Rachel Polonsky

Russia in the dock

Rachel Polonsky says Mikhail Borisovich Khodorkovsky is a prisoner of conscience, and his show trial stands as an indictment of the country’s criminal justice system

Rachel Polonsky says Mikhail Borisovich Khodorkovsky is a prisoner of conscience, and his show trial stands as an indictment of the country’s criminal justice system

Moscow

In an iron cage in Hall 56 of the Meshchansky Court, the former chief executive of Yukos sits on his woollen hat, an anorak stuffed into the bars beside him. As his trial enters its 11th month, it is winter still in Moscow. The lumpen guard beside the cage fiddles with a pair of handcuffs, trying to stay awake. On the first row of visitors’ benches, the elderly mother of the accused clasps her shawl, holding her son in a steady gaze. Emerging from her handbag is a small green book called Democracy. Scratched in biro on the back of the bench are the words ‘Free MBK’.

In the hard fluorescent light of this cheaply fitted courtroom, a familiar pathos grows ever more perceptible. Mikhail Borisovich Khodorkovsky is no longer an ‘oligarch’, an ‘oil baron’ or ‘the richest man in Russia’; he is a prisoner of conscience. True to time-honoured Russian tradition, his prosecutors and judges embody not justice but political repression. To onlookers at the proceedings — human rights activists, writers, artists, TV personalities, independent Duma deputies, lawyers from the provinces, entrepreneurs, and university students — Khodorkovsky has become a living sign of the destructiveness of Putin’s regime and its contempt for the rule of law.

‘In the Soviet period, when they tried our comrades, we would always make an effort to be at the courthouse,’ former dissident Lyudmila Alekseeva reflected after visiting the trial. ‘The accused should know they are not forgotten.’ Dmitri Zimin, founder of one of Russia’s most successful mobile phone providers, proves that he has not forgotten his friend: ‘I came to look Misha Khodorkovsky in the eyes and show my sympathy for him,’ he told a reporter from the Moscow Times.

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