Pardon in Russia under its first president

Print Marietta Chudakova

Today, the overwhelming majority of our citizens (citizens only in the sense that they have Russian citizenship) would not be able to answer the question - is there now a Presidential Pardon Commission in Russia?

The most important institution was destroyed seven years ago - but Russian society did not notice this. How many people over the years have asked me: “Are you still working in this ... Pardon Commission? applies."

Meanwhile, this institution was truly important for the life of the country in general and for the formation of civil society in particular. Its dispersal was one of the first acts of pressure on the sprouts of this society.

First, a few words about how and why I ended up on the Commission, because, as I hope will be clear, this is not only a fact of my biography.

I

In mid-September 1994, when I had just begun fulfilling my public duties as a member of the Presidential Council (the news that I had been included in it found me in Geneva, where I was teaching a semester course at the university, and turned out to be a complete surprise), the Chairman of the Commission on issues of pardon under the President of Russia (formed by B.N. Yeltsin at the beginning of 1992) invited me to join it. (All members of the Commission, with the exception of the chairman, A. I. Pristavkin, worked on a voluntary basis; for me this was of fundamental importance.)

After thanking me (the chairman emphasized that all members of the Commission approved my candidacy), I said that I had to think about it. He offered to attend the meetings as a volunteer to see how it all really happens.

For a month and a half I thought about it. Firstly, I had to understand whether I had the right to spend time on this: I already didn’t have enough for my main, i.e., professional work. And since I also did not intend to limit my participation in the Presidential Council to the role of a wedding general, then I could be satisfied with this - in relation to “working for society”.

The second circumstance was more complicated. I knew that the Commission, in addition to petitions from those serving their sentences, considered cases of death row prisoners (at that time death sentences were still imposed and executed in Russia - although to a much smaller extent than under Gorbachev). Newspapers willingly published interviews with worthy people - members of the Commission with such catchy titles: “A name decides issues of life and death.” To be honest, I hated this, no matter how I felt about the interviewee. For myself, I decided this question at the age of 19 - under the influence of reading “The Idiot”, the great author of which, who himself experienced ten minutes of waiting for death, said through the mouth of Myshkin that this should not be done to a person, and under the influence of my older lawyer brother, Dzhan Omarovich Khan-Magomedova. A front-line soldier (“Vanka-platoon,” as he called himself), seriously wounded twice, his brother graduated from the Military Law Academy after the war and was appointed chairman of the military tribunal in our occupation army in Germany. There he became the first in the family to see the light regarding Soviet power (when special officers, after the next elections, which he naively considered secret, began to bring him ballots and demand fabulous terms for anti-Soviet agitation for the soldiers who wrote whatever they wanted on them). And having passed the only death sentence on a German, of whose guilt there was no doubt (at the trial, the brother said, looking the young judge in the eyes, the defendant spoke of his hatred of the victors), he stopped sleeping and forever became an opponent of the death penalty. Already in the 70s, he once told me: “I still remember his first and last name.”

My brother considered the Soviet code and Soviet justice senselessly cruel. The main punishment in the USSR was imprisonment. Our judges (mostly women) usually imposed the longest possible sentence - or close to it. He amazed me with the numbers: “We have 16 crimes for which the death penalty is imposed in peacetime,” my brother was indignant, “and in South Africa there are 5!” The numbers were convincing, since in our opinion there was no country in the world worse than South Africa at that time.

The brother’s main research topic was “exemption from punishment”; over the past 15 years, he has made unsuccessful attempts to defend his doctoral dissertation on this topic (repeatedly veiling the “impenetrable” topic with formulations; but it did not help). Shortly before his sudden death (in 1983), he gave it to me to read. In this latest edition (1981), it was called “Methodological problems of analyzing trends in the application of punishments and improving the sanctions of criminal law norms”; behind this formulation were hidden merciless conclusions drawn based on the use of methods of mathematical statistics, then quite innovative in Soviet jurisprudence. In the Introduction, the author argued that "the problems of the actual impact of punishment on the crime rate (and even more so the measurement of this impact" are considered by Soviet researchers primarily in the theoretical, logical-legal aspect. "Most works relatively rarely use materials from judicial statistics on the use of punishment. Partly This is due to the fact that the data of our judicial statistics are classified. The latter circumstance seriously complicates the analysis of the practice of applying punishments and its impact on the crime rate. "Judicial statistics were classified from 1934 until the end of Soviet times.

The author of the study was convinced from a large statistical material of court practice from 1962 to 1980 that the main measure of punishment in our country is imprisonment (from 52.9% to 65.2% of all punishments), and punishments such as “exile” , expulsion, deprivation of the right to hold certain positions or engage in certain activities, etc. are used very rarely - on average, all these measures in the same years accounted for only 1.7% of all convicts.”

