I Don''t Agree

What drives an ordinary person to risk imprisonment—or even death—to speak the truth? In 12 Who Don’t Agree, Valery Panyushkin, a veteran journalist and storyteller, reconstructs the lives of twelve Russian dissidents who refused to accept the authoritarian tightening of Vladimir Putin’s regime. Through vivid, novelistic reportage, he shows how conscience, when awakened, can become more powerful than fear. These are not the caricatured rebels of propaganda but flesh-and-blood people who stumble, doubt, love, and persist.

Panyushkin’s central argument is simple yet devastating: in post-Soviet Russia, dissent is not about ideology—it’s about humanity. To disagree with the state’s lies, even quietly, is to reclaim one’s right to be human. Yet, he warns, these small acts of courage extract enormous personal costs. Each of the twelve protagonists—politicians, journalists, human-rights advocates, and activists—reveals a Russia in which freedom survives only in cramped apartments, prison cells, or small acts of moral defiance.

A Mosaic of Defiance

The book opens with Panyushkin himself witnessing a Dissenters’ March in 2007 Moscow—a fleeting kilometer of freedom before riot police crush it. From there, he travels across the country and through time, piecing together a tapestry of personal testimonies: chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov transforming his strategic brilliance into political opposition; economist Andrei Illarionov turning from Putin’s advisor to his critic; Marina Litvinovich, once a Kremlin insider, risking everything to expose information control; and others like Viktor Shenderovich, Vissarion Aseyev, and Natalya Morar who choose conscience over safety.

Each character becomes a moral parable within Russia’s long tradition of dissent. Together, they remind the reader that resistance isn’t the work of saints—it’s the work of neighbors, professionals, and accidental heroes grappling with moral choice in dark times. Rather than idealize them, Panyushkin situates their courage amid uncertainty and fatigue, showing both their faith and their despair. Their opposition is not loud revolt but stubborn honesty.

History as Allegory, Journalism as Art

Structurally, the book blends journalistic investigation with the storytelling of a literary chronicle. Panyushkin’s careful observation of details—the smell of prison corridors, the nervous laughter at clandestine meetings, the texture of Moscow snow—anchors abstract ideals in concrete life. By using novelistic techniques, he humanizes those who would otherwise be dismissed as troublemakers in state media. The rhythm of each chapter mirrors the ebb and flow of protest itself: moments of exhilaration followed by despair, humor shadowed by fear.

His prose echoes the moral witness traditions of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago and Anna Politkovskaya’s reports on Chechnya. However, Panyushkin’s dissenters are born not of Soviet labor camps but of a postmodern dictatorship—one maintained through oil wealth, media manipulation, and psychological resignation. They live in a system that no longer needs mass terror because apathy itself becomes the prison.

Why These Stories Matter

For readers—especially those outside Russia—Panyushkin’s stories illuminate the hidden anatomy of modern authoritarianism. You see how slogans like “Putin’s Plan Is Russia’s Victory” colonize public space, and how a citizen’s simple act of standing with a protest sign can trigger arrest. Yet, you also see the stubborn hope that persists in candlelit kitchens and underground cafes. As one activist tells Panyushkin, “We might not win, but at least we won’t lie.”

Ultimately, the book argues that real resistance begins at a human level—with empathy, not ideology. It’s about helping a beaten comrade, comforting a terrified mother, refusing to falsify an election report. Panyushkin suggests that, in authoritarian societies, the battlefield of freedom is internal. The twelve who don’t agree model a kind of moral clarity that challenges readers everywhere: if your government asked you to trade truth for comfort, would you agree?

Panyushkin begins his chronicle by tracing how dissent takes root—not as a grand ideological project, but as a personal awakening. Many of his subjects start inside the system: Marina Litvinovich shaping Kremlin media strategy, Andrei Illarionov serving as Putin’s economic advisor, or even Garry Kasparov celebrated as a national champion. They believe in the promise of Russia’s renewal, only to realize that power’s logic is erasing what little democracy existed. Dissent, Panyushkin shows, begins as disillusionment.

