Приговор при свечах / Judgment in candlelight - Владимир Анатольевич Арсентьев

that Galushkina showed no resistance being helped up off the pavement outside by Gustov and crying. According to witness Sorokina, she told the policeman: “Hold on, I’ll walk.” At that moment, Gerke came out of the apartment, shoved Galushkina in the neck and told her, “Move it, or I’ll shoot.”

Gustov testified that during the inspection of Galushkina’s possessions, ribbons and bibs were found that belonged to Gerke’s children.

Pagonina testified that Corina had been looking for her red ribbon around five days and asked her about it several times.

Corina Gerke, a minor child, testified that she did not give any ribbons or bibs to Galushkina.

To summarize all of the above, two bibs and three ribbons were found among Galushkina’s possessions. The victim estimated the objects’ cost at two rubles and said at the end of the session that he wouldn’t prosecute Galushkina for such “trifles” if she hadn’t been rude with him. Given that Galushkina’s accusation was entirely based on the testimony of Corina Gerke, victim Gerke’s 7-year-old daughter, who, as the defendant claimed, had given those ribbons to her as a gift, the court decided not to charge Galushkina due to a lack of evidence. As for the charge of verbally insulting victim Gerke, no one of the witnesses heard Galushkina badmouth Gerke, so the court found that accusation baseless, too. The justice of the peace delivered the following verdict:

Acquit Anna Petrovna Galushkina, 18 years old, peasant of the village of Kamenskoe, Maklakovskaya volost, on the count of theft and on the count of verbally insulting Gerke. Terminate the detention.[228]

Robert Robertovich Gerke appealed against the JP’s decision to the Krasnoyarsk district court. The higher court decision of February 26, 1909 upheld the verdict and dismissed the appeal.

However, as early as October 28, 1908, Anna Petrovna Galushkina appealed to the prosecutor from the Yeniseiskaia prison and complained about the behavior of justice of the peace Gerke, who had hired her at the beginning of the same October. In a couple of days he suggested that she “join him in the bathhouse and rub his back.” She refused and asked for her final pay. After that, Gerke started threatening to whip her and throw her into jail, ripping an arm from her jacket. He called a policeman and searched her belongings. Then he sent her to jail on his own whim – because she refused to go “rub his back” in the bathhouse. Anna Galushkina asked to put Gerke to justice for grievously insulting her and let her out of prison. On November 6, 1908, justice of the peace Slivak, acquitting Galushkina of theft and insult, released her from custody.

Judgments are artifacts that preserve information about law, its distortions, and the parallel reality beyond law.

According to one modern theologian, the law of the pagan era was inherited and revised in the legislation of Christian states, first and foremost the Roman Empire after the Edict of Milan. Although norms contrary to the Divine Law were removed, it was never the task to create a utopian legal system based solely on the Gospels.[229]

Meanwhile, the Tsardom of Muscovy was far from giving evangelical meaning to the law. Instead, it regularized the retaliatory system based on the eye for an eye principle, envisaging retributions that matched barbaric customs or even more severe ones. Reprisal combined with the objective to intimidate multiplied the harrowing troubles of existence in bondage. It reached inconceivable savagery with gruesome torture, maiming, and a wide variety of death penalties: burning alive, burying alive women for adultery, impaling, breaking on a wheel, and dismemberment. If someone was pronounced “evil,” the despotic government did not burden itself with ascertaining the guilt of that person – or limited itself to eliciting a confession under mercilessly cruel torture.

Ideologically, this was justified with the idea that it was impossible to base civil and criminal law on evangelical foundations, that it was utopian. If we follow such a tradition, the human and citizen rights and freedoms, enshrined in the second chapter of the Constitution of the Russian Federation, are also utopian.

Meanwhile, the legal system of a society based on democracy and critical thinking[230] is open to evangelical principles through the conscience of all persons covered by law. Their religious preferences or lack thereof are not and should not be important for the legal status of social relations. In this case, law and conscience logically lead to acquittal of the innocent, protection of human dignity, and reification of the ideals of freedom, equality, and justice. These ideals are manifested in the Russian constitutional, criminal, and criminal procedure laws, particularly in the rules of presumption of innocence. Principles are what determines our behavior and attitudes towards people. The exceptional value of human life is expounded on by the Gospel of love (John 13:34).

Thus, what hinders the triumph of the Glad Tidings, first and foremost in the legal system, is not the utopian dream, which has existed as a concept since the 16th century, but the religious ideology of command – the method of turning persons into property on penalty of death, contrary to the Gospel of life (John 14:6; 6:63). Command[231] infected the body of the church completely through the efforts of Patriarch Filaret Nikitich Romanov (1553–1633). Embodied in the violence against Christians committed by patriarch and monk Nikon (1605–1681), it created a rift in the church that continues to this day. Unsurprisingly, those events engendered the synodal organization of the church, embedded in the government system from 1721, and later a government-ruled church from January 1918.

Therefore, leaders of the religious organization pay the due price for their privilege, being involved in the punitive policies of reprisal against any expression of freedom. From one’s childhood they impose servile obedience to the ruler as a sacred ideal, supporting those perverse notions throughout one’s lifetime by upholding fear of death to skew the meaning of rituals. An appendage to