Posts Tagged ‘romanova’
Trudy Rubin: Russian justice often depends upon a bribe
Two weeks ago, during a trip to Moscow, I visited an amazing family that symbolized the dynamism of the new Russia. On Thursday the husband, Alexei Kozlov, was sentenced to five years in prison.
The story of Kozlov and his journalist wife, Olga Romanova, is one of hope that Russia can change, and of despair that the old order will crush reformers. His case is a grim reminder that Russia will never reach its full potential as a developed nation until it institutes the rule of law.
We met in the couple’s comfortable Moscow apartment, where china cabinets and bookshelves lined the walls. As we sat at the kitchen table, the tall, boyish Alexei (who spent a month at Penn State in 1994) pored over legal papers while the short, vivacious Olga told me their story, interrupted by frequent phone calls from supporters.
In 2007 she published an unflattering newspaper article about a Russian oligarch who was close to the Kremlin and also knew her husband’s business partner. The partner argued with her husband about the article. Shortly afterward, Alexei was arrested and jailed on charges of money laundering and fraud; he believes the business partner paid someone to have charges brought against him.
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Fighting the ‘Mafia State’
Russian businessman Alexei Kozlov was arrested and sentenced to eight years after falling out with his business partner, former Federation Council Senator Vladimir Slutsker. The villains in this case, alleges Kozlov’s wife, Olga Romanova, were prosecutors who were paid to trump up charges.
Romanova, an energetic and resourceful television reporter, was able to get her husband’s conviction overturned. In the process, she formed a human rights organization, Russia Behind Bars (rus-sidyashaya.org), to defend others railroaded by crooked law enforcement officials and combat abuses in the penal system. Russia Behind Bars has also become a resource to publicize miscarriages of justice and for mothers, wives and children of convicts simply to state their case, often for the first time.
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Unreported World: Vlad’s Army – Putin’s brave new world
Every Wednesday night, in a smoky basement restaurant in Moscow, some 20 well-dressed and, in some cases, extremely beautiful, women, meet for dinner. They have one thing in common. Their husbands are in jail. Many are serving long terms in degrading conditions. The grief on the faces of these wives, as they meet together for mutual support at the Rosso&Bianco wine bar, is distressing to see. All insist that their spouses are innocent. Each of the wives has a painful story to tell, and many have lost everything: their homes, businesses and family life.
Take Tatiana, an elegant blond woman in her mid-thirties, wearing a mauve shawl and a herringbone suit. She is visibly in shock, because it is only 24 hours since a Moscow court sent her husband, Vladimir, to jail for 13 years. He has been found guilty of raping their seven-year-old daughter. Tatiana knows the story cannot be true – medical tests showed the girl was physically unharmed.
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