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Notes -
Yes, it seems like Putin's modus operandi with these killings is to assiduously maintain a layer of plausible deniability, but to deliberately keep it paper thin.
I can only think it's a power move: "Not only will I have you killed by the means of my choice, but afterwards, no one in Russia will even dare publicly accuse me of doing what everyone can plainly see I did."
The book Nothing is True and Everything is Possible gives a harrowing example of this being done on a legal level to random competitors of regime allies. I can't see how this isn't a regime tendency towards deliberate humiliation by forcing people to come face to face with brazen mendacity backed by total force, a la Senator Rourke
The only reason she got out of it iirc is her tormentors annoyed another regime grandee.
Then the detective came in. His name was Vaselkov, which sounds like the Russian word for “daisy.” He had a face like a bulldog.
“We are charging you with a particularly serious crime,” said Vaselkov.
“Which one?”
“Read this,” he said and handed her a folder of ninety pages or so. “And then sign that you have understood everything.”
Yana looked at Vaselkov. He stared into nowhere like an automaton. She opened the folder. Inside were photocopies of her company’s accounts and transactions. Bills for buying and selling. Page after page of them. Just their accounts and bills. What they did normally every day. She couldn’t understand. What was she being charged with?
“You have been trading in diethyl ether,” said Vaselkov.
Diethyl ether was a chemical cleaning agent. Yakovleva’s company had built its business around it, importing it from France and selling it on.
“Yes.”
“It’s an illegal narcotic substance. You are being charged with the distribution of illegal narcotics.”
Some misunderstanding, thought Yana, just some misunderstanding.
“But we have a license for it,” answered Yana, almost laughing. She was being charged with trading what she traded. Since when was a cleaning agent used in every factory a narcotic substance? It didn’t make any sense. She had been trading in diethyl ether for over a decade. It was like telling a chocolate bar factory that chocolate was illegal. Or a jeans factory that jeans were illegal. She looked at Vaselkov, but he just stared back dumbly.
She continued reading through the charges. The paperwork was just her everyday accounts; that’s what the men in masks must have been taking from the office. In the folder, page after page said the same thing: “bought 150 liters of diethyl ether, sold 100 liters of diethyl ether.” It was what she did every day. What was she being charged with?
“If you have familiarized yourself with the charges, please sign,” said Vaselkov.
She signed, but she didn’t understand. Everything was starting to spin. Her synapses couldn’t make sense of what was going on, a short circuit in logic. Chairs seemed lighter, walls flimsier. The world around us is made up of the association of words to things, and hers was buckling. She kept on trying to square the logic in her head but kept slipping and falling whenever she tried.
.... She was crying all the time by now. All the time. Couldn’t they see she wasn’t a criminal? Every cop she looked at, she tried to catch his eye. Couldn’t they see she didn’t belong here among all these criminals? Wasn’t it obvious? Maybe if they could just see she wasn’t meant to be here, it would change something? Everything?
But they just looked at her as if she were a parcel. In the morning she had been a businesswoman driving a Lexus in a frilly white dress. Now she was a parcel.
They put her in a dark cell. There were three bunks. She lay there for a while, stunned. When she turned to the wall, someone called through the door: “Turn around so we can see you.” The next day they would take her to court to decide on bail.
“The court will sort it out,” thought Yana. “The court will sort it out”: she had grown up with that phrase. Courts were places where things were sorted out. She assumed she would get bail. She had no convictions. She had done nothing wrong. Why wouldn’t she get bail?
They drove her to court in the back of a van. She hadn’t slept or eaten. Her hair was a mess.
At court they put her in a cage in the accused stand. The judge looked matronly, with her hair in a bun and glasses. She looked like a sensible person. She would sort it out.
“Well?” said the judge.
“I don’t understand the charges,” Yana began. She tried to sound authoritative, but as she spoke she started to cry again. She didn’t want to, it was just the absurdity of it all. The tears came from the effort to make sense of it. “I’m being charged with trading what I trade. It doesn’t make sense. . . . ” She was sobbing now.
“All right,” said the judge. “Prosecution?”
The prosecutor was another man in a polyester suit.
“Yakovleva is a highly dangerous criminal. She has been hiding from us. We had to hunt her down. She needs to be put under arrest until the trial.”
What had he just said? Hiding? Where? Where had she been hiding? At the gym? At work? What were they talking about? The prosecutor just smiled at her. The judge nodded and repeated what he had said word for word and said no bail was granted. She would await trial in prison. The next hearing would be in two months.
Everything was spinning again. The prosecutor walked up to Yana and whispered, “Bad girl, why did you hide from us?”
Black is white and white is black. There is no reality. Whatever they say is reality. Yana began to scream. The more Yana screamed, the more guilty she looked: she saw herself for a second, a redhead with red eyes screaming in a cage in a courtroom.
They took her back to Petrovka. They took her prints. Her hands were covered with ink. She cried out for some soap. Some soap! They laughed at her. Then someone threw some soap at her: a gnarly corner of industrial soap that was dirtier than her hands. Then they said, “When you’re done with the soap we need it back.”
They put her in another police van and drove toward the prison.
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