Thank you, Mikhail Sergeyevich, for the best years of our lives!

Marina Shapovalova, writer

To some extent, everything just coincided and was lucky. After all, I could not have been 25-30 then, but 10 or 80, and I would not have felt the full delight of liberation. The happiness of overcoming falling obstacles. What was in that from the courage of my - our - personal formation, and what was from yours, Mikhail Sergeevich, the imperious will aimed at respect for human dignity in a country that did not preserve the dignity of people? It doesn't matter anymore. Coincidentally. Allowed me to straighten up. To strike the balance of forced conformism with a positive balance of moral self-sufficiency. I'll have enough for the rest of my life. For which I am grateful to the great European culture, my best teachers, my talented friends and you, Mikhail Sergeevich! I will never allow ingratitude to clog the sources of my happy, fulfilling being.

Thank you for refusing to prohibit and slow down the unknown, incomprehensible, and hostile to you. I already know the true cost of non-resistance better than any Gandhi: it is defeat. The adoption of which reveals the historical scale of the individual and begins the history of the world struggle against Evil from zero. Without virtuous power, with the need for personal opposition to him.

Thank you for opening the borders! For the return of the repressed thinking to the intellectual circulation by your verbal-muscular effort. For faith in the common sense of people, in its constructive potential. For jazz, rock, "Pop mechanics" and the opportunity to know the emptiness of infinity. Everything was on time and not in vain.

Thank you for the reminder of the human face! Which socialism could not have, but you had it. You and Raisa Maksimovna: never before has the love of a husband and wife for each other so transformed the world, stuck in the deadly hummocks of geopolitics. The two of you walked hand in hand into the arena of mutually assured destruction, and the world smiled. I was ashamed of the means of nuclear parity in front of the human face of the love of two Soviet people. Born under Stalin, but who have become higher than the ideological fronts and the Berlin Wall in their common humanity.

Rest in the bliss of your love together!

And pray to God for us, as this is permitted to the peacemakers!