Russian Justice
By JOE NOCERA
NYT
By the time you read this column, you may already know the fate of Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky and Platon L. Lebedev. Moscow, after all, is eight hours ahead of New York, and let’s be honest here: It’s not going to take the Moscow City Court very long to conclude that the two men deserve another seven years in prison — on top of the eight they’ve already served — on laughably trumped-up charges. Chances are, the three-judge panel knew going in how it planned to rule. That’s the way it works in Russia when somebody crosses the country’s ruling plutocrats. They get sent to Siberia on phony charges.
In China, when the country’s rulers want to get rid of a troublesome dissident, they just lock him up. There is not a lot of pretense. But Russia wants the world to believe that it abides by the rule of law. “It has a Constitution, courts, judges and established procedures,” said Pavel Ivlev, one of Khodorkovsky’s lawyers.
But, Ivlev adds, “You also have the reality that everything is controlled by Putin and his friends.” So when someone starts making trouble for Russia’s premier, Vladimir Putin, and his corrupt cronies, things play out a little differently. An “investigation” is begun, which leads to a series of criminal charges, which, in turn, leads to a lengthy trial. The illusion of justice is created. But the ending never varies: The defendants wind up in prison for crimes they never committed.
No one illustrates this better than Khodorkovsky, who in less than a decade has gone from being Russia’s richest man — an oligarch among oligarchs — to being its most prominent political prisoner. The founder of Yukos, the country’s best-run oil producer, Khodorkovsky undoubtedly played fast and loose in building the company in the early 1990s.
(More here.)
NYT
By the time you read this column, you may already know the fate of Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky and Platon L. Lebedev. Moscow, after all, is eight hours ahead of New York, and let’s be honest here: It’s not going to take the Moscow City Court very long to conclude that the two men deserve another seven years in prison — on top of the eight they’ve already served — on laughably trumped-up charges. Chances are, the three-judge panel knew going in how it planned to rule. That’s the way it works in Russia when somebody crosses the country’s ruling plutocrats. They get sent to Siberia on phony charges.
In China, when the country’s rulers want to get rid of a troublesome dissident, they just lock him up. There is not a lot of pretense. But Russia wants the world to believe that it abides by the rule of law. “It has a Constitution, courts, judges and established procedures,” said Pavel Ivlev, one of Khodorkovsky’s lawyers.
But, Ivlev adds, “You also have the reality that everything is controlled by Putin and his friends.” So when someone starts making trouble for Russia’s premier, Vladimir Putin, and his corrupt cronies, things play out a little differently. An “investigation” is begun, which leads to a series of criminal charges, which, in turn, leads to a lengthy trial. The illusion of justice is created. But the ending never varies: The defendants wind up in prison for crimes they never committed.
No one illustrates this better than Khodorkovsky, who in less than a decade has gone from being Russia’s richest man — an oligarch among oligarchs — to being its most prominent political prisoner. The founder of Yukos, the country’s best-run oil producer, Khodorkovsky undoubtedly played fast and loose in building the company in the early 1990s.
(More here.)
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