"I will approach this border of the human consciousness, where the unconscious begins. And I'll feel the terrible wish to cross this border. Every day, coming from conclusions to cries, from cries to lows, from lows to physical pain in my head and breast, confusing between days and nights, I ordered myself: don't surrender."

This passage, translated from the book We're Singing to the Deaf, by Russian military journalist and whistleblower Grigory Pasko, was written in the Vladivostok Prison where he served 20 months from his 1997 arrest until acquittal in 1999 at his first espionage trial. Pasko is now serving a four year prison sentence upon conviction of espionage, at a shameless retrial condemned by legal and human rights organizations in Russia as well as internationally. This selection, written after his first eight months in a solitary cell, comes by way of a recent article by Victor Tereshkin, who reported on Pasko's retrial in 2001 for the Norwegian environmental group Bellona. Tereshkin's article, in English translation, can be found at www.bellona.org. He concludes it with another quote from the pen of the wrongly imprisoned nuclear whistleblower:

"They are deifying Felix [the founder of KGB, 'Iron Felix' Dzerzhinsky.]. They will restore the monument to him at Lubyanka. They're tenacious of life. They don't sink, like shit or wood doesn't sink. They're numerous. Much more than you think, or the decree about them mentions. They're not coming back from the year 1937: they have already come back. Look around and you'll see them, the wooden children of the Iron Felix."

Letters of support should be sent to Grigory Pasko, at the address given in Inside and Out.