Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [77]
“But the politics of it will probably not be decided in the courtroom. What I can do is everything that is necessary on the merits of the case, as if it was nonpolitical.”
Boris had also arranged for Marina to have a monthly stipend of $1,000, roughly equal to what Sasha had been making.
“Don’t worry, we will get him out,” he said on the phone from Paris. What else could he say? she wondered.
Then she went to Lefortovo.
“When can I see him?” was her first question to the investigator, Sergei Barsukov.
Barsukov was aloof and formal. He explained the rules: Sasha was entitled to two visits a month, at the investigator’s discretion. March was almost over, so she could expect to see him twice in April, unless there was a reason to refuse her visits. But first Barsukov wanted to conduct a search of her home. He presented a warrant.
Why search, she wondered, in view of the charges against Sasha? They were simply on a fishing expedition. They turned her home upside down but did not find anything of interest. Of course, Sasha did have secret files, but he was hiding them elsewhere.
As for the charges, Marina found them laughable. Eighteen months earlier, during the detention of a criminal group, Sasha allegedly beat up a certain Vladimir Kharchenko, the suspect’s driver. The bodily harm was in the form of a bruise “the size of a 5 kopeck coin.” The lawyer said not to worry; politics aside, on its merits the case would not stand up in court.
In early April she got her first visit. She woke up at 6 to get in line to register by 8. As she listened to the conversation of other women in the line, a fear engulfed her: What if somehow she had exceeded the limit of gifts allowed in the prisoner’s package, the allowance for grams of soap and packs of tea, for example, and the whole thing were rejected?
After registering, Marina had to wait for another three hours before she was led into the visitors’ room, to a small booth where Sasha sat behind thick glass. They spoke over the telephone while a stone-faced guard listened. The case could not be discussed, nor could anything that might seem like a coded message. They could talk about family, the weather, health, and all the other things important only to them. During the seven months he spent in Lefortovo, she had sixteen visits like that.
Lefortovo is a special prison. It is well funded, clean, efficiently run—and extremely depressing. The worst thing about it, according to Sasha, was the silence. Such devastating stillness he had never heard in his life.
“Lefortovo crushes you spiritually,” he later wrote in The Gang from Lubyanka. “There is some negative energy coming from those walls. They say that birds avoid flying over it. Perhaps it’s the legacy of the old days when Lefortovo was a place of mass executions and torture.”
As an FSB prison, Lefortovo was reserved for serious clientele: spies, mob bosses, large-scale economic offenders. Sasha had the distinction of being there for a petty offense: beating someone up. Nonetheless, he was accorded the treatment of a serious customer. They used the full gamut of psychological techniques on him.
From the outset, his investigator let him feel that the outcome of his case was not an issue. There was no point in even talking about it, he said. Just wait for the trial, and you will be sent away, to somewhere in the Urals. There, you will be knocked off. No one will notice or care or have sympathy for you. You are a traitor, and you know how traitors are dealt with.
What Sergei Barsukov really tried to convey to him was that everything could still be reversed. He was the one who had brought it upon himself—and for what? He must admit that siding with Boris was a mistake. If he only faced the truth and admitted that Boris was not worth sacrificing his own life, then they could start thinking together about how to help Sasha out of his predicament.
After thirty-six days of solitary confinement interrupted by such sermons, Sasha was on the verge of going insane. Suddenly he was given