Now I'm a Criminal (according to Putin's regime)
But here's why I won't stop
Last week, on March 13, I woke up and learned that back in Russia I was considered a criminal.
I was accused of spreading fake news about the Russian army, specifically about the war crimes in Bucha. A criminal case had been opened against me – if convicted I can face 10 years in jail.
At first I was having quite a bit of fun. Everyone was congratulating me. Friends, followers on social media, even people I don’t know, all wrote words of support, joking that in today's Russia a criminal case is like a badge of honor or a prize.
Two years ago, when the whole horrible truth about the massacre in Bucha was just beginning to come to light, I wrote first a short text on Instagram, then a column for Der Spiegel. But, journalism in Russia is essentially criminalized, so only press releases from the Russian Ministry of Defense are considered official truth - and according to said ministry, everything that happened in Bucha is a fake, it was all staged by Ukrainians. If anyone was killed there, it was only by the Ukrainian military.
After receiving congratulations from my friends, I started reading articles in Russian propaganda publications. That was the end of my light-hearted mood. "The journalist Zyga [sic], who curses Russia, may go to jail for 10 years for his lies about Bucha," a popular tabloid reported. Another pro-Kremlin news agency wrote, I quote, "Mikhail Zygar will not come to say farewell to his dying mother." The piece reported that my mother has less than a year to live and I won't be able to see her anymore. (I don't want to comment on this - I've never seen in the press a discussion of the possible funeral of a person who is still alive.) In another hatchet job, the same media reported that my father allegedly condemns me for my same-sex marriage.
Finally, one of my friends sent me a blog post by a former member of the Duma (Russia’s parliament), a familiar face on propagandist TV talk shows. He wanted me to be indicted for "treason against the motherland" and claimed that back in 2012 I had been recruited by British intelligence and gifted a mansion (Wow!). Moreover, the former Duma member insisted that I, like the rest of the "traitors to the motherland and 'relocants'" is "a sick scumbag who serves the Antichrist."
Logically I understood what they were doing. The main purpose of intimidation is just intimidation itself. I am being persecuted for my words, for my texts, for my books. Apparently, they are so true and so painful for the Russian state, officials and propagandists, that the problem must be dealt with at source.
The logic is easy to understand; what’s much harder is to put all of one’s emotions aside. It turns out that a person can be thrown off balance, frightened, even by ridiculous insults. Even now, I must say, it is not easy for me to write these lines. But I realize that this is exactly the reason for the criminal case, this is exactly the reason for the fraudsters to invent interviews with my relatives or to make up stories about connections with intelligence agencies - to make me stop writing.
I'm not even a politician - I'm a writer. But I write about history and, as we see, history is good fuel for hatred; it is fueling the current war, making it seem logical and justified in the eyes of many. Putin's falsified history of Russia instills in them the idea that Russia necessarily needs a czar, that Russia is doomed to be a dictatorship, an authoritarian empire. How strange, isn’t it, that the Russian authorities are persecuting a writer who proves the opposite...
I think this is a good time to share these simple emotions. We all experience fear and a sense of powerlessness. Violence is frightening: whether it's a hired killer, like those who tried to, and ultimately did, murder Aleksi Navalny, or an anonymous writer on the internet who seeks to slander and humiliate. Throughout my life, it seemed to me that I lived in a world that was learning to avoid violence. My entire generation - millions of Russians who grew up in the post-Soviet era, like millions of Europeans - sincerely believed that there would be no more violence in our time, that it was obsolete. It contradicts our values.
When Russia attacked Ukraine, I and more than a million Russians left Russia - because our world had collapsed. We believed that we lived in a world without violence, a world where war was impossible. But many Russians who stayed were brought up with these same values. When people ask me, "Why don't they overthrow Putin?" - the answer seems so obvious to me that it's embarrassing to say it. Because that's their system of values, they are not ready for violence, that's how their parents raised them for the last 30 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. They are utterly bewildered by Putin and the sudden cult of violence that has taken hold in Russia, they are afraid, they don't know how to counter it. In that sense at least, they are not much different from the average European.
I don't know how outdated our naive dreams are that the world can be changed without violence. At the origin of this great dream was Leo Tolstoy, who wrote about "non-resistance to evil by violence" – he was the true founder of the democratic Russia of the future. It was Tolstoy who inspired Mahatma Gandhi. It was Tolstoy's ideas that underpinned the "velvet" and bloodless revolutions that ended Soviet totalitarianism.
Since the collapse of the USSR, we have lived under the illusion of progress, with the feeling that the world is inevitably changing for the better - and the further time moves on, the better. Putin - and not only him) - in the last few years has been strenuously proving that this was a naive dream. That good old-fashioned violence is still a unique tool for subjugating people. The hammer, Novichok, the threat of jail, the threat of death, including that of relatives - all of these are time-tested ways to crush the will, to trample a person who is not ready for violence.
I don't have an answer for how to fight this archaic evil. But I am a writer - and I will voice what I believe. And I believe that most people in Russia hate violence, hate coercion, fear war - and that Russia's history does not doom it to eternal dictatorship. If I am threatened with prison for this position, then there is strength in my belief. It means that I must continue to write and to speak.