Pasko on Khodorkovsky’s Cellmate

Robert Amsterdam, who has pulled off the greatest coup in and service to the Russia blogosphere to date by signing up Russian hero journalist Grigori Pasko (pictured) as a columnist and arranging to translate his work, offers the following fascinating account from Pasko featuring “an exclusive, first-ever interview with one of Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s cellmates, which illustrates like few other sources the day-to-day life inside the contemporary Russian gulag, courtesy of the great human rights hero Grigory Pasko. It is a testament to Pasko’s strength of will to track down this informant and delve into these issues, as he himself languished unjustly for many years in a Russian prison.” One cannot possibly praise highly enough the quality of Amsterdam’s blog, especially in offering many original translations and various other forms of original content. If his professionalism is any indication of that of his client, Khodorkhovsky’s jailing must be recorded as one of the great tragedies of Russian history, equal to the jailing of Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn. Russia will pay in blood for generations because of these outrages.

Khodorkovsky with a “Brood Hen”

By Grigory Pasko, journalist

Obligatory foreword

The thought suddenly occurred to me: why aren’t there any interviews anywhere with those who at various times and in various places shared a cell with Khodorkovsky? I know from personal experience: tell me who you did time with, and I’ll tell you HOW you did your time. In short, I found a whole bunch of people who had been together with MBK in the Krasnokamensk “zone” and in the Chita “isolator”. Not everyone agreed to be interviewed on tape. Andrey V., the former foreman of the sewing shop at correctional colony IK-10, did agree. Our talk was long and detailed. Right at the start of our conversation, he told me “I already know all about you…”

An hour after we had said our goodbyes, Andrey V. phoned me and said: “There’s a person. He sat a month with Khodorkovsky in the same cell. I don’t need to tell you he wasn’t ‘just’ sitting there…”

I understand what he means: they wouldn’t put just anybody in the same cell as THIS jailbird. No, they would place a “brood hen” – a specially trained prisoner-informant. The “brood hen’s” job is to listen and to hear everything his cellmate lives and breathes, and then to report all of this to those who put him in the cell to sit there – just like a farmer puts a real brood hen on eggs to sit on them until they hatch.

At first I wanted to call this article “An interview with a brood hen”. But then I decided that it would be more logical to write it in the form of a monologue. And so, I give you the man who sat in the same cell with Mikhail Khodorkovsky in the Chita isolator from early January through early February 2007.

My name is Anton Morozov. I’m 24 years old. I was born and raised in Chita. I finished high school, but couldn’t get into college anywhere – I’d gotten my first jail term. For fraud. I was a steward. (Author’s commentary: In the camps, a person who becomes a steward or gets appointed to some other position by the administration becomes “knitted” or “red” [a “trusty” in English]; that is, obligated to cooperate with the administration of the “place of deprivation of liberty” of his own volition.)

… In the isolator, a person from our operative unit said to me: “Sit a while with a person…” Oh, and there were also two colonels from Krasnoyarsk and one from Moscow… “You sit, keep an eye on the person, see what’s what. Don’t try to pull anything out of him. Just report what he says himself to us. But be careful – he’s already an experienced person.”

They put me in a security cell. (Author’s commentary: a security cell is one where the security regimen established by the Internal Regulations is strictly and rigorously observed, which happens rarely.) Reveille at 6 AM, inspection… Naturally, I’d heard about Khodorkovsky before this. The cell was in the old building on the third floor. They’d done the building up specially; there’s a special burrow (corridor) there. It’s all very hush-hush: the cell doesn’t even have a number on it. The duty officers are all with the rank of captain or higher. The system is that they live a month, and then get replaced. They’re not locals; they’re from Krasnoyarsk. They don’t tell the innkeeper (prison warden) anything.

They put me there in January, early in the month, and on February 2 they released me. That whole time Khodorkovsky and I sat there together, the two of us. The cell has a television, and it’s all neat and clean. Six shkons (beds), two-level. Bedside tables.. Nothing European or anything, just the typical stuff. There’s a video camera in the cell. From what I was told, the images are somehow sent to Moscow… One window. Double pane, bars, another double pane, and more bars.

The administration keeps things under very serious observation. They even measure the temperature in the cell. Sauna once a week, right there on the same floor.

There’s two guys sitting with Platon (Lebedev). I was told they were supposed to put one more person in with us, in order to divert suspicion from me. They told me: “The lawyers are going to poke holes in (examine) you, so don’t stick your neck out, don’t set yourself up, just sit tight.”

He’s using the formal form of address with me. At first I was using the informal, but then I switched to the formal too. We washed the floors ourselves, taking turns. We ate gruel, but he’s got the means, so he buys everything in the prison shop. Doesn’t smoke.

At the very beginning, we didn’t talk for three-four days. He loaded (offered) books on me.. . He reads Pikul, Chase, newspapers in English, “Times” for example… He gets publications from there.. He’s got four children, a son who’s finishing up his studies in America A daughter, another two sons…

A lawyer comes to see him, not one but many. They sit there 4-5 hours at a time, discussing.
I ask how come they stay so long. He says that they’re working on problems, both with the investigation and with the firm. He told me how he’d started with a cooperative, rose up by selling computers, occupied a post in the Komsomol, earned extra money working as a janitor, a carpenter, he used to repair windows on high-rises in Moscow… He told me about pyramid schemes, how some people rise up (get rich).

Maybe in a week or so he started to make contact with me. Asked about life in the camps, what things are like there. I’d already been in IK-3 before. He told about the attempt against him happened. He was friends, or rather, he was just associating with this one person; they had a trusting relationship. Yes, yes, with Kuchma. Mikhail Borisovich said: “I’m sleeping, and I woke up because I’d sensed the glint of a knife. A shoemaker’s knife. Kuchma had wanted to get me in the eye, but glanced off the bridge of my nose instead.” Now he (Khodorkovsky) has a scar on his nose. He lucked out, in other words. Well, and they’ve told me the situation is the same as in the whole camp system. There are men of status (polozhentsy), overseers (smotryashchiye). Apparently, Kuchma had a conflict with the blatnye (full-time professional criminals) and he agreed to do this, with Khodorkovsky, so they’d get him out of the “zone”. That’s possible. But I also heard from one of the officers that Khodorkovsky had set this whole thing up, and that one hundred thousand dollars had even been transferred to Kuchma’s account. Do I personally believe this? No, I don’t. Oh yeah, and then there was this dirty rumour that Khodorkovsky was supposedly making passes at Kuchma. There couldn’t have been any intimate relations there, of course.

…We’re different people, naturally. There wasn’t really anything else we could talk about. Just about life in general… In short, those who had put me in the cell with Khodorkovsky didn’t get anything from me. I was released. Before trial: my trial’s still coming up. My lawyer took care of things. They wanted information out of me. I explained that Khodorkovsky won’t give it, he’s not a stupid person. They told me to watch how he behaved, what he’s like when he comes back from the lawyers, what he writes and to whom. Keep an eye on him, maybe he’s ready to commit suicide, to set us up. They never did get anything serious out of me. He controls the situation well by himself; education and life experience help.

He talked about politics… that a tax – I don’t remember which one – well, anyway, he’d been fighting for taxes. If they’re going to be a lot bigger, then they won’t be able to work. When they, the businessmen, got together – I don’t remember the names – someone proposed a new tax, but he got up and said: “I know who will benefit from this, into whose pocket this tax will fall. He argued about it; in short, they didn’t adopt the tax. And because of this he got in someone’s way. Someone decided that he was going to nominate himself for the post of president.

We also talked a bit about the case. As I understood it, they’d filed new charges against him for stealing 15 billion dollars. Mikhail Borisovich told me that all of this money had gone exactly where it was supposed to go, not into his personal pocket. And all the reports were laid out on the company’s website. He said that if he’d agreed with the charges against him, he’d have gotten a suspended sentence. “But I”, he says, “can’t lie.” That’s the kind of person he is. He understands that they’re going to add on a new sentence.

Photo of Anton Morozov by Grigory Pasko

What’s the daily routine like? The usual. We got up at 6 in the morning. Khodorkovsky doesn’t eat breakfast, just some juice, fruits, biscuits. He eats everything at lunch. He doesn’t complain about the food. We’d start the cleanup, wash the floors, taking turns. I could have done it myself, but I didn’t offer, so I could be at least a little bit equal with him. We watched TV. Mostly the news for him. Inspection at 8 AM sharp. Stripped to the waist. The inspection is conducted by all the top brass, the superintendent colonel who, as Khodorkovsky told me, travels everywhere with him. Between 9 and 10, they drive him to the procuracy. Here, in Chita, such a big deal, six escort vehicles, three of them from the road police.

They don’t feed him lunch at the procuracy. He mutinied about that. I didn’t even ask him about that. He looks normal. He exercises, lies down to sleep, gets a good night’s rest… Well, he does take some tablets to calm him down now and then. Always taking notes… I snuck a peek at what he was writing: need to reply to such and such a letter, write a complaint – he scribbles everything down, keeps notes. He writes letters. He gets a lot of letters. Definitely at least 60 a week. From all over the world. His friends have scattered all over, they all write to him.

Ice him? They might. He’s got loads of information about everybody, I don’t remember their names. My head was spinning just from being with such a person.

Why did I decide to give an interview? I sympathize with Khodorkovsky. My opinion: everything that’s going on around him is the scheming of our politicians. My opinion: he’s good, simply as a person… Never lies.

Well, I also came to you because… Well, you know how I accidentally ran into Andrey, and he offered… Not for the money, just… I mean, I can’t even tell you anything like that anyway, really. I don’t even remember the names.. . If they lock me up again, they’ll come to me again and say that I’ve got to sit with Khodorkovsky. They didn’t promise me anything. I just went along for the ride to take a look, to have a chat… Two people in a cell is better than forty, after all.

Yes, maybe the trial will be here. This is lawlessness. He’s writing complaints about it. But it’s hard to fight with our system.

Obligatory afterword

As Morozov himself has said, he is not a novice in the prison system. No doubt he understands that he’s not going to get praised for telling how he had been instructed at being a “brood hen”. But they probably won’t do anything nasty, either: the connection between the nastiness and this interview will be too obvious.

The proposal to meet with me was made to him, as I understand it, by a respected person in the criminal world. And as Anton says himself, he didn’t tell me anything “like that” anyway. But he did say the main thing: Khodorkovsky’s operative tracking group (and I found out about the existence of such a group from various sources) places “brood hens” in his cell, and is watching him constantly. No doubt they look through not only all of his mail, but all the case documents, too. What kind of real defense can you talk about in such conditions?

