The final statement
‘You’re not trying a terrorist in this court. You’re trying a musician, an artist, a pacifist.’
Your honour! Honourable court! Honourable listeners!
My criminal case is so strange and funny that it was opened, appropriately, on the first of April. My case is so strange and funny that sometimes I feel like when I come into the courtroom for the next hearing, confetti will start falling from above, fireworks will go off, music will start playing, and people will rise up, dance, and shout: ‘April Fools! April Fools!’ My case is so strange and funny that the staff of SIZO-5 [pre-trial detention centre] open their eyes wide and exclaim, “Do we really put people in prison for that?” My case is such that none of even the most fervent supporters of the special military operation [Kremlin propaganda’s pseudonym for the war] whom I have met believes that I deserve a prison sentence for what I did. My case is such that my investigator quit his job before it concluded. In a private conversation with my lawyer he said, ‘I didn’t come to work for the Investigative Committee to deal with cases like that of Sasha Skochilenko.’ And he quit my case, which promised him brilliant career growth and had already put another star on his shoulder. He left the Investigative Committee and got a job at a military surplus store. I believe that his choice is immensely brave, and I think that he and I are alike: both of us stayed true to
our conscience. The very Article 207.3 [“public dissemination of knowingly false information about the use of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation”] is discriminatory at its root, because it only punishes a certain group of people – those who do not work for government institutions. Just think about it: the information that I disseminated only received such wide distribution thanks to my investigators, for whom – unlike me – it was “knowingly false”. They spread it among their colleagues, and then among the prosecutor’s office and court staff; they insulted six military witnesses with it, and created an event that has drawn incredible public attention and reached people far beyond Russia. Had I not been arrested, this information would be
known only to one elderly lady [who reported Skochilenko to the police], a cashier, and a security guard at the supermarket. According to the case materials, this information had precisely no effect whatsoever on two of those three individuals. Tell me, do investigators spread drugs among their colleagues in order to try to prove someone guilty of a drug offence? Such investigators would face the same charge. So why am I the only one on trial? If these five small pieces of paper were as frightening as the state prosecutor claims, then why begin this case at all? So that we can chew over those five statements dozens of times? Even the state prosecutor has read them aloud – and didn’t blush. Let’s have the appeal hearing too, and the cassation hearing, so that we can talk more about Putin, about television – we haven’t finished talking yet, we can still go on, appeal to all the institutions, and talk, talk, talk, we could go
on for many years. Alright, we’ve said these five statements hundreds of times. So what? Has the earth opened? Has a revolution in the country begun? Have soldiers on the frontlines started fraternising with each other? Nothing of the sort. So what’s the problem?
The state prosecutor has mentioned multiple times that what I did is extremely dangerous to society and the state. How weak is our prosecutor’s faith in our state and society, if he believes that our statehood and public safety can be destroyed by five small pieces of paper? What damage did I do, to whom? Who was the victim of my actions? The state prosecutor did not say a word about that. When someone starts a military rebellion that inflicts immense damage on our country, their criminal case is opened and closed within a day. So why have I been in confinement for 19 months – along with thieves, murderers, rapists and child molesters. Could it be that my humble action is comparable to the aforementioned crimes, even in the slightest?
Your Honour! Every court sentence is its own kind of message to the public. You may think of this information differently than my lawyers or I do, but you will agree that I have my moral principles and that I haven’t departed from them, not one iota. You will probably agree that I have shown courage, resilience, and fearlessness. In the slang of investigators, to put someone in jail is “to take them captive”. And I have not given up under threats of captivity, of bullying, illness, and the eight-year sentence that prosecution has asked for; I have not been hypocritical; I have been honest before myself and before the court. If you choose to convict me, what message will you send to our fellow citizens? That you have to break if you’re taken prisoner? That you have to lie, to be a hypocrite, to change your convictions if you face some pressure? That you can’t have pity for our soldiers? That you can’t wish for peaceful skies above our heads? Is it really what you want to say to people in times of depression, instability, crisis, and stress? My trial is being widely covered in Russia and abroad; news features and documentary films are being made, books are even being written about it. So, regardless of the verdict you deliver, you will become part of history. Perhaps you will become part of history as the person who convicted me; perhaps as the person who acquitted me; perhaps as the person who made a neutral decision and gave me a fine or a conditional sentence, or sentenced me to time that I have already served. It is all in your hands – but remember: everybody knows, everybody sees that you’re not trying a terrorist in this court. You’re not trying an extremist. You’re not even trying a political activist. You’re trying a musician, an artist, and a pacifist. Yes, I am a pacifist. Pacifists have existed