Russia’s Steve Biko; What Sergei Magnitsky’s brutal death tells us about the Kremlin’s leadership

Wall Street Journal

In 1977, anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko was arrested by South African police, clubbed to within an inch of his life, chained, stripped, manacled, denied care and ultimately left to die in a car. More appalling was the apartheid regime’s response to his murder: denial, followed by coverup, followed by professions of indifference to Biko’s suffering.

For the generation of Westerners that came politically of age in anti-apartheid rallies—Barack Obama’s generation—Biko’s name became a byword for everything they were fighting against. So it is with most revolutionary movements. It’s not sufficient to have the example of great heroes in the mold of a Walesa or Suu Kyi or Mandela. They also require great victims: Men and women who, in the manner of their dying, demonstrate why it is their victimizers who must perish instead.

Last year, the Arab world found its Biko in Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi. Now Russia may find its own Biko in the memory of Sergei Magnitsky, a mild-mannered, middle-class tax attorney from Moscow who spent the last of his 37 years in a filthy Russian prison before dying in November 2009 of medical neglect and physical torture.

Magnitsky’s case is remarkable in many respects, not least because neither the victims nor the perpetrators are prepared to let it go. Last month, a Russian court put Magnitsky posthumously on trial on preposterous charges of tax evasion. In that crass species of cruelty in which Russian officialdom has always specialized, Magnitsky’s bereaved mother was required to sit in her son’s place.

The Kremlin’s show trial comes in response to mounting calls in Europe and the U.S.—including Senate legislation proposed by Maryland Democrat Ben Cardin—to see justice done by slapping travel bans and asset freezes on the officials implicated in Magnitsky’s death. The Obama administration doesn’t like Mr. Cardin’s legislation because it threatens its precious “reset” with the Kremlin. The Kremlin likes it even less because it exposes, both to a foreign and domestic audience, the Comrade Criminal regime that Russia remains under Vladimir Putin.

Consider the details: In June 2007, Russian interior ministry agents raided the offices of Hermitage Capital, which had once been the largest foreign investor in Russia until its founder, William Browder, was declared persona non grata in 2006 for exposing corporate skulduggery among Kremlin-favored companies.

It was a strange raid. By 2007, Hermitage had sold its assets in Russia and paid $230 million in capital gains taxes. Yet the documents confiscated in the raid were then used to re-register Hermitage’s by-then defunct companies in the name of three petty criminals. These “new” companies then claimed the $230 million had been paid in error and that they were owed a full refund. It took exactly one day for the Russian government to approve it.

Magnitsky was the man who uncovered the scheme. In October 2008 he testified to an investigative committee, during which he named the interior ministry officers he believed had perpetrated the fraud. In November, the interior ministry appointed the same officers to investigate the case. Magnitsky went to jail.

The conditions in which Russian prisoners are kept remain nearly as great a scandal today as they were in the days of Solzhenitsyn: freezing and overcrowded cells, grotesque sanitation, larvae-infested food. Magnitsky developed a case of acute pancreatitis that was left untreated. On the day of his death he was transferred to a prison with medical facilities, presumably to be treated. Instead he was beaten to death.

“The main conclusion that can be drawn is that . . . the patient in serious condition was left for one hour and 18 minutes to die in an isolation cell,” went the doctor’s report of his last hours. “I was shocked to find the patient not in a hospital room, but in a regular cell, on the floor dead.”

Last July, an organization called the President’s Human Rights Council presented a damning report on the Magnitsky case to Dmitry Medvedev. “To all appearances, indeed some crimes were committed,” the president acknowledged. He also ordered an investigation. But his interior ministry has dismissed the Council’s findings. In August, it announced Magnitsky’s “guilt has been proven.”

What does all of this amount to? Under most circumstances it would be just another death in Russia. The difference is that Mr. Browder, deep-pocketed and well-connected, has decided to make Magnitsky’s memory the cause of his life. A search of Yandex.ru—the Russian Google—yields 19,000 articles on Magnitsky. It suggests that middle-class Russians, whom Magnitsky typified, finally realize they are no longer immune to the everyday official thuggery routinely meted to Russians outside the privileged belts of Moscow and St. Petersburg.

So far, Mr. Browder has had some success persuading elected officials like Sen. Cardin to act. He’s had less success with the Obama administration. In its zeal to smooth relations with Mr. Putin, it’s been keen to look away from the Magnitsky case, and everything it tells us about Russia’s present leaders. Getting along with Moscow, after all, is a vital U.S. interest. They used to say the same about Pretoria, too. займ на карту онлайн unshaven girls https://zp-pdl.com/emergency-payday-loans.php zp-pdl.com займ на карту срочно без отказа