This week our guest on the podcast is the well-known

human rights activist, Lev Aleksandrovich Ponomarev. Lev Ponomarev is the headof the civil society project ‘For Human Rights’, chair of the Defence ofPrisoners' Rights Foundation and also of the Hotline organisation, and a memberof the Moscow Helsinki Group. In May this year Lev Ponomarev spoke at theInternational Conference ‘Anxiety and Hope. The 21st Century’ held in honour ofthe 100th anniversary of the birth of Andrei Sakharov. His speech, ‘We

are not observers, we are participants’ can be heard on the website of the SakharovMuseum.  In this podcast we discuss some of the main points made by Lev Ponomarev in that speech.

The questions we discuss in the podcast include: Contemporary

Russia and the Soviet past - where is the country heading? - What does it mean forthe country if people from the security services are in power? - Dissidents andthe political opposition face severe repressive measures: who are in the main thevictims of the security services? – Recent legislation – The law on ‘foreignagents’ - Are ‘universal values’ alien to Russia? - Putin and Patrushev – ‘Weare not observers, we are participants’ - What possibilities are there to work forhuman rights, free elections and the release of political prisoners in Russiatoday? – ‘We are many’: how many in fact? - How to participate in electionswhen candidates are banned? – The idea of a Civic Congress - Russia's futureand the future of human rights.

This podcast is in Russian. You can also listen to

the podcast on our website or on SoundCloud, Spotify  and  iTunes. 

The music, from Stravinsky’s Elegy for Solo Viola,

is performed for us by Karolina Herrera.

Sergei Nikitin writes on Facebook: “It

is not politicians who are in power, it is the siloviki. In line with their worldview,they see only one solution to a problem. The use of force. Putting people injail. Possibly even killing them. Generally speaking, any opponent of theauthorities might be killed.” Our interlocutor, Lev Ponomarev, is so dislikedby the Lubyanka and the Kremlin that the authorities and his organisations havelabelled him a foreign agent, and even he himself was one of the first toreceive the newly invented title of ‘an individual foreign agent,’ which is,without a doubt, complete nonsense. Lev Ponomarev is a kind and fair man, andeven Viktor Shenderovich once said that, say, when Putin goes to jail, ‘Lev AleksandrovichPonomarev, the human rights defender, he will defend Putin’. Our interlocutor,recalling this remark, said: "I don't know whether I would defend him ornot, but the situation is a very serious one.”

Simon Cosgrove adds:  A summary of some

of the week’s events in Russia relevant to human rights can be found on ourwebsite here.