Do not participate in meanness

A person is bigger than money. It is more than life's comfort, benefits, dachas, Kremlin receptions and the opportunity to touch the hand of the first persons. Dignity is more important. Principles are more important. Non-participation in meanness is more important. Exactly this was proved by the judge of the Constitutional Court Anatoly Kononov, who from January 1, 2010 will vacate this place for someone else.

There are many versions of why Judge Kononov leaves the chair in which he could sit for another 8 years, and with the chair - the townhouse in St. Petersburg, the chic office in the Senate building, the dacha, etc. Someone argues that the reason for this was his frequent dissenting opinions, disagreements with the verdict of the court, including the recent one in the case of Natalia Morari. Someone remembers his interview with one of the newspapers, in which he qualified the bill, according to which the chairman of the Constitutional Court and his deputies will now be appointed by the Federation Council on the proposal of the president, as "undemocratic." Someone says that Kononov came to the defense of his colleague, another judge of the Constitutional Court Vladimir Yaroslavtsev, who, in a conversation with the Spanish El Pais, called the courts of Russia “instruments in the service of the executive power” ... By the way: Yaroslavtsev himself, on the recommendation of the plenum of the Constitutional Court, is now is called - he left the Council of Judges and its presidium, but in the most important court of the country - the Constitutional - he retained his place. I wonder if he will continue to express his own and only his dissenting opinion, or from now on, taught by Kononov's experience, will he prefer to abstain?

The head of the Constitutional Court, Valery Zorkin, told reporters: “The Constitutional Court cannot force anyone to resign. However, there is the possibility of exclusion on defamatory grounds.” (Zorkin noted that the Constitutional Court did not take such a radical step.) He did not explain what is meant by “discrediting grounds”. Although what happened to our Constitution in recent years, how its first (“Fundamentals of the constitutional system”) and second (“Rights and freedoms of man and citizen”) chapters are emasculated, and the diligence with which the Constitutional Court prefers not to notice this (and Kononov wrote and wrote his Dissenting Opinions) - an obvious discredit of the entire system of the judiciary in the country. What is Kant's "moral law in the soul" when the law is trampled on and lying around every police station and every prison... Anatoly Kononov himself, who has worked in the Constitutional Court since its very creation in 1991, refrains from commenting. But those who know him well, people from the old dissident and human rights environment, say: “Tolya had to choose: either live with constant shame, or leave.”

This dilemma - to participate in meanness, or at some point to say to yourself: that's enough, then - the destruction of the personality, - today confronts many. But only a few choose the solution that Kononov chose. There are hundreds of excuses (by the way, this was the case during the Soviet era as well): “if not me, then who else”, “if I leave, there will be no decent people left”, “you can’t allow fools and scoundrels to destroy everything”. And there is probably some reason for that. Only now it is unclear what has not yet been destroyed? And what else - after the murder of Politkovskaya, another farce over Khodorkovsky, the monstrous death of Magnitsky - should happen for decent people to think: is it possible to shake hands with those who are responsible for all this and much more? What common good does their conformity serve? And what, in the end, keeps them in high and not very high offices: concern for the fate of the country or fear of being thrown out of the nomenclature, but so foul-smelling paradise?