[Translator’s note: The term “operative tracking group” may sound somewhat confusing. Under Russian law operativny refers to something akin to ordinary criminal police work – investigating crimes, conducting surveillance to find fugitive criminals, etc. There is nothing in the law, however, about 24-hour video observation, opening mail, prohibiting visitations, planting informants, etc. without the sanction of a court, as is being done with Khodorkovsky. Ordinarily, a prison will have an “operative group” in-house, to manage the team of informants, among other things. It is unprecedented that a special “operative tracking group” has been created just to keep watch on a single prisoner and never let him out of its sight.]

And one more thing. Naturally, I phoned one of Khodorkovsky’s lawyers and asked if the name Morozov was familiar to him. Yes, I was told, there had been someone by that name sitting with Mikhail Borisovich in the isolator in January.

I also found a person who knows Morozov. Businessman Yuri Mairy said that Morozov had once stolen items from his apartment– a television, a large sum of money… “He is a drug addict”, said Yuri. “He always needs money. He’ll do anything to get his next fix…”

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Pasko on Khodorkovsky’s Cellmate

Robert Amsterdam, who has pulled off the greatest coup in and service to the Russia blogosphere to date by signing up Russian hero journalist Grigori Pasko (pictured) as a columnist and arranging to translate his work, offers the following fascinating account from Pasko featuring “an exclusive, first-ever interview with one of Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s cellmates, which illustrates like few other sources the day-to-day life inside the contemporary Russian gulag, courtesy of the great human rights hero Grigory Pasko. It is a testament to Pasko’s strength of will to track down this informant and delve into these issues, as he himself languished unjustly for many years in a Russian prison.” One cannot possibly praise highly enough the quality of Amsterdam’s blog, especially in offering many original translations and various other forms of original content. If his professionalism is any indication of that of his client, Khodorkhovsky’s jailing must be recorded as one of the great tragedies of Russian history, equal to the jailing of Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn. Russia will pay in blood for generations because of these outrages.

Khodorkovsky with a “Brood Hen”

By Grigory Pasko, journalist

Obligatory foreword

The thought suddenly occurred to me: why aren’t there any interviews anywhere with those who at various times and in various places shared a cell with Khodorkovsky? I know from personal experience: tell me who you did time with, and I’ll tell you HOW you did your time. In short, I found a whole bunch of people who had been together with MBK in the Krasnokamensk “zone” and in the Chita “isolator”. Not everyone agreed to be interviewed on tape. Andrey V., the former foreman of the sewing shop at correctional colony IK-10, did agree. Our talk was long and detailed. Right at the start of our conversation, he told me “I already know all about you…”

An hour after we had said our goodbyes, Andrey V. phoned me and said: “There’s a person. He sat a month with Khodorkovsky in the same cell. I don’t need to tell you he wasn’t ‘just’ sitting there…”

I understand what he means: they wouldn’t put just anybody in the same cell as THIS jailbird. No, they would place a “brood hen” – a specially trained prisoner-informant. The “brood hen’s” job is to listen and to hear everything his cellmate lives and breathes, and then to report all of this to those who put him in the cell to sit there – just like a farmer puts a real brood hen on eggs to sit on them until they hatch.

At first I wanted to call this article “An interview with a brood hen”. But then I decided that it would be more logical to write it in the form of a monologue. And so, I give you the man who sat in the same cell with Mikhail Khodorkovsky in the Chita isolator from early January through early February 2007.

My name is Anton Morozov. I’m 24 years old. I was born and raised in Chita. I finished high school, but couldn’t get into college anywhere – I’d gotten my first jail term. For fraud. I was a steward. (Author’s commentary: In the camps, a person who becomes a steward or gets appointed to some other position by the administration becomes “knitted” or “red” [a “trusty” in English]; that is, obligated to cooperate with the administration of the “place of deprivation of liberty” of his own volition.)

… In the isolator, a person from our operative unit said to me: “Sit a while with a person…” Oh, and there were also two colonels from Krasnoyarsk and one from Moscow… “You sit, keep an eye on the person, see what’s what. Don’t try to pull anything out of him. Just report what he says himself to us. But be careful – he’s already an experienced person.”

They put me in a security cell. (Author’s commentary: a security cell is one where the security regimen established by the Internal Regulations is strictly and rigorously observed, which happens rarely.) Reveille at 6 AM, inspection… Naturally, I’d heard about Khodorkovsky before this. The cell was in the old building on the third floor. They’d done the building up specially; there’s a special burrow (corridor) there. It’s all very hush-hush: the cell doesn’t even have a number on it. The duty officers are all with the rank of captain or higher. The system is that they live a month, and then get replaced. They’re not locals; they’re from Krasnoyarsk. They don’t tell the innkeeper (prison warden) anything.

They put me there in January, early in the month, and on February 2 they released me. That whole time Khodorkovsky and I sat there together, the two of us. The cell has a television, and it’s all neat and clean. Six shkons (beds), two-level. Bedside tables.. Nothing European or anything, just the typical stuff. There’s a video camera in the cell. From what I was told, the images are somehow sent to Moscow… One window. Double pane, bars, another double pane, and more bars.

The administration keeps things under very serious observation. They even measure the temperature in the cell. Sauna once a week, right there on the same floor.

There’s two guys sitting with Platon (Lebedev). I was told they were supposed to put one more person in with us, in order to divert suspicion from me. They told me: “The lawyers are going to poke holes in (examine) you, so don’t stick your neck out, don’t set yourself up, just sit tight.”

He’s using the formal form of address with me. At first I was using the informal, but then I switched to the formal too. We washed the floors ourselves, taking turns. We ate gruel, but he’s got the means, so he buys everything in the prison shop. Doesn’t smoke.

At the very beginning, we didn’t talk for three-four days. He loaded (offered) books on me.. . He reads Pikul, Chase, newspapers in English, “Times” for example… He gets publications from there.. He’s got four children, a son who’s finishing up his studies in America A daughter, another two sons…

A lawyer comes to see him, not one but many. They sit there 4-5 hours at a time, discussing.
I ask how come they stay so long. He says that they’re working on problems, both with the investigation and with the firm. He told me how he’d started with a cooperative, rose up by selling computers, occupied a post in the Komsomol, earned extra money working as a janitor, a carpenter, he used to repair windows on high-rises in Moscow… He told me about pyramid schemes, how some people rise up (get rich).

Maybe in a week or so he started to make contact with me. Asked about life in the camps, what things are like there. I’d already been in IK-3 before. He told about the attempt against him happened. He was friends, or rather, he was just associating with this one person; they had a trusting relationship. Yes, yes, with Kuchma. Mikhail Borisovich said: “I’m sleeping, and I woke up because I’d sensed the glint of a knife. A shoemaker’s knife. Kuchma had wanted to get me in the eye, but glanced off the bridge of my nose instead.” Now he (Khodorkovsky) has a scar on his nose. He lucked out, in other words. Well, and they’ve told me the situation is the same as in the whole camp system. There are men of status (polozhentsy), overseers (smotryashchiye). Apparently, Kuchma had a conflict with the blatnye (full-time professional criminals) and he agreed to do this, with Khodorkovsky, so they’d get him out of the “zone”. That’s possible. But I also heard from one of the officers that Khodorkovsky had set this whole thing up, and that one hundred thousand dollars had even been transferred to Kuchma’s account. Do I personally believe this? No, I don’t. Oh yeah, and then there was this dirty rumour that Khodorkovsky was supposedly making passes at Kuchma. There couldn’t have been any intimate relations there, of course.

…We’re different people, naturally. There wasn’t really anything else we could talk about. Just about life in general… In short, those who had put me in the cell with Khodorkovsky didn’t get anything from me. I was released. Before trial: my trial’s still coming up. My lawyer took care of things. They wanted information out of me. I explained that Khodorkovsky won’t give it, he’s not a stupid person. They told me to watch how he behaved, what he’s like when he comes back from the lawyers, what he writes and to whom. Keep an eye on him, maybe he’s ready to commit suicide, to set us up. They never did get anything serious out of me. He controls the situation well by himself; education and life experience help.

He talked about politics… that a tax – I don’t remember which one – well, anyway, he’d been fighting for taxes. If they’re going to be a lot bigger, then they won’t be able to work. When they, the businessmen, got together – I don’t remember the names – someone proposed a new tax, but he got up and said: “I know who will benefit from this, into whose pocket this tax will fall. He argued about it; in short, they didn’t adopt the tax. And because of this he got in someone’s way. Someone decided that he was going to nominate himself for the post of president.

We also talked a bit about the case. As I understood it, they’d filed new charges against him for stealing 15 billion dollars. Mikhail Borisovich told me that all of this money had gone exactly where it was supposed to go, not into his personal pocket. And all the reports were laid out on the company’s website. He said that if he’d agreed with the charges against him, he’d have gotten a suspended sentence. “But I”, he says, “can’t lie.” That’s the kind of person he is. He understands that they’re going to add on a new sentence.

Photo of Anton Morozov by Grigory Pasko

What’s the daily routine like? The usual. We got up at 6 in the morning. Khodorkovsky doesn’t eat breakfast, just some juice, fruits, biscuits. He eats everything at lunch. He doesn’t complain about the food. We’d start the cleanup, wash the floors, taking turns. I could have done it myself, but I didn’t offer, so I could be at least a little bit equal with him. We watched TV. Mostly the news for him. Inspection at 8 AM sharp. Stripped to the waist. The inspection is conducted by all the top brass, the superintendent colonel who, as Khodorkovsky told me, travels everywhere with him. Between 9 and 10, they drive him to the procuracy. Here, in Chita, such a big deal, six escort vehicles, three of them from the road police.

They don’t feed him lunch at the procuracy. He mutinied about that. I didn’t even ask him about that. He looks normal. He exercises, lies down to sleep, gets a good night’s rest… Well, he does take some tablets to calm him down now and then. Always taking notes… I snuck a peek at what he was writing: need to reply to such and such a letter, write a complaint – he scribbles everything down, keeps notes. He writes letters. He gets a lot of letters. Definitely at least 60 a week. From all over the world. His friends have scattered all over, they all write to him.

Ice him? They might. He’s got loads of information about everybody, I don’t remember their names. My head was spinning just from being with such a person.

