Based on Sever.Revlii, 29.09.2020

A concert in support of political prisoners was held at the Interior Theater of St. Petersburg. Musicians Maksim Leonidov, Maksim Ermachkov, Pyotr Olesov, Dmitry Podosenov, Mikhail Novitsky and others participated in the concert. The idea to hold such a concert belongs to Oleg Maksakov, Chairman of the Primorsky local branch of Yabloko in St.Petersburg and assistant to the deputy of the Legislative Assembly Boris Vishnevsky. Oleg Maksakov was also the organizer of the event.

According to Oleg Maksakov, it is very important for political prisoners cut off from society to know that they are not alone: ​​“It is important for them to understand that they are not left alone with this machine that imprisoned them, that they are remembered, loved, expected back, that we worry about them. That is why we arranged this concert – to show them that we are together with them”.

Musician Maxim Leonidov said that he simply could not help but take part in this concert. “You’d better ask why our famous rockers are not here – where are they? Or maybe they were simply not invited? On the other hand, they have recently made a lot of cool clips on the same topic. Only it seems to me that such concerts should be organised on large venues – so that there many stars and a lot of people can come,” the musician noted.

One of the hosts of the concert was renowned human rights activist Grigory Mikhnov-Vaitenko, who believes that society is mistakenly accustomed to regarding political prisoners as a kind of a narrow group. In his speech, he recalled that the Memorial human rights centre officially recognised 350 people as political prisoners, in fact, there may be about 500 of them. The total number of prisoners in Russia amounts to about 500,000 people. “We cannot delude ourselves with these figures – in Russia many are imprisoned for nothing, and most importantly, the policies of the state are such that all should be imprisoned and all should be afraid, therefore, by and large, most of those who are imprisoned today can be considered political prisoners. We can say that today we are all political prisoners, we are simply on different sides of the barbed wire,” Vaitenko said.

All the participants of the concert recalled Karelian historian Yuri Dmitriyev [persecuted under faked charges due to his investigation of shooting and secret burial of 6,241 of Stalin’s victims in Sandarmokh, Karelia, in 1937-1938], who is now facing another trial. He also said that maybe it would be worth while to go on with concerts in support of political prisoners. Mikhnov-Vaitenko noted that may be it would be better to arrange ten concerts in small venues rather than a large one in one venue, but, in his opinion, the time for large concerts for audiences of many thousands people would come.

Based on Sever.Revlii