Stop the Untouchables. Justice for Sergei Magnitsky.

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.