Why did I decide to give an interview? I sympathize with Khodorkovsky. My opinion: everything that’s going on around him is the scheming of our politicians. My opinion: he’s good, simply as a person… Never lies.

Well, I also came to you because… Well, you know how I accidentally ran into Andrey, and he offered… Not for the money, just… I mean, I can’t even tell you anything like that anyway, really. I don’t even remember the names.. . If they lock me up again, they’ll come to me again and say that I’ve got to sit with Khodorkovsky. They didn’t promise me anything. I just went along for the ride to take a look, to have a chat… Two people in a cell is better than forty, after all.

Yes, maybe the trial will be here. This is lawlessness. He’s writing complaints about it. But it’s hard to fight with our system.

Obligatory afterword

As Morozov himself has said, he is not a novice in the prison system. No doubt he understands that he’s not going to get praised for telling how he had been instructed at being a “brood hen”. But they probably won’t do anything nasty, either: the connection between the nastiness and this interview will be too obvious.

The proposal to meet with me was made to him, as I understand it, by a respected person in the criminal world. And as Anton says himself, he didn’t tell me anything “like that” anyway. But he did say the main thing: Khodorkovsky’s operative tracking group (and I found out about the existence of such a group from various sources) places “brood hens” in his cell, and is watching him constantly. No doubt they look through not only all of his mail, but all the case documents, too. What kind of real defense can you talk about in such conditions?

[Translator’s note: The term “operative tracking group” may sound somewhat confusing. Under Russian law operativny refers to something akin to ordinary criminal police work – investigating crimes, conducting surveillance to find fugitive criminals, etc. There is nothing in the law, however, about 24-hour video observation, opening mail, prohibiting visitations, planting informants, etc. without the sanction of a court, as is being done with Khodorkovsky. Ordinarily, a prison will have an “operative group” in-house, to manage the team of informants, among other things. It is unprecedented that a special “operative tracking group” has been created just to keep watch on a single prisoner and never let him out of its sight.]

And one more thing. Naturally, I phoned one of Khodorkovsky’s lawyers and asked if the name Morozov was familiar to him. Yes, I was told, there had been someone by that name sitting with Mikhail Borisovich in the isolator in January.

I also found a person who knows Morozov. Businessman Yuri Mairy said that Morozov had once stolen items from his apartment– a television, a large sum of money… “He is a drug addict”, said Yuri. “He always needs money. He’ll do anything to get his next fix…”

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Pasko on Khodorkovsky’s Cellmate

Robert Amsterdam, who has pulled off the greatest coup in and service to the Russia blogosphere to date by signing up Russian hero journalist Grigori Pasko (pictured) as a columnist and arranging to translate his work, offers the following fascinating account from Pasko featuring “an exclusive, first-ever interview with one of Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s cellmates, which illustrates like few other sources the day-to-day life inside the contemporary Russian gulag, courtesy of the great human rights hero Grigory Pasko. It is a testament to Pasko’s strength of will to track down this informant and delve into these issues, as he himself languished unjustly for many years in a Russian prison.” One cannot possibly praise highly enough the quality of Amsterdam’s blog, especially in offering many original translations and various other forms of original content. If his professionalism is any indication of that of his client, Khodorkhovsky’s jailing must be recorded as one of the great tragedies of Russian history, equal to the jailing of Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn. Russia will pay in blood for generations because of these outrages.

Khodorkovsky with a “Brood Hen”

By Grigory Pasko, journalist

Obligatory foreword

The thought suddenly occurred to me: why aren’t there any interviews anywhere with those who at various times and in various places shared a cell with Khodorkovsky? I know from personal experience: tell me who you did time with, and I’ll tell you HOW you did your time. In short, I found a whole bunch of people who had been together with MBK in the Krasnokamensk “zone” and in the Chita “isolator”. Not everyone agreed to be interviewed on tape. Andrey V., the former foreman of the sewing shop at correctional colony IK-10, did agree. Our talk was long and detailed. Right at the start of our conversation, he told me “I already know all about you…”

An hour after we had said our goodbyes, Andrey V. phoned me and said: “There’s a person. He sat a month with Khodorkovsky in the same cell. I don’t need to tell you he wasn’t ‘just’ sitting there…”

I understand what he means: they wouldn’t put just anybody in the same cell as THIS jailbird. No, they would place a “brood hen” – a specially trained prisoner-informant. The “brood hen’s” job is to listen and to hear everything his cellmate lives and breathes, and then to report all of this to those who put him in the cell to sit there – just like a farmer puts a real brood hen on eggs to sit on them until they hatch.

At first I wanted to call this article “An interview with a brood hen”. But then I decided that it would be more logical to write it in the form of a monologue. And so, I give you the man who sat in the same cell with Mikhail Khodorkovsky in the Chita isolator from early January through early February 2007.

My name is Anton Morozov. I’m 24 years old. I was born and raised in Chita. I finished high school, but couldn’t get into college anywhere – I’d gotten my first jail term. For fraud. I was a steward. (Author’s commentary: In the camps, a person who becomes a steward or gets appointed to some other position by the administration becomes “knitted” or “red” [a “trusty” in English]; that is, obligated to cooperate with the administration of the “place of deprivation of liberty” of his own volition.)

… In the isolator, a person from our operative unit said to me: “Sit a while with a person…” Oh, and there were also two colonels from Krasnoyarsk and one from Moscow… “You sit, keep an eye on the person, see what’s what. Don’t try to pull anything out of him. Just report what he says himself to us. But be careful – he’s already an experienced person.”

They put me in a security cell. (Author’s commentary: a security cell is one where the security regimen established by the Internal Regulations is strictly and rigorously observed, which happens rarely.) Reveille at 6 AM, inspection… Naturally, I’d heard about Khodorkovsky before this. The cell was in the old building on the third floor. They’d done the building up specially; there’s a special burrow (corridor) there. It’s all very hush-hush: the cell doesn’t even have a number on it. The duty officers are all with the rank of captain or higher. The system is that they live a month, and then get replaced. They’re not locals; they’re from Krasnoyarsk. They don’t tell the innkeeper (prison warden) anything.

They put me there in January, early in the month, and on February 2 they released me. That whole time Khodorkovsky and I sat there together, the two of us. The cell has a television, and it’s all neat and clean. Six shkons (beds), two-level. Bedside tables.. Nothing European or anything, just the typical stuff. There’s a video camera in the cell. From what I was told, the images are somehow sent to Moscow… One window. Double pane, bars, another double pane, and more bars.

The administration keeps things under very serious observation. They even measure the temperature in the cell. Sauna once a week, right there on the same floor.

There’s two guys sitting with Platon (Lebedev). I was told they were supposed to put one more person in with us, in order to divert suspicion from me. They told me: “The lawyers are going to poke holes in (examine) you, so don’t stick your neck out, don’t set yourself up, just sit tight.”

He’s using the formal form of address with me. At first I was using the informal, but then I switched to the formal too. We washed the floors ourselves, taking turns. We ate gruel, but he’s got the means, so he buys everything in the prison shop. Doesn’t smoke.

At the very beginning, we didn’t talk for three-four days. He loaded (offered) books on me.. . He reads Pikul, Chase, newspapers in English, “Times” for example… He gets publications from there.. He’s got four children, a son who’s finishing up his studies in America A daughter, another two sons…

A lawyer comes to see him, not one but many. They sit there 4-5 hours at a time, discussing.
I ask how come they stay so long. He says that they’re working on problems, both with the investigation and with the firm. He told me how he’d started with a cooperative, rose up by selling computers, occupied a post in the Komsomol, earned extra money working as a janitor, a carpenter, he used to repair windows on high-rises in Moscow… He told me about pyramid schemes, how some people rise up (get rich).

Maybe in a week or so he started to make contact with me. Asked about life in the camps, what things are like there. I’d already been in IK-3 before. He told about the attempt against him happened. He was friends, or rather, he was just associating with this one person; they had a trusting relationship. Yes, yes, with Kuchma. Mikhail Borisovich said: “I’m sleeping, and I woke up because I’d sensed the glint of a knife. A shoemaker’s knife. Kuchma had wanted to get me in the eye, but glanced off the bridge of my nose instead.” Now he (Khodorkovsky) has a scar on his nose. He lucked out, in other words. Well, and they’ve told me the situation is the same as in the whole camp system. There are men of status (polozhentsy), overseers (smotryashchiye). Apparently, Kuchma had a conflict with the blatnye (full-time professional criminals) and he agreed to do this, with Khodorkovsky, so they’d get him out of the “zone”. That’s possible. But I also heard from one of the officers that Khodorkovsky had set this whole thing up, and that one hundred thousand dollars had even been transferred to Kuchma’s account. Do I personally believe this? No, I don’t. Oh yeah, and then there was this dirty rumour that Khodorkovsky was supposedly making passes at Kuchma. There couldn’t have been any intimate relations there, of course.

…We’re different people, naturally. There wasn’t really anything else we could talk about. Just about life in general… In short, those who had put me in the cell with Khodorkovsky didn’t get anything from me. I was released. Before trial: my trial’s still coming up. My lawyer took care of things. They wanted information out of me. I explained that Khodorkovsky won’t give it, he’s not a stupid person. They told me to watch how he behaved, what he’s like when he comes back from the lawyers, what he writes and to whom. Keep an eye on him, maybe he’s ready to commit suicide, to set us up. They never did get anything serious out of me. He controls the situation well by himself; education and life experience help.

He talked about politics… that a tax – I don’t remember which one – well, anyway, he’d been fighting for taxes. If they’re going to be a lot bigger, then they won’t be able to work. When they, the businessmen, got together – I don’t remember the names – someone proposed a new tax, but he got up and said: “I know who will benefit from this, into whose pocket this tax will fall. He argued about it; in short, they didn’t adopt the tax. And because of this he got in someone’s way. Someone decided that he was going to nominate himself for the post of president.

We also talked a bit about the case. As I understood it, they’d filed new charges against him for stealing 15 billion dollars. Mikhail Borisovich told me that all of this money had gone exactly where it was supposed to go, not into his personal pocket. And all the reports were laid out on the company’s website. He said that if he’d agreed with the charges against him, he’d have gotten a suspended sentence. “But I”, he says, “can’t lie.” That’s the kind of person he is. He understands that they’re going to add on a new sentence.

