Serf Sutyagin

How a Russian scientist was exchanged for some kind of red-haired daughter of a general

The Constitution of the Russian Federation. Article 61. Clause 1. A citizen of the Russian Federation may not be expelled from the Russian Federation or extradited to another state. Clause 2. The Russian Federation guarantees its citizens protection and patronage for its ...

The Constitution of the Russian Federation. Article 61. Clause 1. A citizen of the Russian Federation may not be expelled from the Russian Federation or extradited to another state. Clause 2. The Russian Federation guarantees its citizens protection and patronage outside its borders.

Let's say your name is Igor. Let's say you're thirty-five years old. You are a scientist. Not just a scientist, but a nuclear physicist. The state spent a lot of money and six years of work on your education. Then the state collapsed. The institute fell into disrepair and became like a garbage dump, those who could leave left, those who could not, went to sell jeans at Cherkizons, nuclear physics sighed and gurgled sadly, and you, a thirty-five-year-old scientist, a citizen of the Russian Federation, became a beggar.

You could not and did not know how to trade or steal. And they didn't go. All you wanted to do in life was to do science. And you were doing. Despite poverty and humiliation.

So that the children have enough for pasta, you sometimes take hack-work. For example, write a report to foreign colleagues. For which they promised to pay you, say, a thousand bucks. This is a lot of money for you. Almost an annual income. You go to the library, take books, read scientific journals, reports of other scientists, transcripts of conferences, go to Yandex, compile and write a report.

That is, all you do is rewrite information from open sources.

Then two people come to you.

"You?" - "I". - "Wrote?" - "Wrote." - "Well, let's go." - "Where?" - "To jail. You are a spy". - "Guys, go to hell, it's all on the forums." "No, buddy, let's go."

And you are imprisoned for fifteen years.

For eleven years you, a nuclear physicist, have been sewing on the mittens zone. You don't sign any confessions. You do not admit guilt. You continue to call all accusations of espionage bullshit. You still believe in some kind of higher justice and hope for it. As a result, you don’t have so much time left to sit, only four years, and you already, in a sinful deed, begin to think that God would be with her, with her third life spent in a cage - anyway, I defeated them. I didn't give up. They didn't break me.

But a decent person will a priori lose to bastards, because a bastard will act like a bastard, and a decent person has a self-limiter for meanness from birth. And now, after eleven years, two more come and say: “Sign. And if you don’t sign, then because of you, ten people will wind up the term even further. And you sign. Because if for himself, he would have sat further. But you cannot substitute others.

Then they take you by the scruff of the neck and throw you out of the country. "Exchange", so to speak. Like a pair of socks. Like it or not, nobody cares (huh? Constitution? hehe...). As a serf master exchanged his peasants for mares to another master, so they exchange you. Without family. The family remains with the old master. True, they still give you permission to visit your mother and children - but only sometimes, rarely and not for long.

And here you are standing in the middle of Vienna, a forty-five-year-old scientist who has rewound ten - without a profession, without a home, without a family, without a job, without money, without a country, with a life smashed to rubble, having slandered himself, betrayed and sold by his homeland and thrown out by it to the trash heap, a phantom spy that no one needs in figs - and quietly shizeete ...

And why? But because some kind of red-haired daughter of the general was caught in America laundering the dough.

I sometimes just go nuts with this country.