“But I did not invade Ukraine!” he protested. “And I did not shoot down that plane!”

The following day, work took me to St. Petersburg. Perhaps because the full realization of the scope of the MH17 tragedy sank in while I was on the overnight train, I decided to go to the Dutch Consulate to lay down flowers.

Much to my surprise, there were already hundreds of flowers there — and many more would accumulate by the end of the day. Someone had placed a handwritten note: “Forgive us.” Several identically worded messages had been deposited at the Dutch Embassy in Moscow.

This was just the opposite of the linguistic statement we had been discussing the day before: Here were people deliberately claiming the right to represent their country, though their views were clearly different from those of the majority and the government. This, too, is a Russian rhetorical tradition: It dates back to the 19th-century intelligentsia, who used the slogan “For our freedom and yours” to protest the Russian Empire’s war on Poland, which was later picked up by Soviet dissidents opposing the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

When dissidents claim the right to speak as citizens of their country, the backlash is usually immediate and painful. The week after the downing of MH17, the Russian opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta published a cover that said, in Dutch, “Vergeef ons, Nederland” (Forgive us, the Netherlands) and received so many contradictory online comments that the editors published a compilation as a separate item on the website.

Many Dutch citizens thanked the paper for its stance. But most Russian-language readers commenting on the cover were furious. “What basis do you have to ask Holland for forgiveness, which suggests that the Russian Federation is responsible for the crash?” was one typical reaction. “You are libeling the Russian Federation and claiming to speak for everybody!”