Transcript:
Thank you to all of you, dear friends, for coming today to support me — for many, it probably meant getting up early — both those I know and those I do not. […]
My heartfelt thanks to the lawyers who made every effort to defend me conscientiously and prove my innocence. I would also like to thank the prosecutor for stating the facts without distortion and for pronouncing the name of God with correct emphasis. Thank you to the court secretary for keeping the minutes strictly. Your Honor, I am grateful to you for organizing the proceedings, for your consistent adherence to procedure, for your patience, and your sincere desire to examine every detail of the case in depth.
Honorable court, I am a law-abiding, peaceful, patient person who respects public order. From the age of 2, I was raised in a single-parent family after my father left my mother and me. I saw him perhaps five times in my entire life, and so my memories are hazy. My mother worked several jobs at once because my grandmother’s pension and my mother’s salary as an electrical technician were not enough. My upbringing was mainly the responsibility of my grandmother. She had a higher education in Russian language and literature, so she successfully instilled moral values in me and taught me to work, since she herself worked as a teacher, deputy head, and school principal in various regions of the USSR. Not long before her death, my grandmother worked as the librarian at middle school No. 2, where I studied. One day, my grandmother and I were doing a crossword puzzle in which the answer was the name of God in the form “Yahweh.” My grandmother showed me this name in the Bible. I was ten years old, and I did not yet understand how important it was to grasp the meaning of this book.
Besides school, from the age of 8 I enthusiastically practiced acrobatics in a community circus under the direction of Viktor Aleksandrovich Zverev. He published a book about his work. Such training kept me from getting …