Andrew Meier has penned an epic, wide ranging profile of the second trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky in The New York Times Magazine, which captures a sense of the courtroom, the personalities, and the historical context of the affair. For readers of this blog it is unlikely to have new information, but it represents an important item of reference for those who want to learn about the case. Moscow would soon grow famous for operatic oligarchs and Byzantine intrigues, but Khodorkovsky never got caught in a compromising position -- never snared at an Alpine resort, a Moscow casino or on a Riviera yacht. Girls, power, even the money, seemed to hold no magic. Where others basked in pomp, he was shy and painfully soft-spoken; you never heard his squeaky voice, a semitone deeper than Mike Tyson's, at dacha parties for the foreign press, let alone on television. He divorced young but stayed on good terms with his first wife. Inna, his second, he met at the institute. Khodorkovsky was never flashy -- he wore jeans and turtlenecks; the family vacationed in Finland -- but he radiated the unlikely allure of a muscular technocrat. And yet, even at the top, he seemed adrift, unsure of his role in society. Unlike older Jewish oligarchs, men like Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky, who were often animated by old scores to settle, Khodorkovsky did not seem to consider himself an outsider. Lacking a public persona, he came to personify, by default, the revenge of the Soviet geek. (...)
"WHO FEARS A FREE Khodorkovsky?" asked Marina Filippovna Khodorkovskaya, the defendant's 75-year-old mother. "Forgive me if I'm blunt, but it's Putin, and all those around him who stole Yukos." Marina Filippovna comes to court as often as possible. A sturdy former engineer, she has never shied from speaking her mind. Asked by the BBC what she would do if she met Putin, Marina Filippovna replied without pause, "I would kill him." "It's not for me to say what led to all this," she told me, as we stood together one morning, awaiting the arrival of her son, in the dilapidated Khamovnichesky District Court in central Moscow. She raised both hands to conjure the years of turmoil. "I only know this case is about politics and money. But which is more important, only those on high" -- again she gestured, this time to the ceiling -- "know the truth."
The answer is unlikely to emerge in Judge Viktor Danilkin's courtroom, a humble affair on the third floor of a squat building perched above the Moscow River. Each time I went to court, over the course of two weeks earlier this year, I sat a few feet from the defendant. It was a scene to boggle Kafka's imagination.
Khodorkovsky would spend hours, pink highlighter in one hand, yellow Post-its in another, meticulously winnowing down a stack of papers balanced on his crossed legs. He sat on a bench, locked inside a narrow rectangle of steel and bulletproof glass, along with his former deputy Lebedev. "The aquarium," the guards have nicknamed the new model of the Soviet-era defendants' cage. The wall of glass alone, Khodorkovsky later said in a missive, weighs a ton and a half. Court officials asked the defense team, a roster as long and distinguished as any in the annals of Russian jurisprudence, to move their desks away from the cage. "They feared the floorboards would buckle," Khodorkovsky explained.
The trial is open, but only three or four reporters (all local) show up regularly. One morning, Marina and her husband, Boris, sat in the front row. On another day, Garry Kasparov, the chess grandmaster turned opposition leader, anchored a row in back, his bodyguard nearby. Outside the courthouse, a car blasted Russian techno, and atop the steep riverbank nearby, lovers mingled on benches and a stray drunk slumbered. The audience, rarely more than two dozen, was dominated by a female crew of Khodorkovsky supporters -- the most devoted was a schoolteacher on a daily vigil. One day the supporters passed out yellow and green scarves, the Yukos colors. Nearly everyone, including the journalists, tied them around their necks.
Artwork is exclusive copyright of Алексей Ермолаев and http://risuemsud.ru/en/.
Have Mr. K's attorneys ever taken any action in court to try to get him out of the unsafe and seemingly tortuous cage he rides to court in?
This is a new low in Russian barbarism, and I speak as an expert in the subject. The people of Russia ought to be ashamed.