Translated material
Ex-president and "successors"
Conference disruption in the Law Chamber of Udmurtia gives an occasion to think about what is happening in the law community as a whole
Dmitry Talents. Photo: Igor Ivanko / Kommersant
In the Zavyalovsky district court of Udmurtia due to the delay in the “delivery” of the defendant Talent to his wife Ole, lawyer Pavel Biyanov and I had to wait about twenty minutes in the lobby. A couple of meters from me serenely, too, was waiting for something by a nondescript peasant. I did not particularly examine him until two policemen entered Black, the peasant readily extended his hands to them, and one of them snapped the handcuffs on them. The second couple, he attached him to him and led him to judge the next room.
Here everything is somehow at home. The defense believes that Talentov with jurisdiction was lucky: we reached the village of Zavyalovo from the capital of Udmurtia in half an hour, but this is no longer Izhevsk and, moreover, not Moscow or Peter. Dmitry Talentov wrote from a country house to Zavyalovo in the forbidden Facebook* in April 2022 those seditious anti-war posts for which he, the ex-president of the Udmurtia Law Chamber, is now being judged. Biyanov was afraid that if the meetings were held in Izhevsk, the lawyers grateful to the ex-president will be scolded into the hall, he would bury and only annoy the judge in vain.
But this is in vain: as soon as the talents were detained on June 28, 2022 in Izhevsk and sent to Moscow, local lawyers for the most part lost all interest in him. Only a wife, who, however, is also a lawyer, steadily goes to the process, not counting the defender (as in a pre -trial detention center). Olya is thin, with glasses with thick lenses, touching, twenty years younger than her husband and does not hesitate to talk about her love for him. They registered marriage after the talents lost freedom.
No one in Zavyalovsky court wants Talent to Evil. The convoy does not prevent him from hugging with Olya through the bars of the cell, too, after the end of the short meeting, they gave me about five minutes to talk with him. Udmurtia is generally a small “subject of the federation”, and its legal world is cramped, and every dog knows Talent here.
The wife of the public prosecutor, as Biyanov confidentially informed me, - the daughter of his long -standing friend, she worked with Talentov as a secretary, father - a longtime member of the qualification commission in the same place, in the ward.
So what? This does not prevent the prosecutor from insisting on the second second of Article 207.3 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, indicating as aggravating the circumstances “Use of the official position” (paragraph “A”). What is such a “official position” on Facebook? .. Well, what do you order to do with it now - let go, or what? However, for fidelity, the standard point “D” was added to the accusation - based on political hatred and article 282 of the Criminal Code about the excitation of hatred - separately.
As I learned from the talent of Talent with the prosecutor during the break (the convoy did not interfere), the judge, closing the meeting in the last Wednesday, said: “Do you understand that you were simply shot in the Great Patriotic War?” Talents terribly offended him. It seems to me, in vain: this is the judge not to him, he said to himself - in order to strengthen in the minds of his own patriotic innocence. Otherwise, how can he sleep at night?
For two years of imprisonment, including the last one and a half - alone (in the pre -trial detention center they also met - this is better - this is better for him), the talents did not leave the image of the President of the Law Chamber and Corifei, known not only to the Udmurt colleagues, but to the entire lawyer community of the country.
He broadcasts from the cage, as if from some other, peacetime, in which his words about legality and conscience still had some more or less recognized meaning.
Talents were not going to run into anything. Olya believes that he simply did not make an amendment for a while, overestimating himself as a lawyer and winner in many processes. Is there an article in the Constitution about freedom of speech?! So prove from the cage now ...
Biyanov believes that no one would pay attention to these ill -fated posts (we will not risk reproducing here), if not for another circumstance. St. Petersburg lawyer Ivan Pavlov **, forced to leave his two dogs from Russia due to the threat of criminal prosecution in September 2021, asked Talentov to replace him as a defender in the secret criminal case of journalist Ivan Safronov. Agreeing, the talents became the object of close attention of the FSB, and here it was necessary to choose with caution: either Safronov or Facebook.
However, this is a saying. The “Tale” will be about what is happening in the bar - in the Udmurt Chamber and in general.