By 1981, he recorded - I think, not without horror - the following trends in changes in the sanctions of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR: “a decrease in the proportion of sanctions, where measures not related to imprisonment are provided as punishment.” And at the same time, “the proportion of sanctions has increased, where the law allows for the possibility of applying the death penalty.” Believing (contrary to the overwhelming majority of his then colleagues and, naturally, the official opinion at that moment of the peak, one might say, of the era of “stagnation”), “that it is unlikely that such a significant change in sanctions in these years was correct,” he argued: “Objectively, all these the changes direct lawyers to the need to tighten judicial repression, which cannot be considered sufficiently justified.” The author noted that since 1973, there has been a fairly clear trend towards an increase in the proportion of those sentenced to a term of more than 5 years - and stated that, in general, “the question of the effectiveness of long terms of imprisonment (over 5 and up to 15 years ) also deserves attention” ( italics mine. - M. Ch.).

So, as a result of reading these works and conversations with my brother, I developed a fairly strong immunity against the saying, rooted in the masses as an elementary truth - through the cult film “The meeting place cannot be changed” and the wonderful performance of Vysotsky: “A thief should be in prison! »

The question of the death penalty bothered me. Most of the members of the Commission (I already knew that not all of them are opponents of the death penalty) will be thinking hard: should he pardon or execute him, but I have the answer ready in advance?.. I shared my doubts with an old friend and colleague, an intelligent and noble man. And she warmly supported, so to speak, my doubts:

- Of course you can't go there! It wouldn't be fair. Everyone is thinking, looking for arguments for and against, but you have a deliberate opinion...

I was just about to think that it would be dishonest, when suddenly one fine morning my thoughts mysteriously turned 180° (in itself a curious psychological phenomenon - I don’t remember another such case in my life).

"How? - I told myself. “You have been a staunch opponent of the death penalty all your life.” And this never had the slightest practical significance. And now you have an unprecedented chance - the opportunity to realize your convictions!”

2

On November 1, I came to the Commission meeting for the first time. Let me quote my diary entry from that time, since all this, in retrospect, has far more than just personal significance: “I sat at the Commission, listened to the cynic, but an expert on the matter, Weiner; the heartfelt speeches of Leva Razgon: “Ah, my friends! I have been released early twice in my life. This is incomparable to anything! With nothing!"; even the speeches of the EMDV... preparing cases for the Commission - I liked those too. And I liked the little General of the Ministry of Internal Affairs Vitsin1. And, approaching him after the end of the meeting, I found out that he knew Dzhan - and his face lit up, and tears welled up in my eyes. And then I finally understood that I had to continue Jan’s work - after all, he told me: “...If I could soften our code even a little, I would consider my life justified.” He failed to do this. I’m the only one in our family who can somehow continue this.”

Soon the war began in Chechnya. I published harsh articles in Izvestia, signing not just my first and last name, as usual, but adding “member of the Presidential Council.”

On January 10, 1995, I attended a meeting of the Commission for the first time as its member: the President signed an order about me, perhaps without knowing my article in Izvestia [1] . I didn’t think that he would sign, but E. A. Ivanushkin (who prepared the papers for us) said that he was 80% sure that he would sign:

— Because Boris Nikolayevich won’t read the newspaper: they take away his reading...

Our Commission was constitutional in the precise sense. Its existence was justified by two articles of the Constitution of the Russian Federation.

Art. 50, part 3: “Everyone convicted of a crime has the right to have his sentence reviewed by a higher court in the manner established by federal law, as well as the right to ask for pardon and commutation of punishment ” (italics mine. - M. Ch.).

So, any Russian citizen convicted of a criminal offense has the right to ask the president to save his life or commute his sentence. This is not about revising or reversing a sentence, but solely about mercy. Having repeatedly had occasions to be convinced that our social consciousness is almost unable to grasp this difference, we refer to the conversation of the “captain’s daughter” with the empress she did not recognize in Pushkin’s story: “You are an orphan: are you probably complaining about injustice and insult? - No way, sir. I came to ask for mercy, not justice." The need of society and its individual members for mercy does not , in essence, depend on the state structure - whether it is a monarchy, a republic or anything else.

Art. 89 - “The President of the Russian Federation: ... c) grants pardon ” (my italics. - M. Ch.).

This is not about the right of the President - rather about the obligation. Since every convicted person could ask for a pardon (that is, in the general case, a reduction in sentence) (and there were always about a million of them in Russia), the president obviously could not read every petition - in this case, he would not have the leisure to execute other constitutional duties.

To assist the head of state in fulfilling his constitutional duty, a corresponding Commission under the President of Russia was formed. She played the role of his hand - she helped him carry out his function.

