Nicolas Miletitch lecture “To The Success of Our Hopeless Cause”
May 12th, 5 PM, room 402
VU TSPMI along with the Institut Français de Lituanie is inviting you to the discussion “To The Success of Our Hopeless Cause: Nicolas Miletitch, the journalist working in the shadow of oppression” with french journalist and former editor-in-chief of AFP Nicolas Miletitch.
After the discussion, there will be a movie screening of Nicolas Miletitch’s movie “To The Success of Our Hopeless Cause.”
The lecture takes place on the 12th of May at 5 PM (UTC +3).
In the 1970s and 1980s, while Leonid Brezhnev was in power and the KGB was all-powerful, men and women fought for freedom and human rights in the USSR. They are called dissidents.
They are Russians, Ukrainians, Jews or Crimean Tatars, leaders of underground magazines, or members of religious communities. They usually pay a high price for their commitment: years in camps or forced treatment in psychiatric asylums. Brezhnev and Stalin are rehabilitated in today’s Russia, the Soviet era is readily glorified, and dissidents are ignored. This film pays tribute to them and perpetuates their memory.
Born in Paris in 1953, Nicolas Miletitch joined AFP, one of the world’s leading news agencies, in 1977. He was appointed correspondent in Moscow in 1978, but was expelled in 1981 because of his contacts with dissidents, which the Soviet authorities considered too close. He then headed AFP’s bureaus in Belgrade (from 1998 to 1994) and Moscow twice (1994-2001 and 2010-2019). He was also editor-in-chief of AFP from 2006 to 2009.
