This month Mary Page talks with Sergei Davidis, who heads Memorial’s programme to support political prisoners and, originally from Moscow, is now one of the leading figures in Memorial in exile. For many years he has been responsible for compiling the lists of Russian political prisoners and he has been active in national and international advocacy for political prisoners. After doing his compulsory military service in the North Caucasus, Sergei Davidis studied sociology at Moscow State University and then law at the Moscow State Academy of Law. In 2019 he was a Galina Starovoitova Fellow on Human Rights and Conflict Resolution at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington.
As well as an activist in the Memorial organisation, he has been an active participant in the pro-democracy movement in Russia. In December 2008, he was a founding member of the Solidarnost movement. At the time of the parliamentary and presidential elections in 2011-12, he was one of the organisers of the protests against election fraud and was a founding member of the 5 December Party, named after the day when protests broke out over election fraud, and a member of the Russian Opposition Coordination Council set up in October 2012. He also took part in organising anti-war protests in Moscow after the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and against Russia’s involvement in the war in Syria in 2016.
In 2021 Sergei Davidis was jailed for 10 days for calling for people to join a protest in support of Aleksei Navalny. At the end of that year the Russian authorities closed down Memorial and in March 2022 shortly after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he and his family left Russia and currently lives in Lithuania, from where he continues to head Memorial’s programme to support political prisoners.
This interview was recorded on 31 October 2024.
Mary’s questions:
- To start with I’d like to ask a very broad but also a fundamental question. Why in your view are human rights important? Why should people care about them? Why should people engage in human rights work? And how did you yourself become involved in human rights work?
- For several years you have headed Memorial’s programme to identify and support political prisoners in Russia. Could you tell us how many political prisoners are there in Russia today? How has that number changed over the years? On a related point, how difficult is it for you to carry on your work from outside Russia?
- As I mentioned in the introduction, Memorial, an organisation that had been set up in the years of Gorbachev’s perestroika, was closed down in Russia at the end of 2021. Why did the authorities take this step – and why at that time? What has happened to the organisation and its staff since?
- In 2020 the authorities attempted to kill Aleksei Navalny. After recuperation in Germany, Navalny returned to Russia in 2021 where he was immediately imprisoned, held in torturous conditions and denied health care, and as a result of his treatment (about which we don’t know all the details) died at the age of 47. You knew Navalny personally. Could you tell us what kind of person he was? Why did he return to Russia? And what do we know about his death? Why wasn’t he exchanged as happened later with other human rights and pro-democracy activists such as Vladimir Kara-Murza and Oleg Orlov?
- You have been a participant in the pro-democracy movement for many years in Russia. What, in your view, has been the main reason for failure of democratic reforms in Russia?
- I’d like to ask about Russia’s war against Ukraine. Why did Putin launch this war? How is Russian civil society reacting to it? And how do you see it ending?
- Do you think it is realistic to believe Russia will become a democratic country in the future? And I know you have been a scholar in the US on the Galina Starovoitova programme at the Wilson Centre. During your time in the United States did you see things that Russia should emulate? Did you see things that a future democratic Russia should avoid?
- It is estimated that approximately 900,000 Russians have left the country since the war began on 24 February 2022. And that includes many pro-democracy and human rights activists. To what extent do the people in exile have share views they have in common and work together? To what extent are they divided by their opinions and aspirations?
- On a personal note, how do you find life in exile in Lithuania?
- What can people living in the US, Canada, the EU, the UK and other countries do to support human rights in Russia?
