“Prison camp & church”.

Evgeny Toropov, Yekaterinburg.

When I was young, I went in for sport. My friends, ex-sportsmen, are very brave and determined persons. But dealing with business, they didn’t manage to avoid an imprisonment. And now after releasing some of them work as managing directors, some of them try to stand on their own feet. Even those who weren’t imprisoned have a lot to bear. One was shot by the robbers in his fur shop for not giving them money, but fortunately he remained alive, the other one was taken dead with his hands tied with a wire from the bottom of an opencast mine after a long time search.

We buried Vova Kutepov on the eighth day after his body had been delivered from Bashkortostan/Bashkiria to Ekaterinburg. The diagnosis of his death said: killed in his attempt to escape from pre-trial prison. His story was like that. One day when he went through the front door of his house, he saw two tramps and asked them to go away. After their rude answer and refusal, he hit one of them. The tramp fell down and died. One of Vova’s friends from his university team helped him with money and everything must have gone well, but the judge … unexpectedly … made another decision. Vova was sentenced to several years’ imprisonment. In his prison camp he met a son of a high-ranking official from Bashkiria and after releasing he went to his friend’s place. Vova didn’t want to come back to Ekaterinburg because of the great break up in relations with his friends, who he’d been training with for many years and which was caused by the car accident. They were three on the car, but it wasn’t him who was driving. All the other details of that quarrel are not really important. Then …in Bashkiria… Vova, his friend and a high-ranking official from police were having a rest together in the country house (dacha) … this and that … generally speaking, he brought that fuzz man down. As for his mistress, he didn’t touch her.

Well, we buried Vova inside a closed coffin so that his mother, who had brought up her son alone by herself and still didn’t believe her son’s death, didn’t see her son with almost all his teeth knocked out.

One of my schoolmates was in prison for three times and between his prison terms he regularly came to me or to other schoolmates trying by hook or by crook to get some money for another fix. Several months ago he died of tuberculosis….