#Repressions

“All these decisions regarding the task of enforcing laws and punishing the guilty have nothing to do with it”

2025.08.20

Zhenya Berkovich* spoke at the Supreme Court session, which upheld the verdict in the case of “justifying terrorism”

We were convicted for a play that the court did not watch... There are enough violations in the case to stop everything, cancel, acquit. The case should not have been initiated. It should have disappeared.

Nevertheless, everything happened. We have been in prison for the third year, more than half a year in the colony. This can mean one of two things: either all the operatives, judges, prosecutors at all levels were suddenly struck by some mental ailment, because a person with a legal education or even without cannot ignore all these violations and commit these violations. It simply cannot be. Or these decisions at all stages were made not in connection with the law, but by some unknown people for some unknown reasons.

There are no other options: either everyone really went crazy and did not pay attention to the fact that destructology does not exist, and I am not talking about things that require opinion, interpretation, or some position, but if there are no documents about Ms. Mochalova's education in the case, then they are not there, and there is nothing to interpret; if destructology does not exist, then it does not exist. Or indeed all these decisions, the final decisions: of the court of first instance and the court of second instance, have nothing to do with the task of enforcing laws and punishing the guilty. Somewhere, people made a decision, the sole purpose of which is to make me personally feel bad. And as a side effect, quite a large number of quite helpless people. If this is so, I will not speak about Svetlana now, she will speak for herself, if it is about me, then this goal has been fully achieved: I feel bad.

We buried one grandmother, who did not live to 90 years, even before the verdict, the second grandmother, who was dependent on me when I was still free, is the closest person to me, and forgive me other relatives, let's call things by their names, no matter how scary it is, she will not live to the end of my term, what is called here, “until the call”.

She is almost deaf, cannot walk. Even the meager minutes a month that I can get here to call her on the phone, she does not hear me. She will not live another three years and four months. She is a very seriously ill person, she will soon be 92 years old. My two adopted children with severe mental disabilities.

Their condition is getting worse and worse. Despite the fact that physically and by passport they are adults, their characteristics are such that they are children, and they will remain children. I am their mother, and I hope to remain their mother. They lost their mother. For them, this is a real loss. Each of them has already experienced several losses of parents. It is almost impossible to talk to the older daughter on the phone, with the younger one for various reasons too: they simply do not have a mother.

And finally, there is me. I am currently in poor physical and psychological condition. I do not like to complain about myself, but my condition is bad and getting worse. I have a severe depressive episode, with which nothing can be done in these conditions, because I cannot get the necessary medications, there is no psychiatrist here. He has not been coming for more than a month. It's not that they are somehow specifically torturing me in colony IK-3, no one is tortured in IK-3. It's just - this is prison, this is a real term. We are forbidden to receive books, I am forbidden to engage in my profession in any form.

But all this, of course, could be endured, I am an adult. But I cannot eat and sleep normally and get my pills, all this can end badly, and I would not want that.

Once again: I do not know who all these people are who made these decisions. I know who the people are who formally made these decisions, starting with the operatives and ending with the appellate court. Whoever these people are and why they wanted to harm us, I do not understand, does the Russian state really have no more powerful enemies than a 90-year-old old woman, two sick orphans, and two not very large and not very healthy women? Is there really no one else to fight? Can’t it stop?

In the end, some part of these people, as I assume, are men - officers, people with some concept of honor. Perhaps it does not coincide with mine. But whatever this concept is, I ask you, your honor, and those who hear and make decisions, please stop. I ask to cancel the verdict and make any decision that will allow me and Svetlana to be free.

Original

* Included in the list of “terrorists and extremists”.

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