Mikhail Baryshnikov's Open Letter to Vladimir Putin

One of the founders of "True Russia" made a statement about the blocking of the project website

Mister President,

Your cronies, seized by fear, were ordered to ban our website — the website of TRUE RUSSIA. Their fear is so very predictable. But it is this very fear that invests us with greater confidence in our chosen path.

In my childhood, the role of occupant was imposed upon me, the son of a Russian officer in Latvia, yet it didn’t stick. I learned the Latvian language, and at the age of 26, rejected all roles that your thin-necked precursors tried to impose upon me. I rejected them forever. I have lived as a person of the free world for almost 50 years now – with no roles forced onto me by others, and without fear, but people still consider me Russian, as they consider my friend Boris Akunin a Russian writer, and Sergei Guriev a Russian economist.

People like us have brought more honor to the Russian world than all of your not-so-precise precision-guided munitions. Your Russian world, the world of fear, the world in which they burn Ukrainian textbooks, will not live on as long as there are people like us — True Russians immunized from the disease of fear. It is our world that will live on despite all your bans, and it is your Russia that will die from its own horror unless it wakes up.

You know what you fear. You know whose munitions are precise.

Mikhail Baryshnikov


Photo Credit: Peter Baryshnikov



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