Photo of Anton Morozov by Grigory Pasko

What’s the daily routine like? The usual. We got up at 6 in the morning. Khodorkovsky doesn’t eat breakfast, just some juice, fruits, biscuits. He eats everything at lunch. He doesn’t complain about the food. We’d start the cleanup, wash the floors, taking turns. I could have done it myself, but I didn’t offer, so I could be at least a little bit equal with him. We watched TV. Mostly the news for him. Inspection at 8 AM sharp. Stripped to the waist. The inspection is conducted by all the top brass, the superintendent colonel who, as Khodorkovsky told me, travels everywhere with him. Between 9 and 10, they drive him to the procuracy. Here, in Chita, such a big deal, six escort vehicles, three of them from the road police.

They don’t feed him lunch at the procuracy. He mutinied about that. I didn’t even ask him about that. He looks normal. He exercises, lies down to sleep, gets a good night’s rest… Well, he does take some tablets to calm him down now and then. Always taking notes… I snuck a peek at what he was writing: need to reply to such and such a letter, write a complaint – he scribbles everything down, keeps notes. He writes letters. He gets a lot of letters. Definitely at least 60 a week. From all over the world. His friends have scattered all over, they all write to him.

Ice him? They might. He’s got loads of information about everybody, I don’t remember their names. My head was spinning just from being with such a person.

Why did I decide to give an interview? I sympathize with Khodorkovsky. My opinion: everything that’s going on around him is the scheming of our politicians. My opinion: he’s good, simply as a person… Never lies.

Well, I also came to you because… Well, you know how I accidentally ran into Andrey, and he offered… Not for the money, just… I mean, I can’t even tell you anything like that anyway, really. I don’t even remember the names.. . If they lock me up again, they’ll come to me again and say that I’ve got to sit with Khodorkovsky. They didn’t promise me anything. I just went along for the ride to take a look, to have a chat… Two people in a cell is better than forty, after all.

Yes, maybe the trial will be here. This is lawlessness. He’s writing complaints about it. But it’s hard to fight with our system.

Obligatory afterword

As Morozov himself has said, he is not a novice in the prison system. No doubt he understands that he’s not going to get praised for telling how he had been instructed at being a “brood hen”. But they probably won’t do anything nasty, either: the connection between the nastiness and this interview will be too obvious.

The proposal to meet with me was made to him, as I understand it, by a respected person in the criminal world. And as Anton says himself, he didn’t tell me anything “like that” anyway. But he did say the main thing: Khodorkovsky’s operative tracking group (and I found out about the existence of such a group from various sources) places “brood hens” in his cell, and is watching him constantly. No doubt they look through not only all of his mail, but all the case documents, too. What kind of real defense can you talk about in such conditions?

[Translator’s note: The term “operative tracking group” may sound somewhat confusing. Under Russian law operativny refers to something akin to ordinary criminal police work – investigating crimes, conducting surveillance to find fugitive criminals, etc. There is nothing in the law, however, about 24-hour video observation, opening mail, prohibiting visitations, planting informants, etc. without the sanction of a court, as is being done with Khodorkovsky. Ordinarily, a prison will have an “operative group” in-house, to manage the team of informants, among other things. It is unprecedented that a special “operative tracking group” has been created just to keep watch on a single prisoner and never let him out of its sight.]

And one more thing. Naturally, I phoned one of Khodorkovsky’s lawyers and asked if the name Morozov was familiar to him. Yes, I was told, there had been someone by that name sitting with Mikhail Borisovich in the isolator in January.

I also found a person who knows Morozov. Businessman Yuri Mairy said that Morozov had once stolen items from his apartment– a television, a large sum of money… “He is a drug addict”, said Yuri. “He always needs money. He’ll do anything to get his next fix…”

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Pasko on Khodorkovsky’s Cellmate

Robert Amsterdam, who has pulled off the greatest coup in and service to the Russia blogosphere to date by signing up Russian hero journalist Grigori Pasko (pictured) as a columnist and arranging to translate his work, offers the following fascinating account from Pasko featuring “an exclusive, first-ever interview with one of Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s cellmates, which illustrates like few other sources the day-to-day life inside the contemporary Russian gulag, courtesy of the great human rights hero Grigory Pasko. It is a testament to Pasko’s strength of will to track down this informant and delve into these issues, as he himself languished unjustly for many years in a Russian prison.” One cannot possibly praise highly enough the quality of Amsterdam’s blog, especially in offering many original translations and various other forms of original content. If his professionalism is any indication of that of his client, Khodorkhovsky’s jailing must be recorded as one of the great tragedies of Russian history, equal to the jailing of Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn. Russia will pay in blood for generations because of these outrages.

Khodorkovsky with a “Brood Hen”

By Grigory Pasko, journalist

Obligatory foreword

The thought suddenly occurred to me: why aren’t there any interviews anywhere with those who at various times and in various places shared a cell with Khodorkovsky? I know from personal experience: tell me who you did time with, and I’ll tell you HOW you did your time. In short, I found a whole bunch of people who had been together with MBK in the Krasnokamensk “zone” and in the Chita “isolator”. Not everyone agreed to be interviewed on tape. Andrey V., the former foreman of the sewing shop at correctional colony IK-10, did agree. Our talk was long and detailed. Right at the start of our conversation, he told me “I already know all about you…”

An hour after we had said our goodbyes, Andrey V. phoned me and said: “There’s a person. He sat a month with Khodorkovsky in the same cell. I don’t need to tell you he wasn’t ‘just’ sitting there…”

I understand what he means: they wouldn’t put just anybody in the same cell as THIS jailbird. No, they would place a “brood hen” – a specially trained prisoner-informant. The “brood hen’s” job is to listen and to hear everything his cellmate lives and breathes, and then to report all of this to those who put him in the cell to sit there – just like a farmer puts a real brood hen on eggs to sit on them until they hatch.

At first I wanted to call this article “An interview with a brood hen”. But then I decided that it would be more logical to write it in the form of a monologue. And so, I give you the man who sat in the same cell with Mikhail Khodorkovsky in the Chita isolator from early January through early February 2007.

My name is Anton Morozov. I’m 24 years old. I was born and raised in Chita. I finished high school, but couldn’t get into college anywhere – I’d gotten my first jail term. For fraud. I was a steward. (Author’s commentary: In the camps, a person who becomes a steward or gets appointed to some other position by the administration becomes “knitted” or “red” [a “trusty” in English]; that is, obligated to cooperate with the administration of the “place of deprivation of liberty” of his own volition.)

… In the isolator, a person from our operative unit said to me: “Sit a while with a person…” Oh, and there were also two colonels from Krasnoyarsk and one from Moscow… “You sit, keep an eye on the person, see what’s what. Don’t try to pull anything out of him. Just report what he says himself to us. But be careful – he’s already an experienced person.”

They put me in a security cell. (Author’s commentary: a security cell is one where the security regimen established by the Internal Regulations is strictly and rigorously observed, which happens rarely.) Reveille at 6 AM, inspection… Naturally, I’d heard about Khodorkovsky before this. The cell was in the old building on the third floor. They’d done the building up specially; there’s a special burrow (corridor) there. It’s all very hush-hush: the cell doesn’t even have a number on it. The duty officers are all with the rank of captain or higher. The system is that they live a month, and then get replaced. They’re not locals; they’re from Krasnoyarsk. They don’t tell the innkeeper (prison warden) anything.

They put me there in January, early in the month, and on February 2 they released me. That whole time Khodorkovsky and I sat there together, the two of us. The cell has a television, and it’s all neat and clean. Six shkons (beds), two-level. Bedside tables.. Nothing European or anything, just the typical stuff. There’s a video camera in the cell. From what I was told, the images are somehow sent to Moscow… One window. Double pane, bars, another double pane, and more bars.

The administration keeps things under very serious observation. They even measure the temperature in the cell. Sauna once a week, right there on the same floor.

There’s two guys sitting with Platon (Lebedev). I was told they were supposed to put one more person in with us, in order to divert suspicion from me. They told me: “The lawyers are going to poke holes in (examine) you, so don’t stick your neck out, don’t set yourself up, just sit tight.”

He’s using the formal form of address with me. At first I was using the informal, but then I switched to the formal too. We washed the floors ourselves, taking turns. We ate gruel, but he’s got the means, so he buys everything in the prison shop. Doesn’t smoke.

At the very beginning, we didn’t talk for three-four days. He loaded (offered) books on me.. . He reads Pikul, Chase, newspapers in English, “Times” for example… He gets publications from there.. He’s got four children, a son who’s finishing up his studies in America A daughter, another two sons…

A lawyer comes to see him, not one but many. They sit there 4-5 hours at a time, discussing.
I ask how come they stay so long. He says that they’re working on problems, both with the investigation and with the firm. He told me how he’d started with a cooperative, rose up by selling computers, occupied a post in the Komsomol, earned extra money working as a janitor, a carpenter, he used to repair windows on high-rises in Moscow… He told me about pyramid schemes, how some people rise up (get rich).

Maybe in a week or so he started to make contact with me. Asked about life in the camps, what things are like there. I’d already been in IK-3 before. He told about the attempt against him happened. He was friends, or rather, he was just associating with this one person; they had a trusting relationship. Yes, yes, with Kuchma. Mikhail Borisovich said: “I’m sleeping, and I woke up because I’d sensed the glint of a knife. A shoemaker’s knife. Kuchma had wanted to get me in the eye, but glanced off the bridge of my nose instead.” Now he (Khodorkovsky) has a scar on his nose. He lucked out, in other words. Well, and they’ve told me the situation is the same as in the whole camp system. There are men of status (polozhentsy), overseers (smotryashchiye). Apparently, Kuchma had a conflict with the blatnye (full-time professional criminals) and he agreed to do this, with Khodorkovsky, so they’d get him out of the “zone”. That’s possible. But I also heard from one of the officers that Khodorkovsky had set this whole thing up, and that one hundred thousand dollars had even been transferred to Kuchma’s account. Do I personally believe this? No, I don’t. Oh yeah, and then there was this dirty rumour that Khodorkovsky was supposedly making passes at Kuchma. There couldn’t have been any intimate relations there, of course.

…We’re different people, naturally. There wasn’t really anything else we could talk about. Just about life in general… In short, those who had put me in the cell with Khodorkovsky didn’t get anything from me. I was released. Before trial: my trial’s still coming up. My lawyer took care of things. They wanted information out of me. I explained that Khodorkovsky won’t give it, he’s not a stupid person. They told me to watch how he behaved, what he’s like when he comes back from the lawyers, what he writes and to whom. Keep an eye on him, maybe he’s ready to commit suicide, to set us up. They never did get anything serious out of me. He controls the situation well by himself; education and life experience help.

