Latynina: Why are Russians so Gutless?

Hero journalist Yulia Latynina, writing in the Moscow Times, asks why her countrymen are so pathetically spineless:

In an interview with Gazeta.ru, Natalya Vasilyeva, assistant to Judge Viktor Danilkin in the second criminal case against former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky, said Danilkin had to obtain approval from the Moscow City Court — and higher — for each of his actions, and that the city court wrote the verdict that Danilkin read at the trial.

There were two surprising things about the interview with Vasilyeva. The first is her claim that Danilkin considered the process unjust and was out of sorts as a result. If that is true, it is unexpected because people tend to rationalize their actions. I find it hard to believe that the average NKVD officer really considered himself an inhumane executioner, despite the historical record showing him to be exactly that.

The second is that, if Vasilyeva spoke the truth, it is amazing how easily Danilkin buckled under pressure and sold out his ideals. After all, what would have happened to him if he had acquitted Khodorkovsky?

Putin and Khodorkovsky

Michael Bohm, editorial page editor, writing in the Moscow Times:

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin sent a clear and chilling signal on Dec. 16 that the “soft autocracy” of his first decade in power will become more oppressive in his second decade.

It was on that day that Putin effectively delivered the guilty verdict in the second trial of former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky during his annual call-in show — two weeks before Judge Viktor Danilkin actually found Khodorkovsky guilty of embezzlement and money laundering and added six years to his sentence, ensuring he will be locked up until 2017.

Putin’s declaration that Khodorkovsky belonged in jail was eerily similar to Stalin’s notorious practice of delivering a sentence and then having the court confirm it. Putin easily could have not selected the Khodorkovsky question during the call-in show and applied pressure on Danilkin in private. Instead, Putin flouted an apparent disregard for the law on national television. (Applying pressure or interfering in a trial is a violation of Article 294 of the Criminal Code.)

The Fraudulent Khodorkovsky Verdict and its Devastating Consequences for Neo-Soviet Russia

Simon Shuster, writing in Time magazine:

It must have been an awkward meeting for Russian President Dmitri Medvedev. On Dec. 29, he convened a session with his economic aides to talk about attracting talented businessmen to Moscow. No one mentioned that across the river from where they were sitting, a judge was reading out the guilty verdict of one of Russia’s most successful businessmen, oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, whose case has scared off a lot of capital from the country. But when the subject turned to Russia’s appeal for investors, Medvedev’s tone became forlorn: “The investment climate in our country is bad. It’s very bad.” And everyone understood why.

Putin has Russia over a Barrel

Anne Applebaum, writing in the Washington Post, explains why the Kremlin feels strong enough to ignore the law and extend Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s sentence illegally:

The judge had already postponed the verdict without explanation (“The court does not explain itself,” said a spokesman). Before reading it, he barred journalists and the defendant’s family from the courtroom. No one should have been surprised, therefore, when Mikhail Khodorkovsky – the Russian oil baron who once defied the Kremlin – received a further six years in prison last week, on top of the eight he’s served. This time, he was sentenced for “stealing” an impossible quantity of oil, the same oil he has already been accused of selling without paying taxes.

SPECIAL EXTRA: Nemtsov Arrested, Again!

EDITORIAL

Nemtsov Arrested, Again!

Boris Nemtsov, New Year's Eve 2010

Once again, the Gestapo-like goons of Vladimir Putin, who pretend to be police officers, have arrested the former first deputy prime minister of the country for daring to publicly criticize the Putin regime and to support jailed oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky.  This time, they did so even though Boris Nemtsov and his followers had a fully legalized permit to demonstrate.  That did not stop Putin, who ordered mass arrests (120 or more were taken into custody, more than a third of all those present — many dressed  in Santa Claus outfits) because that’s the only way he can silence his critics.

Nemtsov has now been sentenced to shocking term of fifteen days in a brutal, savage, uncivilized Russian prison where he, like Sergei Magnitsky, could easily be murdered by any number of killers. All for doing nothing more than peacefully speaking his mind in public.  Mind you, the New Year’s holiday is protracted in Russia, the most important of the year by far. Nemtsov will be held apart from his family throughout it, in mortal peril. This is the nature of the enemy he faces, that we face.

Welcome to neo-Soviet Russia!