From Insiders to Outcasts

Litvinovich’s journey embodies this transformation. Once an architect of propaganda who helped the Kremlin craft the image of a strong, omnipotent president, she turns away after the Nord Ost theater hostage tragedy in 2002. Watching 130 civilians die from government gas during the rescue, she recognizes that the state now values image over life itself. Her conscience splits from her career. It’s a recurring pattern: Illarionov leaves the president’s cabinet after realizing that corruption and fear—not economic reform—define policy. In Panyushkin’s telling, their decision to dissent marks a return to sanity, not rebellion.

Everyday Heroism

Not all dissenters are elite insiders. Some, like Vissarion Aseyev, a local deputy from Beslan, become activists out of tragedy. When terrorists kill hundreds of children in the 2004 school siege, he witnesses the state’s indifference and brutality firsthand. His empathy compels him to organize mothers, teachers, and neighbors—to demand accountability when everyone else is ordered to remain silent. Aseyev’s courage makes him “a man at the table on the right”—an ordinary figure forced by conscience into politics. It’s this human-scale revolt that most moves the author.

Disillusionment as a Moral Turning Point

Throughout the book, Panyushkin insists that dissent emerges precisely when a person’s inner ethics and the outer reality become incompatible. When Litvinovich sees censors rewriting news after Beslan, when Illarionov watches his colleagues profit from lies, or when Kasparov is jailed for simply walking in Moscow, they each face a moment where silence feels like complicity. These awakenings echo Václav Havel’s concept of “living in truth” (from The Power of the Powerless)—the decision to act as if freedom already exists, even when it does not.

For you as a reader, this theme poses a challenge: dissent doesn’t require a manifesto. It begins when you refuse to participate in lies. Whether that means correcting a false fact, ignoring propaganda, or walking with a sign in the cold, Panyushkin’s portraits show that freedom often starts with a whisper of disobedience.

One of the book’s most compelling portraits is of Garry Kasparov, the world chess champion who transforms intellect into dissent. For a man trained in perfect strategy, politics in Putin’s Russia is a paradoxical game: there are no legal moves left. Panyushkin admires Kasparov’s logical defiance—his belief that dictatorship, too, has vulnerable positions if citizens think a few moves ahead.

From Chessboard to Streets

Kasparov’s story begins with his arrest in 2007 for leading a Dissenters’ March. The absurd charge—“failure to obey police orders”—means five days in jail. Panyushkin reconstructs those days with cinematic precision: Litvinovich organizing solitary pickets, Kasparov’s mother, Klara Shagenovna, waiting with sweets and tea, fearing but also believing her son will “win the game.” Even the police, unsure whether to treat him as a criminal or a future president, give him respect. In exile from the chessboard, Kasparov turns the tactics of competition into moral endurance.

The Algorithm of Resistance

The metaphor of chess runs through his narrative. Where others see hopelessness, Kasparov sees variations—what he calls “possible plays.” After one march is violently dispersed, he notes quietly: “It’s still easier than being five-zero against Karpov.” His analytical detachment, Panyushkin suggests, is a survival mechanism. He calculates that each arrest reveals new “moves”: smaller protests, spontaneous gatherings, decentralized resistance. His pragmatism contrasts with the emotional despair of other activists, turning dissent into an intellectual art form.

Family as an Anchor

Kasparov’s domestic scenes—his mother baking Azerbaijani sweets, his wife bewildered by his nonchalance about prison—give the story its emotional gravity. Panyushkin draws a parallel between Klara’s care during his world championship matches and her faith in his political struggle. The intimacy of family, he argues, is what keeps public courage humane. Without these anchors, resistance risks becoming ideology detached from love.

Through Kasparov, Panyushkin redefines bravery: not as fearlessness, but as maintaining clarity under pressure. Like a player facing checkmate yet seeing one last line of play, Kasparov embodies what it means to think strategically in the midst of oppression—a reminder that courage can be methodical as much as it is emotional.

No single tragedy defines the moral collapse of the early Putin years more than the 2004 Beslan school siege. Through the story of deputy Vissarion Aseyev, Panyushkin transforms a national horror into a portrait of moral awakening. Aseyev begins as a loyal functionary but becomes what the author calls “the man at the table on the right”—an ordinary citizen who, faced with unbearable suffering, finds responsibility thrust upon him.

