Appeal for a Russian Maidan

By Anna Foa*

From the letter in which the writer Jonathan Littell invites his Russian friends to overthrow the tyrant: ” You are very numerous, you are millions. The Moscow police can handle thirty thousand people in the street, a hundred thousand. More than three hundred thousand, they would be overwhelmed. They would have to call in the army, but would this army fight for Putin, when it came down to it? […]
There will be terrible danger, of course. […] In Syria, and now in Ukraine, Putin sought to show you, by example, what happens to a people who dare […] not only to ask for freedom but actually to try and take it. Yet if you do nothing, so many will be lost anyhow. And you know it. One of your sons will make a joke on a video game chat, and will be arrested; one of your daughters will express her indignation on internet and will be arrested; a dear friend of yours will make a mistake and will die in a dank cell under the sticks of the police. This is what has been happening for years now, and is what will continue to happen, on a greater and greater scale. […] Now is the time for your own Maidan”.

*Historian