(applause)
- We often hear that Russians don't want freedom.
That they aren't ready for it.
That they've never had it,
and wouldn't know how to use it.
That all they need is a strong hand
and a stern whip.
The people who push these stereotypes
prefer to forget the inconvenient facts.
Like the fact that Russia introduced universal suffrage
before Britain, or Germany, or America,
and they certainly like to forget
that when the Russian people could actually choose
in a more or less free election,
between dictatorship and democracy,
they always chose democracy.
In 1906 when the Constitutional Democrats
trounced autocratic parties in the first Duma election,
in 1917 in the Constituent Assembly vote,
when Bolshevik usurpers lost to proponents
of a parliamentary republic.
In 1991, when pro-democracy leader Boris Yeltsin
defeated the Communist Party
in a presidential election by 57% to 17.
That year, it took Russians more than the ballot box
to gain their freedom.
Two months after the election in August, 1991,
hardliners in the Kremlin attempted a coup d'etat
to try to restore the old ways.
The leaders of that coup had everything,
or at least they seemed to.
They had control of the government
and party apparatus, the army, the police,
and the KGB's overwhelming machine of repression.
They had television channels,
and newspapers, and radio stations.
And they had tanks, which they sent into Moscow.
Russian citizens, Muscovites, who refused to accept
that coup were not armed with anything, except their dignity
and their determination to defend their freedom.
And so they went into the streets in the tens and the
hundreds of thousands and stood in front of the tanks.
And the tanks stopped and turned away.
This was my first conscious political memory.
I was 10 at the time, too young to join my father on the
barricades by the Moscow White House, but certainly
old enough to understand the lesson of what was happening.
That however strong the dictatorship,
when the people are prepared to stand up for their freedom,
all that strength becomes meaningless.
It was a powerful lesson and it will
stay with me for as long as I live.
Today, as we enter the 19th year of another Kremlin
dictatorship, the deck is once again firmly stacked
in its favor, or at least it seems to be.
The regime employs the full might of the state
to bear down on its opponents.
The police, the courts, and the prosecutors
use bogus charges to put opposition activists behind bars.
According to the Memorial Human Rights Center, there are
more than 100 political prisoners in Russia today,
a number comparable with the late Soviet period.
Here are just some of them: Oleg Sentsov, a Crimean
film director who protested against the annexation;
Darya Polyudova, an activist from Southern Russia,
who called for more autonomy for her region;
Dmitri Buchenkov, who was not even present
at the opposition rally for which he is being tried;
Oleg Navalny, the brother of anti-corruption campaigner,
Alexei Navalny; and Alexei Pichugin, the remaining
hostage of the Yukos case, who's now, after 14 years,
Russia's longest-serving political prisoner.
State television rails against Kremlin opponents,
denouncing us as traitors and foreign agents.
Elections have long turned into a largely meaningless
ritual, with opposition candidates often disqualified
from the ballot, and with voting
marred by intimidation and fraud.
For more than a decade now, the Russian Parliament
has been devoid of any real opposition.
In the unforgettable words of its own speaker,
"It is not a place for discussion."
This artificially-created image of unanimity
has been used by the Kremlin to claim
near-universal public support in Russia
for Vladimir Putin and his policies.
86%, they tell us.
Too often, this is being repeated by Western commentators.
But it is not true. A government that is founded
on genuine support does not need to jail its opponents,
falsify its elections, or censor its television.
The true worth of this fake unanimity was shown when
Vladimir Putin launched his war on Ukraine,
and tens of thousands of people marched through the streets
of Moscow in protest, despite the pressure,
despite the intimidation, despite the hysterical propaganda.
The long line of Moscovites who came to say "no" to
Mr. Putin's war, stretched for miles down the Boulevard Ring,
from Pushkin Square to Sakharov Avenue.
And when those of us in front had reached the endpoint,
people were still lining up to go
through metal detectors at the beginning.
That march was led by Boris Nemtsov,
the leader of Russia's pro-democracy opposition,
who dedicated his life to the struggle for a freer,
more democratic, and a more hopeful Russia.