***
On May 17, the next annual conference of lawyers of the Udmurt Chamber - 178 delegates, mainly chosen from 700 of its members, gathered in Izhevsk. The conference was opened by Lyudmila Lyamin, a former deputy talent, who replaced him as president in 2023. She offered to immediately go to the agenda approved by the Council of the Chamber in early April, missing the question of the election of the chairman at the conference and the counting commission. Lyamina herself went along the rows, counting the lawyers on the heads for the quorum. But something was not very converging there, and part of the venerable meeting left the hall in protest against how the conference was being prepared (we will consider the arguments of the “opposition” a little below)-in this way it was disrupted.
Having received a message about the rebellion, I agreed in the editorial office in Izhevsk and called Lamina the day before departure. She kindly agreed to talk, but then she notified the SSMEA that, alas, was busy these days. Happens. I asked her, in this case, to entrust someone from the deputies or members of the Council to present their common position. The president promised to think and still thinks: within two days of my stay in Izhevsk, she simply turned off the phone.
Now a little detailed about what was alerted by the “opposition”. I have no other sources of information, except from the inside of itself, but this is not mine, but the leadership of the chamber. Meanwhile, schismatics confirm their stories with documents and links to the ward website-the refusal of her leadership from the meeting, apparently, explains that it would be extremely difficult to refute the arguments of the opposition.
First of all, the Council by its decision deprived ordinary lawyers, the opportunity to supplement the conference’s agenda and change the procedure for considering issues. The very first attempt to start discussing the agenda was failed by a small majority of votes. However, the council of himself secured himself not quite conscientiously.
Contrary to the Charter of the Chamber, the Council found that members of the Council, the qualification and audit commissions will become the delegates of the conference on the position of the position of elected delegates - 23 people turned out to be such voting “chiefs”, which guaranteed the necessary results of any vote.
Meanwhile, significant changes were made to the conference in the charter and in a number of other internal documents of the chamber.
The text of these complex amendments was published without an explanatory note, score and without a comparative table, and for some reason the old version of the charter stopped opening ...
From the hotel to the office, which rents the ward, on the curved green street of Rodnikova, I went down in a quarter of an hour. This is quite spacious, with many rooms, the room twenty years ago exhausted talents, which already had sufficient connections then, but over the years it was never bought out, and now the chamber threatens eviction in connection with the privatization and expiration of the lease term. Below in the beam, frogs croaks incessantly, as if they were burning with a desire to tell me what the president did not want to tell me.
In the ward, not a soul except the administrations of Svetlana Vladimirovna - she speaks with me extremely kind, although it seems to be not warned about my arrival in Izhevsk. "What, Svetlana Vladimirovna, vice presidents are not there either in place?" - "Alas, no." - "And none of the members of the Council?" - “Probably, they are all in the courts, they are practicing lawyers” ...
Eh, with this last explanation, she ruined the whole impression. The fact of the matter is that the heads of the chamber, according to the “opposition”, have long turned from practicing lawyers (if they were really like that) into officials from the bar. How did they all end up in a choir in the courts?
***
For the impossibility of reflecting the position of the leadership of the chamber, I can only ask here the same questions that would be asked by “opposition” lawyers at the conference - if they were given the opportunity to do this.
The staff of the chamber for 2024, submitted to the delegates (and last year it is not on the site), provides for positions: the president - with a salary of 80 thousand rubles a month and an additional payment of 150% of the salary for the year; First Vice President and two just vice presidents-with salaries, respectively, 65, 60 and 50 thousand and similar to the annual surcharge; Chairman and Secretary of the Qualification Commission - 45 and 40 thousand rubles; There are also assistants and technical personnel, managers, accounting - a total of 770 thousand rubles in total.
“Opposition” lawyers who pay (like loyal) 24 thousand rubles a year (and a total of 15 million 840 thousand, not counting the entrance and other contributions), have information that last year the earnings of the heads of the chamber significantly exceeded salaries (for Izhevsk and so decent) due to the implementation of not always understandable work on one -time contracts. “The opposition” is also interested in why it is precisely the members of the Council who do not use new knowledge in advocate practice, whether much money is spent on banquets, etc., is constantly going on to study in Moscow and other cities.
Yes, and the most “authorities” as such - is it a bit too much? Maybe just right - but it is interesting to know this, but publicly, no one represents such information to ordinary members of the chamber (I am silent about myself).
