“This most unusual career”: Vaclav Havel

This has been a tumultuous year, and it continues with the loss of one of world's greatest civilians, Vaclav Havel. I miss him already.

For me this is perhaps his most essential quote: 

…you do not become a "dissident" just because one day you decide to take up this most unusual career. Your are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins with an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society. 

And right on cue, from a truly spectacular piece on the rebellion in Russia by David Remnick, here comes a perfect example of what Havel was talking about, a civilian who discovers she is a dissident.

Or something:

…there are perfectly ordinary people in Putin’s Russia who find themselves wandering into a life of activism, as if by accident. In the summer of 2007, a diminutive businesswoman named Yevgenia Chirikova was walking with her husband in an oak wood near Sheremetyevo Airport called Khimki Forest. She saw that many of the trees were marked with red paint. When she returned home, she scanned various Web sites, and learned that the government had contracted to cut a huge swath through the forest’s swamps and floodplains, felling thousands of old oaks, to make way for a new highway between Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Until then, Chirikova had been serenely upwardly mobile, concentrating on her small engineering company and her growing family. She enjoyed her walks in Khimki Forest, part of a greenbelt around the capital. “I didn’t know about the situation with Putin,” she said. “I wasn’t political. I was lazy.” Now she realized that if she didn’t raise her voice the trees in the forest would fall with barely a sound.

Chirikova, who looks like a homier Jean Seberg, turned out to be a charismatic civic leader, making effective speeches, keeping up active Web sites and Twitter feeds, and relentlessly drawing attention to the issue. As she organized demonstrations and acts of disobedience in Khimki Forest—members of her group set up a camp there and regularly thrust themselves in front of bulldozers, getting themselves arrested, and even beaten—she learned that the oligarch most closely connected to the project was Arkady Rotenberg, Putin’s friend and judo coach. She also discovered that local officials and Vinci, the French construction firm that was doing much of the work, were supremely uninterested in her movement’s argument that the highway could easily be built without doing damage to the forest. “The letters I got back boiled down to this: If it’s a federal project, then it’s legal,” she said.

Below a portrait of Yevgenia Chirikova, in the hoodie, with her enviro activist friends: 

You know how proud Havel is of her, and all such protesters.