He talked about politics… that a tax – I don’t remember which one – well, anyway, he’d been fighting for taxes. If they’re going to be a lot bigger, then they won’t be able to work. When they, the businessmen, got together – I don’t remember the names – someone proposed a new tax, but he got up and said: “I know who will benefit from this, into whose pocket this tax will fall. He argued about it; in short, they didn’t adopt the tax. And because of this he got in someone’s way. Someone decided that he was going to nominate himself for the post of president.

We also talked a bit about the case. As I understood it, they’d filed new charges against him for stealing 15 billion dollars. Mikhail Borisovich told me that all of this money had gone exactly where it was supposed to go, not into his personal pocket. And all the reports were laid out on the company’s website. He said that if he’d agreed with the charges against him, he’d have gotten a suspended sentence. “But I”, he says, “can’t lie.” That’s the kind of person he is. He understands that they’re going to add on a new sentence.

Photo of Anton Morozov by Grigory Pasko

What’s the daily routine like? The usual. We got up at 6 in the morning. Khodorkovsky doesn’t eat breakfast, just some juice, fruits, biscuits. He eats everything at lunch. He doesn’t complain about the food. We’d start the cleanup, wash the floors, taking turns. I could have done it myself, but I didn’t offer, so I could be at least a little bit equal with him. We watched TV. Mostly the news for him. Inspection at 8 AM sharp. Stripped to the waist. The inspection is conducted by all the top brass, the superintendent colonel who, as Khodorkovsky told me, travels everywhere with him. Between 9 and 10, they drive him to the procuracy. Here, in Chita, such a big deal, six escort vehicles, three of them from the road police.

They don’t feed him lunch at the procuracy. He mutinied about that. I didn’t even ask him about that. He looks normal. He exercises, lies down to sleep, gets a good night’s rest… Well, he does take some tablets to calm him down now and then. Always taking notes… I snuck a peek at what he was writing: need to reply to such and such a letter, write a complaint – he scribbles everything down, keeps notes. He writes letters. He gets a lot of letters. Definitely at least 60 a week. From all over the world. His friends have scattered all over, they all write to him.

Ice him? They might. He’s got loads of information about everybody, I don’t remember their names. My head was spinning just from being with such a person.

Why did I decide to give an interview? I sympathize with Khodorkovsky. My opinion: everything that’s going on around him is the scheming of our politicians. My opinion: he’s good, simply as a person… Never lies.

Well, I also came to you because… Well, you know how I accidentally ran into Andrey, and he offered… Not for the money, just… I mean, I can’t even tell you anything like that anyway, really. I don’t even remember the names.. . If they lock me up again, they’ll come to me again and say that I’ve got to sit with Khodorkovsky. They didn’t promise me anything. I just went along for the ride to take a look, to have a chat… Two people in a cell is better than forty, after all.

Yes, maybe the trial will be here. This is lawlessness. He’s writing complaints about it. But it’s hard to fight with our system.

Obligatory afterword

As Morozov himself has said, he is not a novice in the prison system. No doubt he understands that he’s not going to get praised for telling how he had been instructed at being a “brood hen”. But they probably won’t do anything nasty, either: the connection between the nastiness and this interview will be too obvious.

The proposal to meet with me was made to him, as I understand it, by a respected person in the criminal world. And as Anton says himself, he didn’t tell me anything “like that” anyway. But he did say the main thing: Khodorkovsky’s operative tracking group (and I found out about the existence of such a group from various sources) places “brood hens” in his cell, and is watching him constantly. No doubt they look through not only all of his mail, but all the case documents, too. What kind of real defense can you talk about in such conditions?

[Translator’s note: The term “operative tracking group” may sound somewhat confusing. Under Russian law operativny refers to something akin to ordinary criminal police work – investigating crimes, conducting surveillance to find fugitive criminals, etc. There is nothing in the law, however, about 24-hour video observation, opening mail, prohibiting visitations, planting informants, etc. without the sanction of a court, as is being done with Khodorkovsky. Ordinarily, a prison will have an “operative group” in-house, to manage the team of informants, among other things. It is unprecedented that a special “operative tracking group” has been created just to keep watch on a single prisoner and never let him out of its sight.]

And one more thing. Naturally, I phoned one of Khodorkovsky’s lawyers and asked if the name Morozov was familiar to him. Yes, I was told, there had been someone by that name sitting with Mikhail Borisovich in the isolator in January.

I also found a person who knows Morozov. Businessman Yuri Mairy said that Morozov had once stolen items from his apartment– a television, a large sum of money… “He is a drug addict”, said Yuri. “He always needs money. He’ll do anything to get his next fix…”

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Pasko on Khodorkovsky’s Cellmate

Robert Amsterdam, who has pulled off the greatest coup in and service to the Russia blogosphere to date by signing up Russian hero journalist Grigori Pasko (pictured) as a columnist and arranging to translate his work, offers the following fascinating account from Pasko featuring “an exclusive, first-ever interview with one of Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s cellmates, which illustrates like few other sources the day-to-day life inside the contemporary Russian gulag, courtesy of the great human rights hero Grigory Pasko. It is a testament to Pasko’s strength of will to track down this informant and delve into these issues, as he himself languished unjustly for many years in a Russian prison.” One cannot possibly praise highly enough the quality of Amsterdam’s blog, especially in offering many original translations and various other forms of original content. If his professionalism is any indication of that of his client, Khodorkhovsky’s jailing must be recorded as one of the great tragedies of Russian history, equal to the jailing of Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn. Russia will pay in blood for generations because of these outrages.

Khodorkovsky with a “Brood Hen”

By Grigory Pasko, journalist

Obligatory foreword

The thought suddenly occurred to me: why aren’t there any interviews anywhere with those who at various times and in various places shared a cell with Khodorkovsky? I know from personal experience: tell me who you did time with, and I’ll tell you HOW you did your time. In short, I found a whole bunch of people who had been together with MBK in the Krasnokamensk “zone” and in the Chita “isolator”. Not everyone agreed to be interviewed on tape. Andrey V., the former foreman of the sewing shop at correctional colony IK-10, did agree. Our talk was long and detailed. Right at the start of our conversation, he told me “I already know all about you…”

An hour after we had said our goodbyes, Andrey V. phoned me and said: “There’s a person. He sat a month with Khodorkovsky in the same cell. I don’t need to tell you he wasn’t ‘just’ sitting there…”

I understand what he means: they wouldn’t put just anybody in the same cell as THIS jailbird. No, they would place a “brood hen” – a specially trained prisoner-informant. The “brood hen’s” job is to listen and to hear everything his cellmate lives and breathes, and then to report all of this to those who put him in the cell to sit there – just like a farmer puts a real brood hen on eggs to sit on them until they hatch.

At first I wanted to call this article “An interview with a brood hen”. But then I decided that it would be more logical to write it in the form of a monologue. And so, I give you the man who sat in the same cell with Mikhail Khodorkovsky in the Chita isolator from early January through early February 2007.

My name is Anton Morozov. I’m 24 years old. I was born and raised in Chita. I finished high school, but couldn’t get into college anywhere – I’d gotten my first jail term. For fraud. I was a steward. (Author’s commentary: In the camps, a person who becomes a steward or gets appointed to some other position by the administration becomes “knitted” or “red” [a “trusty” in English]; that is, obligated to cooperate with the administration of the “place of deprivation of liberty” of his own volition.)

… In the isolator, a person from our operative unit said to me: “Sit a while with a person…” Oh, and there were also two colonels from Krasnoyarsk and one from Moscow… “You sit, keep an eye on the person, see what’s what. Don’t try to pull anything out of him. Just report what he says himself to us. But be careful – he’s already an experienced person.”

They put me in a security cell. (Author’s commentary: a security cell is one where the security regimen established by the Internal Regulations is strictly and rigorously observed, which happens rarely.) Reveille at 6 AM, inspection… Naturally, I’d heard about Khodorkovsky before this. The cell was in the old building on the third floor. They’d done the building up specially; there’s a special burrow (corridor) there. It’s all very hush-hush: the cell doesn’t even have a number on it. The duty officers are all with the rank of captain or higher. The system is that they live a month, and then get replaced. They’re not locals; they’re from Krasnoyarsk. They don’t tell the innkeeper (prison warden) anything.

They put me there in January, early in the month, and on February 2 they released me. That whole time Khodorkovsky and I sat there together, the two of us. The cell has a television, and it’s all neat and clean. Six shkons (beds), two-level. Bedside tables.. Nothing European or anything, just the typical stuff. There’s a video camera in the cell. From what I was told, the images are somehow sent to Moscow… One window. Double pane, bars, another double pane, and more bars.

The administration keeps things under very serious observation. They even measure the temperature in the cell. Sauna once a week, right there on the same floor.

There’s two guys sitting with Platon (Lebedev). I was told they were supposed to put one more person in with us, in order to divert suspicion from me. They told me: “The lawyers are going to poke holes in (examine) you, so don’t stick your neck out, don’t set yourself up, just sit tight.”

He’s using the formal form of address with me. At first I was using the informal, but then I switched to the formal too. We washed the floors ourselves, taking turns. We ate gruel, but he’s got the means, so he buys everything in the prison shop. Doesn’t smoke.

At the very beginning, we didn’t talk for three-four days. He loaded (offered) books on me.. . He reads Pikul, Chase, newspapers in English, “Times” for example… He gets publications from there.. He’s got four children, a son who’s finishing up his studies in America A daughter, another two sons…

A lawyer comes to see him, not one but many. They sit there 4-5 hours at a time, discussing.
I ask how come they stay so long. He says that they’re working on problems, both with the investigation and with the firm. He told me how he’d started with a cooperative, rose up by selling computers, occupied a post in the Komsomol, earned extra money working as a janitor, a carpenter, he used to repair windows on high-rises in Moscow… He told me about pyramid schemes, how some people rise up (get rich).

