How to Be a Dissident, by the American journalist Gal Beckerman (1976), is an essay in the form of an instruction manual on a subject—a concept, a vital stance, an attitude towards power—that, from the outset, is not at all easy to define and delimit. What exactly are we talking about when we talk about dissent, about dissidents? From the moment that a dissident is as much a Christian believer who during the Middle Ages broke with the Roman Catholic hierarchy as a German worker who refused to let himself be swept away by Hitlerian euphoria or a Russian writer who wrote poems denouncing the atrocities of Stalin, we will conclude that dissent is a matter that has more to do with attitude and behavior than with ideology and that it unfolds more in the field of pre-politics than properly in that of politics.

On July 30, Viktor Kalinin, aged 14 years and three months, became the youngest person to be included in Russia's list of terrorists and extremists. His crime: having set fire to a railway signaling system box. Although he stated that he had acted under coercion, the police accused him of terrorism. That same day, Pavel Durov, founder of Telegram, was also accused of collaborating with terrorism, in the latest episode of his war with the secret services.