“Tortured for my own money”. Sergei Dudchenko’s fiery closing statement in recruitment office arson case

To round off all our fascinating adventures across all the prisons of Russia, which have lasted three and a half years, we have gathered today in this beautiful place to be given a ceremonial send-off to our new place of residence: the cosy forests of Siberia, or perhaps somewhere even further afield, where we will see out our venerable old age in padded jackets and ushanka hats.

Yet the real reason we find ourselves here today is not that we are murderers, robbers, rapists or anything of the sort. The reason, in my view, is something quite natural: civic conscience. And it took shape thanks to that very same war that I despise and curse.

Naturally, blind love of the state is a wonderful thing. But there is something which, to my mind, is far more wonderful: love of truth. Love of the state produces veterans who set out on their heroic path basking in glory and the people’s reverence, only to end it on the margins of life with their hand outstretched, needed by no one and forgotten by all.

A great example is the 10 years of the [Soviet] war in Afghanistan. Love of truth produces political prisoners, dissidents, “foreign agents” and a host of other free-thinkers, philosophers and romantics of all kinds. Do not be confused by my use of concepts like “the state” and “Motherland”; this is very important. Believe me, I love my Motherland no less than any of us, that sleeping beauty for whose sake more than one generation of my forebears laid down their lives.

But for the life of me, I have never learned to love the state with a gag in my mouth, my eyes blindfolded and my head bowed. Since my schooldays I have grown used to our national decline, in which poverty passes for prosperity and progress, and suffering and repression are treated as the norm.

We might have gone on living that way, but then came February 24, 2022. That date split life into before and after, it divided the world into black and white. It set relatives, friends and even enemies against each other. As one of the Russian classics once said: “Wake me up in a hundred years and I will tell you what is happening in Russia.”

So be it. Every person is free to live their life as they see fit. And to consider themselves a member of whichever nationality they choose, and to speak whichever language is dear to their heart.

That right is given from above, and no one has any business encroaching on it. This is especially true of one’s home and family. We all remember well how 84 years ago Hitler’s yoke forces invaded our land, intent on stripping us of everything: our native language, our native culture, our freedom and, most important of all, our lives.

Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Armenians, Georgians, Azerbaijanis, Kazakhs, Turkmens, Jews and other kinfolk paid an unimaginable price, soaking the soil in their blood from Volgograd to Berlin. To put out the flames of the concentration camp ovens forever, and to earn the right to call themselves independent.

And we, more than anyone, know what kind of grief it is when war comes to your doorstep. Every elderly person I remember from my childhood used the same expression: “Please God, just so long as there’s no war.”

That is why, having thought about it for nearly five years now, I still cannot understand where our people found so much hatred and anger towards their neighbours and close kin, with whom we share more than a thousand years of common history and spiritual heritage.

After all, when socialism collapsed, each of these peoples was given the chance to choose its own path of self-determination and to build its own sovereign, independent state. Nobody had any claims against anyone else. What we are seeing today is a tragedy.

As for those unscrupulous officers of Centre “E” [, Russia’s “counter-extremism” police unit,] who tried to turn a peaceful demonstration into some sort of mishmash of explosives, drugs, a terrorist act and a rally, they have miscalculated badly.

In their pursuit of results and a tidy report for their superiors, they were in such a hurry that they completely forgot about the plausibility of this whole made-up story and the cleanliness of the evidence. Their cruelty, their sense of impunity and their licence to do as they please have provoked international outcry. A great many people and human rights organisations will be sounding the alarm, justice will prevail, and we will regain our freedom.

Sadly, we live in a time when the war on dissent has become commonplace, and arrests and prison sentences no longer surprise anyone. But even with my own safety at stake, I will not put on a mask of pretence, nor will I agree to what is repugnant to my soul, going against my own conscience. Our system will not allow me to be myself, and I will never agree to play the hypocrite. Mark Twain once said: “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”

My war is a spiritual war. My weapon is mercy. It is absurd to accuse of bloodthirstiness a man who wrote, alongside his protest action: “I dedicate my solo ride to all those who care. May it not be the strength of arms that wins, but the strength of loving hearts, the strength of common sense and family ties.” To answer violence with violence can only multiply violence.

