Word: sasha
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Kaminskaya's most significant criminal case is both a lesson in unfamiliar Soviet legal procedure and a riveting mystery thriller. In 1967 the parents of a 16-year-old boy, Sasha, engaged her to represent him in a sensational case. Sasha and his pal Alik had been charged with the rape and murder of their classmate Marina in a village outside Moscow. During six months of pretrial detention the boys had confessed, then recanted. The prosecution's star witness was an old woman who claimed to have heard Marina cry out as the three youngsters passed under...
Kaminskaya's first meeting with Sasha convinced her that he and Alik were innocent. She quickly discovered the reasons they had confessed. Among them: Sasha had been put into a cell with a horribly scarred adult inmate who told him that if he did not confess he would be sent to a notorious prison where guards and convicts alike would beat him up. Alik had been given a similar cell mate...
During the boys' six-week trial, Kaminskaya's new evidence impressed the court, which referred the case for further investigation. Still, the court at the second trial pronounced Sasha and Alik guilty (there are no juries in the Soviet Union). Undeterred, Kaminskaya and Alik's advocate both appealed; once again the case was referred for investigation. A third trial ensued, this time before the Supreme Court of the Russian Republic. The evidence that the boys were innocent was overwhelming. Among other things, the defense established that the old woman who claimed to have heard Marina...
Sitting in the living room of her modest two-story house in Arlington, Kaminskaya widens her piercing blue eyes at the memory of her victory in the courtroom 14 years ago. The 63-year-old advocate brought to America a treasured photo of Sasha, grown up, that is touchingly inscribed to her. But she has other, tragic memories of the dissidents she could not save from injustice: Yuri Galanskov, who died of mistreatment in the Gulag; Ilya Gabay, who killed himself in despair; Anatoli Marchenko, who was sent back to the camps for ten years after three terms of imprisonment...
...Great Purge. An architect, Alexander helped design and supervise the construction of the Moscow-Volga Canal, which was built by slave labor in 1936. According to the diary, when Alexander was slated to receive a medal from Soviet Chairman Mikhail Kalinin for his work on the canal, Cousin Sasha on the eve of his arrest pleaded with the Chekist to try to save his wife. "Sasha wasted no time in asking him to slip Kalinin a petition to have Musya freed when he received the medal from Kalinin's hands," Freidenberg wrote. "The idea was preposterous and utterly hopeless...