Maybe in a week or so he started to make contact with me. Asked about life in the camps, what things are like there. I’d already been in IK-3 before. He told about the attempt against him happened. He was friends, or rather, he was just associating with this one person; they had a trusting relationship. Yes, yes, with Kuchma. Mikhail Borisovich said: “I’m sleeping, and I woke up because I’d sensed the glint of a knife. A shoemaker’s knife. Kuchma had wanted to get me in the eye, but glanced off the bridge of my nose instead.” Now he (Khodorkovsky) has a scar on his nose. He lucked out, in other words. Well, and they’ve told me the situation is the same as in the whole camp system. There are men of status (polozhentsy), overseers (smotryashchiye). Apparently, Kuchma had a conflict with the blatnye (full-time professional criminals) and he agreed to do this, with Khodorkovsky, so they’d get him out of the “zone”. That’s possible. But I also heard from one of the officers that Khodorkovsky had set this whole thing up, and that one hundred thousand dollars had even been transferred to Kuchma’s account. Do I personally believe this? No, I don’t. Oh yeah, and then there was this dirty rumour that Khodorkovsky was supposedly making passes at Kuchma. There couldn’t have been any intimate relations there, of course.

…We’re different people, naturally. There wasn’t really anything else we could talk about. Just about life in general… In short, those who had put me in the cell with Khodorkovsky didn’t get anything from me. I was released. Before trial: my trial’s still coming up. My lawyer took care of things. They wanted information out of me. I explained that Khodorkovsky won’t give it, he’s not a stupid person. They told me to watch how he behaved, what he’s like when he comes back from the lawyers, what he writes and to whom. Keep an eye on him, maybe he’s ready to commit suicide, to set us up. They never did get anything serious out of me. He controls the situation well by himself; education and life experience help.

He talked about politics… that a tax – I don’t remember which one – well, anyway, he’d been fighting for taxes. If they’re going to be a lot bigger, then they won’t be able to work. When they, the businessmen, got together – I don’t remember the names – someone proposed a new tax, but he got up and said: “I know who will benefit from this, into whose pocket this tax will fall. He argued about it; in short, they didn’t adopt the tax. And because of this he got in someone’s way. Someone decided that he was going to nominate himself for the post of president.

We also talked a bit about the case. As I understood it, they’d filed new charges against him for stealing 15 billion dollars. Mikhail Borisovich told me that all of this money had gone exactly where it was supposed to go, not into his personal pocket. And all the reports were laid out on the company’s website. He said that if he’d agreed with the charges against him, he’d have gotten a suspended sentence. “But I”, he says, “can’t lie.” That’s the kind of person he is. He understands that they’re going to add on a new sentence.

Photo of Anton Morozov by Grigory Pasko

What’s the daily routine like? The usual. We got up at 6 in the morning. Khodorkovsky doesn’t eat breakfast, just some juice, fruits, biscuits. He eats everything at lunch. He doesn’t complain about the food. We’d start the cleanup, wash the floors, taking turns. I could have done it myself, but I didn’t offer, so I could be at least a little bit equal with him. We watched TV. Mostly the news for him. Inspection at 8 AM sharp. Stripped to the waist. The inspection is conducted by all the top brass, the superintendent colonel who, as Khodorkovsky told me, travels everywhere with him. Between 9 and 10, they drive him to the procuracy. Here, in Chita, such a big deal, six escort vehicles, three of them from the road police.

They don’t feed him lunch at the procuracy. He mutinied about that. I didn’t even ask him about that. He looks normal. He exercises, lies down to sleep, gets a good night’s rest… Well, he does take some tablets to calm him down now and then. Always taking notes… I snuck a peek at what he was writing: need to reply to such and such a letter, write a complaint – he scribbles everything down, keeps notes. He writes letters. He gets a lot of letters. Definitely at least 60 a week. From all over the world. His friends have scattered all over, they all write to him.

Ice him? They might. He’s got loads of information about everybody, I don’t remember their names. My head was spinning just from being with such a person.

Why did I decide to give an interview? I sympathize with Khodorkovsky. My opinion: everything that’s going on around him is the scheming of our politicians. My opinion: he’s good, simply as a person… Never lies.

Well, I also came to you because… Well, you know how I accidentally ran into Andrey, and he offered… Not for the money, just… I mean, I can’t even tell you anything like that anyway, really. I don’t even remember the names.. . If they lock me up again, they’ll come to me again and say that I’ve got to sit with Khodorkovsky. They didn’t promise me anything. I just went along for the ride to take a look, to have a chat… Two people in a cell is better than forty, after all.

Yes, maybe the trial will be here. This is lawlessness. He’s writing complaints about it. But it’s hard to fight with our system.

Obligatory afterword

As Morozov himself has said, he is not a novice in the prison system. No doubt he understands that he’s not going to get praised for telling how he had been instructed at being a “brood hen”. But they probably won’t do anything nasty, either: the connection between the nastiness and this interview will be too obvious.

The proposal to meet with me was made to him, as I understand it, by a respected person in the criminal world. And as Anton says himself, he didn’t tell me anything “like that” anyway. But he did say the main thing: Khodorkovsky’s operative tracking group (and I found out about the existence of such a group from various sources) places “brood hens” in his cell, and is watching him constantly. No doubt they look through not only all of his mail, but all the case documents, too. What kind of real defense can you talk about in such conditions?

[Translator’s note: The term “operative tracking group” may sound somewhat confusing. Under Russian law operativny refers to something akin to ordinary criminal police work – investigating crimes, conducting surveillance to find fugitive criminals, etc. There is nothing in the law, however, about 24-hour video observation, opening mail, prohibiting visitations, planting informants, etc. without the sanction of a court, as is being done with Khodorkovsky. Ordinarily, a prison will have an “operative group” in-house, to manage the team of informants, among other things. It is unprecedented that a special “operative tracking group” has been created just to keep watch on a single prisoner and never let him out of its sight.]

And one more thing. Naturally, I phoned one of Khodorkovsky’s lawyers and asked if the name Morozov was familiar to him. Yes, I was told, there had been someone by that name sitting with Mikhail Borisovich in the isolator in January.

I also found a person who knows Morozov. Businessman Yuri Mairy said that Morozov had once stolen items from his apartment– a television, a large sum of money… “He is a drug addict”, said Yuri. “He always needs money. He’ll do anything to get his next fix…”

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Putley on Chechnya and Russophiles

Reader Jeremy Putley, one of the most valuable and insightful contributors to Russia blogs around, writes:

Dear LR,

No doubt you have seen the recent CSM piece on Strade’s Chechnya list about paranoid Russian leaders hypocritically bewailing Russophobia.

For what it’s worth, my interpretation of the recent multiple cases of murder of opposition figures in Putin’s Russia is that it’s an extension of the policy of mass murder in Chechnya, where the Russian “leadership” discovered that the way to win the war and impose a fake political settlement was to assassinate or otherwise intimidate (by the extensive use of state terrorism) all those who stood in opposition. Although this barbarism provoked terrorist attacks against “soft” Russian civilian targets for a period of several years, it has now, apparently, won a tactical victory, since there remain very few effective forces still fighting the imposed regime in Chechnya. A policy of murder of all oppositionist figures can win out in an amoral world where criminals are immune from punishment. This is what we see being repeated in Russia now – and not restricted to Russian territory, since murders have been carried out in Qatar and in London. Putin’s gang has discovered there is no downside risk in this strategy, since no penalties arise to chasten the criminals and indeed they are continuing to loot the state with impunity. And the Bush administration has abandoned the moral high ground.

Very truly yours,

Jeremy Putley

It’s worth a lot, Jeremy! Here’s the text Jeremy is referring to, taken from CBS News. Click through to read the comments.

Putin Combats “Russiaphobia”

Soviet-Style Propaganda Publications Launched To Clear Up “Misunderstandings”

Russian President Vladimir Putin and his aides at the Kremlin say they feel surrounded, and they’re not going to take it anymore.

LR: Dear Mr. Putin — If you’d like to discuss the matter, my address is posted on this blog. I’ll be happy to hear from you! As a beginning, I suggest you stop killing people. Us Westerners are funny about that kind of thing, we tend to overreact to political murder. But when in Rome . . .

Russian corporations are being foiled abroad; the Russian state is being unfairly blamed for volatility in global energy markets; and suggestions that the state is eliminating its critics are just preposterous. Why all the bad press? Because of “Russophobia” — an unreasoning Western hostility toward Russia — according to the Kremlin. “I see a campaign here,” Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said in a TV interview last week. “The stronger we are becoming, the greater, perhaps, is the number of those willing… to prevent us from getting stronger.”

Amid all the allegations that the Kremlin — in a reprise of KGB tactics — is behind the mysterious deaths of two investigative journalists and a former KGB agent turned critic in recent months, President Putin is turning to a page out of the old Soviet playbook. His aides are reviving elements of the Soviet Union’s once-massive propaganda machine as well as considering fresh approaches. Novosti, the USSR’s “information agency,” has been renamed RIA-Novosti and is being bolstered by a flood of Putin-era petrocash. It has started an English-language satellite news network called Russia Today and a monthly feature magazine named Russia Profile, both of which carry offerings on the good job Putin is doing in the world and next to nothing on things like the conflict in Chechnya or the murder of government critics. The organization also brings Moscow’s spin to U.S. readers with paid supplements in The Washington Post and other papers.

“Many forgotten forms of work are being restored,” says Pyotr Romanov, a Novosti veteran. “We feel there is a lot of misunderstanding about Russia out there, and that the Russian point of view urgently needs to be expressed in the world media.” But recently, that’s become a tougher sell.

Investigative journalists who died

Ivan Safronov, a reporter for the Kommersant daily who was investigating planned Russian weapons sales to Syria and Iran, fell to his death from a window in his Moscow apartment building last Friday. His paper said he was being pressured by the government to stop his investigations and that he had been questioned multiple times by the Federal Security Service (FSB), the agency that replaced the KGB.

His death followed the mob-style killing of investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya last October in Moscow, who had written extensively about government torture and murder in Chechnya, and the murder by poisoning of former KGB and FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko in London the next month. Litvinenko had accused Putin of mob ties and of ordering Politkovskaya’s murder.

Wednesday, the US Embassy in Moscow confirmed that two Soviet-born American women had been hospitalized for thallium poisoning in Moscow, though both were recovering. How they were poisoned is under investigation.