A former Deputy Prime Minister, a one-time heir apparent
to the Russian presidency, Nemtsov could have easily
settled for a comfortable existence under the present regime,
or at least for safety in exile.
But he loved Russia too much to watch its future
being destroyed by authoritarians and kleptocrats.
And so he chose to stay, and he chose to fight.
And in the end, he gave his life to that fight.
On February 27, 2015, Boris Nemtsov was killed by five
bullets in the back, as he was walking home
over the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky bridge,
just 200 yards from the Kremlin Wall.
When all else fails, when the threats and the smears
don't work, they use bullets as the final argument.
But we will not be afraid.
We know that there are many people in Russia today
who reject the corruption, authoritarianism, and aggression
that have become the hallmarks of the present regime.
I meet these people as I go across the country
as part of my work with Open Russia,
a political movement we founded three years ago this week,
that seeks to restore the rule of law,
democratic elections, and accountable government to Russia.
Our work is mainly with the young people, the new generation
of democratic activists, through our educational
and training programs, through our media start-ups,
through our projects aimed at encouraging
political participation and civic engagement.
We want to empower them and help them
become active and informed citizens.
And we want to help them gain the experience they will need
when they face the task of building a new Russia
on the ruins of yet another authoritarian system.
As part of this experience building, we put forward
candidates in last year's parliamentary election,
not to win, because that was not possible, but to learn,
how to campaign, how to walk door-to-door,
how to organize local activists,
speak at rallies and publish newspapers.
Like the famed Soviet pianist Rudolf Kehrer,
who spent 13 years in internal exile,
practicing on a pretend keyboard he carved out
of a plank of wood so that his fingers wouldn't forget.
We are helping these activists to prepare for the time when
they will be doing the real thing, and they are the wiser for it.
Many of them have come under pressure,
some losing their jobs, others being targeted
by police raids and criminal prosecution,
for they will not back down.
We will not back down.
We will continue our work, whatever the
obstacles they put in our way.
I can certainly speak to these
obstacles from personal experience.
Twice, in the past two years; in May of 2015 and then
again in February of this year, both times in Moscow,
I experienced symptoms of severe poisoning
that left me in a coma and on life support.
Both times, doctors told my wife that
the chance to survive was about 5%.
It was certainly intended to kill.
The message was clear enough, but so is my response.
Now for the second time, you will not see us run.
You will not see us hide.
You will not see us give up.
As Boris Nemtsov always said,
this is our country, we have to fight for it.
Of our friends in the West, we ask only one thing:
please stay true to your values.
We are not asking for your support.
It is our task to change Russia and we will do it ourselves.
The only thing we ask from you is that you stop supporting
Mr. Putin by treating him as a respectable partner
on the world stage and by allowing his cronies to use your
countries as havens for their looted wealth.
And please stop falling for that line that Russians
are somehow uniquely unsuited or not ready for freedom.
We are suited. We are ready.
And we will get there, just like you.
Over these past few months, in the spring,
and then again over the summer, tens of thousands of people
went to the streets across Russia, to voice their protest
at the endemic corruption, at the lack of accountability,
and at the sheer arrogance of the same small group of people
that has now held power for nearly two decades.
These protests took place in more than 200 cities and towns,
large and small, across 11 time zones,
from Vladivostok to Kaliningrad.
And the vast majority of those who came were young people,
university and high school students,
many in their late teens and early 20s.
They are literally the future of Russia.
They are also people who are certainly raised,
and in many cases, born under Vladimir Putin,
who have no other political memories,
who have watched the same face
on their television screens for their entire lives.
And they're increasingly saying, "Enough."
And there's not that much Mr. Putin
will be able to do about that.
For now, he's doing the usual, sending his riot police
and his national guard to attack and disperse
and arrest his own citizens.
But they're not afraid, and they will be back
because we know that in the end,
however strong the pressure, when enough people
are willing to stand up, they succeed.
And then the tanks stop and turn away.
(applause)