Russian Justice: The Horror & The Fear E-Book

Valera Minin

• Herausgeber: BookRix
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

This book is about real Russia and the "Russian soul". This is a book about my struggle for human rights. This is my heartache.... Help? Heip..

Leseprobe

Russian Justice

The Horror

& The Fear

Valera Minin

Copyright © 2020 V. Minin All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-911249-27-6

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to the heroism of my father-in-law, Yevgeny Petrovich Mezhogsky and to Kuzma Minin who fought for human rights.

FOREWORD

This book is the story of my life and my family. As you read it, put yourself in my position and consider: how would I be feeling and what would I have done?

This book is also about the so-called ‘mysterious Russian soul’. And a complete mystery to me is the manner in which Russians judge non-Russians. Specifically, how they judge the indigenous population of the Komi Republic and render them powerless.

This book is dedicated to the heroism of Yevgeny Petrovich Mezhogsky who fought and defended his country and homeland, through all the horrors of war, was courageous as a Prisoner of War in Osventsem, seeing death every day, every hour, every minute and then giving his life for his most beloved daughter of six children…

Yevgeny is like the son of God, not composed of the lies that flooded through the veins of Nikolay Komlev (Komi ASSR Investigator of Internal Affairs who, 33 years later took revenge on the participants of the Second World War). Yevgeny Petrovich is worthy of a posthumous Nobel Peace Prize – at his death he warned of the death of the Soviet Union for which he had fought. The Soviet Union as he liked to remember it, before all the corruption set in. That was the death he meant. In the reborn Russia we do not have the right to have things, alibis vanish, and we give birth to children in prison.

This book is about the fact that we, as Komi ethnic minorities, cannot deny crimes of which we are accused; our confessions will be written for us anyway. Nothing changes.

Above all, this book is about misuse of power, lawlessness, corruption, perjury in the enforcement agencies, courts and the CPSU regime throughout the USSR, and a most cynical and heinous crime against that most holy thing: a pregnant woman: my wife and Yevgeny’s daughter, Galina Minina...

This book is about the horrors of Russian justice.

Valera Minin, Syktyvkar, 2020

1

PART OF THE LANDSCAPE

My name is Valera Minin. Son, husband, father, exlieutenant in the Soviet militia, trial witness, defence lawyer, psychiatric prisoner. I have experienced good times and, for the past 40 years, I have experienced the unimaginably painful.

Beyond everything I have experienced the excruciating ache of injustice.

This memoir is a statement to the world that corruption is still alive and kicking in Russia and, oh boy, do I feel kicked!

But I will start from the beginning, before the controversies. This will be from memory; I didn’t keep a diary though it sometimes occurred to me that I should. I had no inkling that my life would contain episodes worthy of sharing. In fact, I wasn’t really even aware of being me. I was another part of the beautiful Komi landscape, part of my family, part of the typical, happy, mundane world in which we enveloped ourselves. But now I will attempt to individuate myself… And I will first emerge in the village of Rimya on July 7th, 1951.

Looking back at this time, my first thoughts are of nature. The house of my childhood was on the shore of a lake. The views were beautiful. This is often true of any view that features a sea, a lake, a river, or even the tiniest of streams. Beyond the water I could see a beautiful field, with flowers. And behind us? A forest. The air was sweet and clear, though peppered generously with mosquitos.

Rural landscape near Ust-Vym, Russia, Komi Republic

My childhood pastimes were my responses to what nature had laid out for us there: for my parents Peter and Maria, and my older siblings Alexander and Raisa. With my brother Alexander, three years my senior, I would fish, and I would hunt ducks; especially in autumn when the water became a temporary stopping place for every southward-bound duck, goose and swan, or so it seemed. Modest prey, given that the region of Vorkuta translates as “an abundance of bears!” In the capital of Komi, in the city of Syktyvkar, they do not see this side of nature and therefore cannot understand the passion it invokes!

So far, so idyllic: and that was indeed my young perception. But nature had also provided the Vorkuta region in the Komi republic with an abundance of something much darker: coal. This coal was the foundation for something darker still… one of the Gulag’s largest and most notorious forced labour camps.

Mining there started under Stalin’s rule in 1932 at the height of the Gulag’s1 power, the coal having been discovered just one year earlier. Georgiy Alexandrovich Chernov received awards for this geological and financial discovery but those people who were repressed and who found themselves illegally

1 The Gulag was a Soviet government agency in charge of the forced labour camp system. Millions died in these ‘gulags’. Lenin introduced it, but Stalin saw to it that the agency was at the height of its power in the 1930s-50s.

condemned, well, they cursed and despised Chernov and Stalin because they were sent to the Taiga, to build a railroad to Vorkuta for mining that precious black stuff. Laying sleepers in minus 50 temperatures, buffeted relentlessly by strong winds. Ten years later, Vorkutlag – the largest forced labour camp in European Russia – was connected to the rest of the world via a prisoner-built railway line; the general belief being that the price of the railway’s construction was one human life for each sleeper laid.

