told yet what it should be.
History, said Marx, repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. But what a tragic farce. It’s the 50th anniversary this week of the first edition of Index on Censorship, the magazine founded to show solidarity with Marina’s and Alexei’s forebears, the dissidents in the Soviet Union. The initiative for Index came from the poet Stephen Spender, who was reacting to an appeal to the people of the world from two Soviet dissidents, Pavel Litvinov and Larisa Bogoraz. Here in Britain their letter was published in The Times. It concerned the trial of four writers who had published and distributed censored material, known as samizdat.
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Spender imagined, as we can too, the lonely bravery of those who took on a system so oppressive that simply publishing an illegal tract would cause you disappear into a fog of prisons, camps and (a grim characteristic touch) psychiatric institutions. And condemn your family to the worst housing and the worst jobs.
In Moscow in 1984 during the brief gerontocracy of comrade general secretary Konstantin Chernenko, I smuggled a samizdat manuscript out of Sheremetyevo airport at the behest of another British journalist. It was not an act of courage on my part. The worst I would have faced had the guards searching my luggage looked a bit harder would have been a day in a cell and deportation. But for the writer it could have been far worse.
Two years later, even with Mikhail Gorbachev now in power, Bogoraz’s 48-year-old former husband, Anatoly Marchenko, died in Chistopol prison after a hunger strike where he had demanded the release of other dissidents. His death meant he got his way, for a while.
Until, of course, he didn’t. For half a decade we thought all that bad stuff was over. Since then in Putin’s Russia, and so many other places (as I learnt every day when I chaired Index myself), the price of simply telling the truth has been paid by writers, artists, journalists and ordinary (but often lone) citizens.
Four years ago the writer and Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich wrote in The Washington Post commemorating the life of her countrywoman, Anna Politkovskaya, murdered in Moscow in 2006. “There is a war on,” she said. “In the former Soviet Union, dozens of journalists have been killed. Life in Russia is still in limbo, between chaos and a prison camp.”
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But perhaps, as in Soviet days, Putin’s Russia doesn’t have to murder journalists. So complete is censorship now that they have non-lethal ways of silencing the awkward. There would have been nowhere in today’s Russia for Politkovskaya to publish or broadcast. She’d have fallen foul of the law that a war must not be called a war and been sent straight to jail for the requisite 15 years.
My point, though, is not about Russia but about courage, and the lack of it. Challenged morally, we fall into three rough camps: the dissident, the silent and the actively complicit. The dissidents are the smallest group, the silent are the largest. The complicit are the worst.
One of the most prominent Soviet dissidents was the nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov, who agitated for human rights. On August 29, 1973, Pravda carried a statement from 40 Soviet scientists, including three Nobel laureates. The statement said that “to all intents and purposes, AD Sakharov has become an instrument of hostile propaganda against the Soviet Union and other socialistic countries. AD Sakharov’s action is radically alien to Soviet scientists.”
One can imagine the pressure some of those signatories came under to allow their names to be used — maybe no more science trips to the US. But perhaps others were less reluctant. Nothing is more resented than the person who, by doing a good thing, shows up the colleague or neighbour who does not.
There’s plenty materially to be gained from a lack of courage or from rejecting a pedantic insistence on integrity. It permits you as a leader to rock up in Riyadh to beg oil from the man who had the journalist Jamal Khashoggi killed. Or, as a fan, to enjoy the absurd sportswashing largesse of the oligarch or the emir, and not worry about where it came from. But as Alexievich wrote to her dead compatriot: “I think, Anna, you must have already seen those TV images: ‘new Russians’ eating black caviar, bragging about the gold urinals in their personal jets and the largest yachts in the world, while people somewhere in Ryazan or on the Sakhalin Island, without any work or money, looked on with hungry eyes.”
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It’s not given to all of us, or even most of us, to be coldly brave like Marina and Alexei. But it is given to all of us not to be actively complicit ourselves and to celebrate and actively support bravery in others. Is that too much to ask?