Witnessing the Unthinkable

When terrorists seize a school and hundreds of children are killed during the botched rescue, Aseyev’s life splits in two: before and after. Amid the gunfire, he races toward the school, not as a politician but as a father. Afterward, he refuses to accept the government’s lies about “terrorist provocation.” He helps mothers compile lists of victims, distributes aid, and later joins protests that demand accountability. The phrase shouted by grieving women—“We were lucky; our boy was whole”—echoes like a requiem through the narrative.

From Loyalty to Resistance

Aseyev’s protest begins simply: organizing teachers and families around mutual aid. But compassion soon becomes political. When prosecutors demand he take responsibility for an “illegal protest,” he accepts the charges rather than betray his friends. Like Solzhenitsyn’s “living not by lies,” his resistance stems not from ideology but decency—refusing to let bureaucratic convenience erase human loss. Panyushkin contrasts him with the cynical officials who attend funerals, deliver speeches, and leave without touching a single grave.

Resisting the Call to Hatred

Perhaps most strikingly, when a federal prosecutor urges the Ossetians to take revenge on neighboring Ingushetians, Aseyev cries “Quiet! What are you doing?” His plea against ethnic vengeance becomes a whisper of moral sanity in a country increasingly divided by fear. In refusing revenge, he preserves the humanity that violence seeks to destroy.

For readers, Aseyev’s story is a reminder that heroism often hides in gray offices and small towns. When disaster strikes, your choices—to speak or stay silent—define who you become. In Beslan, one man’s conscience becomes a compass guiding through collective trauma.

What happens when a technocrat’s rationalism collides with moral reality? Andrei Illarionov’s trajectory—from Kremlin economic advisor to dissenter at the Dissenters’ March—reveals how logic leads to rebellion when truth is betrayed. Panyushkin depicts him as a man burdened by precision: he makes sense of numbers but must now make sense of fear.

The Insider’s Vision

Initially, Illarionov endorses Putin as a potential reformer—a Pinochet who might stabilize Russia before handing power back to democracy. He helps craft the flat tax, restore fiscal discipline, and dream of Western integration. But as the Chechen war drags on and Yukos is dismantled, he realizes that these “economic victories” merely fund repression. His analytical mind cannot reconcile prosperity built on fear. (This moral awakening recalls Albert Speer’s postwar reflections on technocratic guilt.)

When Numbers Meet Blood

The defining moment comes at Beslan. As part of presidential meetings during the crisis, Illarionov witnesses the clumsy decision-making that leads to catastrophe. He later resigns, stating, “One cannot rescue hostages by killing them.” Yet he never publicly reveals the classified details—caught between duty, fear, and responsibility. His silence, Panyushkin suggests, mirrors the moral paralysis of Russia’s intellectual class, torn between knowledge and risk.

The March of the Disillusioned

When Illarionov joins the 2007 Dissenters’ March merely “to see what it’s like,” he finds himself leading a column through backstreets, guiding babushkas and students away from police batons. His instinct for methodical planning—the same that once designed tax policy—saves real people. In that inversion lies Panyushkin’s quiet irony: the economist who once measured GDP now measures courage in human terms. Freedom, it turns out, cannot be graphed but must be lived.

Illarionov’s story resonates with any professional struggling between comfortable complicity and dangerous integrity. It asks whether competence without conscience is merely another form of servitude—and whether intelligence can still serve truth in a system built on lies.

Among Panyushkin’s twelve dissenters, the most striking thread is the courage of women—Marina Litvinovich, Masha Gaidar, and journalist Natalya Morar—who defy political and gender expectations alike. In their stories, rebellion is both an act of conscience and an assertion of personal dignity in a patriarchal state.

Marina Litvinovich: From Power’s Core to Its Critic

Once a Kremlin political technologist, Litvinovich crafts the narratives that sustain presidential image-making. After witnessing the government’s lethal rescue at Moscow’s Dubrovka theater, she cannot bear the hypocrisy. Leaving her “information threats” report behind, she joins liberal reformers, organizes Kasparov’s rallies, and becomes their strategist. Her transformation shows how conscience can bloom even in propaganda’s shadows—proof that truth, once seen, cannot be unseen.

