Committee to Free Mikhail Khodorkovsky & Platon Lebedev

by Jeremy Putley

Masha Gessen, whose insightful new book “The Man Without a Face” is a biography of Vladimir Putin, has written that Dmitry Medvedev, now Russia’s former president, will be remembered for very little: “People do not like to remember being made to look like fools, which is exactly what many Russians feel he did to them.” Medvedev, like the Roman god Janus, is a man with two faces. Janus could look into the past and the future simultaneously. Medvedev’s two faces, we now know, denote a different type of ability. One face is a mask with which during his presidency he pretended to be a number of things he was not – a liberal; an upholder of the rule of law; an honest, uncorrupted politician worthy of his office; a man of principles and undoubted integrity.

Consider Medvedev’s presidency in the context of the second trial and sentencing of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev, the two Yukos executives who are widely recognised as victims of a corrupted legal system controlled by the Kremlin. There was international condemnation of the trial because of the ludicrous nature of the charges, and the sentence was widely understood to have been superimposed on the court by a “higher authority” in order to keep the prisoners in jail until 2016. A lawyer, Medvedev undoubtedly knows that the Russian judicial system lacks independence, and he knows that Khodorkovsky and Lebedev are not guilty of the charges brought against them in the second trial – to say nothing of the unfair first trial.

There exists within the Russian constitution a power available to the president to pardon any prisoner, at the president’s sole discretion, and it is unconditional. It would have been perfectly possible, therefore, for the retiring president to have pardoned a large number of wrongly-imprisoned men and women, including the Yukos executives. It would indeed have been the right and proper thing to do, especially considering the well-known deficiencies of Russia’s court system.

Medvedev’s refusal to do what is right is worse than complicity with Khodorkovsky’s principal persecutor, Vladimir Putin. It is going back on the promise he made to the Russian people on coming into office to combat “legal nihilism”, his own peculiar phrase to refer to the failures of the rule of law within the Russian Federation.

In 2011 Medvedev declined, as guest of honour at the Davos Economic Forum, to accept for a televised Q and A session the question I submitted concerning the unfavourable Russian investment environment in the light of the recent flawed trial in Moscow of Khodorkovsky and Lebedev. Considering the question was at the top of the shortlist of questions accepted for the Russian president to answer, its deliberate omission was both contrary to the spirit of the Davos forum and a clear instance of bad faith, but it was consistent with a refusal to deal with the matter in an open, straightforward, honest manner. Consistency is the chief characteristic of the manner in which Medvedev as president maintained and supported the subversion of the legal system by his predecessor and successor to ensure that Khodorkovsky remained in jail.

As to whether prime minister Medvedev is personally corrupt, we have the evidence of a paper entitled “Putin. Corruption. An independent white paper” by Boris Nemtsov and others, which can be found here. The paper includes allegations that both Putin and Medvedev possess watches of such monetary value – in the manner of corrupt potentates through history – that if they bought them they are extremely wealthy men, beyond any wealth they could have come by honestly, and if the watches were gifts they could never have been received except with deeply compromised standards of integrity.

“Dmitri and Svetlana Medvedev are not to be caught lagging behind Putin. In early 2009, Kommersant editor Andrei Vasiliev was suddenly fired following the publication of photographs of the president’s wife with an expensive $30K Breguet on her wrist – yellow gold, 128 diamonds, mother-of-pearl and so on. The story went on to say that Dmitri Medvedev’s wife had other, not quite so expensive, watches ($10-15K). Prior to that article, Kommersant had also published a photograph of Medvedev himself with a $32K Breguet. During a visit to the Ukraine, he was seen to be wearing a $28K Glashütte. It is known that he at the very least also has an $18K Franck Muller and an $8K Jaeger-leCoultre. The presidential couple have an income comparable to that of the prime minister. Asked by Vedomosti about the president’s watches, his press secretary responded that the question was not proper, since it concerned ‘the premier’s private life’. The president and prime minister are, however, obliged to account for their incomes and if their expenditure clearly outstrips their incomes, the question is not about their private lives but about corruption.”

