Stop the Untouchables. Justice for Sergei Magnitsky.

‘Cloud Atlas,’ Russian style

Moscow News

A story needs a beginning and end, but what has become the main narrative of Russia’s current political era doesn’t seem to have either. And the weak are meat the strong do eat, as David Mitchell coined in his novel “Cloud Atlas.”

Sometime in 2005-2006, William Browder, an American investment fund manager, ran afoul of someone close to the Kremlin. He had thought that his friends in high places would support him as he greenmailed their enemies, but as an outsider he overestimated his standing, and Russian authorities revoked his visa. When he went to the top for help, help was refused, and his capital fund suddenly became fair game in a tax-fraud racket run by a group of tax officials.

When a lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, blew the whistle on the racket, he was himself accused of tax fraud, jailed, and, in a maliciously lazy form of torture, denied medical treatment until he died.

Still barred from Russia, Browder (“I’ve spent every day thinking what I could have done that could have saved [Magnitsky’s] life,” he told me in November 2011) started lobbying hard in Washington to avenge Magnitsky’s death. American lawmakers, many of them desperate to appear hawkish during a presidential campaign, linked the bid to blacklist 60 Russian officials implicated in Magnitsky’s death to the longawaited repeal of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, a 1974 trade restriction with the Soviet Union.

In December 2012, the Russia and Moldova Jackson-Vanik Repeal and Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act of 2012 were passed by the U.S. Congress and signed into law. President Vladimir Putin, who had pushed for the Jackson-Vanik Repeal for years, was furious over the blacklist, as intended. Within days, Russian lawmakers came up with a tit-for-tat blacklist, adding a clause that banned the adoption of Russian orphans by Americans.