A real hero of Russia

The Hawk Eye

Supposedly nobody likes a snitch. Presumably nobody who’s honest likes crooks either. That poses a moral conundrum. Not for the corrupt and the crooked infecting society. They’re incorrigible. But it does raise a problem for decent whistle blowers who too often pay a bigger price than the bad people they out.

That sticky moral dilemma can have negative effects in democracies where honesty and integrity are supposed to be valued above all else, and also in corrupt autocracies where they are not.

In many places, being honest will get you not just shunned and fired, but killed. That’s particularly true in Russia, where the government and the businesses it controls under President Vladimir Putin have become dens of thieves, and some say murderers too.

Putin recently won a new term in a rigged election. He was in China this week commiserating with the masters of Russia’s old Cold War ally about how the world – and the United States in particular – gives neither of them sufficient respect and keeps telling them what to do: Like stop behaving like a mafia, and stop beating, terrorizing and jailing political dissidents and their families.

Putin is particularly upset because the U.S. Congress is threatening to punish some really rich Russian officials for stealing a foreign-run investment fund and allegedly murdering the tax lawyer who uncovered the crime.

Sergei Magnitsky was a real hero of a modern Russia struggling to emerge from seven ruinous decades under communism and now Putin’s ” managed democracy.” Both have poisoned the country, perhaps fatally.

It’s unlikely Magnitsky’s name will ever be carved on a monument. To the Kremlin’s bosses, he is persona non grata. To the world, he is a martyr to a sense of integrity devoid among Russia’s leaders.

In 2009, Magnitsky, 37, discovered that the Russian tax officials who had illegally seized his employer, the Britain-based Hermitage Capital Management fund, had given themselves an illegal $230 million tax refund for the taxes the company had previously paid to the Russian government. The corrupt officials his investigation threatened to expose had him arrested on bogus charges of tax fraud. He died in prison 11 months later when guards beat him to death, presumably under someone’s orders.

The people who wanted Magnitsky dead thought they had shut him up. But other good and courageous people in and outside Russia have continued to speak for him, often at great risk. They include British citizen William Crowder, the man who founded Heritage Capital to invest in Russia’s rebirth but was deported in 2007 for complaining about official corruption and violence toward his employees.

Crowder and others refuse to let Magnitsky’s killers enjoy their lives of luxury, intimidation and violence without the nagging fear that one day, somehow, they will be punished.

Russia’s Presidential Council on Human Rights ruled Magnitsky had been denied medical care and died of a beating. And yet Putin is not interested in arresting those who killed him. In the two decades since communism collapsed (most of that period under Putin’s rule), dozens of journalists have been murdered after exposing rampant criminality. Their killers also remain free.

Crowder’s investigators have followed the money the Russians stole to Swiss banks and real estate outside the country. But despite promises of justice, Putin’s police can’t or won’t find the killers in their midst.

In fact, a few weeks ago Putin’s government moved from the appearance of protecting a criminal conspiracy to the realm of the truly bizarre. Prosecutors are preparing to try the dead Magnitsky in court in hopes of persuading the public he was the real crook.

Nobody is buying this pathetic scheme. Nobody with a brain or a conscience, anyway. Yet there apparently remains in Russia’s perverted authoritarian psyche the notion that people will believe what they’re told if it’s repeated often enough.

The same sick idea infects politics in other countries too, including the U.S. In fact, Magnitsky’s sacrifice has not gone unnoticed elsewhere. Lawmakers in Britain and Italy have vowed to block Russia’s entry to the World Trade Organization until it punishes Magnitsky’s killers.

In Congress, the House Foreign Relations Committee will vote today on a bill that would deny entry visas to any of the 60 Russian officials suspected of involvement in the tax case and Magnitsky’s murder, and to freeze the assets they’ve stashed outside Russia.

As a gesture of righteous indignation, it may get through the House. But the Senate and White House? Probably not.

Several business and industry groups – whose members not coincidentally donate to re-election campaigns – are opposed, saying Russia could retaliate by cutting off exports to Russia. The Obama White House is also worried that response would hurt the still-shaky economy and damage ongoing efforts to get Putin to stop backing Syria and Iran in their various misbehaviors.

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