Unkind changes. Vera Vasilieva - about the 18 years of Alexei Pichugin

June 19 marks the 18th anniversary of the arrest of Alexei Pichugin. The Memorial human rights center (forcibly included by the authorities in the list of "foreign agents") and some other human rights organizations consider it political prisoner , and the European Court of Human Rights has twice ruled that the principles of fair justice have been violated in relation to the former employee of the Yukos Security Service. The Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe has repeatedly demanded from the Russian authorities the liberation of Pichugin.

18 years is the age of majority. Over the years that Alexei spent in prison, a whole generation has grown. Life has changed beyond recognition-not only in a socio-political plan, technological, everyday. For us, all the usual Instagram, Facebook, iPhone ... I sometimes get lost when I try to describe in the letters to Alexei what already seems ordinary and what he had never seen.

The defeat of Yukos began with the case of Pichugin

In conclusion, the writer and the political prisoner of the Stalinist Gulag Yevgeny Ginzburg spent 18 years. According to the memoirs of Evgenia Solomonovna herself, after the exit due to the grille, she was never left for fear. The line of Count Monte Cristo Pichugin stepped back four years ago. But, in contrast to this literary character, Alexei, the character of which can be a view of people who correspond with him regularly, the idea to spend their life on revenge will never occur to him. Only this, apparently, is difficult to understand his pursuers, who is obviously moving in completely different feelings and motives.

The defeat of Yukos began precisely with the work of Pichugin, although at first even the representatives of the disgraced oil company themselves probably did not quite understand that this was not a private story, and the scale of the attack was global. But the essence of what happened is not only in Yukos. And not only that Russia, a country that, judging by the television picture and speeches of state husbands, seeks to emphasize the contribution of the Soviet Union to the victory in the Second World War and the development of space - is now famous completely different. I mean the well -known concept of "bassman justice" that arose when there was a trial in the Yukos case.

The bottom line, in my opinion, is that in our country over the past 18 years, worldview has changed radically. After all, the guides of the current lawlessness are by no means alien. Like it or not, our fellow citizens are, among other things, investigators, fabricating criminal cases, and judges, stamping convictions. We all heard and read about “telephone law” many times, about censorship, and some of us have encountered these phenomena and personally. But today, already, it seems to me, the courts do not always make unfinished sentences on the direction from above. A negligible share, less than one percent of justifying decisions, is not always due to the fact that they pressed on the judges, intimidated that they were forced and the like ... Sometimes it is already a kind of inertia, the habit, as a self -censorship of other representatives of the writing fraternity. You yourself understand how to write or what sentence to pass. Since a person was put in, it means that he is guilty.

Alexey Pichugin, when he is released, will fall into a completely new atmosphere for himself. Not only from the point of view of high technologies, changes in the legislation and its law enforcement in the courts. Just with the judicial machine, he is familiar with the firsthand, because the principles and techniques of “basmanial justice”, the boundaries of the permitted were determined and drove in fact Yukos. Russia has become different in thinking, worldview, social behavior, and these are unkind changes. But to divide here into the good "us" (dissatisfied with the situation and suffering) and on the bad "them" (seized power), in my opinion, is not quite correct. "Why do we allow us to contact us like this?" - Here is a key question that, I believe, must pose for himself everyone who is not indifferent to the future.

Vera Vasilieva is a journalist host of the Radio Liberty project “Freedom and Memorial” , author of the books “Alexei Pichugin - Ways and Bades” and “Third Court of Alexei Pichugin. Chronicle of Yukos case”

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