Judge Gorbacheva interrupts Sergey Karpov, plaintiff, in midsen-tence. He is the father of Alexander Karpov, a popular Moscow singer, poet, and translator who was asphyxiated during the gas attack.
“Sit down, Karpov, or I shall have you removed. You missed your opportunity to make a written submission before the hearing.”
“I didn’t miss the opportunity. I was never notified.”
“Well, I say you did. Sit down, or I shall have you removed.”
“I wish to submit—”
“I am accepting nothing from you!”
The judge has a hysterical look. Her eyes are vacant, and she sounds like a street trader. While berating the plaintiffs, she is cleaning the dirt from under her fingernails. It is a disgusting sight. She continues her haranguing of Sergey Karpov: “Karpov, do not put your hand up again.”
“I request that my rights be explained to me.”
“You are going to have nothing explained to you.”
The crammed courtroom has not been swept for a long time. All the journalists have been forbidden to use dictaphones. Why, exactly? What state secrets are likely to be divulged? You are reluctant to talk to the victims—whose souls are in torment—because they immediately start crying. Relatives and friends have come to support them in case they are taken ill. The representative of the Russian bench continues, however, to drown everything in her vulgarity.
“Khramtsova, V.I; Khramtsova, I.E; Khramtsov, T I.Are you present? No?” The judge reels off the names with a total lack of courtesy.
“I am present,” a tall, thin young man replies.
“Khramtsov! You may speak!” From the tone of her voice you would think she was saying, “Here is a ruble, my good fellow, and now be off with you!”
Alexander Khramtsov has lost his father, who played the trumpet in the Nord-Ost orchestra. He begins to speak but finds it difficult to hold back the tears.
“My father traveled the world with orchestras and to make personal appearances. He represented our country and this city everywhere. His death is an irretrievable loss. Are you completely unaware of that? It is you who let the terrorists in, you, the city administrators of Moscow. They strolled around unhindered. Of course the assault was not your responsibility, but why were four hundred people taken to No. 13 Hospital when there were only fifty staff on duty there and they couldn’t treat people promptly? People died before they received any attention. That is how my father died.”
The woman in the judge’s robes, presiding up there on the bench, appears to be miles away. To kill time, she lazily shifts her papers from one place to another. She is weary and occasionally looks out of the window, adjusts her collar, checks her appearance in the dark glass. One of her earrings seems to be irritating her. She scratches her ear.
The son continues. He turns naturally to address the three defendants at a side table. They are the “representatives of Moscow,” officers of the law departments of Moscow’s government. Now the judge is checking her manicure.
“Why did you not at least allow medical students into the building if there was a shortage of doctors? Or on to the buses taking the hostages to the hospital? They could have looked after our casualties on the way there. People were choking and dying because they were lying on their backs.”
“Khramtsov!” Gorbacheva interrupts tetchily, noticing who the plaintiff is addressing. “Who are you looking at? You must address your remarks to me.”
“Fine.” Alexander turns his eyes back to the judge’s bench. “They were choking on the buses. Choking!”
He is crying. Who could remain unmoved?
Sitting immediately behind the witness stand, Valentina Khramtsova, his widowed mother, is also weeping. She is dressed completely in black. Gorbacheva cannot fail to see her. Next to her is Olga Milovidova, her face hidden in a handkerchief, her shoulders like two sharp humps, but nevertheless holding back her tears in order not to disturb the court. All the plaintiffs know they must not anger the judge, since she could simply have the court cleared and they would have to stand outside for several trying hours. Olga is in the seventh month of pregnancy. Her fourteen-year-old daughter, Nina, died in the audience at Nord-Ost. Olga had bought the ticket for her. “Why do you keep trying to humiliate us?” shouts Tatyana Karpova, the late Alexander Karpov’s mother, wife of Sergey. “How have we deserved that?” Danila Chernetsov, a Moscow student asphyxiated by the gas, was twenty-one years old and earning a little money in the evenings at Nord-Ost as an usher. His mother, Zoya Chernetsova, gets up and walks out of the courtroom. Outside the door she can be heard wailing. “I was looking forward to grandchildren,” she cries. Her son’s pregnant young widow had a miscarriage nine days after his funeral. “And now I have a court case where I’m insulted to my face.”
There is such a lack of decent legal tradition in this land of ours. We all know Judge Gorbacheva’s situation. Those who employ her consider that they, rather than we taxpayers, are paying her salary. They could remove her and the privileges of her office, which do make life easier for her than for an ordinary citizen on a low income. Let us suppose there is nothing she can do other than reject every one of the unfortunate victims’ demands.
But why does she have to be so rude? What need is there for all this derision, all these insults? Does she just enjoy kicking those who are already down? Who is Judge Gorbacheva, anyway, standing so zealously in defense of the interests of Moscow’s municipal exchequer?
Do you think anyone wrote in these terms in the state-controlled press or spoke in this way about the Nord-Ost hearings on state-controlled television? Some hope! Day after day the media informed citizens that the government supported Judge Gorbacheva in her defense of the interests of the state, which take priority over personal needs.
Such is our new Russian ideology, Putin’s ideology. And there is no getting away from the truth that it was first tried out in Chechnya. It was precisely at the time of Putin’s ascent to the Kremlin throne, amid the din of the bombing at the beginning of the second Chechen war, that Russian society made a tragic, immoral error because of its traditional unwillingness to think clearly. Our society ignored what was really going on in Chechnya, the fact that the bombing was not of terrorists’ camps but of cities and villages, and that hundreds of innocent people were being killed. It was then that most people living in Chechnya felt, as they still feel, the diabolical hopelessness of their situation—when, taking away their children, fathers, and brothers to who knows where and for who knows why, the military and civilian authorities said baldly (and still say), “Stop whining. Just accept that this is what the higher interests of the war on terrorism require.”
For three years Russian society kept quiet. The vast majority of citizens tacitly condoned the behavior in Chechnya and ignored those who predicted that it would come back to haunt them: a government that has acted like this in one part of the country would not stop there.
The Nord-Ost victims and the families of those who died are being abused in exactly the same way. “Stop whining,” they are told. “This had to be done. Society’s interests come before personal interests.”
Well, perhaps the government is behaving a little better, some 50,000 to 100,000 rubles better, toward them, since this time it has managed, at least, to pay for the funerals.
What about the reaction of the Russian people?Not much sympathy has been forthcoming—sympathy as a politically significant impulse that the government could not afford to ignore. Quite the opposite, in fact. A depraved society wants comfort and peace and quiet, and doesn’t mind if the cost is other people’s lives. Citizens run away from the Nord-Ost tragedy and would rather believe the state’s brainwashing machine than face the reality.