It included people who were more or less well-known (in the first composition there were S.A. Kovalev, Vyach. Be. Ivanov) and who felt their responsibility to society - in contrast to invisible officials responsible only to their superiors. Over the years, the composition of the Commission has changed, but the principle has remained unchanged: its members work voluntarily and for free, based on a sense of civic duty and their ethical presumptions. Only one member of it was in the service - in the presidential administration - and on the payroll - chairman A.I. Pristavkin.

By decision of the Commission, the text of a presidential decree on pardon or refusal of pardon was drawn up for each individual prisoner and sent to him for signature. It is clear that he had to trust the Commission preparing decrees signed by him (the president who followed him, as is known, declared to the whole country that he trusted only one person - himself).

Boris Yeltsin personally approved each of its members. In addition to people well known to the whole society (Bulat Okudzhava, Arkady Weiner, Lev Razgon, priest Alexander Borisov), it included people known to a fairly wide professional community, most importantly, those who had an unblemished reputation: such as S. E. Vitsin, Chairman of the Council for judicial reform under the President of the Russian Federation, or M. M. Kochenov - a forensic psychologist, employee of the Institute of State and Law (for me personally, it was important that he also knew well and highly valued my older brother). The noble personality of this man became even more obvious at his funeral - it turned out that he had once taught literature at school; his students of the 60s came; they said that for 30 years he had always collected them in his house; fifty-year-old men did not hide their tears over the coffin of their school teacher.

It is worth recalling that in Soviet times the right to pardon belonged to the impersonal Presidium of the Supreme Council. His commission consisted of the deputy chairman and secretary of the presidium, the Prosecutor General, the top officials of the Supreme Court, the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Internal Affairs - in a word, petitions were also received to the one who accused, judged and carried out the punishment. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the adoption of the Russian Constitution in 1993, which recorded the end of Soviet power, the Russian president began to issue pardons. And he decided to rely on the public, on independent figures, in one of his important humane-democratic functions. The commission has become one of, albeit not the most significant, pillars of the development of democracy in Russia.

We sat on Ilyinka, as if in the former office of the chairman of the Party Control Committee, Pugo, from where those called “to the carpet” were sometimes carried away on stretchers with a heart attack. Meetings took place every Tuesday at 2 p.m., sometimes lasting until six or seven in the evening. I note that there were almost no cases of the usual Russian social and cold disease - lack of quorum. We read the cases at home all week. We were given two folders to read - “blue” and “green”.

In the “green” case there were cases of those who were sentenced to death. It was customary to discuss no more than 15 cases at each meeting. We did not prepare decrees on them, but only reported to the President the opinion of the Commission, obtained as a result of discussion and voting. The president reviewed these cases himself and made the final decision, taking into account, to one degree or another, our opinion - and the opinion of his other advisers.

The blue folder contained files of those serving prison terms; in different periods - different numbers, from approximately 400 to 150 cases. Each case took up two or three pages - it was an extract from the dossier of the convicted person, prepared for us by employees of the Office of Pardons - a division of the presidential administration, the main function of which was “to ensure the work of the Commission on Pardons” (there were, it seems, no less than 60 employees - cov-lawyers). This extract was built according to a clear pattern, so the eye quickly got used to grasping its content:

First and last name of the convicted person, year of birth, when, by what court he was convicted under what article, for what term. Next - “marital status”: presence of children, age of children, presence of parents, etc.; whether you have been convicted before, if so - all dates, articles, terms. What did you do before your arrest, and what was your character description? The most important thing is the “corpus delicti”: a clear summary of the verdict. What part of the sentence did he serve (for example, of the 12 years that the criminal received for killing a friend in a wild drunken fight, he served 7 years and 1 month; at the time of filing the petition, his children were 14 and 7 years old); as characterized by the administration of the ITK. For example (I’m copying it from the same real case): “...Characterized positively. Does not violate the containment regime. For conscientious work and exemplary behavior, he was rewarded 12 times, transferred to improved conditions of detention, and was on leave to go home 3 times. Reacts correctly to comments. Communicates with convicts who are characterized positively. Maintains contact with relatives and provides them with financial assistance. The administration of the penal colony is petitioning for a pardon... The convict and his wife are petitioning for a pardon.”

In case of any uncertainty, one could take the case that was lying in the general pile right there, on the wide window sill of the spacious office, read the verdict, petitions, etc.

In general, a person had the constitutional right to ask for pardon even on the first day after the sentence, but in reality he received some chance only in the second half of the sentence assigned to him, towards the end. We have given the Pardon Office the right to reject the requests of those who have not served half of their sentence (with the exception of exceptions, of course) - since there is still no reason to believe that this term was enough for him and he is no longer dangerous to society. But we did not violate constitutional law, since the convicted person has the right to submit his request again and again. Sometimes a family waiting for a breadwinner joined the request - the parents were getting old, the children in the orphanage were waiting for their father or mother. Often the convict himself, while serving a sentence of five, seven, ten years in our Russian camps, where a year, in my opinion, is equal to three (I studied places of detention in Canada for several days), became seriously ill and became disabled. Taking into account all this, but first of all, the degree of danger of the prisoner to society, the Commission decided whether to recommend or not the President then carry out the act of pardon. This is not a legal issue, but an ethical one. This is not about justice (as when reviewing a sentence), but, we repeat, only about mercy.

