Here is a good example (video plus text) of how to deliver a speech using consecutive interpreting: short, sharp sentences. This rather diminishes the sense of the flow of the argument, but it (crucially) keeps up the sense of conversation with the audience. See Speechwriting for Leaders where I explain this in detail.

The speech is by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the Russian tycoon who refused to toe the Putin line and was thrown in prison. It has several important passages:

Russia could have become a completely different place if it had not turned off from the trajectory that it had started moving along in the last decade of the previous century.  If our country had continued moving in the direction of an open society, political competition, a real fight against corruption, and equality before the law.

The period of reforms of the 1990s was indeed hard.  It has become customary to utter curses at those years and to frighten people with warnings about their return.  But it was precisely in this period that Russia’s economy was rebuilt and started growing at a headlong pace.  At the end of the 90s and the beginning of the 2000s, per capita GDP increased on average by 7% per year, while the size of the middle class got to be as much as 30% of the population …

The economic boom of the 2000s, which in Russia is only partially explained by the rise in oil prices, would have been impossible without the reforms of the 90s, without the new class of entrepreneurs who were creating entire new industries from scratch:  retail, banks, automobile manufacturing, telecommunications, media.  Our internet companies became the biggest in Europe.  Russia doubled the production of oil and started exporting wheat, even though only recently the USSR had been forced to bring grain in from the USA and Canada.

Putin is still in place today, as are the oil-and-gas incomes, but there’s no more economic growth.  On the contrary, a decline has begun …

Why have export incomes stopped turning into economic growth then?  This is the inevitable result of the destruction of freedom and the liquidation of normal democratic institutions.

The authorities had taught society to detest business that’s independent of the state.  But until 2011, hope still remained that this was temporary.  In 2010-2011 it became clear that Putin wasn’t planning on going anywhere.  That there wasn’t going to be any political competition and independent judiciary in Russia.  That nobody wanted to recognize the contribution that entrepreneurs had made to improving the lives of the citizens.

Not having received recognition and respect, having lost all hope for understandable and transparent rules of the game, entrepreneurs began to abandon Russia.  In 2003-2008, capital flight comprised a mere $10 bln.  In 2010-2014 it was $383 bln.  A nearly 40-fold increase.  Business started fleeing from Russia.  And also running away with it is the entrepreneurial spirit, competition, and respect for the consumer.  And at the end of the day — material prosperity as well …

In 2015 Russia can expect a decline in GDP.  Even those economists who are loyal to the Kremlin are forecasting that 10 years of no growth lie ahead.

The citizens of Russia won’t see good roads, universities, hospitals, and polyclinics.  Hundreds of thousands more people are going to be unlawfully convicted or will become victims of arbitrary rule.

This last point is the key one. It gets to the opportunity cost of V Putin’s machinations.

The Putin slogan “Hurrah, we got Crimea back!” makes sense only if it is explained in terms of what that outcome has cost and will cost far into the future as compared to other desirable outcomes. In the deliberate absence of any such comparisons it is merely a silly noise, the latest manifestation of the age-old Kremlin manipulation that insists that the patriotic Russian masses rejoice in eating nothing but turnips to make sacrifices for the Fatherland.

Khodorkovsky explains what is needed:

A country where, if you obey the law, you need not be afraid of anybody — not a prosecutor, not a judge, not the governor, not the president.  Not even the president of Chechnya.  Where every citizen who obeys the law will feel himself far more confident than a president who violates the law.

A country with an independent judiciary and an influential parliament, where the citizens themselves determine the future at honest elections.  Where the real power isn’t in Moscow, but in each and every municipality.

A country where the state has no choice but to respect people’s rights and international obligations, and not engage in pillaging and plundering beyond the confines of the country and protecting criminals inside.

A country from which capital isn’t fleeing, talented people aren’t fleeing, but on the contrary, one that attracts enterprising people from all over the world.  Where the only criterion in business is how good you are at what you do.  If you’re talented and not afraid of work, then you’ll certainly achieve success, irrespective of how close your friendship with the president is.

Good schools, hospitals, and roads will appear only when every person who has power and money conferred on them will know that if he doesn’t do his job well, someone else will take his place.  Voters will choose another candidate, consumers — another producer.  This is called political and economic competition, and many countries have learned how to use it for the benefit of society.

Russia is no different in this regard.  Our country was developing and growing rich thanks to the competition of the 1990s-2000s, and now that competition has been destroyed it’s getting poor.

Mind you, when you see the dismal badly written political party manifestos here in the UK and the delusional policies pursued by the Scottish nationalism tendency, you wonder quite where and why even in the supposedly smarter parts of the world political competition veers from the road of rationality to stupidity.