by Edward Lucas
This is a standard tactic in the Russian (and before that the Soviet) jail system, to weaken a prisoner’s resistance. Later he was put in a cell that was flooded with sewage – this extract is from his prison diary on 9 September 2009:
At about midday, in the cell, sewage started to rise from the drain under the sink, and half of the cell floor was flooded straight away. We asked for a plumber to be called, but he only arrived at 22:00 and could not repair the fault. We requested to be transferred to a different cell but were told that we had to stay put until the next morning. On the morning of the following day the plumber did not arrive and by the evening the whole floor was covered in a layer of sewage. It was impossible to walk on the floor and we were forced to move around the cell by climbing on the beds like monkeys.
Throughout his ordeal, Mr Magnitsky made complaints and requests – over 450 in total – on everything from the denial of hot water for washing to demands to meet his family, phone his children, and have medical attention. That is more than one for each day of his imprisonment. They, and his jail diary, make poignant reading.
The reason for the ill-treatment was simple. The authorities wanted Mr Magnitsky to switch sides. If he would retract his testimony against the police officers, and instead give evidence confessing that he was responsible for the fraud and implicating Mr Browder, he could go free. Such tactics were familiar in the Soviet era, when political prisoners were told that they would never see their families again, or that their children would be sent to orphanages, if they did not incriminate their fellow-dissidents. It is shocking to find the same approach in 2009 in a country that is a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights and is a member of the Council of Europe.
Each time Mr Magnitsky refused to cooperate, the authorities worsened his conditions. By June he had lost 40lb (18kg). He began to experience severe abdominal pain. After an initial stay in an overcrowded and squalid detention centre, Mr Magnitsky had been transferred to the ‘Sailor’s Rest’ prison (Matrosskaya tishina in Russian) where conditions were marginally less bad, with a mere three prisoners to a 16m2 cell. Medical services were better there too. On 1 July an ultrasound examination diagnosed ‘calculous cholecystitis’, an illness caused by untreated gallstones (choleliths, in medical terminology). The symptoms include pain, anorexia, nausea, vomiting and fever. The prison doctors prescribed a further examination and surgery in a month’s time. But a week before that treatment, Mr Magnitsky was transferred to the notorious Butyrka prison, which has no ultrasound machine and none of the surgical or medical facilities required for his treatment. The ostensible reason for his move was renovation works, though an independent investigation later established that these never took place. In any case it is unclear why Mr Magnitsky, already seriously ill, should be one of the handful of inmates needing to be moved. Questioned later by independent investigators, the prison director, Ivan Prokopenko, said he did not consider Magnitsky sick, remarking: ‘Prisoners often try to pass themselves off as sick in order to get better conditions. We are all sick. I, for instance, have osteochondrosis.’12
On 9 August Mr Magnitsky demanded a meeting with Mr Prokopenko, complaining that his health was at risk because of ill treatment. On 11 August he followed it up with a second complaint demanding immediate medical attention. On 19 August his lawyers complained again, both to Mr Prokopenko and to the chief investigator in the case, Oleg Silchenko, demanding an ultrasound examination. On 25 August, after Mr Magnitsky had spent a sleepless night in agony, the lawyers made an urgent complaint demanding a medical examination and surgery for cholecystitis and pancreatitis – the latter disease resulting from lack of treatment of the former. Following a meeting with Silchenko, on 13 October 2009, Mr Magnitsky wrote the following witness statement:
I believe that [Interior Ministry Lieutenant Colonel Artyom] Kuznetsov and other law enforcement officers in conspiracy with him could be involved in the theft of Rilend, Makhaon, Parfenion and the subsequent theft of 5.4bn roubles from the State Treasury and were extremely interested in suppressing my activity relating to assisting my client in investigating the circumstances connected with these criminal offences. This was the reason for my unlawful criminal prosecution being carried out by investigator Silchenko. I believe that with Silchenko’s participation or with his tacit approval, inhuman conditions were created for me in the detention centre, which humiliate human dignity. While in custody, I have been transferred five times to four different detention centres. I am tired of counting the cells to which I have been transferred innumerable times. I am denied medical assistance. On many occasions, for artificial and unjustifiable reasons, my mother’s and wife’s visits were prohibited, as well as telephone conversations with my little children. While in custody, situations have been created for me where I was deprived of the right to have a weekly shower, to watch television, to use a refrigerator, and simply to live under normal conditions, to the extent they can be ‘normal’ in a detention centre. I am convinced that such intolerable conditions are being created for me with my investigators’ full knowledge. I am convinced that the only possibility to stop this humiliating treatment is for me to accept false accusations, to incriminate myself and other persons.p
Far from being intimidated by his treatment, on 16 October 2009 Mr Magnitsky reiterated his allegations in greater detail. That sealed his fate. On 12 November another farcical pre-trial hearing brought a curt dismissal of his appeal for bail, on the grounds that the time to file it had elapsed. This was a big psychological blow, perhaps aggravating his physical woes. By 13 November he was vomiting constantly, with a visibly swollen stomach. Even at that stage, a simple medical intervention could have saved his life. On 16 November Mr Magnitsky was transferred from Butyrka to the ‘Sailor’s Rest’ for ‘emergency medical treatment’. But the doctor there prescribed only a painkiller. When that failed, he had Mr Magnitsky put in a straitjacket and referred him for psychiatric evaluation. Eight guards from a special disciplinary squad arrived. They handcuffed the dying man, beat him with rubber batons and took him to an isolation cell, where he lay handcuffed on the floor by the side of a bed. He was found dead an hour and a half later by a doctor and nurse who had been kept waiting outside his cell for one hour and eighteen minutes.