EDITORIAL: The Russian “Legal” System, out of Control

EDITORIAL

The Russian “Legal” System, Out of Control

2017.

That’s when dissident oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky can expect to leave the Siberian prison cell where he has been held since October 2003.  He’ll serve 14 long, brutal years — and indeed may not live to complete his term. Then again, since he has just been sentenced a second time for the same offense he’s already served years for allegedly committing, what is to stop Russian dictator Vladimir Putin from taking a third bite at the apple. Or a fourth?

“The verdict has nothing to do with justice,” said Karinna Moskalenko, Khodorkovsky’s attorney.  That’s putting it mildly.

We have long warned about the danger of the “give Russia a chance” advice.  We have warned that if you “give Russia a chance” to do the right thing on Khodorkovsky, you play into the Kremlin’s hands, allowing it to consolidate power and present horrific misdeeds as fait accompli.    What can be done now to influence Russia’s manifest persecution of a political rival to the Kremlin? Nothing.

And so the Kremlin will continue and persecute more rivals, until there are none.  In fact, the so-called Russian “justice system” has been on something of a feeding frenzy of late. And that does not surprise us.

SPECIAL EXTRA: Double Jeopardy for Khodorkovsky

Khodorkovsky

A truly brilliant and inspiring editorial from the Christian Science Monitor, which takes the words right out of our mouth. There is something deeply wrong, perhaps evil, about the President of the United States and his malignant advisor Michael McFaul, who continue to betray American values in the hopes of scoring cheap electoral points with sham foreign policy “victories” while Russia descends into neo-Soviet darkness:

Talk about timing. A Russian court waited until this week – after the US Senate had ratified an arms-control treaty with Moscow – before handing down yet another conviction on that country’s best-known political prisoner, Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Sentencing is expected in coming days.

The conviction also came as the West is preoccupied with the winter holidays and not focused on the rise of human rights abuses in Russia.

But here’s the best timing: Mr. Khodorkovsky will now likely be sentenced to several more years in a Siberian penal colony – further isolating him until well after next year’s parliamentary elections and a 2012 vote for president.

Khodorkovsky Exposes Russian Barbarism

An editorial from the New York Times:

Russia’s newly outrageous legal treatment of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former owner of the country’s largest oil company, is a reminder that Russia has yet to grasp the idea of equal justice under law — especially when the Kremlin decides someone is in the way.

Mr. Khodorkovsky was convicted in 2005 on trumped-up charges of fraud and disobeying a court order and lost his company to Kremlin loyalists. Russians call his sort of case “telephone law,” imposed by the politically powerful through a call to the courthouse. With his sentence almost up, he was just tried again on suspect charges of embezzling and money-laundering. The judge is expected to reach a decision in December.

Is Lebedev the Next Khodorkovsky?

The always-brilliant Ariel Cohen, writing on the Heritage Foundation blog:

[The first week in November], two seemingly unconnected events took place in Moscow. Yet, considered together, they have are of tremendous importance and serve to weaken the rule of law in Russia.

[On] Tuesday, imprisoned former Russian oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky delivered a passionate speech at the end of his kangeroo court proceedings about the corroding lawlessness plaguing his country. As Khodorkovsky addressed the court, masked Russian police SWAT teams armed with Kalashnikovs raided the National Reserve Bank in Moscow. The bank belongs to Alexander Lebedev, another billionaire political opponent of the Putin-Medvedev “tandemocracy.”

Khodorkovsky exposes Putin’s Barbarism

The New York Times reports:

I wish I had enough space to reprint in its entirety Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky’s closing statement, as his latest sham trial in Russia came to an end earlier this week. I have never been so moved by the words of a businessman.

Not that Mr. Khodorkovsky is a businessman anymore. Once the most famous of the Russian oligarchs, he ran YukosOil, which under his leadership became the best-run, fastest-growing, most transparent company in the country — a gleaming symbol of hope for Russian industry. Mr. Khodorkovsky, however, has spent the last seven years in prison, much of that time in Siberia. Stripped of his company, which was sold off to politically connected insiders, Mr. Khodorkovsky and his business partner, Platon Lebedev, were convicted of trumped-up tax charges brought by prosecutors acting on behalf ofVladimir V. Putin, who had come to view Mr. Khodorkovsky as a threat.

