Time to Back the Other Russia

French philosopher Andre Glucksmann wrote an impassioned editorial in Le Figaro, which has been translated and reprinted across Europe. It is available online in English here. A few excerpts:

Khodorkovsky and Trepashkin are locked up in deepest Siberia. Every fourth or fifth Chechnen has lost his life. Gary Kasparov and his friends are receiving threats and being prevented from demonstrating with a rose in one hand and the Russian constitution in the other. How many heads have to roll, how many hopes destroyed before Europeans, those champions of human rights, finally react? . . .

If censorship, corruption, beatings, threats and murder prevent all forms of criticism, and silence the opposition, then nobody will be left in Russian society to stand up for democracy, reason, responsibility, caution and human respect.

Have you learned nothing, you European greats? Do you think it’s smart to watch all the internal opposition powers – the only ones that could possibly help reign in a unilateral power that seems, willingly or not, bent on destroying the world – be decimated? . . .

It’s time that the European Union stand up for the freedom that it has passionately defended since Greek antiquity. This passion can be attributed to its origins. It animated the anti-totalitarian revolts in Berlin (1953), Poland’s awakening (1956), the uprisings in Budapest (1956), Prague, Warsaw and finally the fall of the Berlin wall. And what resulted: from the student revolts against Milosevic in Belgrade to the Rose revolution in Tbilisi to the Kiev December in Orange. It’s high time that we articulated clearly that the soul of Europe does not lie in a few divisions, but rather in the Other Russia and Garry Kasparov.