Try me for treason

Try Me for Treason: Anti-war Protesters’ Speeches in the Russian Courts  is a film featuring excerpts from four speeches by Bohdan Ziza, Darya Kozyreva, Igor Paskar and Andrei Trofimov. The film is produced on a Creative Commons basis by the Ukraine Information Group. The videographer is Tony Aldis. Readings by John Graham Davies, Leila Mimmack, Gareth Brierley, Maya Willcocks and Nick Evans.

These and six other speeches, in English, are published in Voices Against Putin’s War.

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Notes about the speeches

In Bohdan Ziza’s speech:

The Crimean Tatars are a Turkic ethnic group that until the 20th century made up most of the peninsula’s population. In May 1944, in the space of two days, the Soviet government deported all Crimean Tatars, an estimated 470,000 people, to Kazakhstan, on false accusations that they were Nazi collaborators. Many families returned in the

1990s. Since Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, Crimean community and political groups have been subject to political repression.

In Darya Kozyreva’s speech:

The Cossacks are a Slavic people who lived in eastern Ukraine and southern Russia. Under the Russian empire they maintained autonomous military and proto-state formations. Hetmans were military commanders in Cossack and other forces.

The Ukrainian People’s Republic was founded in January 1918 and effectively dissolved in March 1921. In February 1917 the tsarist empire was swept away by revolution; in June that year Ukrainian politicians declared the country’s autonomy; in November Soviet power was established in Russia; the declaration of Ukrainian independence soon followed soon after. The civil war across the old Russian empire continued during the republic’s whole existence. Both the area it controlled and its political colouring changed constantly. The Bolsheviks (Reds, or Soviet forces) and Volunteers (Whites) were the two principal antagonists in the civil war. Symon Petlyura was commander of the Ukrainian People’s Republic army, opposing both. Forces under Petlyura’s command carried out pogroms in which thousands of Jews were killed. In 1926, in Paris, Petlyura was assassinated by the Jewish anarchist Sholem Schwarzbard.

In Igor Paskar’s speech:

Tamara Petkevich (1920-2017) grew up in a communist family. Her father was arrested and executed in the purges of the 1930s, and other family members died in the siege of Leningrad. She was falsely charged with terrorism and served seven years in prison camps, where she joined a theatre group. Her book, Memoir of a Gulag Actress, was published in 1993 and an English translation appeared in 2010. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) is the best-known writer about the Soviet prison camps, author of The Gulag Archipelago, Cancer Ward and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970. Kolyma Tales by

Varlam Shalamov (1907-1982) is also rightly regarded as a masterpiece, unfortunately less well-known outside Russia.

 

More information at bit.ly/againstputinswar.

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Featured Image credit: Crimea Platform, Linva Chernyavskaya, Memorial Political Prisoners, Memorial Political Prisoners; modified by Tempest.