Speech by Stanislav Markelov. Moscow, November 30, 2008

Address by Stanislav Markelov. Rally against Political Terror. Moscow, November 30, 2008.

  

I’m in a strange position. It turns out that I’m the lawyer of all the people who wound up in these awful stories. And I’m tired.

I’m tired of coming across the names of people I know on the crime pages. I’m tired because a week before what happened I was at Mikhail Beketov’s house. And he complained to me that he was alone against the world.

And that turned to be true.

I’m tired of opening up a criminal case and seeing that the first point in the list of charges is that the accused is a member of the antifa movement. People not only have charges filed against them for this, they are arrested and put in jail, just like [Alexei] Osinov right now.

I’m tired of reading the crime pages and scanning lists of victims. This is how I found out about [Fyodor] Filatov, who was recently murdered outside his home. This is no longer a job, but a question of survival. Whereas Mikhail Beketov needs blood right now, all of us need protection. We need protection from Nazis. We need protection from the mafia-like authorities. We even need protection from the law enforcement agencies, who often simply wait on them hand and foot. We all need protection.

And we know perfectly well that, besides ourselves, no one is ever going to give us this protection. Not God, not the Tsar, not the law, no one. Only we ourselves. And only when we manage to march shoulder to shoulder will we be able to protect each other, only then we will make a breakthrough. I hope that this will happen. Otherwise we’ve gathered here in vain.