Recently at the House of Journalists in Moscow a book launch event was held by Igor Sutyagin – who is well known not only as a fellow of the USA and Canada Institute, but also as one of Russia’s most famous political prisoners, after getting a 15-year jail sentence on a fabricated case by the FSB.  There were a lot of people there, with majority of them being human rights advocates. There were practically no journalists, which isn’t really surprising: once a person is sitting in jail in the name of the FSB, then in a state that is all FSB through and through, and to whom practically all the mass information media belong, there is practically nobody to write about such people as Sutyagin.

At the launch spoke all those same persons that speak at such events always: chairman of the Moscow Helsinki Group Ludmilla Alexeeva, president of the Glasnost Defense Foundation Alexey Simonov, leader of the faction of the greens in the Yabloko party ecologist Alexey Yablokov…Igor’s parents spoke, read aloud an address from the sitter [i.e. prisoner–Trans.] to those gathered (the sense of the address – «don’t be silent!»). They gave out the book.