Приговор при свечах / Judgment in candlelight - Владимир Анатольевич Арсентьев

choice: following the New Testament ideal, where “the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27), or using another person as a means to one’s utilitarian ends that have nothing to do with the Gospels.

The freedom of choice is ensured by the constitutional principle of secularism, which forms the foundation of relations between the state and different faiths. This principle is designed to rule out the temptation to distort the creed by introducing religious ideology for the benefit of the state. Thus we can be God’s fellow workers, in the words of Paul the Apostle (1 Cor. 3:9), not state’s, as is declared in the 2000 Basis of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church (III, 8–9). The reason is that since January 1918, church has been separate from the Russian state and school from church. That principle is enshrined in the 1993 Constitution of the Russian Federation to proclaim freedom of religion, not freedom from religion.

As for the ideologists’ reference to authorities being appointed by God (Rom. 13:1), Paul the Apostle explains instantly that a ruler is God’s minister only when that person encourages what is good and punishes those who do evil (Rom. 13:3–4), for the ruler does not bear the sword in vain. If the ruler does the opposite, that kind of power, called political power, is calamity from God and passes evil as good.

This manifested in the February and then October revolutions of 1917 in Russia, which technically annihilated legal principles, substituting justice with class struggle and paving the way for a police state. The classics of Marxism-Leninism borrowed the very word “class” (peasants and landowners) from Speransky, lending antagonistic character to the concept in order to incite social hatred and the subsequent mutual destruction in the Civil War of 1917–1922.

In her autobiography titled “Memories of the Russian Court,” Anna Alexandrovna Taneyeva-Vyrubova (1884–1964), lady-in-waiting and closest friend of Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, wrote about her interrogations by order of the Provisional Government, “No less than fifteen times was I brought before Judge Vladimir Rudnev,[239] and every time he diligently tried to seek out the truth, acting in the name of justice and separating facts from hysterical rumors. There are several mistakes, although not very serious ones, in his reports about me, and also one or two unfair judgments, for which I hold no grudge against him. For instance, Judge Rudnev accuses me of being overly talkative, of jumping from one thought to another in my story for no good reason. However, I am very curious if even an educated judge, after weeks of imprisonment, attended by inhuman abuse and infliction of physical wounds, could talk in a collected and natural manner, given the opportunity for explanation and defense for the first time. However, I am not complaining about what Rudnev says about me. I am grateful to the only one Russian in authority that chivalrously considered the possibility of my innocence.”[240]

The matter ended by extrajudicial execution of Tsar Nikolay Alexandrovich Romanov and his family, minor children included, and mass terror. During the totalitarian Soviet regime, court judgments reflected the political struggle, filling up the “dirty jug” where all you pour in turns sour (according to a Latin author). Or it can be likened to a gale that whips up the foam-topped wavelets, then little by little the sea begins to heave, the billows roll, and the sea surges from the deep to the very heavens (Latin source), sweeping everything in its way, first of all the freedoms of the person who is forced into servitude to the state.[241]

For example, according to Verdict No. 1444, on September 13, 1933, the people’s court of the Irkutsk district, composed of people’s judge Yerentenko and people’s assessors Kolotygin and Prosekin, in the presence of secretary Bushuyeva, heard in open court the following case against:

Aleksey Yevdokimovich Pavlov, 38 years old, citizen of the village of Galkovskoye, who has five family members and had a joint kulak farm together with his father, which farm is currently individually taxed, owns a house, a horse, a cow, two hectares of crops, has no previous conviction by his own statement, and was committed for trial on Article 107 of the Criminal Code.

Having heard the investigation, the court found that defendant Pavlov, owning an obviously kulak farm, fraudulently divided the property and, posing as a peasant from a mid-income category, started wilfully neglecting the national task. According to the government law on crops, Pavlov had to deliver thirty kilograms of crops in August. He wilfully failed to comply, threshing the existing bread on a secret piece of land and hiding it with the purpose of profit-making. Therefore the court considered the guilt proven and passed the following judgment based on Article 107 of the Criminal Code:

Pavlov, Aleksey Yevdokimovich, to be sentenced to ten years of imprisonment with total confiscation of property. Propose to seize the existing bread and pass it to the government. Assign pre-trial restrictions in the form of detention. Appeals can be submitted within five days.

On a single peaceful day of September 12, 1938, three people – Stalin, Molotov, and Zhdanov – approved 4,825 death sentences. During the 25 years of Alexander I’s rule, however, not a single death sentence was carried out in Russia. In the last 112 years of Imperial Russia, except the First World War, Russian authorities deprived 3,975 persons of life.[242]

Karl Jaspers, one of the originators of existentialism, wrote in the 1940s, “It is astonishing how those who are today the mighty of this earth are often oppressed by a slight feeling of inferiority, which they veil in a peculiar childishness and in the anger of their demands.”[243] By the law of the moral world, the victimizer hates the victim more than the victim hates the oppressor. Both are subjected to moral corruption, while the seed of evil develops more violently in the sower,