The following is a translation of an opinion piece by Frank Nienhuysen about the Yukos prisoner Svetlana Bakhmina, published in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on Friday, October 24.
Sometimes it just happens that even when you haven’t invited any guests to your birthday they come anyway. Svetlana Bakhmina must have been very pleased when several dozen people gathered a few days ago to congratulate her on her 39th birthday. They met at a Moscow train station wearing thick jackets, but they weren’t there to celebrate, they were there to ask for clemency. More than 600 kilometers to the east, Svetlana Bakhmina is lying in a Russian prison hospital bed in her eighth month of pregnancy and worried that the child will enter the world in a prison.
The woman with the reddish-blond hair was the lawyer for the Yukos oil company when she was taken into custody at five in the morning one day in December, 2004. Two years later she was convicted of tax evasion and misappropriation and sentenced to seven years behind bars, which were then reduced to six and a half. She has already done more than half of that and now she is turning directly to President Medvedev.Bakhmina’s friends think she is innocent and see her as the victim of the Yukos affair, whose ex-boss Mikhail Khodorkovsky has already been behind bars for five years. Bakhmina was accused of embezzling millions when Yukos took over the oil company Tomskneft, which remains in doubt even today. This case is not so much about the law. It is a test to see the extent to which the Russian state can make a human gesture.
A court refused early release for the lawyer several times, the last time in September. Increasing numbers of Russians are pressing the Kremlin head Medvedev to act quickly and show mercy, in particular Mikhail Gorbachev. “Why does she have to be kept behind bars?” asks the ex-President, who feels that “in this case he should make use of his right to issue a pardon.” A kind of support committee is busy collecting electronic signatures for Bakhmina on an Internet site, and on Thursday the number exceeded 60,000.
The ex-Yukos Vice President Vassily Alexanyan, who was just mandated by a court to remain incarcerated despite being ill with AIDS, hopes for similar solidarity. The very pregnant Bakhmina has better chances. The newspaper Novaja Gazeta ran a touching family picture on Thursday in which the young woman held her two sons Fedya and Grisha in her arms before she was incarcerated. The children, who are now seven and eleven years old, live in Moscow with their father, who also fathered the third child during a prison visit. A Kremlin spokesperson confirmed that Medvedev “definitely knows about the appeal for clemency, but he has not made a decision yet.” The spokesperson for the Russian Federal Council believes he already knows the decision. “Svetlana Bakhmina has the right to expect clemency from the President” said Sergei Mironov, and added patronizingly, “She has admitted her guilt.”
