Letter of Forty-Two
Thank God, the army and the law enforcement organs were on the people's side, did not split, did not allow the bloody adventure to develop into fatal civil war, but what if?… We would have had no one to blame but ourselves.We "compassionately" begged after the August putsch not to "take revenge", not to "punish", not to "ban", not to "close down", not to "engage in a witch hunt".The question arises: was the head of the State so short-sighted as to fail to foresee this decree's consequences when he chose to defy the very same law that had enabled him to become President?Should I have been in Moscow, I'd have signed [the letter] too"),[4] on 3 October 2004, wondered how "all of those 'democratic' writers who were preaching humanism and denouncing capital punishment" all of a sudden "came to applaud mass execution without trial".[4] A letter entitled "An appeal of the democratic public of Moscow to the President of Russia B. N. Yeltsin" ("Обращение собрания демократической общественности Москвы к президенту России Б.Н.