Note: As I was in the process of the description of general Raduev’s stay in cell No 101, I was interrupted. I was taken out of the cell and as usual, hands behind the back brought by hallways to the investigator Mayor O. A. Shishkin. There I was awaited by my two lawyers and a few investigators. They took two samples of my writing, i.e. I wrote two dictations: in French and in Russian. Afterwards, in another office, a huge Kalmyk investigator conducted a confrontation with the accuser on my case, the traitor D. K. As I came in, I saw on the chair a broken boneless person from liquid clay. According to the Quran the first man was made out of clay. It was like there wasn’t a single bone left in him. He was like a worm. Not only he didn’t look on me. His entire body stretched away from me. To the side, up and to the right he was bend, taking the eyes as far as possible from mine. He would have liked I think to sit with a box on his face. The being that I saw can also be compared to a dripped candle. He gave false testimonies that exonerated his clay. With a dull zombie voice. He was, obviously, beaten and terribly scared in the city before his bringing to Moscow. And he became a worm, this myopic guy, who looked like an eternal student, on the first congress of the party he sat with a baseball cap. He wrote in “Limonka” bold, heroic articles under the pseudonym “Oprichnik”. And here is the oprichnik who lies, slanders the Party’s chairman, affirms, that I, supposedly, ordered him to find and to get a set of arms. The oprichnik spreads like a worm on the chair. Humanology is a science that doesn’t stop to surprise you.
Returning to my cell in the evening I continued to write about the general Raduev. And I was ashamed, even at a distance before Raduev from the second floor from the cell 101, I was ashamed in my cell 24. Ashamed for the worm oprichnik, who has his living eye in place, who didn’t have to support the top of his skull, half a night waiting for the doctor or death. The Fighting spirit of the Chechen turned out to be higher than the fighting spirit of the NBP member, and I am their general, of these boys. I accused myself, that I did not warn them beforehand that “our people” would beat them terribly. By night however, I calculated that we had a draw with the Chechens. Since my first month-and-a-half I shared my cell with a powerful psychopath, who intensely “nightmared’ me. Voluptuously he hissed: “You will curse the day you were born, they will kill you slowly, they will hunt you down, you will lick the toilet with your tongue…” I understood that he was promised to take off a part of his term. After he was removed I learned that the same personage was put to a Chechen with the family name of Frantzuzov, who was involved in the preparation of the bombings, where, in what city, I don’t remember, he, I think, was the one who brought hexagen. The psychopath succeeded in “nightmaring” Frantzuzov. After a night of scaring (the psychopath like a boulder) Frantzuzov signed a sincere avowal – a “cleaning”. So in the moral contest with the Chechens it’s the NBP that has won. Because I had supported the nightmaring, I didn’t break. This is all fighting instinct and fighting instinct guys. Already in the morning I, light hearted, came back to general Raduev, to the description of his life’s fragments from the words of my cellmate, because I calculated that on the fighting instinct in prison with the Chechens we have a 1:1 score. I think that the administration of the isolation ward will never put me together with Raduev, so that I don’t get acquainted with a tribe with a high fighting instinct.
Lecture 18
The business of the Orthodox Church experiences a boom. The Patriarchate received from the State, and also won in courts and took from the “laypeople”: from organizations, from clubs, from factories and warehouses – its property. The RPC [Russian Orthodox Church] has property galore now. It became fashionable to build churches and chapels. I saw a humid concrete church even in the Soviet Zheleznogorsk-26. It is there now that they will take for processing, on the unique mining complex, graved in a rock (“We have an Eight world wonder here!” proudly affirmed to me the director of the GOK Zhidkov. “The pyramids take a rest!”), nuclear waste from the entire planet. A great place for a church. Next to hell.
However the fact that church constructions, return of the treasures, temples’ living spaces and icons are not at all accompanied by the religious activity of the population. The pike of such activity had passed in the beginning of the 90s, that’s been ten years that it had passed. Well, sure that on Easter and Christmas crowds of commoners flow to the Cathedral of Christ the Savior (not so many: according to police data 250-270 thousands in all Moscow churches), however the custom of Easter and Christmas goes beyond the limits of a religious behavior and belongs to the genre of entertainment activities together with concerts and soccer games.
Regularly leaders of the Russian Federation and Moscow, ministers and deputies appear in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. Back in 1996 I attended, from curiosity, the laying of the CCS foundations. Yeltsin was supposed to be there, so six rows of frozen soldiers, police and special services guarded the fenced off construction site, this is apart from the fence. The guests were stroked over with mine-searchers like in a dance club – a shameful show. Possibly, today such authority visits to a church look less shameful. The authorities, in any case, had set up the church for their own needs, though they doesn’t quite get what profit they can have from these motions of theirs, like the appearance in a church on Christmas or on Easter. Do the voters-believers relate Putin’s or Luzhkov’s visits in church and the frequency of these visits with their civil preferences, when they hold the voting bulletin in their hand? In any case, the habit of a hypocrite coaxing of the elector by visits in the church here in Russia had resuscitated from the dead anew and took root. At first the leaders didn’t know how to cross themselves, now they wave their three fingers with ease.
This wouldn’t matter, but 2001 has come. XXI century. The century of Internet, aerosol bombs, and man is about to be cloned. Therefore Russia’s return to a near-eastern religion turned out to be late, ill timed. In normal days the churches are empty so it doesn’t seem that there is any return at all, it looks rather one-sided, residential-municipal… God lives alone in his lodgings… besides one can’t get rid of the impression that the sticky, hot near-eastern attributes of the legend about Christ look unconvincing in our country’s snows. Just as some kind of Isida cult, if our authorities decided for a reason to implant it in the frozen Russia. Christ, hanging naked from the cross, only in a loin cloth, the palm-tree resurrection (where do we have palm-trees? In restaurants?), sweat, heat, Roman legionnaires in sandals – all of this is an out-of-place exotica. It seems so bath-like. And what do we have to do with all this? I can’t overcome my estrangement from this myth of a climatically different zone. Indeed all these attributes are so foreign. Among the Magi there is even a Negro on the icons, so involuntary you think in bewilderment “a loin cloth, a palm-tree resurrection, a Negro, camels, why not a crucified Negro!”
It is known that the Christian clergy adapted the festive costume of a wealthy Roman citizen of the IV century AD period for church service. Therefore you can’t even reproach the patriarch, the metropolitans and the clergy of the Orthodox church that they, like big officials or big thugs, drive around in Mercedes and jeeps, and they have more and more guards. Like they adapted the costume of a wealthy Roman citizen, thus they adapted Mercedes and jeeps, that is, they behave in complete accord with the church tradition.