Extract from 'My fear and loathing [i]

I wanted to write about this for a long time. Well, let it be the first post after the new sentence. It's like a confession. I need to get over this loathing and fear, maybe you can help me with this.

Loathing. People ask me a lot about it, and I started receiving letters again: do you hate the judge? Do you hate Putin even more? I have said many times before that hate is the main thing that must be overcome in prison. There are so many reasons for it, and your powerlessness is a strong catalyst for the process. So if you let it go, it will eat and end you up.

I'll be honest, I have a hatred and I've got a lot of it. Old-users of the Internet will remember that meme: I fiercely, wildly hate it. Something like this. Most often I have it after «trials». The last one, by the way, where I got 19 years, was not one of those. There, on the contrary, we all competed in showering each other with pleasantries. During the whole process, no one raised their voice once. This is the most dangerous kind of judge: they give you 19 years in prison, and will also make you sympathize with them.

I get furious after the sessions of the local district court. There are simple cases, there is no space for legal tricks, and the judges simply and frankly say about the black: «Oh this is white, look, the reference says white» and make demonstratively illegal decisions.

Sometimes I can't stand it and yell at some «judge» Samoilov, but it's not him I hate with my great hatred. Not the cops, not the outlaw thieves from the colony. Not the FSB officers who command them. You'll be surprised, but not even Putin. At times like this, I hate people I previously loved. For whom I stood up, for whom I argued to the hilt. I also hate myself that once I loved them.

I am sitting in my SHIZO and reading a book by Natan Sharansky, «Fear No Evil» (I recommend it). Sharansky was jailed in the USSR for nine years, and in 1986 he was exchanged. He went to Israel, created a party, achieved great succes. In general, he's a cool guy. By the way, he spent 400 days in punishment cells and SHIZO. I really can't imagine how he survived.

So, Sharansky describes the arrest and the investigation. 1977. I was one year old at the time. The book was published in the USSR in 1991. I was 15 years old at the time. Now I am 47, and while reading his book, I sometimes shake my head to get rid of the feeling that I am reading my personal file. For example the SHIZO/PKT building — is a separate barrack behind the barbed wire. The maximum term in the SHIZO is 15 days. I was not surprised when after several «15 days» in a row I was transferred as a persistent offender to a PKT for six months. It was exactly the same.

In the introduction (I remind you, the year is 1991), Sharansky writes that it is in prisons that the virus of free-thinking persists, and he hopes that the KGB will not find «an antidote to this virus.» Sharansky was wrong. The antidote was found. The antidote that now, in 2023, seems to have more political prisoners in Russia than in the Brezhnev-Andropov times. What has the KGB got to do with it? There was no creeping or overt coup in our country led by people from the special services. They did not come to power by pushing the democrat reformers out of power. They did it themselves. They called them themselves. They invited them themselves. They taught them how to fake elections. How to steal property from entire industries. How to lie to the media. How to change laws to suit themselves. How to suppress opposition by force. Even how to organize idiotic, stupid, talentless wars.

That is why I can't help it and I fiercely hate those who sold, drank, and wasted the historical chance that our country had in the early 90s. I hate Yeltsin and «Tanya and Valya», Chubais, and the rest of the corrupt family who put Putin in power. I hate the swindlers, whom we used to call reformers for some reason. Now it is very clear that they did nothing but intrigue and take care of their own wealth. Is there any other country where so many Ministers of the «Government of Reforms» became millionaires and billionaires? I hate the authors of the most stupid authoritarian constitution, which they sold to us idiots as democratic, even then giving the president the power of a full-fledged monarch.

I especially hate everyone for the fact that there was not even a serious attempt to remove the basis of lawlessness — to carry out judicial reform, without which all other reforms are doomed to failure. I am studying this a lot now. In 1991, the RSFSR adopted a good concept of judicial reform, but already in 1993, counter-reforms aimed at building a judicial vertical began. At that time, all political forces wanted honest courts. There was a complete consensus in society. If an independent judiciary had been established, a new usurpation of power would have been impossible or very difficult. So make no mistake: the thing that is now dashingly handing out 8-15-20 year sentences to innocent people started to be built long before Putin. Now it is clear: no one in the Kremlin and the government of the 90s wanted an independent court. That's because such a court would have been a barrier to corruption, election fraud, and the transformation of governors and mayors into irremovable princes.

I hate the «independent media» and the «democratic society» that provided full support for one of the most dramatic turning points in our new history — the fraudulent presidential election of 1996. Again, I was an active supporter of all this at the time. Not election fraud, of course — I wouldn't have liked it even then, but I did my best to ignore it, and the general unfairness of the election didn't embarrass me even for a bit. Now we are paying for the fact that in 1996 we thought that election fraud was not always a bad thing. The end justified the means.

I hate oligarch Gusinsky (even if he is no longer an oligarch) because he blatantly hired Bobkov, the deputy head of the KGB, who was responsible for persecuting dissidents. They thought it was a joke at the time: ha-ha, he put innocent people in jail, and now he works for me. Kind of like a bear in the livery. So not only was there no lustration, there was the encouragement of villains. Now, literally, those people who worked for Bobkov as young employees are putting Yashin, Kara-Murza, and me in jail…

[continued….in part 2]

References

[i] https://navalny.com/p/6652/ [accessed 22-2-24 / follow link for full article]