Greetings!
Yesterday morning, when I found out what had happened, I remembered an episode from our exile in Gorki. I wrote about it in my book. But it's unlikely that most of you have read it, so I'll tell you now.
It was the nth time they had separated Andrei Dmitrievich and me. I was trying desperately to see him, raising hell, pestering every official I could find. In the end they took pity on me and I was taken to meet Andryusha. I was driven there in a Volga by some fellow from the local KGB. It was pretty obvious that he was high-ranking.
Driving along, I asked half sarcastically: "How come you're not ashamed of yourselves, spreading all this rubbish about Sakharov that he's some kind of black marketeer, selling jeans on the sly, selling his native country down the drain. Isn't there any limit to how low you'll stoop?" At the time they were putting this sort of thing out in the press all over the country.
So this KGB officer smiles and says to me that they're not writing this "for the likes of you and me". That's exactly what he said: "It's not for the likes of you and me". That is, he graciously put himself and me up there together, implying that the rest of us, you, the people, were so much rubbish, at their beck and call, slaves. I got angry then. I told him straight to his face that it was of course very kind of him to invite me into his company, but that I'd prefer to give this 'honour' a miss and remain amongst the scum with whom I had spent my whole life. With whom I had gone through the war and with whom I had shared all the dubious joys his whole gang of thieves have visited upon my people.
The point is, the people who started this filthy business happening here today, they also think that we're all here to lick their boots! That they can do with us whatever they like. Shut us up with a piece of eight ruble sausage, courtesy of Pavlov. That they can send our kids off to kill people in Lithuania and Afghanistan or die in Karabakh. That they can steal the pittance pensioners and invalids still have, after they've worked themselves half to death just to put a few pitiful roubles in the bank. That they can just take it all away with a single stroke of the pen. And then run us down with tanks. That, finally, they can remove our President and destroy the hopes of our great country in a single day.
But we are not slaves!!! And whatever you can say about our President, he is still our legally elected President. And today our children have grown up differently, they are here, with us at the White House, with us, with our Parliament and with our President!
We are not slaves! And when I look at you now, my dear Muscovites, I believe that I have not lived the greater part of my life here, in this city, in vain. I left it for the front, but I returned to Moscow after the war. We won't hand them over our city, we won't hand them over our people. We have to destroy this gang of thieves and we shall destroy them. Not in the literal sense though. God forbid that blood be spilled, or we shall have added yet another bloody page to our tragic history.
But they cannot lord it over us! We are higher than they are, we are better, we are more pure than they are. And there are many of us! Thank you!
Yelena Bonner
August 20, 1991