The final statement

‘Making the right choice, increasing the level of honesty and common sense—this is our path. Without us, elections cannot make themselves honest. People make them honest.‘

Your Honor, esteemed participants in the proceedings, dear friends!

Today is a joyful day for me. Before the verdict is delivered, our court proceedings have come to an end. It has been an exciting experience. I listened to wonderful, sometimes emotional words from people who testified, read letters filled with warmth, and received amazing postcards. At times, it felt like a real celebration, as if I were the guest of honor, not the defendant.

Twenty-one months ago, on August 17, 2023, a new and fascinating stage of my life began. Since then, I’ve gone through: a search, arrest, a temporary detention facility, three pre-trial detention centers, 12 cells, over 100 cellmates, and 26 court hearings. I value this experience greatly, as it came at a high cost. But most importantly, it gave me the opportunity to reflect on my path and to learn much about a world I previously hadn’t paid enough attention to.

I saw how prison destroys people’s lives, depriving them of joy—and therefore, of happiness. Because the joy of life is true happiness.

Don’t be surprised by this word—’joy.’ One might wonder what there is to be joyful about in my situation, in the gloom of prison confinement, when for months you don’t see your family, friends, or colleagues. It’s the joy that comes from growing stronger through this trial and not losing faith in the cause to which I’ve devoted my life.

Here in custody, I’ve met many people I likely never would have encountered in ordinary life—people with different life experiences, education levels, and charges. Every day we must negotiate how to live together: how to schedule chores in the cell, whether or not to air it out, how to get a fridge or kettle. In essence, we constantly hold mini-referendums and reach agreements.

In prison, my optimism helps me a lot; I always look for something good in any situation and try to support others. I relate to the spirit of the heroine from a novel—the orphan girl Pollyanna. Her father, a minister, taught her the ‘glad game’—to find something to be glad about in everything and seek a reason for optimism—and she went on to teach this game to everyone around her. This doesn’t mean ignoring problems, but rather seeking ways to solve them and learning from them.

Try playing the ‘glad game’ too, because if you think about it, we each have only the present moment to live in, and there is no other time in which life is not this very moment. And it doesn’t matter where you are: at home or abroad, on vacation or at work, in an apartment or stuck in traffic, at a polling station or in a prison cell—live this very moment with joy and positivity. There is only the now, and that’s why it’s called the ‘present.’

So this time in prison has been—both personally and as a lawyer—very fruitful for me. I’ve explored creativity: I started drawing, making collages and crafts, writing poetry. I’ve come to see people, relationships, and processes in a new light.

I’ve come to enjoy the flow of life more—work, creativity, intellectual freedom. You can lock up a person, but you can’t lock up thought, stop it, or take it away. My path and the world I’ve built and lived in—you can’t take that away or cancel it. Perhaps to some it seems boring, but without fair laws, clear and useful procedures, the society we all dream of is impossible. I think about this constantly and know I’m not alone. What unites us is an unshakable drive to think, to consider what would make the world better, and the will to contribute, even in a small way.

But let’s look at joy from another angle. Can there be real joy from deceit, falsification, or the prosecution of an innocent person? What joy can be found in conducting my case? A case that should have fallen apart at the preliminary investigation stage. A case they didn’t want to open, bouncing it between agencies. A case built not on evidence, but on assumptions and investigators’ lack of understanding of civil, administrative, and criminal law. A case handled by eight different investigators. This injustice of prosecuting an innocent person drains the joy from those entangled in it.

But I bear no ill will toward anyone. The ability to forgive and let go of the bad—even when it feels beyond your strength—makes forgiveness a joyful moment in life.

Your Honor!

The investigators have constructed a unique situation. For the first time in our country’s history, they want to declare the Russian Central Election Commission’s session hall the scene of a crime and label an expert speaker there as a criminal.

