The Last Days of an Honest Man

New York Times

In hour into “One Hour Eighteen Minutes,” a play recounting the death of the Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in Moscow’s Sailor’s Silence prison, the woman seated next to me started to laugh. She was about 20, wearing a beret and an expensive blue coat.

Danny Scheinmann, an actor who at turns plays a journalist, a policeman and a medical orderly in Magnitsky’s story, was demonstrating how to find one’s pancreas, the source of much of Magnitsky’s pain. He lay on a tabletop, hitched up his shirt and pointed to a red outline sketching out the organ on his skin. The gesture released the tension in the audience. The woman laughed.

Scheinmann then impersonated the agony of Magnitsky as his diseased pancreas spewed out enzymes and digested his body from within while prison orderlies failed to help him. The laughter curdled in the woman’s throat.

The real Magnitsky was arrested in Moscow in 2008 while he was investigating a massive tax fraud committed against the investment fund Hermitage Capital Management. Russian Interior Ministry officials had been masterminding a scam under which they stole Hermitage documents and employed criminals to claim taxes the investment fund had already paid.

The same officials then arrested Magnitsky, accusing him of evading taxes himself. Held without trial for almost a year in increasingly squalid conditions, he died in detention, his illness untreated, in November 2009.

The play, written by Elena Gremina and performed by the Sputnik Theatre Company, is based on court documents, interviews and petitions written by Magnitsky to complain of his treatment.

That the tale of Magnitsky’s agonizing last months can fill a theater in central London for three weeks — it closed Dec. 1 — when everyone in attendance already knew how the story ends, is a sign of changing times. When the real-life death of a Russian whistleblower becomes the plot for a well-attended play in London, you know the Kremlin has lost control of the message.

“I am very humbled to be associated with what is now a really effective campaign,” the British playwright and screenwriter Tom Stoppard said at a Q&A session after one performance. He had come to show support for the effort to bring Magnitsky’s killers to justice, having himself been involved in campaigns on behalf of Russian dissidents in the 1970s.

The Russian officials Magnitsky accused of embezzling money, as well as those he accused — in dozens of petitions written from prison — of mistreating him, remain at large. Instead prosecutors are still investigating Magnitsky himself. Some say this would make him the first person in Russian history to be prosecuted posthumously.

William Browder, the C.E.O. of Hermitage Capital Management, lobbied the U.S. House of Representatives to pass the Magnitsky Act, which would stop any Russian officials linked to Magnitsky’s death or any other human rights violations from visiting the United States or owning property there.

A British law banning officials from having houses or bank accounts in London would hit corrupt Russians extremely hard — and the British housing market, too.
Russian officials have promised to retaliate when the Magnitsky Act becomes law, but the threat has provoked little more than mirth: How many U.S. officials want to own property or vacation in Russia?

And the U.S. lobbying effort is only one part in a broader campaign to ban all officials involved in Magnitsky’s death from going anywhere or owning property outside Russia and ultimately to secure their prosecution and conviction in Russia.

As I straggled out of the theater among the crowd of spectators last Friday, leaving squalid Moscow inside for the damp London evening, I saw a smart new retail development: a gleaming gym, the offices of a major bank, lights reflected in puddles.

Walking home, I passed the window of a real estate agent and started thinking about a local Magnitsky Act. Russians now own as much property in the city’s most prestigious neighborhoods as all Western European and Scandinavian London property-owners combined. A British law banning officials from having houses or bank accounts in London would hit corrupt Russians extremely hard — and the British housing market, too.

That’s one reason no such law will pass here, no matter how well British actors impersonate the terrible last days of an honest Russian man.

Oliver Bullough, a writer based in London, is the author of “Let Our Fame Be Great” and the forthcoming “Last Man in Russia.” buy over the counter medicines займ онлайн на карту без отказа https://zp-pdl.com/how-to-get-fast-payday-loan-online.php https://zp-pdl.com срочный займ