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It’s difficult to make it suit

And make it all come out all right.

To torture you and maybe shoot

and cut your throat and strangle you when I am drunk …

The Cadet

The letter needs no commentary. This former militia officer is just very sick, a common condition given the way the Second Chechen War has developed under our supreme Commander-in-Chief, Vladimir Putin. The majority of soldiers who have served in Chechnya need serious rehabilitation but are not getting it, and the state machine which propelled them into the tragedy now spits on them from the great height of its Kremlin bell-tower. As it does on the rest of us.

We will not take out proceedings against a sick man: I forgive him and accept his “repentance.”

Let it be clear, however, that in our opinion Sergey Lapin should be condemned for the crimes he committed in Grozny, and this newspaper will do everything a newspaper can to report fully the trial of Criminal Case No. 15004. We will do our utmost to prevent his being represented as some perverse new “Hero of Russia” in the mould of ex-Colonel Budanov, rather than showing him to have been a fiendish torturer and killer.

THE SERGEY LAPIN CADET CORPS: HOW MANY PROSECUTORS’ OFFICES ARE THERE IN RUSSIA?

August 7, 2003

Strange things are going on. The Prosecutors’ Offices in different parts of Russia are declaring unilateral independence. There seems to be no controlling hierarchy and they seem to have no nationally established goals and obligations. In short, there is no “dictatorship of the law,” each of them within their own region making up the law as they go along. The struggle for independence from each other of the city, district, regional and national Prosecutor-General’s Offices is demonstrated in the quite extraordinary way they are pulling in different directions in the case of The Cadet, No. 200201389/46.

Novaya gazeta has written about this saga more than once. Our indignation that, after all that had happened, The Cadet was still employed as a militia officer in Nizhnevartovsk led to his being charged and sent to prison in Pyatigorsk. Not, however, before he had had time to contact our offices to express his great displeasure and threaten to kill us. Afterwards, when he was surprisingly released from prison as posing no danger to society, he went on to withdraw his previous threats in writing, mentioning that he could no longer afford to buy a sniper’s rifle.

At the present time The Cadet nevertheless faces court proceedings, while simultaneously contributing, to the best of his ability, to the internecine strife between the Prosecutors’ Offices of Russia. No sooner had the Basmanny District Prosecutor’s Office in Moscow summoned me for further questioning (the last time was on July 30) than Investigator G. Rodionov wrote to demand that the original of Lapin’s letter withdrawing his death threat should be produced, this having long since been delivered to the Nizhnevartovsk Prosecutor’s Office. On August 2 an official letter, Notification No. 104402 of July 24, 2003 from the Nizhnevartovsk Prosecutor’s Office, was brought to my front door.

I hereby notify you that pursuant upon the results of the preliminary investigation of Criminal Case No. 200201389/46 I have issued a ruling that the criminal case (prosecution) should be closed on account of S. Lapin not having committed any offence provided for under Article 109 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. Senior Investigator of the Prosecutor’s Office of the City of Nizhnevartovsk, E.N. Shchinov.

The date, we note, is one week before my questioning in the Moscow Prosecutor’s Office, where I was officially assured that the case was continuing and hence further investigation, for example analysis of the handwriting of the letter, was required. Now, no less officially, Senior Investigator Shchinov appears to have closed the same case.

Which of our territorially sovereign Prosecutors’ Offices is to be believed? On whose breast should I lay my weary head and crave protection? It is a serious question. And that