"Our elders had taught us well. First of all, you had to respect all living creatures – a category which did not include policemen, people connected with the government, bankers, loan sharks and all those who had the power of money in their hands and exploited ordinary people. Secondly, you had to believe in God and in his Son, Jesus Christ, and love and respect the other ways of believing in God which were different from our own. But the Church and religion must never be seen as a structure. My grandfather used to say that God didn't create priests, but only free men; there were some good priests, and in such cases it was not sinful to go to the places where they carried out their activities, but it definitely was a sin to think that in the eyes of God priests had more power than other men. Lastly, we must not do to others what we wouldn't want to be done to us: and if one day we were obliged to do it nonetheless, there must be a good reason. One of the elders with whom I often discussed these Siberian philosophies used to say that in his opinion our world was full of people who went down wrong roads, and who after taking one false step went further and further away from the straight path. He argued that in many cases there was no point in trying to persuade them to return to the right road, because they were too far away, and the only thing that remained to do was to end their existence, 'remove them from the road'. 'A man who is rich and powerful,' the old man would say, 'in walking along his wrong road will ruin many lives; he will cause trouble for many people who in some way depend on him. The only way of putting everything right is to kill him, and thereby to destroy the power that he has built upon money.' I would object: 'But what if the murder of this person were also a false step? Wouldn't it be better to avoid having any contact with him, and leave it at that?' The old man would look at me in amazement, and reply with such conviction that it made my head spin: 'Who do you think you are, boy – Jesus Christ? Only He can work miracles; we must only serve Our Lord... And what better service could we do than to remove from the face of the world the children of Satan?' He was too good, that old man."