Where is the audience? The Big Question for a Speech Alexey Navalny’s Speech to Court February 2nd 2021

Where is the audience? The Big Question for a Speech

Alexey Navalny’s Speech to Court February 2nd 2021

There are speeches given to great crowds. There are speeches given before God. And there are speeches given to a silent few.

The speech given by Alexey Navalny at his preliminary hearing this week has one thinking “Where is the audience?”. It’s actually the primary question to address to uncover the speech’s significance - as for so many speeches.

One thinks of other great “courtroom” speeches – among which I always rank Oliver Cromwell’s speech to dismiss Parliament in 1653 and which ends with those words that resonate across the centuries:

“In the name of God, Go!”

My other favourite line from that speech is:

“Ye have no more religion than my horse”.

One can sense the cowering members of Parliament, edging to the giant doors in the face of such Cromwellian wrath. We know exactly who and what and where the audience was in 1653.

Then the courtroom speech by Mandela – the wonderful Rivonia Trial speech which concludes with the memorable and magnificent:

“It is an ideal for which I hope to live for and to see realized. But, My Lord, if it needs to be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

Nadine Gordimer, the South African writer was present at the trial. She commented that:

”the delivery was hesitant, parsonical’ until ‘only at the end did the man come through and when he had spoken that last sentence the strangest and most moving sound I have ever heard from human throats came from the 'black' side of the court audience’ "

It’s a haunting phrase.

The moving sound of the audience.

And what with the Navalny speech?

He delivered one of the great lines in modern political dialectic, let alone courtroom drama:

“We all remember Alexander the Liberator [Alexander II] and Yaroslav the Wise [Yaroslav I]. Well, now we’ll have Vladimir the Underpants Poisoner”

‘The Underpants Poisoner’. Edgar Allen Poe couldn’t have dreamt it up.

A line to the bring any house down.

Yet, no-one was laughing.

The truth is the Navalny speech was not given to an empty room. But it was given to silence. The question hanging over the speech is “Where is the audience?”

There is no “audience” in this room. Because no-one dares to hear.

And that is more concerning than the etiolate forces which faced Cromwell or the ignorance of Rivonia.

It is sound of fear. There was no audience.