So it was that my beautiful village was a ‘rural locality’ situated in the north of the coal-mining Komi ASSR. My mother told me that we occasionally gave food to the Baltic prisoners who were led in columns through our village, carried on river barges. Her heart went out to them. The famous Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a famous opponent of the Gulag, later linked the influx of Ukrainian prisoners to the incident to which I now turn…

In 1953, there was an uprising among the camp inmates. After two weeks of a fairly peaceful stand-off the Chief of Camp, Derevyanko, possibly buoyed by his mass arrest of many of the saboteurs on the previous day, ordered guards to open fire on the inmates: nearly fifty were shot dead, and more than a hundred were injured. Further deaths followed as a result of medical help being temporarily withheld (at Derevyanko’s request). Our region’s first notable brush with corrupt politics.

Can a surname affect the fate of an individual? I believe it can. You will find in Moscow a monument to two men who fought for human rights: Kuzma Minin and Dmitry Pozharsky. These heroes created a militia to fight for freedom and liberation in Russia against its Polish invaders. It is to Kuzma Minin that the events of my life are dedicated.

My father spent part of his childhood in the company of the eminent Pitirim Sorokin. Sorokin would have been twenty years old, my father just seven; therefore, I cannot claim that there were any noteworthy political discussions between the two of them! Just lots of fun times crayfish-catching and forestforaging! My father remembered the time most fondly.

After the October Revolution, Sorokin – anticommunist and a member of the Esser Party – went into hiding after having been arrested several times and even sentenced to death. With Lenin’s personal help he escaped execution by travelling to the United States, where he continued to work as a professor of sociology, and supporter of human rights, until he retired from Harvard in 1959.

Most versions of history state that Lenin wanted him arrested, but actually I can tell you now that the opposite is true, and there was a bond of underlying respect between the two men, especially on Vladimir Lenin’s side. He admired Sorokin’s honesty and integrity: an admiration detailed by his own accounts in each volume of his Meetings. You can compare this to the relationship between Stalin and Pasternak, detailed later in this book.

Sorokin had certainly been very honest in much that he wrote about Lenin! I read an article by Sorokin, the title of which says it all: “Lenin. A Fanatic and a Social Extremist.” In it, he addresses the reader and asks him or her to:

“Look at Lenin’s face. Is it not the face that can be seen in the Lombroso album of born criminals?” He goes further.

“Lenin is not only a character from the Lombroso album, but also a good teacher of another from that same album: Adolf Hitler.”

But now, I wish to return to descriptions of my mother and father…

My father fished his way into adulthood! And it was on board a fishing vessel in Murmansk that he sustained the injury that kept him out of the war… when he lost his fingers to a winch. Not fighting suited his own distinct lack of politics. Not quite so much on a domestic level unfortunately, and I would always side with and protect my mother when I saw his hand raised in anger.

My mother, Maria Ivanovna, was born under the rule of Tsar Nicholas II in 1910. From an early age she had a devout belief in God and managed to hold on to her faith and live by it for all of her 94 years. Her wisdom and intelligence belied the fact that she had received only three years of schooling. Despite (or perhaps because of) her longevity, she was always very pragmatic about the fleeting nature of life. I remember once asking her about how fast life seemed. She said that time did indeed go very quickly, but that was just the way it was.

My instinctive memories of her are flavoured with food and milk… but not just for infantile reasons! Yes – she fed me very well: Mother loved to cook with her traditional Russian stove, the treasured stove that imparted at least as much taste into the food as it did aroma into the house. I would wake in the morning to the warm smell of koloboks3. But my mother was also a milkmaid on the collective. She worked hard on the farm and more often than not harvested the biggest milk yields. If I could not find my mum at home, then I knew she was hard at work with the dairy herd.

My mother retired when I was 14. Looking back at a 1965 copy of our regional newspaper Vperyad [or Forward], I saw an article about Maria Minina being the farm’s hardest-working woman and how she had received a party and a gift-bestrewn ‘send-off’ at her retirement. “Is this right?” was my question to her. She shook her head and I felt keenly, and for the first time, the hypocrisy of casual propaganda, the lies of the Soviet press. She was even lied to about her pension, receiving two times less than the amount promised to her. A shortfall in income that troubled her greatly. She felt hurt by her treatment and insulted by the meagre pension.

That feeling of injustice moved from her to me, like a spark, as I reread the misleading article. It continues to burn in me with more intensity each time a new breath of propaganda whips up the flames. I could have no idea at that young age that my anger over the misleading article about my mother was a faint foreshadowing of the pain I would feel years later upon reading an article about my wife.

2

KALASHNIKOVS AND VODKA

As I moved from my teens to my twenties I was to be found in the army. Between 1970 and 1972 I was a serving electrician, based at the Moscow Border School’s shooting range where captured weapons were stockpiled.

Time spent investigating and comparing the various mechanisms of German guns convinced me that the Kalashnikov machine gun was an improved version of a German weapon.

Kalashnikov, who saw a steam locomotive for the first time when he was eighteen years old, had built a machine gun by the age of 21. But the idea of locking in the propellant powder gases was a German one.

During this time my mind was hungry for facts and learning. I’m probably one of the only people from the

USSR who spent his or her spare time in evening classes! I enjoyed studying. There was, after all, very little cerebral exercise in the soviet army. As a small boy I had loved to read, and that passion for words and learning stayed with me.

I also spent a lot of time playing chess with an offduty mess officer. We would play for butter rations: 20g of butter and three slices of white bread. This was actually a more dangerous gamble for me than for him… if I lost, he took my ration, but if I won then he would still keep his but just give me extra. He always had excess.