The Commission included people of different professions, different life experiences, different psychological makeup, who approached the assessment of the personality of each convict with varying degrees of severity. But, as a rule, it was a point of view that was not deformed by any incidental circumstances hidden from the listener.

Decisions were made by direct open voting, a simple majority of votes. If the votes “for” and “against” were equal, it was decided to take the side of the convicted person. Two minutes were enough for one thing, while arguments about another could last for 20-30 minutes or more. But any dispute immediately stopped after the vote, the furious debaters began to discuss the next matter in a friendly manner. This was democracy in action. I don’t know where else in Russia at that time it was found in such a pure form.

And almost no one outside the Commission imagined this work! Nobody was interested in her; on the contrary, if someone unfamiliar found out that I was a member of such a Commission, instead of questions, advice followed: “You have mercy on murderers there! But it’s necessary...” - etc. Compatriots are not inquisitive, but they are confident that in any matter they understand better than the one who does it; it seems that they made a mysterious exception only for the outgoing president.

Personally, from the very first meetings it became clear to me that general common sense and some of my preliminary ideas were completely insufficient - experience was needed. But the “collective intelligence” of the commission greatly contributed to the fact that this experience was gained at a rapid pace: for example, it was easy to understand that the murder of a witness to a crime is one of the most serious crimes.

There were times when during the discussion I, without hesitation, changed my view on this or that matter three or four times - each new speech of a colleague seemed to me even wiser than the previous one!

Only one of the members of the Commission never changed his opinion - A. Weiner always pronounced the same resolution: “Reject!” And at first I was surprised - why should I go to the Pardon Commission with such a view of things?

In general, we could look at the same circumstances in different ways: for lawyers, the state of intoxication, in accordance with the Code, did not serve as a mitigating circumstance, but for me, in accordance with Russian life experience, it often did.

Although not the most violent member of the Commission, I have consistently voted against pardoning drug traffickers and child murderers.

But she became known among our men (for the last two or three years I was the only woman on the Commission) as a “defender of rapists.” When the men nobly showed not the slightest mercy to those who were convicted of violence and asked for a reduction in their sentences, I said:

- Excuse me, how old is the victim? Sixteen? Why did she, of her own free will, get into a car with three drunk men?..

Or - two girls, 15 and 17 years old, drank all night in the company of twenty- and twenty-five-year-olds. In the morning they were raped in this company. I explained to my comrades, paying tribute to their masculine nobility, that if these girls had no one to explain that they should not drink with adult men, then they were doomed to what happened to them, not this time, then another time.

It’s a different matter for girls under 15 or those who were dragged into a car or apartment by force. Here I was against pardon.

It was hard to read the cases of very young people who received three years for theft (I have never seen sentences of several months, as in other countries). And when, after a year and a half, they asked for pardon and the administration testified: “He communicates with the positive part of the convicts,” I always insisted: “The guy survived a year and a half - let’s let him go before he starts communicating with the negative part of the prisoners!”

Almost always I insisted on leniency towards the “Afghans”.

They objected to me: “But he killed a man!” I also objected: “But we sent him at the age of 18 to a foreign country to fight! And they only taught us how to kill.”

3

Having joined the Commission, I considered it necessary to see with my own eyes the situation in places of detention. I went there, including to the so-called educational colonies for minors. Tracing the further path of some of the prisoners, I came across the fact that the young man, released early, returned to his home and learned that his room in the communal apartment was already occupied - and quite legally - by resourceful neighbors. Many years before the adoption of the law on preserving space for prisoners, many of those released found themselves on the street and, in front of the eyes of a state indifferent to them, began a new path to prison.

In those years, I visited Butyrki more than once, a huge pre-trial detention center where so many of Russia’s best people of the 20th century spent their last days. Almost stalactites hung from the high, smoky, spongy ceilings above the staircases and long corridors. In the hot summer of 1995, there were 70 people in women’s cells with 25 places. I don’t know how they breathed there - when the matron opened the cell, rattling the keys, a hot wave washed over her. We took turns sleeping. (The women's detention center on Skhodnya had not yet been built.) Many have been awaiting trial for a year and a half... I asked if they had any requests that I could handle. Instead of shouting vying with each other (and there was every reason to expect that), everyone unanimously pushed forward a tiny young woman with the crazy eyes of Bulgakov’s Frida.

- Hey, help her! She hasn’t known anything about her child for 10 months!