Today, May 7, 2012, Vladimir Putin assumes the presidency of the Russian Federation once again, in breach of the principle that underlies the constitutional prohibition designed to prevent one individual occupying the presidency for more than two terms. Putin was able to achieve this objective only because he was assisted by his loyal acolyte, Dmitry Medvedev, who now reassumes the office of prime minister. The tandem continues on its way. On re-entering the office of president today, Putin has promised to “continue the fight against corruption”. The Russian president seems to believe you can fool most of the people most of the time. Unfortunately his re-election appears to show that he is right.

April 30, 2012, 7:46 am
Invisible President
By MASHA GESSEN, International Herald Tribune

MOSCOW — Dmitri Medvedev has entered his last week as president of Russia: on May 7, he will hand back the office to Vladimir Putin. Having served just one four-year term, he will be remembered as one of the country’s shortest-lived rulers. He will also be remembered as one of country’s shortest rulers. At no more than 5’3”, and with his propensity to ­­­wear huge Windsor knots, he often looks like a fourth-grader trying on daddy’s business suit.

What else will Russians remember of Medvedev? My guess is, nothing. People do not like to remember being made to look like fools, which is exactly what many Russians feel he did to them.

At the outset, Medvedev reached out to liberals and intellectuals. Weeks before his election, in February 2008, he had announced that his guiding principle was, “freedom is better than unfreedom.” People might have worried about a leader who found it necessary to turn this truism into a grand pronouncement, but, having been left out in the cold during the previous eight years of Putin’s reign, Russian liberals were eager to be engaged again. Over 40 people accepted invitations to join a newly constituted presidential council for human rights and civil society.

At first, they just wrote speeches that the new president would read back to them — and only to them. But after some time, they did real work. They wrote comprehensive reports on the cases of the jailed billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his partner, recommending that they be released for lack of evidence and because of numerous violations of due process during their trials. And they argued that prison officials be prosecuted for the death of the whistleblower auditor Sergei Magnitsky, who died in sketchy circumstances in a Moscow jail in November 2009. But the reports made no difference.

And so even as more and more people I respected jumped on the Medvedev bandwagon, I remained a proud skeptic. I even wrote that I believed Medvedev was playing first lady to Putin: his actions were ceremonial, I argued, and he was powerless to make policy.

But then it was said that Medvedev was going to support a project that was very important to me: he would sign a decree establishing a museum of Soviet terror on a symbolically important plot of land outside of St. Petersburg. I threw myself into the effort, even convincing a Russian company to contribute a large sum of money.

We were told that Medvedev would sign the decree on Political Prisoner Day, October 30, 2009. Then we were told it would happen in 2010. By last year, we no longer expected it to happen at all.

People now realize how powerless Medvedev was. The popular anticorruption blogger Alexei Navalny has called him “pathetic” — in Moscow political conversation, the word has become the president’s nickname. In a poem, the satirist Dmitry Bykov writes that Medvedev is Putin’s “shadow.” And here’s a sentence from a blog post by the prison-rights activist Olga Romanova, “No fallen woman could ever fall as low as Medvedev has.”

As the end of his term approached, Medvedev did try to make a grand gesture: he pardoned Sergei Mokhnatkin, who had been sentenced to two and a half years in prison after an altercation with a policeman on December 31, 2009. Mokhnatkin, a pizza-delivery man, had been walking in central Moscow when he saw the police roughing up an older woman. It turns out that she had been taking part in an illegal protest, and so when Mokhnatkin, who had no knowledge of the demonstration, intervened on her behalf, he was treated as a political agitator.

By the time Medvedev signed the pardon on April 23, though, Mokhnatkin’s term was just about over. And so powerless is Russia’s outgoing president that the prison authorities simply ignored the decree and continued to hold Mokhnatkin. In the end, the activist Romanova went to the prison herself on April 25 and almost literally wrested Mokhnatkin out.

