Some thoughts on the trial
Grigory Pasko, journalist
At the trial in the case of the theft of all the oil in Russia, they are reading the text of the bill of indictment - 14 volumes of 300 pages apiece. I'm familiar with this: both with the crazy quantity of volumes of the charge, and with the standard selection of pages per volume. And also with that drivel the investigators usually write when they don't have evidence or don't have enough of it...
The first thing that jumps out at you in this charge - the vagueness of the formulations. By the way, both the lawyers for Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev, and the defendants themselves, have already spoken about this numerous times. They have spoken justly, because that is what the law demands. According to the Code of Criminal Procedure, a charge - this is an assertion about the commission by a specific person of an act prohibited by law. If the person is not established (indicated is a supposedly organized criminal group, under which the prosecution has in mind just about 15 thousand employees of the company YUKOS), then what concreteness can be spoken of?.
Second. If they are charging Khodorkovsky and Lebedev with founding an organized criminal group, then it is stupid, absurd and illogical not to include in this organized criminal group ALL the employees of YUKOS - without them, after all - and this is evident - they would not have stolen ALL the oil of the company! Besides this, if the stolen oil in so doing was directed to consumers at ministries and agencies (in particular, the ministry of defense and the ministry of emergency situations), then it would be logical to see the accomplices from these structures on the defendants' bench as well. When they «lock up» a thief, while at the flea market they catch a seller of the stolen rags red-handed, the seller too gets thrown behind bars, not just the thief.
Third. If Khodorkovsky during the time of the commission by him of the crime discussed the topic of oil - the object of the crime - with Putin, Kudrin, Sechin, and hundreds of other high state officials and businessmen, then it is unlawful not to summon these to court for questioning in the capacity of witnesses. This is demanded by the interesting of the fullness of the judicial investigation and the interests of defending the rights of the accused.
The moot situation with the translation of a text from English to Russian, when as the result of such a translation there appeared the dates of 32 and 38 December, was characterized by the defense as «the replacement of established business expressions by phrases with a criminal tinge». The fact is that this - is a time-honored form of amusement for repressive machinery, first and foremost the KGB. Having their psychology and abilities, you can write any text with such a spin. And the KGB has succeeded at this. Let us take , as an example, such a phrase: «The child went to school with classmates». The wizards from «the office» would have written it thus: «Having as an objective the commission of a particularly grave crime in the composition of an organized group, ignoring the law and hoping to elude the deserved punishment, the defendant N. at an unestablished time in an unestablished place committed acts associated with locomotion to the place of the commission of the crime...» And so on. Funny? Even from this side of the bars - not very.
In general, we need to have in mind that the investigators from the KGB have a rather unique sense of humor. Precisely for this reason, they are incapable of brevity in expressing their thoughts. For brevity assumes the presence of talent, while talent - is the presence of thoughts. Evidently, things are somewhat tight with both the one and the other. Hence - 14 volumes of 300 pages each in just the bill of indictment alone.
Photo: People with a rather unique sense of humor: Procurators Dmitry Shokhin and Valery Lakhtin (L-R, bottom) and their prime movers (Photo collage by Grigory Pasko)
