THE court case against Alexei Navalny, the anti-corruption blogger who coined the phrase “the party of crooks and thieves” to describe Vladimir Putin’s United Russia, has been widely described as a show trial. But what kind of show is it?
The accusations against Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer who helped to expose a big corruption scam, would be silly even if he didn’t happen to be dead. In the second trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the dangerously outspoken ex-richest man in Russia, he was accused of stealing the same oil on whose sale, in his first trial, he was supposed to have avoided taxes. Leonid Razvozzhayev, an anti-Putin activist who was last year kidnapped in Ukraine (and, he alleges, tortured), has been accused of stealing 500 fur hats in Siberia in 1997. In this company, the Pussy Riot case is distinguished by the fact that its members actually committed the act over which they were arraigned—singing in a church—even if the interpretation of it by the court, and the sentence imposed, were unjust.
