Press Release, 12.10.2022

Photo by the Yabloko Press Service

The central office of the Yabloko party in Moscow hosted a screening of the film “My Duty to Not Stay Silent” by imprisoned journalist and politician Vladimir Kara-Murza. The film is about priest Georgy Edelstein. Before the screening, Kara-Murza’s lawyer Vadim Prokhorov, Yabloko Chairman Nikolai Rybakov and Yabloko founder Grigory Yavlinsky spoke to the participants of the event. Unidentified masked and hooded young men attempted to disrupt the screening of the film: they burst into the hall shouting “Kara-Murza is a traitor to the motherland!”. The hooligans were driven out of the hall.

Kirill Goncharov, the host of the screening and Deputy Chairman of the Moscow Yabloko, noted at the beginning of the event that this was the second screening of a film by Vladimir Kara-Murza, which Yabloko was holding without the author of the film: during the screening of the film “Nemtsov”, the politician was in a coma after being poisoned [with symptoms the same as of Novichok victims].

Vladimir Kara-Murza addressed the audience in a letter: specially for the event, he prepared a welcoming speech, which was voiced by his lawyer Vadim Prokhorov. We publish the text of the Vladimir’s greeting from prison in full:

“Dear friends,

First of all, I would like to thank Yabloko – and specially Grigory Yavlinsky, Nikolai Rybakov and Kirill Goncharov – for organising the screening and apologise for not being able to be with you today. It has turned into a kind of a tradition already. Last time, Kirill Goncharov and I agreed to show the film “Nemtsov” here at the Yabloko office, but I ended up in a coma after being poisoned. Now we have agreed on this screening – and I ended up in jail. Apparently, for some time I will not agree on anything with Kirill. But seriously, it is very important to me that our film continues to live and find its audience, even while I myself am on temporary downtime – and I am deeply grateful to everyone who is here today. We will definitely see each other again, including, certainly, [our meetings] in this hall.

I would like to take this opportunity to say a huge thank you to all my friends and colleagues at Yabloko. I don’t know how happy the special unit of our pre-trial detention centre is to see my face on the postcards that come to me [to jail] from the regional branches of Yabloko from all over the country, but I feel very warm from your words and from your support. Thank you.

This film is about a surprisingly bright person; one of the most wonderful people I have ever met in my life. Father Georgy Edelstein has never lived up to stereotypes. A deeply non-Soviet person in Soviet society. A non-Soviet person in Soviet society. A defender of freedom who rejects the title of dissident; a village priest in Russia who was restored to his parish by President Reagan and whose son would become an Israeli statesman. A man who has been always telling the truth – about the state persecuting for the faith, and about the church hierarchs who participated in this. A man who considered it his duty to not stay silent.

“If we are silent, we are participating in the evil that is happening in the world. I have to say what I think. (…) Silence, I am convinced, betrays God.” These are the words of Father Georgy, we hear in the film. I thought about them in February, when Georgy Edelstein was one of the first – and, unfortunately, one of the few clerics of the Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate – to publicly speak out against *** *** in Ukraine. I think about these words every morning, waking up where I have been for the past six months. Because, in the end, no matter how high the price of NON-silence is, the price of silent complicity in evil is unacceptable.

And because silence betrays God.”

Vadim Prokhorov, the lawyer of Vladimir Kara-Murza, also thanked those supporting the politician in prison with letters and postcards, and recalled that the worst thing for a dissident is to be forgotten.

Chairman of the Yabloko party Nikolai Rybakov, speaking to the participants of the film screening, noted that such an event would not only support Vladimir Kara-Murza, but also all those who gathered in the hall.

“The film by Vladimir Kara-Murza gives an opportunity to think about how to live in such a difficult time. To think and find answers to many questions, including those about the responsibility for one’s actions. It is very difficult for us today to be responsible for what they do on behalf of our state. But each of us must answer for what we do on our own behalf – on behalf of Yabloko, on behalf of those who came to the meeting today,” Nikolai Rybakov concluded.

Grigory Yavlinsky read out to the audience a fragment from his letter, which he had recently sent to Vladimir Kara-Murza, where he expressed “the words of brotherhood and solidarity” to the political prisoner. “You have become an example of courage and loyalty in upholding goodness and light. Your desire for help and love for your neighbour prove that it is impossible to break a person like you,” Yavlinsky writes in his letter.

“You are a man of the world and understand that the global security system is weakened and the world is threatened if principles and values are neglected for the sake of personal well-being; that not a single person or country is a distant island, and all of humanity is interconnected at different levels, and if some kind of injustice is committed somewhere, others cannot be indifferent. You are a man of moral imperative,” the letter runs.

Vladimir Kara-Murza was an authorised Yabloko campaigner in the 2021 parliametary elections, as well as an authorised campaigner of Grigory Yavlinsky in the 2018 presidential election.

Now the Vladimir Kara-Murza remains under arrest on criminal cases brought against him for “fake news about the army”, “carrying out the activities of an undesirable organisation” and “treason”. On 12 October, the Basmanny Court of Moscow extended his arrest for two more months. On the same day, it was reported that Kara-Murza was awarded the Vaclav Havel Prize for his work in protection of human rights.

Vladimir Kara-Murza’s film “My Duty to Not Stay Silent”, awarded two special prizes at the 26th International Film Festival “Stalker” in 2020, is available on YouTube.