I do not want violence. Not in any form. I do not want teachers’ hands down schoolgirls’ underwear. I do not want drunken fathers’ fists beating the bodies of their wives and children. Were I to list all the violence that I am aware of, there would not be enough days, weeks, or years. To start seeing violence one simply has to open their eyes.
We knew that the transcripts of our hearings would be broadcast. Even though no one listens to you in the courtroom, you can address invisible listeners who will read about it later in the media. And so to demonstrate the full absurdity of the Russian courts we set up what we called a “word auction”: we invited our readers to contribute words, any words, along with a monetary donation. We then went ahead and wove them into our speeches we put the speeches together using the words people sent in. So the speeches ended up pretty absurdist, but we managed to express some of our ideas at the same time. I remember that there were a lot of really wacky and exotic animals, so we would say, like, “we’ve been sitting under house arrest for a long time now, we aren’t able to admire these wonderful animals.” Someone sent in the phrase “bee extinction,” so my colleague Volodya [Vladimir Metyolkin] gave a whole speech about the problem of bees going extinct due to climate change, an
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