As a lawyer, I don’t understand why I am here and why I am the one accused in this case. And most importantly, I don’t understand why I have to prove my innocence instead of the prosecution proving my guilt, as required by Article 49 of the Russian Constitution. There is no actual crime in this case. Yet I am forced to prove a negative: that the Golos movement is not a structural division of the international organization ENEMO, which has been deemed undesirable in Russia; and to prove that I did not organize ENEMO’s activities by speaking at a roundtable at the Election Commission.

In the end, my innocence was proven by state agencies and stubborn facts. The first response from the Russian Ministry of Justice states that ENEMO has no branches in our country. The second response confirms that the Golos movement’s activities were not declared undesirable. No court or other decisions were made to ban or restrict Golos. And finally, the fact that ENEMO and Golos are different organizations is confirmed by government decisions placing them in two separate registries: ENEMO in the list of ‘undesirable’ organizations, and Golos in the registry of so-called ‘foreign agents.’

It turns out the entire accusation is based on unfounded and unreliable information from operatives, lacking evidentiary weight, and on fabricated conclusions that distort the documents in the case.

Here, a constitutional guarantee should come into play: any irremovable doubts about a person’s guilt must be interpreted in their favor—which should inevitably lead to an acquittal. Even though such verdicts make up only 0.26% across the country today. But that means they’re possible, and that not every court always assumes guilt is unquestionable.

Friends!

I am a citizen of Russia, I love my country, and I deeply value my constitutional rights and freedoms. I am sincerely grateful to our ancestors for securing these rights. Today they may seem routine, but in prison, how differently they are perceived—how sharply one realizes that it’s not enough to win them with blood and struggle; they must be constantly defended and upheld.

That’s why I found great joy in working on proposals about how to implement voting rights under detention. For example: how a detainee can sign in support of a candidate, how to donate to a campaign fund, how to receive campaign materials, how to verify the identity of a detainee when issuing a ballot, how to enable out-of-district voting, how to implement observation effectively. This is crucial, because a person in pre-trial detention retains all voting rights until convicted. This is often forgotten. Over these months of reflection and observation, I’ve come up with many good solutions.

I don’t know how much longer I will be in custody, but I’m confident I will eventually be released and reunited with loved ones and friends. The anticipation of that fills me with joy. I am happy that in prison, I can call my mother, write to kind people, meet with my defenders, and work on the cause I believe in.

Of course, I worry about the fate of the Golos movement, to which I gave 12 years of my life, and I don’t know what will happen to it after the verdict. But I do know that over the years, hundreds of thousands of smart, honest people became observers. While I’ve been imprisoned, these thousands of fellow citizens have not wasted time. They’ve continued to defend voting rights and monitor elections with great benefit to our country. Nearly 9,000 elections have taken place in Russia during this time. This is a unique experience in citizen self-organization—an inspiring example of civic spirit. I’m proud to be part of this community.

Some people wonder: is it even possible to have fair elections? Is it worth participating? These are fair questions. In moments of doubt, don’t forget that humans are imperfect, and so are elections. In elections, all the flaws we struggle with daily are revealed. Each of us makes daily choices between kindness and malice, love and hate, loyalty and betrayal, strength and weakness, generosity and greed, truth and lies, optimism and apathy, humility and pride, sincerity and selfishness, joy and despair, engagement and indifference.

Making the right choice, increasing honesty and common sense—this is our path. Elections can’t make themselves honest. People make them honest. Happy people. Observe, participate, enjoy life more—raise the level of honesty and common sense—drop by drop, step by step, day by day.

Thank you for listening so patiently. Finally, I want to thank from the bottom of my heart my loved ones, my defenders, my colleagues, and the many kind people who support me and won’t let me face injustice alone. This tells me that what I’ve done matters to people—and that means it wasn’t in vain.

Thank you!


Basmanny District Court, Moscow, Russia

12 May 2025

Source: Mediazona
More: Memorial
Photo: Alexandra Astakhova / Mediazona