forever. They are a certain kind of people who believe life to be the highest value of all. Pacifists believe that every conflict can be resolved by peaceful means. I can’t kill even a spider – it scares me to imagine that it is possible to take someone’s life. That’s just who I grew up to be, that’s who my mother brought me up to be. Wars don’t end thanks to warriors – they end thanks to pacifists. And when you imprison pacifists, you move the long-awaited day of peace further away. Yes, I am a pacifist. Yes, I believe that life is sacred. Oh yes – life! If you cast away all the trifles of this world, like cars, flats, wealth, power, success, social connections and social media, life is the only thing that remains. Oh yes – life! It is incredible, it is amazing, it is unique, it is tenacious, it is strong. It emerged on Earth, and so far, we haven’t found its equivalents even far away in space. It can break through concrete, it can destroy rocks, it can turn from a tiny sprig into a colossal baobab, from a minuscule cell into a gigantic whale. It lives on the highest mountains, it hides in the depths of the Mariana trench, by its ineradicable power it spreads from the Arctic ice into the red-hot desert. Its most perfect form is the human. The human is a highly sentient form of life. It is life that can be conscious of itself. Life that can be conscious of its mortality. But most often we don’t remember this, and live our life as if we will live forever. But it is not so: a human life is brief. It is extremely short. All we can do is make a short moment of bliss a bit longer. Everyone who is alive wants to live. Even on a hanged man’s neck you can find traces of fingernails. It means that at their very last moment, they held onto life, they madly wanted to survive. Ask someone who has just had a cancerous tumour removed what life is, and how valuable it is. That’s why today all the world’s scientists and doctors fight to extend human life expectancy and find remedies for deadly diseases. Which is why I can’t understand: why have a military operation? Because warfare shortens lives. Warfare is death. We lived through the coronavirus pandemic, when we lost our dear elderly relatives – our beloved grandmothers, grandfathers, war veterans, mentors, teachers. There was grief, there was pain, there was mourning, and just as we were finding our feet again, just as we were starting to live… a military operation. But now we’re losing young people. Pain again, mourning again, grief again. So I just couldn’t understand: why have a military operation? You may call it whatever you want to – I was misled, or mistaken, or I had the wool pulled over my eyes. … Whatever happens, I will walk out of here and I will say, “And yet it moves.” And I don’t believe that one truth or the other needs to be legally enforced. The state prosecutor believes in a truth that is very different from mine. As you may have noticed, in his accusatory speech he did not explain, he did not provide any arguments as to why, exactly, it is official government sources that are the ultimate truth. No, he did not. Just as he did not explain why, after analysing a variety of sources of information, I should have concluded that it is only the official sources that tell the truth. And I can tell you why: faith has no need of explanations. He believes in the existence of the so-called “NATO sycophants” or in the fact that there is no independent media – just media that is financed from abroad, whose goal is to libel and destroy Russia. Let him believe that! It is his right. But the huge difference between our prosecutor and myself is that I would never put him in jail because of it. Especially not for eight years. I sincerely regret it if I hurt anyone by my action. I really did not mean to do so. My pre-trial detention allowed me to understand that there are many people with their own unique individual truths in the world – and you can’t argue with them, you can’t convince them. The same goes for their attitude toward the special military operation. And it is a huge tragedy that we don’t all share the same truth, and that some people squabble over truth, like dogs over a bone: that divides society, destroys families and tears apart friends, colleagues, and people who love each other, it multiplies hostility and enmity on Earth, and takes us further away from that long-awaited day of peace. I will not deviate from the truth if I say that every person, every single person in this courtroom wishes for the same thing – peace. And if there is someone who wishes for the opposite – let them cast the first stone at me. Why wage war, if all we have in this frightening world full of disasters, hardships, and tears, is each other? No, not all the wealth and power in this universe could buy your loved one out of death’s grip. No, not money, not wealth, not power, not cars, not flats, not territories, not palaces, not oil wells, not atomic energy – none of it! There’s only us. We are all that we have. I have people I love too, people who are close to my heart. They come to this courtroom every time, they wait, they believe, they pray that I walk out of these doors – alive, healthy, free, and as soon as possible. At home, my elderly mother is waiting for me, along with my sister, my lovely nieces and nephews, and my beloved partner who has had a terrible diagnosis – cancer. I don’t know a single person in this courtroom who really wants to see me go to prison, apart from maybe the state prosecutor. Although I think that in his heart of hearts the state prosecutor does not want that either. I think that he came to work for the prosecutor’s office to put real criminals in prison: murderers, rapists, child molesters. I think that when he is not busy with our trial, that is what he does – and I thank him for it. But a requirement of his career development is that you have to imprison those who must be imprisoned. Let’s not pretend it isn’t so, at least now, as our