Some days, Russia seems to swing like a pendulum between memory and the present, between what we were and what we have become. Since 16 February 2024, when I wrote the first lines about Navalnyj’s death, I have hadthe impression of living in one long day without a sunrise, interrupted only by flashes of dignity, as if a whole people were breathing in half.

However, October and November this year showed that memory, when it comes knocking, can change even the present. It happened on 30 October, the Day of Remembrance of Victims of Political Repression. In St. Petersburg, around the Solovki Rock, young and old, opposition deputies and foreign diplomats laid flowers in silence.

The atmosphere was thick, like at Navalnyj’s funeral: no one spoke, but everyone knew they were being watched. Yet they continue to do so, every year. The remembrance of 30 October is not an innocuous ritual: it is a counterweight to daily propaganda, and perhaps that is why power fears even the names written on a name tag.

Ordinary repression

At the same time, repression continues to creep into everyday life. In Perm’, a boy risks administrative proceedings if he sings a song by an artist declared to be a ‘foreign agent’. At the prestigious ‘Rimsky-Korsakov’ Music Institute in St. Petersburg, a circular warns students of the consequences of the ‘public use of music belonging to artists recognised as foreign agents‘: icy bureaucratic language with a very clear message – there is no room for the unexpected, nor for cultural freedom.

And while music is controlled in conservatories, courses in ‘Semjevedenie‘, an extracurricular but de facto compulsory subject based on manuals written by Orthodox priests, are introduced in provincial schools. ‘Every bride is born for her bridegroom‘, ‘Premarital purity is the basis of strong Russia‘: at the age of thirteen, one learns that motherhood is a national destiny. Lessons with images of embryos, abortion presented as a ‘crime against the fatherland‘, even in cases of rape. It is old-fashioned biopolitics, pedagogy of obedience disguised as ‘traditional values‘.

Meanwhile, border regions like Belgorod collapse under daily blows: blackouts, destroyed houses, constant fear. When some activists ask singer-patriot Šaman to donate part of his earnings to the purchase of generators for the population, the comments are deleted. The real suffering of the country must remain invisible so as not to disturb the narrative of national unity.

The OVD-Info channel continues to publish its reports: new arrests, new hearings, new accusations of ‘extremism’, ‘terrorism’, ‘fake’. Behind each one, a person posted a sentence, a picture, a poem. Mediazona, with its ‘Politzeki‘ project, offers short portraits of men and women who spend months in solitary confinement for one word too many, while the ‘First Otdel‘ explains the difference between ‘political prisoner‘ and ‘prisoner of conscience‘: formal distinctions, but essential for understanding the workings of the repressive machine.

The voices that remain silent, the voices that resist: Diana Loginova

In this context, the silence of some is a painful sign. I am thinking of Vera Afanas’eva, founder of the ‘Gorod Glupov‘ channel, who turned the absurdities of bureaucracy into moral parables, and Aleksandr Gorbunov (‘Stalingulag‘), who narrated power through the fragility of his own body.
They have not written for months. Their motionless pages are like closed windows in the Northern winter: when such limpid satire falls silent, it is never an accident.

And yet, while some voices die out, others continue to speak. Testimonies of surprising clarity still appear on Russian social media. One teacher confessed that she had believed for years that Russia was a no-win territory, destined only for pain; then that feeling turned into a desire to resist. The pure gesture of a young artist reminded her that ‘many good, bright, extraordinary people still live in Russia‘.

It referred to the case of Diana Loginova, a street singer from the group Stoptime, who was arrested in St. Petersburg for performing songs by authors on the ‘foreign agents‘ list. In just a few days, a petition on change.ru collected more than 50,000 signatures; Diana was released and then fled to Yerevan in Armenia. It is an exemplary story: the arrest, the solidarity, the escape. Power fears songs and words more than you imagine, and cannot always calculate the strength of a heart that does not want to stop hoping. In this story, which is not ‘official’, the best conscience of the country still passes.

A third way between rhetoric and despair

Describing the Russia of 2025 is difficult without falling into despair or rhetoric. On the one hand, every day offers a new reason to think that all is lost. On the other, the very cracks – the commemorations on 30 October, the students silently protesting, the volunteers writing to the prisoners, the mothers asking to bring their sons back from the front – reveal a civic vitality that power is unable to stifle entirely.

Sometimes I only have to read a Telegram message, written at two in the morning by a girl from Samara denouncing the abuses of her school district, to realise that Russia is not reducible to its rulers.
I then think back to what I wrote in 2024, when I compared Navalnyj to the martyred saints Boris and Gleb: for power they were ‘traitors of the clan‘, memory turned them into symbols of innocence and truth. In our history, suffering has never been irrelevant: it has left behind novels, icons, poems, songs. Today it returns in impromptu posters, letters to prisoners, flowers in front of the Solovki Rock.

Sometimes I wonder if this diary still makes sense, in a country where independent newspapers have been shut down and public debate is an empty theatre. Then I am reminded of the phrase of an anonymous activist interviewed by Mediazona: ‘If a word survives, we survive too‘.
Writing has become a way of keeping a crack open, of preventing obscurity from becoming the only possible language. Today’s Russia is tired, wounded, but not silent. In its darkest corners – schools where archaic dogmas are preached, art institutes where wrong music is punished, bombed regions, courts that try poets – another Russia is moving: the one that reads, writes, protests without being seen, sends generators to its neighbours, walks on 30 October with a flower without looking if there is a camera.

Power works on oblivion; people work on memory. And this diary is on that side. I keep writing because, when lies become a system, truth must become a voice. And because, in the thick darkness of these years, I still feel that there is a Russia that has not completely given up hope.