This is an activist from the FEMEN organization, protesting recently in Kiev, Ukraine. She was demanding the resignation of the country’s prime minister, a sexist pig who is routinely denying basic civil rights to women. The protesters put the photograph onto the Prime Minister’s Facebook page, and they were manhandled and arrested by his goons. In a similar protest in Belarus, the activists were brutally tortured by the autocratic regime.
The contrast between this activism and the sorry excuse for it taking place in Moscow could not be more extreme. As we previously reported, the Moscow opposition rally has been described like this: “It all felt much more like a national holiday, a festivity. What’s more, not even a ‘festivity of disobedience’, but simply a festivity.” There were no arrests.
Russians, it seems, do not yet even know the real meaning of the word opposition. Their efforts to challenge the neo-Soviet regime of Vladimir Putin are ineffectual, senseless, indeed pathetic. Their actions do not in any way indicate that Russians are willing to take real risks or that they feel any true sense of outrage or urgency. On behalf of the Russian people, we are ashamed.