Last November, Marina Peradze (it was now September) was detained at the Petrovsko-Razumovsky market while trying to steal jeans from a merchant. With her was her two and a half year old son; she was detained; her son was taken away from her. Since then he has been sitting in Butyrki, awaiting trial. Since then he has had no information about his son.

“Several times we helped her write to the police station - they didn’t answer!” — the cellmates vying with each other explained.

“He doesn’t speak Russian to me...” Marina muttered pitifully, having every reason to go crazy over these months.

I told her firmly:

- Marina, I will find your child!

I simply had no other choice.

...When I found the investigator on the second day, he said that he remembered the case perfectly well, that he had handed over everything that was required of him back in January, and she signed it then, i.e. she could go to trial even the next day ...

- Why has she been sitting in Butyrki since January?!

- The courts are overloaded... I assure you, based on my considerable experience, that according to my conclusion, she would have been given no more than three months in court. And she served them for a long time.

Traces of the boy were found in the well-known Children's Home on Pyatnitskaya. I asked people I barely knew in advance for a Polaroid for a few hours. The charming dark-eyed boy willingly walked into my arms and smiled while we were photographed.

“Chabuka already speaks Russian,” the teachers boasted, “but when they handed him over to us, he didn’t know a word.” And we no longer know what to do with him. We are up to three years old - and he is already almost three and a half...

I rushed to Butyrki with the photo.

The same camera was opened. The same eyes stared at me.

- Marina, I found your son!

This was my psychological mistake. She had to be prepared somehow. How she screamed!.. It was not a woman’s cry - more like a wounded wolf.

4

Since the beginning of 1996, the year of the presidential elections, suspicious circles began around the Commission. Bypassing us, they began to carry out long-standing death sentences.

Hundreds of people were shot in the last Soviet years. In the first post-Soviet years - in 1992-93 - only 5 and 4 requests for pardon from death row prisoners were rejected, respectively. In 1994 - 19. In 1995, 86 people were shot... On March 15, 1996, member of the Commission Jl. Razgon wrote in Izvestia: “In February of this year alone, requests for pardon of 30 people were rejected. Why are those structures that are preparing documents for the president on carrying out the death penalty in such a hurry? Yes, because, when joining the Council of Europe, we must, no later than three years later, consider the issue of abolishing the death penalty, and before that, establish a moratorium on the execution of death sentences from the day we join the Council. Until this moratorium is established, the machine sending people to their deaths is feverishly working. To a large extent, this is being done under the pressure of law enforcement agencies responsible for fighting crime.” But among the suicide bombers, he emphasized, there are no hired killers who kill “politicians, financiers and journalists with impunity. For the most part, murders - even the most terrible ones - occur on domestic grounds, as a consequence of drunkenness and mental inferiority. Being dangerous to society, they must be kept for the rest of their lives in conditions that do not smell like the comfort of European prisons. But the number of death row inmates is growing, there is nowhere to keep them, and many people with higher legal education see the solution to this problem in the mass shooting of the accumulated death row inmates: a bullet costs less than the construction of prisons...”

That same spring, I was forced to appear—also in Izvestia—with a long article entitled “Behind the President’s Broad Back,” where I described in detail the manipulations of officials around the Commission. Instead of retelling, let me cite extensive fragments from it - especially since after the dispersal of the Commission (which took place after Yeltsin), the text was somehow “refreshed”.

“The shoveling of “human material” (Lenin’s phrase, picked up by Bukharin) in the Kremlin corridors, which has been going on for several months now and, in the best Russian traditions, is very roughly known and understandable to society, has recently led to the creation of another department and another chief - the Main Directorate President of the Russian Federation on issues of constitutional guarantees of citizens' rights. The title is binding. On April 2 of this year I had the opportunity to see and. O. the head of the new department, A.I. Voikov, convened a meeting “on the issue of preparing proposals to the President on the procedure for applying the act of pardon...”

...Almost all the people gathered by comrade. Voikov, they wanted one thing - that again everything would be in the same master’s hands, without any division of branches of power, without this public that no one needs - not 91, thank God, it’s a year in the yard; we've had a walk - it's time to get home.

It soon became clear that the Commission was simply supposed to be returned - or, if one hopes, sent forward - to Soviet times. Namely: to include into its composition, as before, heads of law enforcement agencies. It is clear as day that neither the Prosecutor General nor the ministers will sit at the Commission every week - they will send their employees. However, for “particularly complex” cases, it may be sufficient to assemble the Commission several times a year.

....What an abomination it is in that special bureaucratic knowledge that is passed down from generation to generation of the Russian government - from the “faithful Leninists” to the administration of the President of a free Russia! This is the knowledge that any ordinary person, who glorified his name only by promptly ensuring a transfer from chair to chair in the Kremlin and near-Kremlin offices, always and obviously deserves more trust from the authorities than an academician, professor, writer... As happened with the Leninist constitution of 1918, according to which any university professor could be considered an exploiter and made “dispossessed”, since he probably had a cook (hired labor!) - so one can read the cherished thought in the eyes of every second functionary: “Shouldn’t we declare you, so smart, deprived? You’re not a cook to run the state!”