Many Russians decry cold war cliches

Yet many Russian analysts say they wince when they read stories animated by what they consider cold war cliches, especially in British and U.S. newspapers. “Once again it’s all black and white, and the image of Russia is that of a potential enemy,” says Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of Russia in Global Affairs, an independent foreign policy journal. He says that some Western media outlets “rushed to judgment” on the murder of Litvinenko by suggesting Mr. Putin may have ordered the former Russian spy’s assassination. An organization of intelligence service veterans, “For Spirit, Honor and Dignity,” told the Russian media that it’s thinking about suing the London Telegraph over its Litvinenko coverage. “It was absolutely open slander, we have never seen such staged malevolence,” said a man who answered the group’s Moscow phone this week, but refused to give his name.

And the Russian establishment say they aren’t just being unfairly attacked over politics. When Arcelor, a large European steelmaker, rebuffed a takeover bid by the Russian firm Severstal last year, Moscow officials were quick to point to anti-Russian bias. “The unprecedented propaganda campaign that has been launched… shows that people don’t want to let us into global markets,” said State Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov. And after a January energy blockade of Russia’s neighbor Belarus led to shortages in Europe, the Kremlin blamed the messenger. “The Western mass media are always suffering from an old disease called Russophobia. Only this time it’s energy,” Andrei Reus, deputy minister of industry, told a recent oil and gas conference in Houston.

In addition to the Soviet-style approach, Moscow is also considering Western image boosters. Kommersant reported in January that Russia paid $15 million to the U.S.-based Ketchum Inc. — which has done PR for the U.S. Army and government agencies — to handle publicity for last July’s Group of Eight meeting in St. Petersburg. “This kind of action is badly needed, not to deceive, but to explain [and] make Russia look more accessible,” says Mikhail Maslov, director of the Moscow-based Maslov PR Agency. Some say a Russia flush with oil money and an assertive leader frightens Westerners into a cold war posture. “Can you explain how it is that life is better in Russia today, but Western coverage… is much more negative than it was six years ago?” asks Sergei Markov, a Kremlin-connected analyst. “It’s because Russia is rising off its knees.”

The heavily state-controlled media has, in turn, adopted a more stridently anti-Western tone. “One reason Putin is so popular… is that he is seen as standing up to Western pressure and strengthening Russia’s defenses. Our media merely reflects those feelings,” says Mr. Romanov.

LR: Gee, what a good way to stop “russophobia.” Attack the West and prove the russophobes are right! No wonder Russia is such a brilliant success as a nation!

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

IBD on the Putin Killings

Investor’s Business Daily had the following brilliant observations on the Joyal shooting:

We don’t know if last week’s shooting of a U.S. analyst was a Russian hit job, but we know critics are being picked off as President Vladimir Putin cleans house ahead of a transition. He is going to go too far.

Thirteen journalists have been killed in mysterious circumstances since Putin took power, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. The shooting of U.S. analyst and TV commentator Paul Joyal, less than a week after he criticized the Kremlin on Dateline NBC, looks like a street crime, but as high-ranking retired KGB general Oleg Kalugin told the Financial Times, Russian government involvement should not be ruled out.

Face-on shootings in entryways have been done lately against two other Americans who blasted the Kremlin — journalists Paul Klebnikov of Forbes and Anna Politovskaya of Novaya Gazeta.

Other deaths, from highrise windows, seem to occur a lot to Kremlin critics. Over the weekend in Moscow, Ivan Safronov, 51, a Kommersant journalist accused of writing unflattering stories about Russian space failures fell from a fifth story window to his death.

If it was an unnatural death, it is within the Kremlin repertoire of eliminating critics. In 1948, Soviet agents hurled Czechoslovakian foreign minister Jan Masaryk out of a ministry window, an act that that Czech police in 2004 confirmed as murder.

Then there are poisonings. The sudden death two weeks ago of another Dateline NBC commentator, Daniel McGrory, 54, of the Times of London, is suspicious. It followed the poisoning of ex-KGB man Alexander Litvinenko, who died last year in London; the 2004 poisoning of Ukraine’s now-president, Viktor Yushchenko, and the umbrella-tip poisoning of Bulgaria’s Georgy Markov in the 1980s, also in London.

Why so many deaths of Kremlin critics, and so recently, is puzzling to some. After all, the U.S. is trying to avoid a Cold War with Russia, and Europe has been extremely generous diplomatically.

It’s true Putin came out of the KGB and these events seem to be KGB-linked. But the more likely reason is domestic politics. Putin is preparing a political transition in the next year and a half, and is running what are believed to be two puppet candidates to succeed him.

Critics think he seeks to create an atmosphere of terror to stifle all opposition so that the Kremlin can transition without any questioning. It’s significant that over the weekend an opposition rally was attacked by Putin’s security henchmen in St. Petersburg.

Journalists and pundits like Joyal are easy targets for two reasons: Their words can be far-reaching, and as a broad group they annoy everyone — leaving them without a political constituency.

These recent attacks on Kremlin critics seem too systemic to be coincidental. Already they’re drawing attention because of the number. Normal nations do not conduct business this way; pariah states do. And eventually, the West is going to have to act because already they are going too far.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

LR on WordPress

For security purposes, La Russophobe is constructing a backup blog on WordPress.com. All of LR’s archives have now been uploaded to WordPress and can be viewed there, but no new content will appear on WordPress for now (although archival material will continue to be uploaded on a regular basis). New content will appear only on this blog, until further notice.

WordPress has a number of interesting features not (yet) offered by blogger, including the ability to split long posts with a jump page (reducing scrolling on the main page) and the ability to apply custom design features. Therefore, it’s possible that LR will move to WordPress and begin placing new content there at some point in the future. Readers, of course, will be notified.

Meanwhile, another interesting feature of WordPress is that it provides a tally of comments; all the comments on this blog have been uploaded to WordPress along with the content. LR was surprised to learn that she has received a total of 2,298 comments to date, over the course of 11 months (we think there’s a way to display this information on the blog, but we haven’t figured out how yet; if anybody knows, please tell us). That works out to an average of over 200 comments per month or nearly 7 comments on this blog every single day. Given the fact that for much of our history we have required blogger membership prior to commenting, a major obstacle not present on any other Russia blog we know of, and given the fact that we post much more than any other Russia blog and therefore posts don’t stay on the main page nearly as long as elsewhere, we think this is an amazing testament to reader interest and support and we humbly express our thanks to all readers who have commented in the past. It’s not our goal to be a discussion forum, but we are always glad to hear from readers both by comment form and by e-mail (where we received the vast majority of feedback on the blog).

LR on WordPress is a work in progress. It’s very clunky right now and not really meant be seen, but reader comments as to the design are still welcome. If you’d like to see a certain feature on the blog, do tell us.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Annals of Russophile Screwball Yuri Mamchur

EDITORIAL

Reader Note: This is an editorial in which LR gives her opinion about the educational background of Russia Blog publisher Yuri Mamchur based on information provided to her by Charlie Ganske of Russia Blog. The information is documented in the text and gives rise to various disturbing questions which Mr. Ganske has refused to answer. Therefore, the editorial offers our informed speculation about possible answers to these questions. Our speculation is just that and nothing more until further facts become known, and we will be happy to provide more information should Russia Blog choose to provide it. However, we feel that Russia blog readers need and want as much information about publicized claims such as those made by Mr. Mamchur as they can get before deciding whether to rely on statements they read in the blogosphere. In short, LR is concerned that Mr. Mamchur could be overstating the extent of his educational credentials and understating the extent to which his education is connected to the Kremlin.

You know very well, dear reader, that La Russophobe never makes any attempt to lord “credentials” or “qualifications” over the blogosphere. She simply makes sourced information available along with her own opinions and lets the world make of it what it will.

The same cannot be said, however, for the folks at Russia Blog/Real Russia Project. Therefore, in the continuing saga of trying to find out just who Screwball Yuri Mamchur, publisher of Russia Blog, really is (because he publicly brags about his credentials and uses them as leverage for his crazed dictatorship-enabling Russophilic propaganda diatribes but gives precious little detailed information about them), LR is pleased to offer readers the following investigative update. Given the fact that Russia Blog is claiming to lure as many as 2,000 unsuspecting visits per day into its web of propaganda for the Kremlin (and for intelligent design), this ongoing investigation is obviously important.

In an e-mail, Charlie Ganske of Russia Blog has finally identified for La Russophobe, months after she asked, the actual Russian name of the educational institution in Russia from which Russia Blog’s publisher Yuri Mamchur claims to have graduated. No wonder it took so long. He’s stated that its website is this one. LR could hardly believe what she read there. If you click through the link, the Russian text you see at the top of the page reads:

Official Site
All-Russian State Tax Academy
of the Ministry of Finance of the Russian Federation

In other words, this institution is analogous to an American school for accountants that was operated by the American Internal Revenue Service itself (if there were such a thing, which LR doesn’t think there is). For all practical purposes, in LR’s view, it makes Yuri a functionary of the Kremlin, certainly someone steeped for years in the Kremlin’s propaganda. Not very surprising, then, that Yuri would spout so much pro-Kremlin Russophilic gibberish himself, or that he wouldn’t wish to voluntarily reveal this information, now is it? Kind of tends to undermine his credibility a bit. It also makes him, to all appearances, an accountant.

As you can see from the following screenshot of Yuri’s biography on the Russia Blog website, “All-Russian State Tax Academy of the Ministry of Finance of the Russian Federation” is not the title given by Yuri himself for his alma mater. Instead, he calls it the “Russian Tax Academy School of Law.” Click the screen shot to see it full size.

Given this mistranslation of the name (perhaps understandable, after all English isn’t Yuri’s native language), it’s little wonder that neither LR nor anyone else would be able to find the institution’s website. Yuri has made not one but four errors in this short translation: (1) he’s omitted “State” and (2) he’s omitted “All” and (3) he’s added “of law” and (4) he’s omitted all reference to the Ministry of Finance — so anyone translating his translation back to Russian would get a completely different title for the main entity that constitutes the school. In so doing, he’s hidden the connection of this institution to the Russian government and implied it has a broader range of educational coverage than the true name actually conveys. In other words, it’s more flagrant dishonesty (or maybe just lame-brained stupidity) from the publisher of Russia Blog. And there’s no excuse for it, because all Yuri had to do was post a link to the Russian website.

Mamchur’s RB bio states that he is currently a “Foreign Policy Fellow” and “Program Associate Director” at the Discovery Institute. However, Yuri’s own personal website states: “Right now I’m working as a Director of Foreign Policy.” Here’s the screenshot:

So which is it? Is he the “Director of Foreign Policy” or is he the “Program Associate Director” or is he a “Foreign Policy Fellow.” Has he been promoted? Demoted? And no matter which one he is, how does a degree from a tax academy qualify him to hold that position?

