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Slava, the driver:
"You should've seen the expression on his face when he picked up the phone and heard that the Gorins had been kidnapped! We were sitting in his office waiting for Gorin, but there was no sign of him. Pichugin rang through to Tambov. You should've seen his face! You couldn't fake it! And he was never an actor, anyway - he always wore his heart on his sleeve. He was genuinely shocked, he sat there with his mouth open, completely shaken, unable to speak."
Ira:
"I'd just gone into his office, and I saw from his face that something dreadful had happened. 'What's going on?', I asked. Everyone just sat there, silent. Then someone whispered to me: 'It looks like the Gorins have been murdered. He's only just found out.' It took Aleksey half an hour to pull himself together, and then he briefly told me. From then on, from November all the way through to June, the talk in the family was about adopting the Gorins' youngest son. And it wasn't just idle chatter, they thought it through properly. The details were discussed and the necessary papers were got together.
"Once, when Aleksey wasn't there, I had a quiet heart-to-heart with Tanya: 'I know you've got to do what you can to help, but adopt their child? Have you gone mad?' Tanya shot back at me: 'Don't you dare say that when he's around. He'll go through the roof! A heart of stone, and that's only the start of what he'll say.' To accuse Aleksey of killing the boy's father after all that is an insult."
Slava:
"He couldn't stand criminals. When I'm behind the wheel I like to listen to shanson music . Aleksey hated it. He just couldn't stand it. I often used to put "Vladimirskiy Tsentral" on, and it got right up his nose. The same with films with criminals as the romantic heroes. When Putin came to power he said to me: 'About time we had someone in authority! This is what the country needs.'"
Ira:
"Aleksey said to me back then: 'If he want us, we're with him!' He said it often afterwards as well. It sounds naive, like a joke now, of course. We've even had a bitter laugh about it since. But he only ever watched detective films. 'TASS is Authorised to Announce' was always in his VCR, and he knew the entire film off by heart, every single word. And of course 'Seventeen Moments of Spring' and 'Officers'. He never liked it when the bad guys were on.
"He regarded himself as a Don Cossack. He knew everything about the Cossacks, and was always on about them. He particularly liked the way Cossack families ran their affairs, and reckoned that was how all families should be. He liked the way Cossacks treat each other, how they kept their word and their friends. He was even a bit over the top about it. It was like an obsession: the brotherhood of Cossacks, through hell and high water for your friends and all that.
"Time goes on and in my letters to him I ask: 'Where is everyone?' He knew so many people whom he called his friends. In two years they haven't phoned or written once. That came as a shock to him. Our lawyer spent a long time spelling it out that they'd simply been using him. The ones still here are his true friends. There's not many of them."
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