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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
World
Andrew Roth and Pjotr Sauer

‘Our voices are louder if we stay’: Russian anti-war activists refuse to flee

Oleg Orlov of the human rights group Memorial  poses at an exhibition devoted to political repression in Moscow on 15 November 2021.
Oleg Orlov of the human rights group Memorial poses at an exhibition devoted to political repression in Moscow on 15 November 2021. Photograph: Alexander Nemenov/AFP/Getty Images

Despite reaching one of the darkest moments in more than 40 years as a dissident and human rights activist, Oleg Orlov says that he has no plans to flee Russia. “I made a decision a long time ago that I want to live and die in Russia, it’s my country,” Orlov told the Observer. “Even though it’s never been so bad.”

That’s saying something for Orlov, who can recall printing homemade anti-war posters in the late 1970s to protest against the Russian invasion of Afghanistan or in support of Poland’s Solidarność movement, and was an observer and negotiator during the bloody war in Chechnya in the 1990s.

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