No War

A human rights protest monitoring group, identified the woman as Marina Ovsyannikova, a producer at the Russian news channel where she holds her sign that translates: “No war. Don’t believe the propaganda. They lie to you here. Russians against war.”

by Robin Podolsky

No war. Don’t believe the propaganda. They lie to you here.

We, that is, all of us, all of us clicking on Youtube or Reddit or Facebook, all of us watching our own news, we could be the last people to see this woman alive or, very possibly, as she is now, whole and apparently in good health.

We are watching an act of courage in real time. A homemade sign, what we in the politics world call an intervention, a break in what had been a seamless narrative. A disruption—Russians against war. Not in our name, not armed with the fiction that we all think this is fine.

Holding up a sign with words drawn badly in sharpie is an act of extraordinary courage when thousands of people are being disappeared for holding up signs with nothing on them at all. Another kind of brave act, holding up a blank placard, daring the regime to arrest them for making everyone think about the unsayable, the act of signifying itself become a subversion, the act of suggesting any meaning at all.

We could be the last people to see this woman alive as she is.

Human Rights Watch has smuggled videos of people being beaten and kicked and burnt with electricity in custody. Of the thousands arrested, hundreds remain unaccounted for. The woman with the sign knew all this, she was a journalist, she knew. She knew that a law has been passed making it a crime to tell the truth about the war, that she could be facing up to 15 of hard time.

She took that risk for one moment, one uninterrupted moment of being a journalist, telling what she knew, doing her real job. Don’t believe the propaganda. They lie to you here.

This woman standing awkwardly behind her messy handwritten sign interrogates me. What I am doing is possible she says. It is terrifying but it is possible. Are you doing everything you possibly can?