Thirty years later

On the night of August 3-4, 1982, my mother Zoya Krakhmalnikova ** was arrested. Arrested for publishing collections of Christian readings "Hope", consisting exclusively of texts of religious content. She was also accused of “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda”, kept for a year in the Lefortovo pre-trial detention center and sentenced to five years in exile. Amnesty International recognized my mother as a prisoner of conscience. Not one of the priests of the Russian Orthodox Church, not one of the hierarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church spoke out in her defense. None of them went to her in exile, although she suffered for her faith.

Today, thirty years later, young women are being judged in the Khamovniki Court for allowing themselves to speak in church with a protest action against the merger of the Russian Orthodox Church and the authorities. Amnesty International recognized them as prisoners of conscience.

Pussy Riot members consider their action to be contemporary art. The Russian Orthodox Church considers it blasphemy and sacrilege. Many Orthodox felt insulted, there are others who spoke in defense of those arrested, called on the Russian Orthodox Church and the court for mercy. The girls asked the Orthodox for forgiveness for the insult, which they did not intend to inflict.

History repeats itself: today, as thirty years ago, not a single priest of the Russian Orthodox Church agreed to come to court and express his attitude - neither to the action itself in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, nor to the severe punishment that its participants had already been subjected to.**

They came at half past ten in the evening. It was at a dacha in Kratovo, 40 kilometers from Moscow. 30 years ago. In August 1982. The big red poodle Mart did not smell the trouble. He wagged his tail as six strangers climbed the stairs to the second floor. The door was open. There were three of us: me, my mother and my four-month-old son Philip.
“Give out slanderous documents and materials,” one of them said, stopping at the entrance to the kitchen. "Here's a search warrant." Mom was silent, then gathered herself and said firmly: “Look.” And they were looking. For several hours they pulled out drawers of desks, raked clothes out of closets, rummaged through Philip's crib, not paying attention to the fact that he was sleeping. There was no telephone at the cottage. Mobile phones were not yet invented.
We did not know that at the same time, at 21.45, searches were also going on in our Moscow apartment and at several addresses of friends. And there they take away the same things that they take from us: manuscripts, notebooks. All books published in the West: Berdyaev, Florensky, Nabokov, Bible. I remember how delighted one of the investigators was when he saw a typewriter. “I protest,” my mother said. “This is the tool of my professional work. You have no right to take it."
“We have,” the investigator answered her, smiling into his mustache.
Today, when I read indignant remarks about the fact that lawyers were not allowed to search Navalny’s place, I think: this is all that has been achieved in 30 years - a lawyer has the right to be present at the search. What's the point? They still do what they want.
And then - no lawyers, no journalists, no one. And the same humiliation, the same temporary captivity: to walk the dog, go to the toilet - only accompanied by witnesses.
And now personal letters from my grandmother from the Stalinist camp, love letters from my late father's wife are in the wrong hands. They rake everything in envelopes, in folders, in bags, in bags. Everything will be useful, then we'll see.
„

Lustration is needed. White is white and black is black. You can't sit down to play with the devil. He always has marked cards

”
Aha! Baby diapers - and you can rummage through them. Thanks for not picking up.
In the morning, when everything was already turned upside down, books, papers, carbon paper were put in bags, a low voice: “Zoya Alexandrovna, get ready, let's go with us!”
“Hurry, hurry…” And now the black “Volga” takes my mother to Moscow, to the Lefortovo prison. And I'm alone with a baby in a wrecked house.
Today, 30 years later, searches are coming to find anti-state slogans and State Department money for the revolution. Now they are not taking away typewriters, they are taking away computers, mobile phones, sim cards. But just as then, they take personal letters, school essays. And all this will perish in the dusty cupboards of dull offices, just as the manuscripts and letters taken away in the summer of 1982 perished.
And again, like 30 years ago, we are enemies of the authorities. How enemies were those to whom they came with a search in the 37th. The nature of power remains the same. Her spirit, her energy are the same. And the same KGB men, only on the Audi, and not on the Volga. The tone is set by the heirs of the former - from the 37th, from the 80th.
When books, manuscripts, typewriters were confiscated from homes, the current president of the country worked side by side with those who planned and carried out these searches, investigated cases against those who allegedly plotted to “undermine the Soviet system”, like my mother, for whom was a typewriter. And people in gray suits with gray faces considered her an instrument of crime.
Why should our children, who imagined that they can live like free people in a free country, again be afraid of wiretapping and survive searches? Wasn't there perestroika, were there millions of copies of The Gulag Archipelago?
Why can't we shake off this curse?
Lustration is needed. Call white white and black black. You can't sit down to play with the devil.
He always has marked cards.