Khodorkovsky’s Challenge to Putin

Once again defying Vladimir Putin, Mikhail Khodorkovsky appears boldly in the Western press calling for insurrection against the Kremlin, this time in The Los Angeles Times:

I am a member of the last generation of Soviet people — those who were born and came of age in the USSR. In 1990, the final year of the Soviet Union’s existence, I was 27 years old. The next generation — of which the first of my sons, born in 1985, is part — only knows about “those times” from our stories.

Growing up, an ordinary young man from the outskirts of Moscow from a family of engineers who worked at a Soviet factory, I believed the things that were said on television, written in the newspapers and taught in school. I wanted, like my parents, to work at a factory and serve my country. I wanted to go further than my father, to become a factory director. Like a third of my peers, I studied at a technical institute, and like 90% of them, I was a member of the Young Communist League.

Khodorkovsky as the neo-Soviet Sakharov?

Foreign Policy offers a long feature on dissident oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s neo-Soviet persecution by the Putin Kremlin, which Dave Essel highly recommends:

He has been stabbed, spied on, and sent to solitary confinement. His oil company assets have been seized by the state, his fortune decimated, his family fractured. And now, after nearly seven years in a Siberian prison camp and a Moscow jail cell, he is back on trial in a Russian courtroom, sitting inside a glass cage and waiting for a new verdict that could keep him in the modern Gulag for much of the rest of his life. Each day, he is on display as if in a museum exhibit, trapped for all to see inside what his son bitterly calls “the freaking aquarium.”

Mikhail Khodorkovsky was once Russia’s richest man, the most powerful of the oligarchs who emerged in the post-Soviet rush of crony capitalism, and the master of 2 percent of the world’s oil production. Now he is the most prominent prisoner in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, a symbol of the perils of challenging the Kremlin and the author of a regular barrage of fiery epistles about the sorry state of society from his cramped cell. In a country where the public space is a political wasteland, his case and his letters from prison evoke a different age.

“No doubt,” he wrote us from inside the glass cage, “in modern Russia any person who is not a politician but acts against the government’s policies and for ordinary, universally recognized human rights is a dissident.”

EDITORIAL: Warrior Khodokovsky slashes Putin yet Again

EDITORIAL

Warrior Khodorkovsky slashes Putin yet Again

At the second trial of dissident oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky last week, not one but two major figures in the Putin government heaped scorn on the ludicrious charge that Khodorkovsky personally embezzled millions of tons of crude oil from his company while he was a free man.

Khodorkovsky as the New Sakharov

Foreign Policy reports:

He has been stabbed, spied on, and sent to solitary confinement. His oil company assets have been seized by the state, his fortune decimated, his family fractured. And now, after nearly seven years in a Siberian prison camp and a Moscow jail cell, he is back on trial in a Russian courtroom, sitting inside a glass cage and waiting for a new verdict that could keep him in the modern Gulag for much of the rest of his life. Each day, he is on display as if in a museum exhibit, trapped for all to see inside what his son bitterly calls “the freaking aquarium.”

Mikhail Khodorkovsky was once Russia’s richest man, the most powerful of the oligarchs who emerged in the post-Soviet rush of crony capitalism, and the master of 2 percent of the world’s oil production. Now he is the most prominent prisoner in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, a symbol of the perils of challenging the Kremlin and the author of a regular barrage of fiery epistles about the sorry state of society from his cramped cell. In a country where the public space is a political wasteland, his case and his letters from prison evoke a different age.

“No doubt,” he wrote us from inside the glass cage, “in modern Russia any person who is not a politician but acts against the government’s policies and for ordinary, universally recognized human rights is a dissident.”

EDITORIAL: Khodorkovsky, Russia’s Oddest Duck

EDITORIAL

Khodorkovsky, Russia’s Oddest Duck

Jailed oil “oligarch” Mikhail Khodorkovsky is surely Russia’s oddest duck, and in a land of strange fowl that is really saying something.

Khodorkovsky released a vicious broadside aimed at the Kremlin last week.  Writing in Nezavisimaya Gazeta (we republish an English translation below in today’s issue), Khodorkovsky stated that “the steamroller that has replaced justice is the gravedigger of the modern Russian state” and accused the Putin regime of operating a mafia-like judicial system whose “destruction will occur in the traditional way for Russia – from below and with bloodshed.”

