For the original Russian, see HRO.org and Amnesty International (Russia)

  Photo: Amnesty International

• The old red brick water tower, like a monstrous magnet pulls towards it broken hearts, empty stomachs, greedy hands and people with uneasy consciences… 

• After the seizure of the Crimea I came to the conclusion that the Russian people have not completely lost their sense of humour … 

• The Kamaz truck driver, concentrating hard, was carrying people resembling old broken furniture from the dacha… 

• Along the pathways people walk, as flat as shadows. They seem cut out of wrapping paper... 

• In a complete rapture I gulp the dust from Tambov roads. In the fields, sacks lie like corpses. All the men from the prison administration, their tongues hanging out, run and collect the sacks of cabbages, carrots, and beetroot, and drag them to their sweethearts … 

• Pillows in snow-white pillow-cases are thrown across the sky. From some of them the down is falling out. Poplars, like aged, once-fashionable women in broad straw hats with crimson, orange and yellow ribbons … 

• From the slender, round-headed apple trees falls yellow hair … 

• A rainbow looked over the fence, a cheerful, multi-coloured banner. The wind whistles along to a familiar melody in the rhythm of an Argentinian tango. What nonsense the magpies and sparrows are talking … 

• Further away on the other side of the fence the buildings of the living quarters rise up, dirty, pimpled, their decaying walls covered with lichen and cracks … 

• Everywhere there is the great and mighty Russian mud. It lies like an over-fed pig, snorting and spluttering. And everyone’s faces are tattooed with this mud … 

• There comes a time when every faith palls, like meat chops and minestrone soup, and from time to time we just have to have change – the Slavic god Perun, Christ, socialism, VVP. Or else… 

• Autumn poplar trees are like women of the streets. Their hair is also coloured with henna and peroxide. They have hard bodies and cool blood. They spread out along the avenue, seductively swaying their narrow hips. I am sure girls end up on the streets out of kindness. They like to be nice to people … 

• Darkness falls in soft grey flakes … 

• We are getting in the cabbage. It can be compared with the country’s current regime. Once the leaves with which they hide themselves have been pulled off, all that remains is an empty stump that no longer has any purpose, and is no use to anyone … 

• We are gathering apples in a huge orchard very close to where Michurin grew up. Everyone is shaking the trees, but no one gets an apple on their head, as Newton did. Probably they are the wrong sort … 

• Kirkorov is singing again on Russkoye Radio. Russian singers were always distinguished by their sensitive hearts. Throughout the modern history of Russia they have generously given up their free Mondays, earmarked for a no-fee wash in the bathhouse, for charitable purposes … 

• The night is easy and unhurried…and it sighs like a young woman, kissed on the lips. A freckled and goggle-eyed moon gazes out at something from behind the pipes of the boiler room. It’s as though the stars have been washed in a good, sweet-smelling soap and rubbed dry … 

• What are three years compared with the eternity we promised our sweethearts? All the more that the ‘love that moves worlds’ is already within me … 

• In the Iron Age it took three years to gouge out a boat with stone or bone tools, one year to make a trough … 

• A rumour’s been going round about government officials running away to Siberia, about boxes of jewels and crockery they took with them, all the proceeds of their corruption – the ‘gold, furniture, and clothes’ – that they have taken with them as they run off to the taiga… 

• Night. The Pleiadies shine on the dining room, Corona Borealis on the school, while the Great Bear hangs above the bathhouse and the icy Pole Star, that has almost disappeared, shows officials the way to go … 

• I study people. It’s a cheerful exercise. As though you put your hand in a bucket with tiny fish in it. An uncertain joy, a shaky courage, a growing malevolence, an eyeless anxiety, fearful hopes – my sorry catch… 

• I go up to the window. The October frost has written its whimsical ornament: Egypt, Rome, Byzantium, Persia. A magnificent and extravagant mixture of styles, manners, temperaments and imaginations. There is no doubt that the greatest art on earth will be created on the principle of the cocktail … 

• Often looking into the eyes of judges … for some reason I don’t see justice in them just yet … 

• It turns out that Tambov wolves eat Tambov hares with complete impunity … 

• Morning… The lazy sun is waking up, as though it doesn’t want to rise above the horizon, accompanying the full moon as it falls asleep. The steaming pond gives off heat to the cooling earth and the bitingly cold air in anticipation of warmth. Your fingers, frozen into the gloves, don’t do what you tell them. Under your feet the leaves, caught in the frost, crunch noisily, and the cabbages are covered in white … 

• The militias are fighting (most likely bravely) on three fronts, in four of the country’s regions and in twelve directions … 

• The classroom desk can serve as an indicator of the level of education, fixed to the floor back-to-front next to the principal’s office … 

• - OK, I won’t argue: a writing table and bedside chair – these are luxuries. When it comes down to it, poems and complaints to the court can even be written on a windowsill. But a bed! Don’t I need somewhere to sleep? 

        - Not necessarily according to the law …
        (from a conversation with a prosecutor responsible for legal compliance)

• If we can believe the respected English diplomat, Ivan Grozny and those protecting the Olympic Flame at Sochi-2014 both tried to teach the Russians how to smile. They ordered that, during walks, journeys or, nowadays, the flame relay, ‘the heads of those whose faces don’t please should be cut off’. Despite measures such as these, Russians all the same have kept their gloomy characters … 

• We go back along the country boulevards, I mean the ruined roads. Exactly three versts. The trees rustle with evil, croaking birds. The crows hang on the branches, like black, living leaves. I don’t remember in which chronicle I read it, but before one of the most terrible of Moscow’s fires, ‘when the flames flowed like a river, stones crumbled, iron glowed as if in a furnace, copper flowed and trees turned to coal, the grass to cinders’, the crows croaked annoyingly above the Kremlin … 

• Someone thought that this was the start of a riot. In fact two ‘refuseniks’ had just gotten up on top of a forty meter pipe, to show their total indifference by spitting on everything … 

• Their boss escaped to Tambov on the third day, and from there deigned do nothing less than declare war on Obama … 

• I genuinely don’t like these ‘Scythians’ with black sticks in old trodden-down slippers. The sticks, in very romantic fashion, pull down at their sun-bleached and frayed uniforms … 

• The officer on duty rubs the dry bridge of his nose on the edge of the table. He is like a big shaggy dog that makes you think he is friends even with black cats… 

• I stare into his dreamy eyes with my own sober, indifferent, cool gaze, like green September water with a rusty film. And unbearably I want to annoy him, frustrate him, make him lose his temper… 

• They feel bad, not just because of my presence, but because of my words, looks, thoughts… 

• And people here are measured in piles, like cabbages… 

• A girl enters, capacious and broad, like the copper bowl in which Mother made jam. Her face is regular and white, like a playing card of the best quality from a new pack, and her mouth – the ace of hearts. She raises her brow melodramatically above her laughing eye … 

• The Senior State Councillor, who one time headed one of the parties in the State Duma with the contradictory name of ‘United Russia’, ‘wearing a pince nez’, sells Kharkov toffees at the entrance to the apartment building … 

• I glanced in on the canteen. Slices of blood-red sausages made of meat of mysterious origin sizzling on frying pans. In cloudy buckets soaked cucumbers are swimming, wrinkling up out of their own squeamishness. Herrings bleed rust, corroding the cooks’ swollen hands …