Суд мести

For the sake of readers in the future, I should add that even inside the procuracy not everyone was willing to implement the authorities' illegal plan. Some did have reservations, and were reluctant to damage their integrity by rushing headlong into a series of minor and major breaches of procedure.

At the start of the proceedings the defence team was faced by two prosecutors: one from the Procuracy General, who vanished into thin air two weeks in, and one from the Moscow procuracy. After the first jury was dismissed the Moscow prosecutor was taken off the case, supposedly to work on another.

Could there have been any case more important for Ustinov's warriors? The reasons probably lay elsewhere. Loktionov, the man from the Procuracy General, did not suit the handlers of the case. During the first trial, he took a clear-cut position on how the evidence should be presented. He conscientiously progressed through the case stage by stage. If a witness was unavailable, he would adjourn so as not to upset the chain of logic that the prosecution had constructed.

He held his ground so that the jury could form a definite picture of the crime. Judge Olikhver herself began asking Loktionov to move on to examining other aspects of the case, to save time. But in vain: the prosecution had its own view and it was entitled to set out the evidence in the order in which it deemed appropriate.

The judge was compelled to reconcile herself to the prosecution's pedantry in a trial with a predetermined verdict. Simply put, Loktionov's performance in the courtroom showed that he, unlike the judge, did not sense that this was a trial in name only. He was trying to prove the case, and he was holding up proceedings for no political purpose.

The second trial was not like that. It moved at near lightning speed and was over in just 18 sessions of the court. During the first trial the prosecution had examined all the episodes for which evidence had been gathered, but now things were different. The two new prosecutors did not need to examine everything. They confined themselves to the testimony of Korovnikov and the corroborating accounts of Erbes, Kabanets, Popov and Smirnov. They also called the injured parties, of course.

This led to the omission of crucial evidence and witness accounts. For the story about the attack on Kostina, the first trial heard from the people who were first on the scene after the detonation. They said that the device had been left in a place where it could not damage Kostina's mother's flat. Not to mention the people sleeping inside. These were live witness accounts.

But during the second trial, judge Natalya Olikhver simply refused to allow the defence to call these witnesses. So the defence asked for their testimony to be read in court from the transcript. The reply was: "No, it may not be disclosed." But this was evidence directly confirming what the convicts had said during the pre-trial investigation, namely that their orders were merely to intimidate Kostina.

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