trial is coming to its end. But I don’t blame you. I know that you care about your welfare, your status, about your position in society; you care about not losing that position, and about – God forbid – never being in my position. You care about the well-being of your family, about giving them food and a roof over their heads; perhaps you care about your future children, about giving them a good education, qualified medical help… But what will you tell these children about? About how you once sent a gravely ill artist, beloved by all, to prison, for five small pieces of paper? No, undoubtedly, you will tell them about your other cases. You must comfort yourself by thinking that you’re just doing your job and that you don’t have a choice. But what are you going to do when the pendulum swings in the other direction? Such is the law of history, just as absolute and fundamental as the law of universal gravitation: conservatives take the place of the liberals, liberals take the place of the conservatives. After the natural death of one political leader another comes to power, who leads the country in a very different direction. That is the moment when the first shall be last, and the last shall be first. You know, this may sound strange, but I feel sympathy for you. Even though I am in a cage, I may be much freer than you are. I can make my own decisions, can say whatever I want, I can quit a job if it makes me do something I don’t want to do, I can organise my own work schedule, I can spend as much time with my loved ones as I want. I can dress however I want. I can love whoever I want. I don’t have enemies. I’m not afraid to find myself without money or even a roof over my head. I’m not afraid to seem weird, vulnerable, weak, or funny. I’m not afraid of not being like the others. Maybe that’s why my state is so scared of me, time, the truth can go unnoticed, be forgotten. But the truth is that you hold an incredible power: to determine people’s fates. In this case, it is the question of my fate, life, my health, my freedom, and the happiness of my loved ones. I sincerely believe that you will use your power wisely and those who are like me. Maybe that’s why it keeps me in a cage, like the most dangerous of animals. But people are not wolves to one another. It’s just that it’s easy to be angry at each other because of a difference of opinion, while loving each other, trying to understand each other and find compromises, is very hard. It’s so unbearably hard that sometimes it feels simply impossible – at such moments violence, pressure, and intimidation seem to be the only way. But it isn’t so! We need to learn to love each other, be merciful to each other, and to compromise – it’s the only way to climb out of this morality crisis in which we have ended up. Your Honour! You have a unique chance, with your sentencing, to give an example to our society. And I don’t even mean telling the international community: ‘hey, we don’t have repression, we don’t send people to prison for five spikelets, we don’t have a totalitarian or an authoritarian state, we appreciate that people have their own opinion, that they can trust the sources that they choose, that we have freedom of speech. … I’m not even talking about that. [A spikelet is the basic building block of a wheat plant. In August 1932, during the forced collectivisation of farms and famine that followed, the Soviet authorities issued a decree provided for severe punishment for the theft of collective property, which became known as the Law of Three Spikelets. It was zealously applied to hungry people in the countryside who stole food products – so zealously that, when cases were reviewed in 1936, 60 per cent of the 120,000 people serving prison sentences after conviction under the law were released.] I’m saying that you can give an example of how to resolve a conflict through words, mercy, empathy – and not with coercion into the so-called truth through a criminal sentence. There have been many unusual circumstances in our trial. There wasn’t just a mother and a grandmother in the courtroom, as with most ordinary hearings – there was a big crowd, some stayed outside the courtroom, tiresome journalists came… and perhaps, they may have annoyed you with their disobedience or by breaching the order. Please forgive them. We have very recently become interested in how our state and society work, we’ve just become interested in how our electoral system and our local government work… we lived without any interest in it all, and now suddenly people have come to court to see how the judicial and penitentiary system work. It’s a huge step forward for our society in becoming conscious and aware, and a step towards a decrease in crime rates. Please forgive them! They are in that sense – forgive me! – a bit savage, a bit like small children; they don’t know how to behave in court: on the first day, they didn’t even know how to address the judge or that you can’t laugh, whisper, or clap, like at the theatre… Please don’t be mad at them, and don’t take it out on me. What was also unusual in our trial is that the defence presented its evidence not over two days, as normally happens, but over 22 days. My defence was very proactive: they interrupted the participants in the trial, they argued, they objected to the judge’s actions, and, in your opinion, breached the order. … Please do not be mad at them, they just did everything possible to defend me and to act in my interest. Do not take it out on me, as I am not responsible for their actions. Do not take it out on me – I’m convinced that you are wiser than this, and you are above this. Yes, I understand, this is just your job, an ordinary case, your endless working hours, loads of paperwork. Maybe among all this routine, like at any other work for anyone else, with
16 November 2023
Vasileostrovsky District Court, Saint Petersburg, Russia
Source: Voices against Putin’s war
More information: Memorial PZK
Photo: Solidarity zone.