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I'm going to the zone to meet my husband. And I don’t understand where corrupt investigators, judges and prosecutors come from in a country populated by such wonderful people

Now I'm in the zone and there is no communication with me. Whatever happens, I won't know about it until I get out: they will return my phones, I will turn them on and read a dozen urgent SMS and look into the overflowing mailbox. I am writing and sending this...

Now I'm in the zone and there is no communication with me. Whatever happens, I won't know about it until I get out: they will return my phones, I will turn them on and read a dozen urgent SMS and look into the overflowing mailbox. I am writing and sending this text before the plane to Perm.

I will be without communication with the outside world for almost a week - there is no TV or radio in the guest hut. In general, it’s quite creepy - every minute you think: did something happen? My family say that when I leave for the zone and disappear completely, they also feel uncomfortable. However, this time I will try a new format: my husband says that it seems that I will be able to go into the supply room (or whatever that shed with the attendants is called) and I will be able to take my phone to call there. What's more good is that my husband will have a weekend, five days in a row, in honor of my arrival. I don’t know how the pumping station subordinate to him will survive this.

I'm going to my husband's birthday. For the first time in three years, we will be together on this day. I bring an unimaginable number of gifts, he still does not know about it. A lot of my colleagues wrote notes, letters and postcards to him. The notes were handed over by former employees of her husband's ruined company. Journalist Zoya Svetova donated her book on our favorite judicial and prison topic and the book of her mother, who was imprisoned in Lefortovo almost 30 years ago. Many people sent me links in the mail - what Alexey would need and would be interested to read: I printed everything out, put it in my daddy, and I'm taking it. The writer Masha Traub made pancakes and a cupcake, because she remembered how Lesha liked all this when he was with me at Masha's dinner, when everything was different.

And I was also tracked down through the newspaper by a terribly handsome guy Dima, with whom my husband worked in a bank already in 1998, together they successfully survived the crisis and default then, because they were smart, threw off the GKOs on time. Dima began to write letters to Lesha, gave gifts and kept telling me what a wonderful husband I have. To be honest, I didn't really realize it when I got married. Now, yes, I understand. A parcel came from America - my husband's classmate at an American university sends vitamins, and this is especially useful in our north, for some reason Russian ones do not work, although why am I surprised when ... Well, you yourself know about the friendly family of our ministers, who work in including vitamins. And my mother has been collecting all these years something like a demobilization album - every week she carefully cut out my column in Novaya and hemmed it, but now she couldn’t stand it, she handed over the entire set, although we are still oh so far from the demobilization, and stuck it in an album of chocolate so that I don’t notice: I swear at chocolates, because the dentist is practically impossible for us, and my teeth suffered quite badly in prison. Okay, she pretended not to notice.

I always have a scene from the cartoon about Winnie the Pooh scrolling before my eyes, when Eeyore was given gifts: “It turns out that I have a real birthday? With real gifts? Although my husband is the least like Eeyore, he is more like Winnie the Pooh, a sort of philosophic optimist.

It turned out very well this time with transport. When I arrive in Perm, I order a taxi from the airport. Then I buy products in the city that are not available in the zone (meat, fish, vegetables and dairy, in colonial stalls mainly cereals, canned food and semi-finished products, although there is ice cream - however, it’s very cold there, it doesn’t pull yet). And after the Perm department store I go to Gubakha, where I usually confess to the driver that I’m actually in the zone, and not in the city. No one has gotten angry yet, but it's still uncomfortable, and the route lengthens. Then the driver waits until I get to the authorities on foot (from the barrier, through which the car is not allowed, it’s a few kilometers on foot), then our wonderful Lieutenant Colonel Sibagatulin allows the car to pass, and I unload. That is, this transport event costs me a lot of money, because it takes 300 km to travel by taxi. But this time, a car with a driver is given to me by glorious business representatives from the city of Berezniki, who tracked down my husband and me already through the HSE, where I have been teaching for many years, and took such a very informal patronage over Alexei: they help with groceries, with felt boots, a subscription he was issued for everything that is possible, and most importantly, they visit him, they bring the right books and talk about what is actually the most necessary thing.

In general, I don’t really understand where corrupt investigators, judges and prosecutors come from in our beautiful country, populated by such people. Them that, other women give birth, mishandled? Or maybe they are specially selected in childhood, brought up in special detention centers so that they are angrier? And where do people come from who make vitamins and medicines that don't work the way they're supposed to? I just can't imagine a situation in which a businessman I know from Berezniki would agree to do this bullshit for our own people, for their parents and children - or for neighbors. Or go to work in the government to protect such businessmen. Personally, I have no such acquaintances. Not otherwise, they are sent to us by the world behind the scenes or recruited by enemy intelligence - nothing else can explain such hatred for their own people. He is not native to them.