Pussy Riot’s powerful message to putin / You can’t stop the future with bullets, poison or prison

Nadya Tolokonnikova’s speech at the opening of the FEAR NOT exhibit at The Wende Museum, California. Follow-up to a last year TED speech. This pop-up exhibit featured Tolokonnikova’s works from “This art is a hammer to shape reality“, “Middle Finger“ and Pussy Riot’s “Murderers“ action done in front of the Russian embassy in Berlin two days after the murder of Alexei Navalny. Nadya Tolokonnikova says: This exhibit is an act of defiance. Darkness is engulfing my home country, darkness engulfing the world, darkness named authoritarianism. My colleague and a leader of the anti-Putin resistance, Alexei Navalny was murdered by Putin on February 16 in the “Polar Wolf“ penal colony. Alexei left us a simple message: “I’m not afraid, and you shouldn’t be afraid either“. Ideas, unlike us humans, are immortal. Every autocracy is based on two pillars. It breaks your body and it breaks your spirit. The first one - beatings, prisons, murders - primary goal of all these is to break your body. The second one is more hideous, and more dangerous in a way, it targets your soul and results in broken spirit, which manifests in self-censorship, learned helplessness, compliance, apathy (“What can I change“, “Nothing can be done“, “Everything is predetermined“). It’s painful to see your country dissolve into the dark hell of autocracy. It’s painful to see your friends and colleagues being murdered one by one. The first political death I witnessed was a double murder of two people close to me in 2009. I saw drips of their blood on Moscow snow and I will never forget it. Then Nemtsov in 2014. Then Navalny, 2 weeks ago. We still can prevent the world crumbling into autocracy, but it takes determination and courage. Democracy is the most fragile form of human organization, and it’s precious. It needs us to show up for it. Help Ukraine win. Help Russian dissidents to fight Putin. And maybe don’t elect a Putin-loving authoritarian narcissist for your president again - trust me, you won’t love it in Putin’s Russia. Filmed by Riley Bray Quote in the title by Vladimir Kara-Murza, politician and political prisoner who serves 25 years in a Siberian penal colony for opposing putin and standing with Ukraine