But wait! The plot thickens! Interestingly, on his personal website (where he touts not his foreign policy knowledge but his musical acumen, here he’s a composer seeking to hawk his wares — hard indeed, of course, to fathom how being a musical accountant qualifies one to be a foreign policy expert), he refers to his alma mater as merely the “Russian Tax Academy.” No “of law” here, and again no “State.” Yet here he explains:

“The Russian educational system is different. It is not a 4-year college followed by a 3-year masters program. I went for a Law major in 1998, and after five and a half years of school, I received my European law degree with honors.”

So although the “of law” was dropped, here he does claim to have studied law (not Russian law mind you, but “European”) at this tax academy run by the Russian government, and he claims that the Russian government taught him about European law (tax law?) and he claims that just five years later he became a lawyer (as he notes, it takes seven years to do that in the U.S.). On neither his personal website nor his bio at DI does he post a link to the website given above. Here’s the screenshot:

And then it gets really interesting. The personal website continues:

I am proud of my perfect GPA. I worked at a law firm for half a year and found it extremely boring. Though I never really used the degree, the education helps.

Helps what? Dupe the unwitting? So, after five years of study to become a lawyer Yuri gives up the practice of law after one job and six months, and decides to become a “foreign policy expert/composer”? Hmmmm . . . Note that Yuri doesn’t name the “law firm” he worked for, and implies he left its employ merely because it was “boring.” Maybe it’s true, but its an excuse people often give when they fail, and it can’t be verified unless he names the firm. He also fails to mention how easy it is in Russia to get a “perfect GPA” by paying money for it (especially at an institution that just opened its doors), and he doesn’t give any details about his course of study or whether he entered via a competitive entrance exam. As for his “perfect GPA,” if he’s such a bright boy why would he choose to study law at this obscure institution whose primary focus is clearly not legal education? What not Moscow State University, or any one of a number of much more prestigious universities? All these are the questions LR is asking, and she’s not getting any answers from the folks at Russia Blog.

As you can see from the RB screenshot, the bio claims that Yuri is also a “PhD candidate.” Yuri’s RB bio also states that he “took classes at Georgetown University.” LR asked Georgetown, and (as she’s previously reported) was told that “Yuri Y. Mamchur was enrolled in a Non-degree Program through the School of Continuing Studies at Georgetown University during the Spring semester of 2004.” Note that Yuri doesn’t care to say what kind of “classes” he took (basket weaving? origami?) or why (since apparently he got no academic credit for them), and he doesn’t name any academic institution where he is currently enrolled in a PhD program (or state the nature of the degree he is seeking or the topic of his alleged dissertation).

With so much mystery about, LR went to the source and asked Charlie Ganske of the REal Russia Project (apparently he’s Yuri’s lapdog, since he’s written comments on this blog, and sent e-mails to La Russophobe, defending Yuri and RRP) the following questions by e-mail:

(1) Why did Yuri add “of Law” to his translation of this institution’s name? Why did he omit reference to the Ministry of Finance?

(2) Please give me the specific link to the page of the school’s website that explains their law education program, including their accreditation.

(2) Approximately many law students were in Yuri’s graduating class? How many classes of legal graduates had the school produced prior to Yuri’s class?

(3) What specific qualification did Yuri take from this institution when he graduated? Is he a tax lawyer? His personal website states that he holds a “European law degree.” What does that mean? Is Yuri qualified to practice law in Europe? Please describe his general course of study in detail and state how long it lasted (including whether he was a full-time daytime student or not). Include a complete list of all “foreign policy” coursework Yuri undertook during his studies.

(4) Yuri’s personal website states that he “worked at a law firm for half a year.” What law firm did Yuri work for, and where was the office located? If he washed out, I suggest you tell me now.

(5) How did Yuri matriculate that the Tax Academy? Did he take a competitive entrance examination and earn his place or did he pay money to enter?

(6) Yuri’s Russia Blog bio states that he is a “PhD Candidate.” It says that he “took classes” at Georgetown, but I’ve confirmed with them that these were not degree-related courses. How many credits towards a PhD has Yuri earned, and from what universities? What is the topic of his dissertation?

(7) Yuri’s personal website states that he is “Director of Foreign Policy” at DI. That title differs from what is listed on his RB bio page; Does he hold that title now? If not, has he ever held it? If so, when/why did he lose it? If not, why did he claim it?

(7) If Yuri had a “perfect GPA” as he claims on his personal website, why didn’t he study at one of Russia’s really prestigious centers of legal study (Moscow State University, for instance)? I’m sure you’re aware that grades can be easily bought and paid for in Russia at fly-by-night institutions, as can admissions itself. Therefore, claims as to grades have to be checked out carefully.

Ganske refused to answer any these questions, claiming that he personally didn’t know the answers and refusing to ask Yuri. Here’s what he said:

“This is as if the IRS was operating a college for accountants. In my view, it virtually makes Yuri a former employee of the Kremlin, and it makes him, to all appearances, an accountant.” This is as ludicrous as declaring that anyone who ever worked for the federal government was “virtually a former employee of the White House, or the Bush White House” if they worked for the feds in the last seven years. While it may be true in some very limited technical sense (especially for military personnel who have the President as their commander in chief) it’s ridiculous to make such a comparison in the first place. Kim, I have respectfully replied to every non-insulting question you posed on your site. I have shown you a lot more respect than you have shown us – for example, you claim that we’re part of some vast conspiracy to push intelligent design in Russia simply because one girl in St. Petersburg didn’t like her biology textbook. I’ve read two articles about this and that’s the extent of my knowledge about the whole thing. I don’t go around telling people that you’re getting paid by Boris Berezovsky or something ridiculous like that, why do you insist on making outlandish claims about us? Why is it my job to tell you exactly what it says on the Russian Tax Academy website? Don’t you read Russian? Simply because a title reads differently in one place than another doesn’t make it “fake”. Furthermore, I have personal friends who attend Moscow State University, and your question about the prestigiousness of institutions is like asking why doesn’t everyone go to the Ivy League… seriously, get a grip.

That’s quite an impressive amount of neo-Soviet question dodging, isn’t it?

This means it’s quite possible that “lawyer” Yuri graduated from a “law school” that had only just been invented, in a class the size of a bowling team, without competitive admissions. A school operated by the Kremlin, spewing plenty of nationalist propaganda. It’s also possible that, having had poor preparation to say the least, he couldn’t handle work in in actual law firm, and hence decided to give up the whole notion of being a “lawyer.” Next stop, mongering intelligent design. But that, of course, is only LR’s guesswork based on Charlie’s stony silence in the face of her questions. She’ll be happy to correct the record if Yuri will only have the guts to answer her questions.

Since RRP refused to provide further details about the school, LR did some poking around herself. It appears that this is one very odd law school, to say the least. Generally, it appears that a great deal of the education dolled out at the school is by correspondence, including some very short sessions (three weeks each) three times a year. It is unclear what the relationship is between this “academy” and the Russian MinFin. It takes tuition money, and has no dormitory (it says on the website, though that is kind of obvious, since it’s basically a correspondence school).

The law school lists only one faculty member, Natalya Valeryevna Zlubovskaya; the heads of the other six departments in the school (covering various areas of law) are shown as vacant (see screenshot below). Zlubovskaya also has no extension number, and no academic credentials (PhD, M.A.) are noted for her. Meanwhile, all the other departments of the academy (economics, IT, HR, etc.) are fully staffed, mostly with PhD’s or PhD candidates. There is also an Assistant Dean of the law school, Ilya Vladimirovich Ivanov, but again, no academic title or any other info on him. All of this can be found here. There is a picture of Ivanov shown on a “faces of the faculty” page. He looks to be in his mid-30’s. (check out the photo of of of S.R. Demidov, the “Pro-rector for International Affairs”, who is shown wearing a leather jacket with his tie.)

We could find nothing of any substance (publications, substantive public appearances) in Internet searches on either Zlubovskaya or Ivanov. We did find a listing of a dissertation for Zlubovskaya, “Inheritance as a means of gaining property rights to a residence,” written in 2005.

The law school claims to have about 1,300 full-time students and 400 correspondence-school students, 130 graduate students, and a faculty of 159, including 25 PhD’s (due to a typo on the page, we couldn’t tell how many PhD candidates and how many with no academic title given, but one is 105 and one is 80 – we’re guessing many of these may be their graduate students). The law school claims to have been around since 1996, but only in 2005 appears to gotten something that sounds like an accreditation — but then, the rest of the departments in this academy make no mention at all of their accreditation.

Again, the striking thing about this “law school” is how much different it is from the other departments at the same academy – no faculty, no phone number or academic qualifications given for the dean or vice-dean. Here’s a screenshot of the law school’s information page, with dashes where the names of faculty and administrators should be:

Meanwhile, the rosters of all the other schools in the academy are completely full, and every one of them has a phone number. There might be a logical explanation for this (maybe the law school has discovered the value of “outsourcing”, like a lot of smaller U.S. colleges), but we are sceptical. Another possible explanation would be that it is someone’s cash cow, appended onto the academy for appearances only and cranking out diplomas for a fee. Would you rely on the leal advice of a graduate of this institution? Not, of course, that you’ll get any such chance where Yuri is concerned.

So it appears, as LR suspected, that Yuri may well have entered this institution a couple of years after it was founded, when everybody was running around like chickens with the heads cut off, and the classes were tiny, when standards for admission were non-existent. Even now it’s not that credible; while it claims to have a “faculty” of 160, it only lists one person on its website, along with one administrator. They may well be “outsourcing” to hired-gun “faculty” on an as-needed basis.

Now we ask you, dear reader, to form your own conclusions about whether Yuri Mamchur’s background is any basis for attaching additional gravitas to the statements that appear on Russia Blog — or whether, in fact, it implies readers need to be even more careful in assessing the propaganda they find on his blog. We’d be delighted to publish Yuri’s answers to our questions, if he ever sees fit to give them.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

March 11, 2007 — Contents

SUNDAY MARCH 11 CONTENTS

(1) Sunday Photos Part I: YouTube Special

(2) Sunday Photos Part II: Cyberpunk Edition (Graphic Art)

(3) Sunday Travel Section: Torture by Visa

(4) More Ridiculous Lies from the Bozos at Russia Blog

(5) Annals of Russophile Gibberish: What Bulygin!

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !