There are no pockets in the coffin

It is always curious: how do people who have participated in meanness come to terms with themselves later?
They cynically state: “Life is a complicated thing, and it is one”? They feel a little awkward and in the evening, hugging their wife in bed, they say: “This is all for you, dear, and our children”? Fill your soul with vodka? Light a candle and confess? I don’t believe in the fact that they don’t understand when they commit nasty things, because of which others go through the stage, children grow up without fathers and mothers, people lose their life’s work or are left without a livelihood - I don’t believe in this. Man - if you do not take perfect deviations - nevertheless differs from the animal in that he is capable of reflection.
Motive for meanness
What do judges who give spinal verdicts experience? Or deputies who quickly pass repressive laws? Or perjurers in uniform? And even more interesting - the motive, why do they agree? Well, yes, of course: loss of a familiar place, salary, benefits, status. But judges, even those who left with a scandal, are quite successfully practicing law today, former deputies are lobbying, people in uniform find themselves in private security. These are not Soviet times, when there were only stokers and work as a janitor. It is more difficult for journalists and people of art, but someone leaves for Ukraine or for grants to the West, someone goes into the advertising business. And most importantly: while they don’t shoot for refusing to participate in meanness, they don’t send them to the zone, and I didn’t meet them on the porch. Although I admit that someone has a very hard time.
Executioners and victims
During perestroika, I did a lot of work with former NKVD investigators - I met with someone, talked about them, read files and documents about someone, those who ended up in the camps through their efforts but survived. And I was also looking for those who refused to torture, to sign execution charges and sentences. Found. In the late 1930s, Terenty Deribas, the head of the NKVD of the region, was in the Far East: he refused to carry out arrests on falsified charges. Shot. There was investigator Glebov (I don't know his name), who refused to extract "testimonies" against Commander Yakir. Shot. The prosecutor of the city S. Nuskulter was in Vitebsk, he came up with a strange idea for those times: to check the legality of the detention of those arrested by local Chekists in pre-trial detention cells. Shot. Even in the documents were two heads of the regional departments of the NKVD - Kapustin and Volkov: they shot themselves.
I knew General Boris Viktorov well, who was a Stalinist prosecutor, then, during the Khrushchev thaw, Deputy Chief Military Prosecutor, who was entrusted with the rehabilitation of those who sat down, did not get out or got out under that terrible Article 58 * ** Its text is The New The Times published in No. 20 of June 11, 2012. After retiring, Viktorov did a lot of work on the well-known case of the “conspiracy in the Red Army” - the Tukhachevsky case, showed me the brown spots of old blood on these 1937 cases. He has been dead for a long time, and now I can say: it was he who then, back in the days of the USSR, when I worked in the Moscow News newspaper, helped me get documents and archival files - he believed that people should and have the right to know the truth about what was going on in the cellars of Lubyankas across the country. It seems to me that he thought that in this way he was partially returning his parents to his children: with their unread complaints, their terrible deathbed, pre-execution letters, he named the names of their tormentors and murderers.
By the way, about children. Suppose pangs of conscience and other humanitarian problems of our judges, deputies, and so on. are not particularly busy. They do not think about the soul and the last minute. And - about children, about what surname, reputation they leave - also not?
In 1987, I interviewed the investigator in the case of academician Nikolai Vavilov, Colonel Khvat, who ended his career in the KGB as head of department. Then those who managed not to die in the camps were still alive - in short, the old man got a couple of slaps in the face in the passage near his house. I remember that then, during the interview, I was most shocked by one of his phrases. I asked: “Weren’t you sorry for Vavilov? After all, he was threatened with execution or death in prison? So, humanly, it was not a pity? Grip laughed (namely, laughed): “What does it mean to be sorry? Well, is he alone, or what? After the publication, his nephew, a physicist from Leningrad, unexpectedly came to my editorial office. “You understand,” he told me, “Uncle Sasha was the kind genius of our family, he saved us when we were dying of hunger in the blockade” ... And then Khvat’s daughter Natasha came, a mathematician by profession, who then worked at a very decent academic institute Moscow. She arrived in a state of confusion. She did not know what her father was doing in the investigation rooms of the NKVD, and did not ask. And she also told me what a wonderful dad he is. And I'm talking about whom and to what extent: the same Vavilov, who collected the world's largest collection of plant seeds, died in a Saratov prison from starvation dysentery. And also about how in Leningrad, dying of starvation, Khvat and his colleagues arrested people, took cards from their families and took them for themselves. She cried: “This can’t be…” I don’t know if she changed her last name - other adult children of those who were mentioned in perestroika and then, in the 90s, by the press, changed, I know. They did not want to pass on such an inheritance to their children and children's children. The same happened after the collapse of the Third Reich in Germany, and in Argentina after the end of the military junta, under which almost 20 thousand young people disappeared in ten years: trials are still going on. And that was before the Internet. As you know, nothing dies on the Web: information will live in five years, and in ten, and when we, the living, will no longer be. And that doesn't stop it either?
Legacy *
There is a well-known formula of businessman and billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov: “there are no pockets in the coffin”, believers or atheists - you cannot take gold to the ground or to the sky. The cynics object: the sleazy leave children a reputation, scoundrels leave fortunes. Maybe so, but why do some relatives of Stalin - Dzhugashvili go to court, trying to prove that their ancestor did not send people to death? Why do the heirs of well-known mafia families, or at least those who made billions on dirty turns - the same Carnegie, create funds, donate hundreds of millions of dollars for good, kind, eternal? Is it not in order to wash away the name, to pass on to the descendants not only palaces, planes and yachts, but also a good human memory? „

Suppose the pangs of conscience of our judges, deputies, and so on. are not particularly busy. They do not think about the soul and the last minute. And - about children, about what surname, reputation they leave - also no?

“On the Jewish Judgment Day, on the Orthodox Maundy Thursday before Easter, on the Muslim Night of Predestination on the eve of Ramadan, synagogues, churches, mosques are packed with people, including those who do not go there on other days of the year, atheists, I suspect, too. And so it is all over the world. These are the days of repentance and forgiveness. This means that at least once a year there is a need to throw off the dirt, because living with it - if you delve into your soul - is difficult, if not impossible.
However, I know, and it does not stop. That is why Kant once, in addition to his moral imperative (“the starry sky above our heads and the moral law within us”), formulated in his short and amazingly accurate essay “On the History of the Universe” the thesis: “A republic can consist of devils, if there are law". Our misfortune is that we have a lot of the first, and the second is not at all.