Last week, the members of the punk group Pussy Riot, three of whom are in detention for staging an unauthorized performance in Moscow’s central Orthodox Church, sent Medvedev an open letter. Four years ago, they wrote, they had believed that his inauguration marked the “victory of freedom over unfreedom.” But now, “The end of your presidential term is marked by the victory of unfreedom over freedom in Russia.”

March 28, 2012
The Power Vertical

Are the Russian authorities really considering a pardon for Mikhail Khodorkovsky? The markets sure seem to think so.

Deutsche Bank AG and Troika Dialog both said this week that the former Yukos CEO, who has been incarcerated since October 2003, has a 50-50 chance of being granted early release.

In a note to clients on March 26, Yaroslav Lissovolik, Deutsche Bank’s head of research and strategy for Russia, said Khodorkovsky’s chances of being freed were “significantly higher than anytime in the past.”

The Khodorkovsky case is widely seen by investors as a metaphor for the absence of the rule of law in Russia.

Khodorkovsky, once Russia’s richest man, is serving a 13-year sentence for two separate convictions for tax-evasion, fraud, and oil embezzlement that critics say are punishment for opposing Vladimir Putin’s authority.

Releasing him, analysts say, would have a bullish effect on the Russian stock market.

Both Lissovolik and Roland Nash, chief investment strategist at Verno Capital in Moscow, told Bloomberg News that this could add as much as 10 percent to the value of Russian shares.

What exactly is driving these market expectations? In large part, they are a reaction to signals being sent by the Russian authorities.

On March 5, President Dmitry Medvedev ordered Prosecutor-General Yury Chaika to review Khodorkovsky’s case, as well as others raised as politically motivated prosecutions by opposition activists in a February 20 meeting with the outgoing Kremlin leader. Chaika has until April 1 to complete the review.

Moreover, earlier this month, the Kremlin’s human rights council urged Medvedev to pardon Khodorkovsky before Putin’s May 7 inauguration. The council, which is strictly advisory, called Khodorkovsky’s conviction “a fiction,” adding that there was “no evidence” to support the charges against the former oil executive.

And as “Nezavisimaya gazeta” reports, two key members of the council, Chairman Mikhail Fedotov and former Constitutional Court Justice Tamara Morschakova, said that there was no legal requirement that Khodorkovsky admit his guilt as a precondition for receiving a presidential pardon. Khodorkovsky has repeatedly said he would never admit his guilt.

Russia’s human rights ombudsman, Vladimir Lukin, also suggested last week that a Khodorkovsky pardon might be on the table.

“I think there is an increasing number of indications that the authorities are considering this issue, although I personally am not aware of it,” Lukin told Interfax on March 23.

“I have discussed it with the president; he knows that he has this legal power. However, I don’t know how events will unfold…. I believe that the sooner humanity is shown toward Khodorkovsky, in one form or another, the better it is for everybody, including the authorities, civil society, and him too.”

It seems clear that Medvedev, who has said in the past that releasing Khodorkovsky would not be dangerous, favors a pardon. But if this long saga is really moving toward an endgame, it would require the blessing of Putin, who in reference to the case has said that “a thief must sit in prison.”

Moreover, as Igor Yurgens, an adviser to Medvedev who heads the Institute for Contemporary Development, told “Nezavisimaya gazeta,” there are also powerful forces in the ruling elite opposed to releasing Khodorkovsky. These include the law enforcement hierarchy and those connected to the oil industry who benefitted from the break-up and redistribution of Yukos’s assets (see Rosneft and Sechin, Igor).

“There is the whole vertical of law enforcement agencies objecting to Khodorkovsky’s release. They will see this as a slap in the face,” Yurgens said. “Even should Khodorkovsky himself decide to keep a low profile afterward, Yukos’s foreign shareholders might demand compensation from Russia.”

But that said, those familiar with the case say there has been a noticeable shift in favor of a pardon as more of the ruling elite come to the conclusion that keeping Khodorkovsky in prison has become a liability for the Kremlin, while the benefits of his continued incarceration diminish.

– Brian Whitmore