Interview with Dasha, Coordinator of «Saharnica» Volunteer Centre
«Saharnica» is the name of the Sakharov Centre, a Moscow cultural and scientific educational centre founded in 1996 at the initiative of the Andrei Sakharov Foundation.
The Sakharov Centre was recognised as a foreign agent in 2014. We talked to Dasha, the coordinator of the volunteer Foundation, about the changes in the work related to the war and the future activities. And picked up experience for the future of the foreign agency, for sure.
How did you come to organise the volunteering in Saharnica in the first place? Did the "foreign agent" plaque confuse you?
In 2016, I went to the recruiting of the Human Rights School at the Sakharov Centre. At that moment, I was in my third year at the Higher School of Economics, but I never really fell in love with it, I was going through a crisis of self-determination. The School of Human Rights helped me a lot: the meetings gave me the opportunity to think about particular things, individual human stories. It was new to me, it resonated with me and was much closer to me than the state, regimes and institutions. I was very surprised by this discovery at the time – as well as by the problems of present-day Russia. Torture, unfreedom of assembly, brutal detentions.
All these revelations and the people I met made me change a lot, become more civic-minded in a lifestyle or something. And I could no longer just leave the School of Human Rights; I stuck to the values, the people and the place, so I decided to stay on as a volunteer at the School. It continued like that for about two years; then, just as I was looking for a job, the Volunteer Centre coordinator position became available, and I decided to apply. I wanted to work doing something very meaningful for me. And there were not many people closer to me at the time than Saharnica.
The "foreign agent" label didn't embarrass me then, and it wouldn't embarrass me now. I will do what I think is right, even if I realise that the consequences may not be the most pleasant. And especially if the consequences are mostly unforeseeable. Our reality is that you never know where you'll fall, and if a policy of repressing dissent is taken, people who say something against it are always in danger.
Can you outline what volunteers do now?
After 24 February, we slightly restructured the trajectory of our work. Before, we worked more on the request of our human rights partners; after 24 February, we focused a lot on the Sakharov Centre and Sakharov's legacy, as well as on supporting our small community.
Many people had lost their footing and at least had to find some ground first in order to be able to help their partners again. This is why there has been an increase in the direction of the Zoom Calls, with the aim of speaking out and feeling a sense of belonging (so called support groups).
There are now many transcription tasks for the Sakharov Centre and for human rights organisations, whose assistance we have not totally abandoned, of course. The transcripts are one of the most popular formats of work. Volunteers also help with scanning in the Archive, proofreading the Sakharov website and with the Declarator project (Transparency International-R) – there are tasks to find and upload information on the website.
Were there any problems with the legislature because of this? If so, how were they resolved?
Not yet. The Sakharov Centre has preventively stopped its public activities, and our volunteer work is mostly non-public.
How to organise political volunteering in the conditions of war in general?
I always draw a very strict line between human rights volunteering and what the question calls it is, while I call it political activism or political activity. One can of course say that the political is widespread (perhaps it is), but an important aspect of the political is the battle for power.
Human rights activism is not about state power at all, it is about trying to bring this power in line with the international human rights system. It does not matter what ideology the representative of the state advocates; what is important is that he does not torture people, do not take their lives, do not send them to captivity and do not carry out other actions prohibited by international law and, by the way, by our national law as well.
If we talk about our Volunteer Centre, no one has touched us directly, but our partners (e.g. Memorial) have been under strong pressure to stop working for a very long time. And this is, of course, tough. The Volunteer Centre exists specifically to help human rights organisations, and if they disappear, so do we.
In what format will the activities continue?
So far, we haven't rethink the formats. I think all kinds of text-based work and the predominance of remote tasks over offline tasks is something that will always be there, as long as there is a Volunteer Centre.
You can join us by filling in an application form.
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