But the experience of thinking about the problems of crime and punishment of Lev Razgon and comrade. Voykov is incomparable not only in volume - it is measured in different units. And what does Comrade know? Voikov specifically about the human soul in comparison with Bulat Okudzhava? Or in comparison with the professional psychologist Mikhail Mikhailovich Kochenov, whose subtle judgments often turn out to be especially significant for us? Or with Fr. Alexander Borisov, who hears the confessions of hundreds of people, including those who are not very law-abiding, whom the church calls lost souls? Why did the new appointees not have at least a minimal interest in the vast experience accumulated as a result of several years of work of such people?

And about. appeared as a rather coarse-haired man, with a deep-seated, perhaps not noticeable to him (or maybe, on the contrary? Maybe this is what he especially values ​​in himself, considering it the main guarantee of his buoyancy?) disrespect for his neighbor - that to a man who is not his superior. The habit and grip of a Soviet bureaucrat immediately revealed itself, not erased or even smoothed out in the employee of the apparatus of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR by the post-Soviet experience - neither with Shakhrai, nor with S. A. Filatov, nor as head of the apparatus of the Duma. Before us turned out to be something recognizable, not erased from the memory of the long Soviet era (and how we would like not to refresh this memory!), sometimes muttering with displeasure, sometimes irritably assertive, sometimes habitually, without fixing it at all, distorting the facts and brushing people off the table. - either counter-arguments, or grab the opponent’s “throat”. In every intonation there is confidence in the complete, which even does not exist, of his impunity and, on the contrary, the complete absence of doubts that he himself will punish anyone...

...I would like to shake this confidence. A broad plan conceived by an immodest official to separate society from the protection of one of the important constitutional rights is an anti-democratic action. It goes against, I believe, the dominant activity of the president. Many people understand this. And I hope that I will not be left alone, preventing the implementation of a large-scale bureaucratic plan.

And the project was such that prisoners’ petitions would be accepted “only after a positive conclusion from the executive authorities of the constituent entities of the Russian Federation” - those territories where the sentence is being served. The typical path of papers through the offices of the current - as well as yesterday's - executive branch is more or less known to everyone. And now imagine that a prisoner must monitor the fate of his petition - so to speak, through the fence of the camp... The verdict is passed in the name of the Russian Federation. Why should a person sentenced and serving a sentence appeal to the subjects of the Federation?

But a positive decision, it turns out, will not be enough - it must also be agreed upon with the subject of the Federation at the place of permanent residence of the convicted person before the crime was committed! And then, if in the Knyazhpogostsky, say, region of the Komi Republic they remember someone who has been serving a sentence for many years in places far from Komi (of course, provided that the same people have been sitting in the leadership of the region all these years and, like Solveig, wait at the window for news from a former fellow countryman), and, knowing the characteristics of his personality, they will make a positive decision and coordinate it with the subject of the Russian Federation at the place of detention - then the petition will go to the pardon department. If they don’t agree, they won’t forward it. And this will violate the Constitution, which, as you know, is a law of direct action, and every convicted person has the right to make a request directly to the president.”

I wrote that the president, instead of relying on the public, on independent figures (or at least the remnants of this support), under the pre-election noise they want to slip “service people from the government structures and are constantly indoctrinated that only this is the true support and that our people “ will correctly understand” any tightening and tightening - in general, any similarity to the previous government - and that this is a struggle for the electorate.

A powerful bureaucratic layer is aggressively striving today to ensure its interests, trying to insure them against any outcome of the summer events. They do not need analysts to determine strategy. They have enough hardware instinct.

...For the sake of tireless self-sufficiency, the bureaucracy is today playing a little respectable game on the darkest sides of Russian consciousness. Stalin knew our darkness well and used it effectively; he managed to thicken this darkness to the limit - that’s why it has not yet dissipated, and we hear how his actions are approved in the streets, and we see how fellow citizens carry portraits of Stalin and let children carry them...

...It’s an interesting country, after all—everything drags on and gets bogged down for years, and then suddenly, literally in a few weeks, a completely new situation is built around a case that, like few others, needs to be not hidden from the eyes of society and not decided on the turntables of the capital and regional offices.

Here, for some reason, Saltykov-Shchedrin with his old official, teaching the young one, gets into the head of neither the village nor the city: “Don’t do anything without a bribe: don’t spoil your hands!”

And again, curiosity begins to torment me - why, with constant moaning about general corruption, about the break with the president of a significant part of the democratic public, etc., a link that is obviously not affected by corruption was chosen for destruction (maybe this is what irritates me the most?) and supporting the alliance of the president with the intelligentsia? Who recommended starting this destruction? Who is helping him? For what purpose?