Masha Gaidar: Inheriting a Legacy of Courage

The daughter of reformist Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar, Masha could have chosen comfort. Instead, she forms the youth movement Yes, fights censorship, and stages bold theatrics—most famously, abseiling from Moscow’s Bolshoi Kamenny Bridge with a banner screaming “Bastards, give the people back elections!” When arrested, she remains fearless, teasing her interrogators. Her defiance, lighthearted yet purposeful, embodies a generational rebellion against cynicism.

Natalya Morar: Exile as Testimony

A Moldovan journalist for The New Times, Morar investigates Kremlin slush funds and deported oligarchs—until one night she’s denied reentry into Russia. Her real-time phone calls from the airport capture the absurdity of bureaucratic power: a woman erased by a database. Her marriage to fellow journalist Ilya Barabanov turns into stateless exile. Yet rather than silence her, exile amplifies her voice abroad. Panyushkin calls her “a witness of absence”—someone who resists by remembering.

Collectively, these women redefine dissent. They show that courage can be analytical, playful, or deeply vulnerable. Whether through research, risk, or refusal, they remind us that resistance is not confined to gender or grandeur—it begins with saying, simply, no.

Panyushkin’s Russia operates through a subtler instrument than terror: fear’s quiet routine. Across all twelve stories, fear seeps like gas—odorless but lethal. It dictates behavior, silences neighbors, and challenges even brave dissenters to distinguish prudence from cowardice.

Fear as Habit

In scenes of police intimidation—Kasparov’s arrest, Gaidar’s interrogation, Litvinovich’s stalking—the real weapon isn’t violence but unpredictability. The regime keeps citizens guessing when rules apply. “You can stand with a sign,” Panyushkin notes, “but only as long as you’re alone.” This fragile legality ensures self-censorship. People police themselves long before the state arrives. By depicting fear not as drama but as daily ritual, the author reveals how autocracy survives without mass purges.

The Uses of Humor and Solidarity

Yet humor punctures fear. Dissidents joke in police vans, drink tea after release, film their “interviews for posterity.” Such levity recalls Vaclav Havel’s “power of the powerless”: laughter transforms power’s absurdity into vulnerability. Friendship networks—shared arrests, clandestine dinners—form an underground republic of mutual care. Through these micro-communities, people relearn trust, the first muscle of freedom.

The Price of Courage

Still, fear extracts a toll: exile, broken families, psychological exhaustion. Panyushkin never romanticizes protest. After Kasparov’s speeches or Morar’s deportation, he shows the quiet aftermath—the fatigue, the cold apartments, the endless waiting. The courage he chronicles is endurance, not ecstasy. To resist in such a climate means carrying fear without letting it define you. “They were not fearless,” he writes, “but they walked anyway.”

For modern readers—whether facing censorship, workplace bullying, or societal pressure—the lesson is universal: fear loses power when shared. Naming it, laughing at it, or acting despite it transforms oppression into resistance.

Across Russia’s vast silence, Panyushkin finds a parallel country—a “republic of conscience” inhabited by those who refuse to lie. They meet in kitchens, emails, protest cells, and tiny cafes. Their gatherings lack flags or leaders but carry moral gravity. This underground network becomes the book’s most hopeful discovery.

Communities of Truth

Whether it's Aseyev’s teachers’ committees in Beslan, Litvinovich’s “I Think” youth lectures, or the shared cells of imprisoned National Bolsheviks, these micro-societies uphold values erased from public life: dignity, compassion, dialogue. They mimic the civil institutions that the official state hollowed out. In their modest gatherings, citizens rehearse democracy from the ground up.

Hope as Practice

Even as marches fail, these people persist. They exchange banned books, write letters to prisoners, bake bread for court days. In doing so, they enact what Panyushkin calls “everyday freedom”—the refusal to live solely in fear or cynicism. Their republic survives precisely because it seeks moral coherence, not power.

A Mirror to the World

Panyushkin invites readers beyond Russia to recognize parallels in their own societies. Whenever truth becomes inconvenient or compassion unfashionable, the republic of conscience calls for recruits. “We don’t calculate variations,” he writes, “we simply say—we do not agree.” In a time of polarization and propaganda worldwide, his message resonates far beyond Moscow’s streets.

The quiet republic, he concludes, is fragile yet indestructible because it exists wherever integrity does. And so long as one person refuses to agree, freedom endures—not as a regime, but as a relationship between souls.