In addition to issues not asked at the conference, I would ask Lamina or her “vice” (and no more) who replenishes the ranks of lawyers in recent years, paying an entrance fee in the amount of 110 thousand rubles. Olga Talentova told me how, having come to the failed conference, she saw a vaguely familiar face in the hall - BA! .. Yes, this is the investigator, with whom she had been bickering a month ago in a specific case, but he was not just a lawyer, but a chosen delegate of a lawyer conference. With such neophytes from the advocacy, the leadership of the chamber is more convenient to work: they do not ask unnecessary questions, but work most often in the affairs of "as directed".
A prosperous client chooses a lawyer as a goods on the counter, and Udmurtia is small, and it is unlikely that there are 660 people under contracts here.
In case of exceeding the supply of services over demand, the so-called 51st article forms a significant part of the market-this is the norm of the Code of Criminal Procedure, which provides for the provision of “appointments” to the accused. Their work is paid from the state budget - maybe not so generous, but reliable. In the Udmurt Chamber, as in most others, there is a computer program that should evenly divide this pie. The Opposition believes that a program that is not allowed to familiarize it with it works strangely: one members of the “destination” chamber are in three to four times more often than others.
In general, the problems here are the same that arose and arise among lawyers in other regions. The scale of the scandal in the Udmurt Chamber is less than it was, for example, in Bashkir in 2017–2020 (see my publication in No. 63 for June 2019) or now in the Chamber of St. Petersburg. The recently elected new president of the St. Petersburg chamber, Vyacheslav Tenishev, has just posted a speech addressed to his colleagues, in which, without naming names, he spoke about the new broom -revealed similar abuses. There are nine posts of vice presidents alone, 4.5 million rubles were terminated, instead of them, one in the amount of 300 thousand per year was concluded. Only to refuse to rent a car with the driver managed to save a million.
We, in fact, are already in the course of these and other details for two years, but I did not climb into the St. Petersburg swamp. The hand does not rise very much to run into lawyers - the only, perhaps, allies who still remained in the "law enforcement" sector with journalists. But there are real ones, but there are pseudo -assocrats (like pseudo -journalists), and there are more and more such, therefore it is impossible to pretend that nothing of the kind happens.
***
For us, events in the Law Chamber of Udmurtia are an occasion to talk about what is happening in the lawyer community as a whole. And “what happens in the world? “And just winter.” What courts are such a bar. But there are nuances.
The fundamentally breakthrough law “On advocacy and advocacy in the Russian Federation”, which expanded the lawyer self-government, was adopted on May 31, 2002 (No. 63-FZ), but in subsequent years numerous changes were made to it. One of the most important amendments, which provided for the replacement of regular re -election of the advice of the chambers by their rotation by one third of the time every two years, was made in 2004. According to this scheme, the Council of the Chamber elects the President from its composition, and he offers candidates for “rotation”, so that ordinary members of the chamber, once during the council of the Council and the audit commission at the conference, subsequently, can be actually deprived of the opportunity to break into these bodies - in any case, without a rebellion and scandal.
The FZ-63 provided that the President of the Chamber can maintain the powers of no more than two consecutive terms, but in many regional chambers, including Udmurt, this restriction was bypassed-either with the help of a special decision of the conference as the highest in relation to the body of the body, or by brief replacement of the president with a passing member of the Council and the subsequent voluntary addition of powers and the return of the previous one.
So the year after the year, the lawyer “top” was formed, which used to burn not at the expense of work in the courts, but on the contributions of ordinary members of the chambers, from which it was torn further.
Other processes developed in parallel - but not so much, in fact, in the lawyer, but in the judicial system. The ranks of the bar were constantly replenished by immigrants from the "law enforcement agencies", and the stubbornness of the "workers" of lawyers was increasingly annoying investigators and judges. The “supervising” lawyer and his regional administrations were encroaching on lawying self -government over and over again. The latest changes, which provided for, among other things, by maintaining the Ministry of Justice of the Unified State Register of Lawyers and the issuance of lawyer certificates for a term (so far-15-year-old) were entered in the FZ-63, just in April of this year.