Why does the number of people being released early by the president from Russian camps cause indignation among managers? Deliberate changes are aimed at sharply reducing it. And it makes up 0.5-0.8% of all prisoners - and this does not count those awaiting their transfer to pre-trial detention centers. In other European countries it ranges from 5 to 15%...

Then the destruction of the Commission was stopped. The two-meter-tall comrade Voikov not only ceased to be acting, but the very department that he was headed was abolished.

5

At the beginning of 1999, more than 600 people were awaiting execution in Russia. The President wanted us to decide their fate in four months - I think it was that by the beginning of June we had to stop using the death penalty.

I repeat - we have never considered more than 15 death row cases at a meeting. None of us wanted to turn the review into a conveyor belt. There seemed to be no way out. And suddenly he was found. Pristavkin proposed handing out 12 cases to everyone at each meeting, so that at the next meeting everyone would report their carefully worked cases. And since all the dossiers, as usual, were right there in front of us, any of us could, listening to a colleague, understand what remained unclear while looking through the dossier...

I did all these reports in writing, on the computer. The work was grueling. You can ask a question - what exactly were you thinking about? After all, the choice was only between life imprisonment and 25 years?.. What, exactly, is the difference?

...If a person is a little over twenty, it is large. If he survives, he will also start a family when he gets out.

Let me briefly retell one of “my” cases.

Pavel K., in the village of Malaya Kiznya, Debessky district, Udmurtia, no conviction. The petition for pardon began with the words: “I blame only myself for my crimes, only myself is to blame for everything.” At the age of 19, while drunk, he killed his stepfather with an ax, and then hit his mother with an ax, setting the house and hayloft on fire. As a result, everything burned down and the mother died. The criminal himself “ran away to his sister’s house and entered the house through a window. He fell asleep on the bed and was detained at the end of the same day at his sister’s house by police officers” - that is, he had no intention of hiding and was generally not thinking well. From a psychiatric examination: “...after the bath, the subject drank alcohol, was in a club... Then, with several young fellow villagers who asked the subject for drinks, he came to his house, asked his parents for alcohol for the specified purpose, having been refused, he broke it in glass house...” His stepfather refused him in this form: “Get out of here, you asshole!” It is known that in Russia there is no worse insult... And even in the presence of drunken friends. It ended in a double murder.

He committed the crime in December 1992; For six years he had been awaiting execution and dreaming of pardon.

I began to compile his biography for my own understanding of the matter - based on his own petitions and materials from several psychiatric examinations. His father died when he was three years old, “I don’t even remember what he was like. At first I was raised by one mother, who didn’t do any good raising, most of the time he lived with his grandmother until she died.” The cruel, drinking stepfather beat and reproached. My grandmother “left me a farm and some money as an inheritance. But my parents sold this farm, although it was in good condition. And they used the money from the sale at their own discretion and paid off their debts. When I reached adulthood, my stepfather demanded the money left by my grandmother and bought a house from his relatives. <...> I went to serve willingly, because living at home was very bad, and I wanted to serve in the army normally. But it was my fate that I ran away from the army. “I couldn’t stand the bullying and oppression of the old-timers.” He didn’t run away somewhere - he came to his own district military registration and enlistment office; he lived at home and worked on a collective farm for two months, then he was sent to a new unit, where he was beaten from the very first day; received a fracture of the sternum, and at that time his command had already removed the unit from all types of allowance as “illegally seconded.” He returned to his collective farm again. He worked conscientiously. “At the military registration and enlistment office, they first assigned me to their place, and then they completely forgot me, and I remained in practice and of no use to anyone, either at home or at the military registration and enlistment office. So my ordeal began. Out of hopelessness and indifference, he sometimes began to drink until he lost consciousness. While drunk, he wanted to commit suicide, but nothing came of it. Although I worked on the collective farm and helped with the housework, my stepfather and mother, when they got drunk, began to scold and reproach me, so, apparently, it all accumulated in me that I reached psychosis that day. Moreover, the guys added fuel to the fire. They also decided to try alcohol that day. Well, I've reached my limit. And he could no longer control himself when his stepfather appeared from somewhere with an ax. So I lost it.

I'm not making excuses, I just want to explain so that they understand me.

...I fully admit my guilt and repent of everything I have done. I still have younger sisters and brothers, towards whom I am very guilty and punish myself in any way I can. I want to atone for their guilt - to help all of them and provide material support, to work no matter where and how, just so that they can forgive me...”

The result is a biography of a man who, from the age of five - after the death of his grandmother - was needed by no one in the world: neither by his family, nor by the state. I reported it to the Commission. And she asked, despite the undoubted gravity of the crime, to propose to the president that the death penalty be replaced not with life imprisonment, but with 25 years. I was very glad that my comrades agreed with me.

