“I am a Lezghin woman, but I don’t live there permanently, I live in Moscow. My mother [lives] in a village in Dagestan, but she is far from Makhachkala and does not participate in rallies.

“The men of Dagestan cannot understand what it is like to respect women even during rallies. Something out of the realm of magic that cannot be explained to them. This is the rhetoric they promote: when a man in a crowd of women goes to a rally, the man is HE. But when a man [acts like] an unscrupulous schmuck, the man is SHE.

“I just follow the news out there all the time because I care. And this injustice too. I don’t live in Dagestan precisely because of such men for whom a woman is an object of humiliation. Now hundreds of women come out to defend these men, but these cowards do not even defend [women] when women are beaten by policemen.

“In fact, even though men owe women their freedom, they continue to ridicule women. Who gave them the right to use the female gender as an insult? Why when one man stands with a crowd of women against the police, that man is THE man, but when a man is a powerless enforcer who beats women, chokes them from the back and threatens them with a gun, then that man is HER? HE is the one who shot in the air to scare the women, HE is the one who attacked the woman from behind and started strangling her, HE is the one who threw the girl into the concrete fence! All these men are not HE, they are all HE. But Dagestani men have so little respect for women that even today they see no reason to respect our gender.”