Words Will Break Cement by Masha Gessen

Author:Masha Gessen
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-02-25T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

IF THIS HAD BEEN A NORMAL TRIAL, the judge, having finished with the preliminaries at four in the afternoon, would have broken until the following morning. But this was not a normal trial; this was a fast one. The judge announced a thirty-minute break. Victims’ testimony would follow.

The first victim was Lyubov Sokologorskaya, a fifty-two-year-old woman with a tired, apologetic face. After eliciting her identifying information, the judge started the questioning rather than allowing the prosecution to proceed.

“Tell me, please, are you an Orthodox believer and an Orthodox Christian?” asked the judge.

“Yes,” Sokologorskaya said apologetically. “I try to observe all the rituals. I have been fasting as prescribed for several years.”

“Tell me, please, what in your understanding and in that of your religion, is God?”

The defendants gasped. Having read the prosecution’s case, they had realized that the trial would focus not on their actions but on their attitudes toward religion. And after the probable-cause hearing, they had a bad feeling about its likely trajectory and about their lawyers’ level of expertise. But nothing had prepared them for such an opening.

“In my religion, God is all that is, and we are all in His image and likeness,” responded the victim. “These are not idle thoughts on my part. I have examined myself and learned how a person can change for the better if he strives. I am deeply convinced that God the Lord is the source of all change.”

“The source of all change?” echoed the judge.

“Is God the Lord. I can explain.” She cleared her throat. “Where our Orthodox religion is concerned, God’s mercy is in the sacrament of repentance for all the sins we commit. This is the exact opposite of self-love. In other words, it’s being liberated of all the passions with which we are contaminated.”

“Tell me, what does the place where the sacrament happens mean to you?” Now it was the prosecutor speaking. “I don’t mean only the Cathedral of Christ the Savior.”

“We can’t hear the prosecutor at all!” Maria shouted. “We are behind bulletproof glass.”

No one seemed to hear what she said, though her words, carried by the microphone in their stall, were audible to everyone in the courtroom.

“What does the cathedral mean to you?” the prosecutor continued. “What do its walls mean to you as an Orthodox believer?”

“Actually, I would like to begin by stating that the Church, in our Orthodox religion, is the union that Jesus Christ led when He came onto this earth as God who was personified in the human image. This is the essence of Orthodox faith.” What she meant was not entirely clear, but this did not discourage the judge from questioning her further.

After some more theological fumbling, the judge finally asked Sokologorskaya to describe what happened on February 21. Sokologorskaya said she came to work that morning, performed her usual duties of lighting oil lamps and cleaning candle holders and other ritual objects, and saw visitors enter the cathedral starting around ten in the morning. Those who came in an hour later made her suspicious.

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