By June we completed everything. Each of those who actively participated in this four-month extremely intense work was presented with the “Gratitude of the President of the Russian Federation” - as expected, framed and under glass. After a personal address, the President wrote: “Thank you for your great contribution to ensuring the activities of the President of the Russian Federation on issues of pardon and completing the work of pardoning all those sentenced to death. B. Yeltsin. Moscow Kremlin. July 5, 1999." Indifferent to any form of government encouragement, I treasure this one - the text stands in a prominent place in my home, reminding me of that important moment in my life when my long-held beliefs were able to be translated into actions. For this alone I am grateful to my president.

6

The destruction of the Commission after Yeltsin left was organized, but not quickly: we resisted. This is a special topic and needs to be discussed separately. The then head of the presidential administration, A.S. Voloshin, fought for the Commission not out of fear, but for conscience. I am a living witness and will not forget this. But I will not forget the behavior of the journalists who helped sink the Commission. A 300-page dossier was sent to the editorial offices of newspapers and magazines to help the greyhounds' pens (one of the journalists, in his youth, took it out of a diplomat and boasted to me), which began with an angry story about how we pardoned the famous Jap. In fact, he was released in November 1991, and the Commission was formed in early 1992. One of the most disgusting was an article by Leonid Radzikhovsky, where he assured that the Commission “stamps with cold hands” ready-made decisions (whose?..), since it is clear to him, Radzikhovsky, that it is physically impossible to read 250 cases in a week. From that moment on, any of the most correct statements of this journalist have no value for me. The word on public issues must be ensured by the honor of the speaker or writer.

At the end of 2001, by one presidential decree, the Commission was dissolved, and by another, its chairman Pristavkin was appointed advisor to the president. Then we learned that there will be 89 commissions - in each subject of the Federation such a commission is appointed by the governor (I). But it didn’t take long to be upset about this principle of formation - it soon became clear that these commissions were of no interest to anyone anyway; At first, the president pardoned several dozen people a year (instead of 10-12 thousand under Yeltsin), last year, they say (I haven’t checked), not a single one. But A. Pristavkin, shortly after his appointment as an adviser, said from the television screen (I heard it with my own ears, otherwise I would never have believed it): “We can say that the pardon reform was a success.” And it is unheard of that over the past years, observing Russia without the institution of pardon, he took back his words.

Sometimes you meet someone in charge of our colonies and they say: “It’s a shame that there are no more pardons! After all, the Presidential Decree came - we lined everyone up and read it out! And they said: behave like Ivanov, and the president will pardon you too!”

[1] In the dissertation of D. O. Khan-Magomedov there are sympathetic references to the work of S. E. Vitsin on a systematic approach to the study of crime.

[2] The article began with a direct appeal to the president: “The lies are disgusting. Lying in the name of democratic government is intolerable. Everything else seems to be manageable. Boris Nikolaevich! After all, you didn’t like our previous state lies? Or I'm wrong? You said in the spring of 1992 in your speech to the US Congress: “We no longer intend to lie to our negotiating partners, nor to the Russian, American, or any other people. This practice has ended forever.” The US Congress applauded these words for a particularly long time. And I admired them so much that I wrote a whole article where I talked about how important it is that “Yeltsin announced the rejection of lies as a state policy not at some home meeting, but to the whole world. This will be remembered. They will remind us of this.”

So is it “over forever” or starting over?

Why are they announcing to us on the state TV channel that the Chechens are bombing themselves? So that parents feel ashamed in front of their children again? Why does the unbearably Soviet abbreviation “band formation”, that is, steeply mixed with the half-criminal jargon of party officials, flutter from mouth to mouth so easily? The language does not tolerate everything. You can’t say “subsection” (or “merzostructures”, as one colleague suggested). The word "bandits" is a little more honest. I don’t doubt that during the three years of inaction of the federal government, a lot of criminals have accumulated in Chechnya, but is it possible to think that only the worst are fighting there today? Only bandits? No, that doesn't happen. When a war is going on on their own soil, the best cannot help but rise up with arms in their hands - those who just yesterday did not want to be close to the bandits.

And so we destroy them. Who will return to a small country (a country, a country - not a region, not even a “subject”, whatever it is, it’s not without reason that Russia is a country of countries) its male population? And who is in such a hurry to declare with significance that there has been an outflow of qualified labor from Chechnya?.. Will we replenish it at the expense of other “subjects”?

Do they hope to start retraining us again - to speak, maybe even think? Under Yeltsin, it turned out to be possible to publish this - in Izvestia! That is why, I note, I did not leave the Presidential Council, and the president, knowing my point of view, which was recorded more than once at meetings of the Council, did not remove me from it - and even introduced me to another presidential commission.

Parole of convicts for the benefit of those in need