I had planned to write so much that it’s honestly scary to even begin. Besides, you already know everything. So I’ll keep it short. The cheery sound of a saw outside the door early Monday morning forced me to open the door to the exciting but exhausting adventures brought to you by Alexander_"I’ll_take_you_to_the_forest"_Bastrykin. The adventures temporarily ended three hours ago, along with the search of our office. Today they searched only the safe that had been sealed the day before. In the safe they found 570 rubles (about $18 at the time; not confiscated). They seized absolutely all electronics from the house, including children’s cameras and pagers that I had kept for laughs (I used them back around ’94).
http://srok-doc.livejournal.com/5894.html The nastiest episode, of course, was the search at my wife’s parents’ apartment. The only person there was her 85-year-old grandmother. Elderly, so frail she can’t even look through the peephole. Naturally, she was terrified to the point of near-heart-attack panic and refused to open the door. It was impossible to persuade her over the phone. The cops were shouting, “We’re starting to saw,” the grandmother was stammering in terror, my wife was in tears on the phone begging her to open the door, and so on. In the end, they agreed to wait until Yulia’s parents got back from the dacha (country house) and opened it with their key. And all this circus was just to seize an ancient computer that nobody even uses. Each investigative procedure was handled by different investigators, and the whole thing gave the impression of total chaos. The investigators were following instructions clearly enough, but had no idea why any of this was necessary, and from the look on their faces it was obvious what they thought of whoever had come up with it. On the whole, both the investigators and the operatives accompanying them, along with the physical support team, were fairly nice and reasonable people. Every now and then you get some ghoul who won’t even let a lawyer in, but that’s more the exception. The Kind Machine of Truth, in my person, gave the searchers/interrogators the full treatment. As you can imagine, after 13 hours in one room, you end up talking about everything under the sun. Questions of corruption and shady dealings involving investigators/cops are especially easy to discuss, because they’ve seen a million times in their work how cases against officials get buried. Gunvor, the Rotenbergs, and RosPil cases are still a hit in any conversation. Everybody understands perfectly well what this is. The case isn’t worth a damn. Someone invented these terrible “mass riots,” in which one OMON officer (riot police) got a black eye (and was given an apartment for it). This case is being investigated by a task force of 160 (!!!) investigators. Most of them were specially brought in from the regions. The crime of the century. Only the Nord-Ost terrorist attack (the 2002 Moscow theater hostage crisis) had more.
http://srok-doc.livejournal.com/5877.html An utterly unimaginable amount of human and material resources has been diverted to this. Don’t we have more important crimes? This looks much more like socially dangerous mass rioting. There’s a serious crime there, resistance to police, and violence against a state official. But somehow we don’t see mass searches, arrests, and so on. Obviously, every member of the investigative team fully understands the idiocy of what’s going on, and while rummaging through RosPil papers during a search will say, “You’re doing good work.” In short, the more investigative actions they carry out in this case, the more investigators we will morally prepare for conducting searches at Shuvalov’s estate, Putin’s palace and Abramovich’s mansion. Of course, there’s a chance that along the way Shuvalov, Putin, and Abramovich will jail some of us. We should take that philosophically—it’s a normal defensive reaction from crooks: they don’t want to lose their mansions and their 140 million serfs. We’ll have to live with that risk. That’s that. And of course, I apologize to everyone for not coming to the rally and march.
It’s terribly upsetting. One thing is comforting: we’ll be back (quote).