The final statement
‘…I found myself in a world depicted in the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. It’s a completely different world with its own unique science of punishing people.’
In my final statement, I would like to thank my friends, my loved ones, my colleagues, and my management for their solidarity, and for their moral, emotional, and material support throughout these months of my detention. I would like to thank them all for taking the time, effort, and energy to come to court today and last time.
For the past few decades, I’ve been accustomed to living in a world of science and evidence-based medicine, where I hear about the latest successes in treating patients based on data from evidence-based medical science. Now I find myself in a world depicted in the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. It’s a completely different world with its own unique science of punishing people.
According to this unique science, it is somehow believed that if you confine potentially guilty individuals—most of whom have not committed any violent crimes and pose no danger to society—in a restricted area or within four walls for many years… if you severely limit their contact with family and friends, desocialize them, lead them to professional and emotional degradation, accustom them to prison slang, order, and hierarchy… if you humiliate their human dignity—it is somehow believed that, by producing a broken human being, mentally, physically, and emotionally, society will reduce the number of crimes and become healthier.
I would like this assumption to be proven scientifically, as in medicine, based on large-scale psychological, social, multicenter, randomized studies.
Moscow City Court, Moscow, Russia
5 June 2025
Source: Novaya Gazeta
More information about the case: Memorial
Photo: Sota.vision