Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is on trial in Kirov (a town named, incidentally, after the murdered Soviet leader whose ‘assassination’ was the pretext for an immense wave of Stalinist terror) on trumped-up embezzlement charges. The New York Times has his response to the prosecutor’s closing argument here:

…If somebody thinks that having heard the threat of the six-year imprisonment I would run away abroad or hide somewhere, they are mistaken. I cannot run away from myself. I have nothing else but this and I don’t want to do anything else but to help my country. To work for my compatriots.
I think that no one of us has the right to neutrality. No one has the right to evade the work aimed at making our world better. We do not have this right. Because every time someone thinks, “Why don’t I step aside and wait?” he only helps this disgusting feudal regime which, like a spider, is sitting in the Kremlin. He helps these 100 families, which are sucking from all of Russia. He helps them to put the Russian people on the path of degradation and drinking to death, and to take away all of the national wealth from the country.
In conclusion, I would like to call on all people like me, people who worked with me, people who want to work with me not to be afraid of doing it. Anyway, there are more of us. There are hundreds of thousands, millions of us. But a funny thing happens when this hundred, because of inertia and apathy, seize the power.
But this cannot last endlessly, that the 140 million-strong people of one of the biggest and richest countries are subjugated to a handful of bastards who are nothing. They are not even oligarchs, who built their capital due to their shrewdness or wisdom. They are a bunch of worthless former Komsomol activists turned democrats turned patriots who grabbed everything into their hands. This is nonsense, and this nonsense will be corrected by our own work.

That is the voice of courage. The question is whether it is also the voice of the future.