Actually, the most important task of the leadership of the chambers, including the federal, is to somehow get along with the leaders of the courts and "law enforcement agencies", which can include the Ministry of Justice. They have to constantly maneuver and make concessions under their pressure - so, in 2019, after a scandal in the Bashkir Chamber in the Code of Professional Ethics of the Lawyer, a vague norm appeared that a lawyer can be brought to disciplinary liability up to deprivation of the status, including for actions committed not at work, but in some way throwing a spot on the community, for example, for an unauthorized The income of the hut (in fact is tracing paper from the Code of Judicial Ethics).
A protracted but unclugal process of degradation of the advocacy is not at all unique, it became a reflection of the general Russian unremarking for democracy:
The best and most successful in the profession (not only in the bar) once and reluctance to be distracted by its complex procedures, requiring time and effort. Moreover, the lawyer is the very essence of the “lone wolf”, who enters into some coalition only as necessary. Well, someone there arranges banquets for officials for our not too burdensome contributions-well, thank God, what?
All that such a workhorse wants from the leadership of the chamber is protection in those cases (more and more frequent), when the corporation as a whole or individual lawyers “law enforcement agencies” begin to press. But with this in different regional chambers in different ways, and most of all the possibility and the very initiative of such protection depend on the personal qualities of the Chairman of the Chamber.
Since 1995, Talents headed the Udmurt Republican College of Lawyers, when neither the FZ-63 nor the chamber had been any. A vivid figure, authority for judges, in some way the pride of Udmurtia, with everyone or good, or at least in working relations - like Henry Reznik in Moscow, only in Izhevsk. No equivalent candidates at the Udmurt horizon were visible, it was re -elected once every four years, overcoming the conference with decisions of the conference in the form of two terms in a row.
All the current members of the Council of the Chamber are Talentov’s “godsoners”, they lived here, as behind a stone wall, no schisms in the Udmurt Chamber before - the authority of the president was unquestioning. “What happened to my colleagues on advice? -exclaims talents in a “appeal” to the “appeal” to the “appeal” to the brothers-brothers. - Although, more likely, nothing happened to them. Rather, I was blind and deaf. And dark times tend to aggravate our dark qualities. ”
***
Exactly: in the pre -trial detention center, where, despite all the requests, colleagues do not transfer any documents and projects, he will reap the fruits of his own activities at the presidential post. He is all to them and the patron, and the teacher, and the godfather, and almost his own father. Оля ждала, что совет палаты встанет горой за ее мужа. Но вместо этого в самый день его задержания на улице Родниковой уже делили портфели, проводили «операцию преемник». Похоже, что и о задержании там догадывались или знали заранее.
Впрочем, и встали бы горой — это Талантову не помогло бы; возможно, даже наоборот: подсудность тогда приземлили бы не в Удмуртии. Ну и какие тогда к ним претензии? И все же это низость — в самом отношении к коллеге, другу и к его беде. Вот о чем, наверное, квакали мне из балки лягушки.
В последнем перерыве судебного заседания Талантов просит у меня прощения за отказ от встречи его бессменного «вице»: отключить телефон — это, как ни крути, хамство, типа плохо воспитал. Но в это время Биянов как-то нерешительно просовывает ему в клетку какую-то бумагу — это справка о здоровье Оли: у нее начались какие-то приступы, она может потерять сознание и забывает слова. Диагноз жены — слабенький, но все же еще один аргумент в пользу изменения Талантову меры пресечения.
Что в этой бумаге, я пойму только спустя четверть часа, когда судья вернется в зал, мы все из предписанного почтения к правосудию привычно вскочим, а Биянов попросит приобщить диагноз к делу. Едва ли поможет, но он резонно объяснит мне уже на пути в аэропорт: тут важна каждая мелочь, дела же эти будут пересматриваться. Кто знает: может, через двадцать лет, а может, через два.
Тем временем в перерыве Талантов начинает заикаться и тянет, тянет руку через прутья, чтобы погладить жену, а Оля размазывает запястьем слезы по лицу. Преодолевая неловкость, я исподтишка делаю фото айфоном — оно потом тоже пригодится для истории.
Under the text
27 мая Федеральная адвокатская палата опубликовала у себя на канале сообщение о встрече с президентом Удмуртской палаты Ляминой. ФАП однозначно осудила «раскольников» и выразила уверенность, что конференция в Удмуртии, о дате которой будет сообщено дополнительно, теперь пройдет штатно. Про правило «выслушай вторую сторону» руководство Федеральной палаты, видимо, никогда не слышало.