When I sped along on my bike with the banner of the oppressed streaming behind me, past an astonished crowd of militarists, I felt the human in me come into bloom.

And it was a wonderful thing. Long ago, one of the most remarkable politicians in Russia, in my view, Boris Nemtsov [, Russian opposition leader assassinated in Moscow in 2015], gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures from ordinary people across the country in a petition calling for a halt to the fighting in Chechnya.

If he were to do the same noble thing today, with a petition to stop the fighting in Ukraine, I am more than certain he would now be sitting in a cell somewhere nearby on some charge of state treason or the like. But, sadly, he is no longer with us. Nor is my teacher and spiritual mentor, [the Soviet dissident] Vladimir Bukovsky. People like them do not stand on the sidelines.

If they were here beside us now, if they were alive, they would be standing alongside us for a just cause. Of that I have not a moment’s doubt. They are gone, but we are still here. And while our fellow citizens have been listening to [the pro-war novelist Zakhar] Prilepin and other smooth-tongued bullshitters like him, we have been receiving an injection of antidote straight to the heart, drawing inspiration from Pasternak, Mandelstam, Chaadayev, Gogol and other wonderful thinkers, who stamped out blind fanaticism in us and nurtured a love of justice.

People like us will always keep emerging, to pick up the fallen banner of good and reason. In the name of the country, in the name of our own dignity, in the name of the country’s dignity, not the state’s, but the country’s. In 1968, for example, seven young people went out onto Red Square to register their protest against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. After that demonstration, the Czechs began to say: there, that is reason enough for us to stop disliking the Russians.

Recently I learned what real terrorists look like. Contrary to expectation, they are not shaggy bearded men with Kalashnikovs. They are a 16-year-old teenager, a 22-year-old student, a 75-year-old pensioner, a 35-year-old barber, a 42-year-old history teacher, a 52-year-old physicist, a 36-year-old philosophy teacher; there is even a winemaker. I would meet all these people here, in the Rostov pre-trial detention centre and in court. For the most part they are educated, well-mannered people, with clear minds and sound judgement.

Until 2022, they were family men, honest taxpayers and a reliable foundation on which our Motherland stood. Now they are outcasts in their own land, with fewer rights than a stray dog, and on top of that they bear the humiliating brand of terrorist. And all this for their active civic stance.

It is clear, of course, that there is no smoke without fire, and none of us has ended up here for no reason. But in our specific case the molehill that has been turned into a mountain will lead to lost jobs, huge financial damages suffered by our families. And it will impact our reputations, which have been destroyed forever.

And even if we were to come home in 50 years’ time, people would still point fingers at us. Because no one wants anything to do with terrorists, even fake ones.

I am supposedly living in a secular society; I am supposedly a citizen of a state governed by the rule of law, in which, regardless of my status, I have constitutional rights. And I am protected by a law which is supposedly the same for everyone. But in reality there has been no rule of law to speak of. There was no fair hearing and no competent investigation. On top of all that, there has been a brazen falsification of evidence. My friends and I have been charged with something to which we have no connection whatsoever.

And, most important of all, the taxes I have paid all these years went to support and pay the salaries of public servants who, in theory, were supposed to honour the law and follow its rules to the letter. Instead, I was driven around basements and tortured, for my own money. George Orwell would have appreciated it.

In conclusion, I should like to read out a few very important lines [from the United States Declaration of Independence]: “All men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. To secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

These wonderful words I have borrowed from the great writings of Thomas Jefferson, and they belong, sadly, not to our society. And even if they did, I fear we would never have learned how to make use of them. I very much want to believe that Russia has not turned its back forever on the world order which it once helped to establish, on the basis of international legal canons.

Editor: Dmitry Tkachev