Ouch.

Khodorkovsky comes out Swinging

“Legalized” Violence

By Mikhail Khodorkovsky

Nezavisimaya Gazeta

March 3, 2010

Translated from the Russian by Khodorkovsky & Lebedev Communications Center

My view of the work of our law-enforcement System and of the feelings experienced by a person who has been caught in its grindstone would be far too negative if it were based only on my own personal experience.

After all, I am a somewhat different kind of prisoner.

My adventures are taking place under the double classification of “special control” – my lawyer Yuri Schmidt happened to discover this by chance in the course of a session of the Supreme Court of the RF. And I have always been sitting under this same “special control”. Audio, video, and human. They have never placed ordinary homeless people, in jail for a break from the tough conditions of life on the street, with me in my cell.

What I am about to recount is the result of the instinctive work of an analyst (something the manager of any large entrepreneurial structure invariably is), who, over a period of nearly 7 years, has continually found himself in the thick of the struggles of our law-enforcers – both amongst themselves and against Russian citizens.

Khodorkovsky Speaks

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, writing in the New York Times:

For Russia, the past decade started out on an optimistic note. The country was emerging from a severe financial crisis and the political upheavals of the ’90s. Industry and agriculture were rapidly recovering and the financial system had been rescued and strengthened. Business attracted millions of people to apply their efforts and talents. The institutions of state had begun to work more reliably and the structures of a real civil society had begun to form.

Today, many people recall with sadness that Russia once had a real, working parliament, where social and business interests engaged in dialogue, where compromises were sought and found. They recall how the country’s judicial system had begun to feel its independence, and how they discovered that they had a civic role to play in the places they called home. There was hope that people in Russia would become active participants in a dynamic, full-fledged civil society.

In the international arena, the voice of a new Russia began to be heard — the voice of a responsible and benevolent good neighbor. Before us lay a long yet well-lit road.

But in the years that followed, Russia turned from it. Today, for all practical purposes, we do not have a real parliament, an independent judiciary, freedom of speech or an effective civil society. The hopes for the formation of a new Russian economy turned out to have been misplaced: Our industrial output, other than raw materials, is not capable of competing even on the domestic market. Russia’s international role has changed drastically as well — now we are more likely feared than respected.

Who is to blame for this turn of events? Not just the Kremlin. Responsibility for modern Russia’s transformation must be laid on the elites — the people involved in the adoption of the most important political and economic decisions.

Khodorkovskaya Speaks

Anastasia Khodorkovskaya

The Moscow Times reports:

Jailed businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky and writer Lyudmila Ulitskaya were jointly awarded a literary prize by the literary journal Znamya on Wednesday for a series of letters between the pair.

For obvious reasons, Russia’s former richest man — who was jailed for eight years on fraud and tax evasion charges that he says were fabricated and is currently on trial for laundering billions of dollars in Moscow — was not at the ceremony. His daughter, Anastasia Khodorkovskaya, accepted the prize on his behalf.

Putin sticks his Foot in his Mouth, Again

Streetwise Professor reports:

No doubt the recent decision of Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague intensified Putin’s Pavlovian response to a question about Khodorkovsky.  The court ruled that Yukos shareholders could sue Russia for violating the Energy Charter by seizing Yukos assets.

EDITORIAL: A New Low in Russian Barbarism

EDITORIAL

A New Low in Russian Barbarism

We here at La Russophobe spend a good deal of time gaping slack-jawed in horror at the latest example of Russian barbarism.  But now and then, even we are surprised by the depths to which this misbegotten mire of a country can sink.  For instance, the New York Times reports:

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once his country’s richest man, has resided in “gulag lite,” as he calls the Russian penal system under Vladimir Putin, for six years. Since the spring, on most working days he is roused at 6:45 in the morning, surrounded by guards and packed into an armored van for the drive to court. For two hours each way, the man who once supplied 2 percent of the world’s oil crouches in a steel cage measuring 47 by 31 by 20 inches. Convicted of tax evasion and fraud in 2005, Khodorkovsky now faces a fresh set of charges that add up to the supposed theft of $30 billion. In the dark of the van, Khodorkovsky tries to prepare for his trial, replaying in his mind his night reading, the daily stack of documents from his lawyers. But Russia’s most famous prisoner worries too about what would happen if a car slammed into the van. (Collisions are routine in Moscow’s clotted avenues.) “Your chances of making it out alive,” he wrote me one day this summer, “at any speed, are next to none.”

