#24 | December 18-29, 1997  

by Mark Ames

Last week, I sent the following letter home to my family:

Dear Everyone,
I have some good news and some bad news.
The good news is that I'm finally getting married.
The bad news is that my wife-to-be is sitting in jail.
Don't worry: I'm not marrying for love. This is purely humanitarian.

They were shocked. I'd never done anything humanitarian in my life-they remember me cheering when the French busted a cap in a Greenpeace activist during one of their Nouveau-Beaujolais-mushroom-cloud festivals in the South Pacific. My joke at the time: "Q: What do you call a dead Greenpeace activist? A: A dead Greenpeace activist." It really bowled them over in Peoria... had 'em rolling in the aisles in Kalamazoo... But that was back

Out here you're faced with enough road kill, cop beatings and gonorrhea-that is, the stuff black humor is made of-to rattle your average cynic. Once in awhile, you even have to shed your cynicism, to do something to fight against the horribleness of it all, or else you feel you'll lose your right to comment on anything. Sometimes those black jokes seem as defiant as singing Christmas carols on Christmas Eve.

The trial of Alina Vitukhnovskaya is one such injustice that has inspired me to utterly futile action, and not mere quips. She is the victim of vicious persecution from renegade FSB agents, a rigged legal system, and hypocrisy on the part of American writers and human rights activists, who once beat their breasts in support of Soviet dissidents, but now keep obediently quiet.

I went to her trial way out in northwest Moscow. You sit in this worn beige and yellow room on the fifth floor of a severe granite building... an empty cage awaits the defendant on one side, and three dilapidated Alice In Wonderland high-backed chairs on the far end, where the judges sit. You realize, just by looking at this perversion of a grammar school detention hall, that there's no way the accused will be judged innocent. You could sit Mother Theresa in that cage, and she'd look like guilty.

Taibbi and I came to watch Vitukhnovskaya's trial, which has reminded many here of the repression against writers and dissidents during the Brezhnev era. The State went after Vitukhnovskaya in 1994 in a highly-publicized trial in which she was accused of selling seven dollars of acid to a pair of rent-a-junkies who, everyone admits, had been brutally beaten by a team of eight FSB goons to force a "confession." After an outcry by famous Russian writers and leading human rights activists, she was freed in 1995, but not after spending over a year in Butirka prison, one of the most savage dungeons in the northern hemisphere.

This year, her case was reopened. The judge signed a secret order in August to re-incarcerate her based on a rarely-invoked Russian statute, article 96, which allows re-incarcerating someone based on the "dangerousness of the crime." He called Vitukhnovksaya in for a hearing on October 23rd, and unexpectedly, without warning, had the five foot two poet seized, arrested, and thrown in Women's Prison number 6 for the duration of her trial. To imagine what her days were like there, remember that each prisoner is allotted an average of .7 meters of space. Often they have to sleep in shifts. The harsh, cramped cells are hostile to humans to the same degree that they are luxury suites for parasites. Prisoners become little more than a human salad bars for lice, fungi, bacteria, gum disease, tuberculosis, and worse.

The judge presiding over her case is a 30-year-old ex-cop from outside of Moscow; his two "consultants" are a pair of barely-breathing white-haired Soviets, one of whom spent most of the trial asleep.

After the first trial, I left for home feeling utterly defeated. You can write an article about it, make some phone calls, but you know you'll have no effect. Something else had to be done. Something to draw attention to her desperate plight. Something... stupid.

That's when I realized that if I married her in jail, thus making her an American citizen, then perhaps the American press would decide that she "counts." We all know that if the American press cries, the Russian government listens. It even worked during Soviet times!

Even though every Russian and West European human rights group has condemned her trial as a farce, the Americans won't touch it because of drug allegations. The local head of the PEN writer's association, Alexander Tkachenko, admitted his frustration.

"Even the American PEN backed away when they heard that there was a drug accusation," he told me. "I showed them evidence that the accusation was unjust, but they didn't care-the accusation was enough to scare them off."

My stepsister, who is an intern at the New York branch of Human Rights Watch, agreed. "The Russians are tricky," she wrote me. "They must know that people here are afraid of looking like they support drug use."

Just last Thursday, the judge made an unbelievable decision: he transferred Vitukhnovskaya to the Serbsky Psychological Institute to decide whether or not she is insane. This is exactly the same judgement handed down to countless Soviet dissidents, and this is the very same psychiatric ward where the same Soviet dissidents were held. Only now, it's worse: today, Serbsky holds the worst, sickest maniacs and serial killers in Russia. This is where the "Red Ripper" Chikatilo underwent his examination. And now this innocent young poet is stuck in there with them. Her sentencing is set for January 26th, unless the psychiatric expert assigned to her case decides he needs more time. Incredible, but it's happening. Now there's no other choice but marriage.

So here goes. I'm on my knees, Alina. Sure, I've got a few blemishes on my record. I was denied a few weeks back by a disfigured provincial girl; I hate children, and I will strangle you with a pair of cheap stockings if you if you dare threaten me with kids. All in all, I'd make a shitty husband. But I have a few pluses. I'm tall, for one thing; I can score free eXile drinks. And most importantly, I have American citizenship.

Lately, I've tried imagining what our married life would be like. You'd fry up some meat and potatoes, toss up a little tomato and cucumber salad with mayonnaise... I'd be watching some cheap porno in the other room. We'd talk about our day at work-how the eXile is going downhill, or how you're becoming more famous and more respected than me-as Mr. Nasty groans in the background... when we make love, you insist on wearing the famed eXile propeller cap. We're a team. And the most important thing is that you're free. You're out of that madhouse that they're holding you in. And they won't hurt you any more, because Carol J. Williams and Michael Specter have decided that your oppression counts. They've written you up, so the same people who intervened to free Richard Bliss have intervened to free you.

Even the thought of your freedom is enough to cheer me up. And that's all that matters.