Elena Gold
Feb 26, 2024
Quora
On February 24, 2024, 18-year-old Daria Kozyreva came to the monument to Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko in St. Petersburg with a poster that contained lines from his poem “Testament.” She was arrested and accused of “discrediting the army.”
40 years ago, this very poem by Taras Shevchenko was studied at schools and learned by heart.
Shevchenko was a great poet and a great Ukrainian patriot, whom the authorities of the Russian Empire cruelly persecuted for the ideas of national revival of the Ukrainian people.
The Russian Empire was called “a prison of nations” by Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the USSR and father of the Bolshevik Revolution. In the USSR, a lot of information was distorted and hidden. But even in the USSR, no one came with such insane nonsense as “Lenin invented Ukraine in 1918”.
Today, in the state that is “the legal successor of the USSR”, the Russian Federation, a crazy dictator claims exactly that.
In today’s Russia, the very right of the Ukrainian people to exist is denied.
Russian citizens are thrown into prison for simply quoting Ukrainian poets. Once again — for the quote from a poem, written not today or yesterday, not after the start of the war in Ukraine, but 180 years ago.
This is the purest, refined, distilled form of fascism.
Today, Daria’s fate was decided behind closed doors in a court hearing. Journalists and the public weren’t allowed, because the prosecution claimed that there were “state secrets” in the case.
“State secrets” in a case of an 18-year-old girl who brought a piece of paper with a poem to a monument!
The court sent Daria to a pre-trial detention center for 2 months. This means, she will be most certainly sent to serve real time in prison.
In the 2 years of Russia openly becoming a fascist state, the vast majority of its citizens supported this transformation.
In her explanation to the police, Daria wrote: “What is dead cannot die.”
Most people in today’s Russia are already dead inside. They sold their souls for the illusion of “normal life”. They don’t want to know that they live in a fascist country. And they’ve made this choice consciously.
They have supported fascism, either actively or passively, by doing nothing to change it.
Just 22 years of Putin’s rule turned the country with an over 140-million population into a fascist dictatorship that constantly wages wars against its own people and neighboring countries.
For as long as the fascist regime exists in Russia, the world will not be safe.