It is far beyond our powers of comprehension how a country could allow a situation like this to persist and yet call itself “civilized.”  In our view, it cannot do so.  This is barbarism, pure and simple. It is torture, it is subhuman, it is unworthy of nation with pretensions to greatness.  It shows that Russia is governed by petty, mean-spirited and indeed demonic children, not men, certainly not mature human beings.

We condemn it, and we condemn those — the vast majority of the Russian population — who condone it actively or passively.  We implore the people of Russia to slow down step back from the black chasm of neo-Soviet despair and failure toward which they are hurtling at breakneck speed.

EDITORIAL: Russia Legalizes Barbarism

EDITORIAL

Russia Legalizes Barbarism

A few weeks ago, we reported on how Russian courts have ruled that it is illegal for women to work in various jobs that men are genetically better suited for.

More recently, we noted the European Union’s conclusion that corruption is so widespread in the Russian court system that justice is impossible to obtain.

But none of that prepared us for the revelation provided by Khodorkovsky attorney Robert Amsterdam while translating a report about his client’s second trial, now underway, from the pages of Novaya Gazeta.

In Putin’s Russia, they Free the Rapist Murderers and Jail the Mothers

Susanne Scholl, Moscow Bureau Chief for Austrian Public Television, writing in the Moscow Times:

Colonel Yury Budanov is a convicted rapist and murderer. After serving half of his 10-year prison sentence for the rape and murder of an 18-year-old Chechen, Elza Kungayeva, he was released in January on parole for good behavior.

Svetlana Bakhmina worked as a lawyer for former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky. In 2004, she was arrested and sentenced in 2006 to 6 1/2 years on embezzlement and tax fraud charges. Like Budanov, she applied for early release from prison in 2008. Her request was refused, as was her earlier plea in 2006 to suspend her sentence until her two small sons reached the age of 14 — a request she was entitled to make under Russian law.

EDITORIAL: Netherlands Sticks it to Putin

EDITORIAL

Netherlands Sticks it to Putin

Last week a court in the Netherlands ruled that the Russian government, specifically its Rosneft oil subsidiary, owes nearly $400 million to YUKOS Capital, a company owned by former managers of Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s YUKOS oil concern, because it had wrongfully seized their assets.

The ruling will allow the court, in turn, to seize Rosneft assets abroad and was the first time that YUKOS has scored a victory in a foreign court challenging the corrupt proceedings that liquidated the company and transferred all it assets to the Russian state.

Robert Amsterdam says that Russian courts will ignore the ruling, but European courts won’t.  Russia can now expect an avalanche of similar rulings leading to billions of dollars in Russian governmental assets across Europe being seized and sold to satisfy the judgment.

And that’s not the worst of it, not by a long shot.

Special Extra: Bakhmina is Free!

Svetlana Bakhmina with her children

First Russian “president” Dima Medvedev sits down with Kremlin foe Novaya Gazeta and now the Kremlin has released Khodorkovsky attorney Svetlana Bakhmina, who will walk out of prison almost three years to the day after she was sentenced to six for fraud.

Nothing could better prove how desperate the Kremlin is becoming to deflect criticism as the Russian economy faces a relentless tsunami of bad news.  Unemployment is soaring, inflation is doing the same, and Russia is caught in a merciless vortex of finanical hardship that the KGB thugs who rule Russia simply have no idea how to correct.

EDITORIAL: Jail Khodorkovsky!

EDITORIAL

Jail Khodorkovsky!

In another typically excellent piece of analysis, Russia’s leading liberal pundit, Yevgeny Kiselyov, in his Moscow Times column, explains why Russia and the world would be much better off if jailed oil executive Mikhail Khodorkovsky stayed in prison.  We think Khodorkovsky would be better off too, and staying in prison would be appropriate pennance for his outrageous recent attempt at collaboration with the Kremlin, leaving Khodorkovsky himself better off as well.