Around this time, Mr Browder’s staff in London started receiving terse, threatening text messages in Russian on their mobile phones. Copies they have supplied to me make chilling reading. One read: ‘What is more frightening, I don’t know . . . death or prison?’ A later one used a quote from The Godfather to try to intimidate the recipient: ‘If history tells us anything, it is that anyone can be killed. Michael Corleone.’ One after his death said mockingly: ‘A lawyer dies in investigative detention, in the framework of an interesting criminal case. An emblematic case. Paid-for articles won’t work. Extradition etc.’
Even in Russia, where public opinion is hardened to news of official misconduct, Mr Magnitsky’s death caused a public outcry. He was not some marginal figure from the political opposition, nor an investigative journalist who had clearly been asking for trouble, neither was he from the country’s troubled and violent southern fringe, where many Russians think tough treatment by the authorities offers the only hope of quelling terrorist insurgencies by violent Islamist extremists. Mr Magnitsky fell into none of these categories: he was just a middle-class Russian lawyer trying to do his job. Belatedly, some of the wheels in the system began to turn. Pressure groups and official watchdogs made the first moves. Within weeks an independent group, the Moscow Public Oversight Commission, blamed his death on ‘psychological and physical pressure’. One member termed it ‘premeditated murder.’13 The Moscow Helsinki Group, headed by Lyudmila Alekseyeva, the doyenne of the Soviet dissident movement, submitted a powerfully argued criminal complaint. It said that the death
did not occur accidentally. It did not occur merely through the oversight or negligence of some particular prison officials. Sergei Magnitsky died from torture that was
wilfully inflicted upon him.
As pressure grew, Mr Medvedev ordered an official investigation. He signed a law prohibiting the detention of suspects in tax crime cases. Though twenty prison officials, including the deputy head of the federal prison service, were fired, nineteen of them had nothing to do with the Magnitsky case. The only figure directly involved in the case was Major-General Anatoli Mikhalkin, who had headed the Interior Ministry’s tax crimes department in Moscow, and had been named by Mr Magnitsky in one of his complaints. The official reason for his dismissal was ‘retirement’. On 25 June 2010 the internal security department of the MVD started an investigation into Kuznetsov, following an appeal by Mrs Clinton. It has brought no result. On the contrary, several of the people directly involved in the case have received medals and promotions. Kuznetsov moved from the Moscow City tax crimes office to a job in the federal economic-security division of the MVD. Karpov also moved to a job at the federal level. An official inquiry by the Investigative Committee exonerated Silchenko, the investigator ultimately responsible for Mr Magnitsky’s death, of all wrongdoing. One week before the anniversary of his death, the MVD held an annual awards ceremony recognising the thirty ‘best investigators’ among its million-plus officers. Five of the awards went to people directly involved in the Magnitsky case, including Silchenko and Karpov. Growing international condemnation of the case has brought largely ineffective and token responses in Russia. A commission set up by Mr Medvedev’s Human Rights Council said that Silchenko ‘bears serious responsibility for [Mr] Magnitsky’s death’ and that he might have died as a result of a beating by medical orderlies.14 A report by the State Investigative Committee in July 2011 accepted that Mr Magnitsky died because of failures in his medical care. But the Interior Ministry said it saw ‘no reason’ to investigate the action of its officials. Instead Russian prosecutors said they would reopen the case against Mr Magnitsky (oddly, cases against dead people can be tried in Russia). They even summoned his mother as a witness.
Meanwhile, the perpetrators were getting rich. Official Russian documents show that cars and real estate worth $3m were registered to Kuznetsov, his wife and his pensioner parents in the period between the raid on Firestone Duncan and Mr Magnitsky’s death. An investigation by Hermitage claims that Olga Stepanova, a senior official in the Moscow tax inspectorate, her subordinates and their families suddenly gained $43m in offshore property and other assets following the phoney tax refund.15 Nobody has established so far that this has anything to do with the Magnitsky case. But there would be those who would find the coincidence striking. Nor is it proved where the bulk of the money stolen from the Russian taxpayer went. Mr Browder’s investigators believe that the finger points to the higher reaches of the FSB, and still more senior figures in the Interior Ministry, in the tax authorities and in the prosecutors’ office.
Had they known five years ago the result of their scheming, the perpetrators would surely have decided to pick another target. It is hard to see now what will stop Mr Browder’s formidable campaign against the sixty people he accuses of benefiting from the fraud, or of complicity in Mr Magnitsky’s death.16 The European Parliament has voted to ban them from the European Union; Canada’s parliament has proposed a similar resolution and it has passed in the Netherlands. More than twenty American senators have backed legislation banning these individuals from the United States, provoking a furious response from the Russian authorities.
While Mr Browder has shed his reputation as a grandstanding wheeler-dealer for that of an inspirational leader of a moral crusade, the Russian authorities’ response to the case has been a textbook study in how not to handle a tricky issue. As in so many episodes, from the mysterious apartment-block bombings in 199917 to the looting of Yukos, they have made their case spectacularly poorly, with a mixture of paranoid silence, bluster and deceit. The best place to test all these claims would be in court, with proper lawyers on both sides and a fair judge in the middle. That does not seem likely to happen. Overall, while some officials have condemned Mr Magnitsky’s treatment, others have implied that he deserved it, and others still have made counter-allegations. When, prompted by Mr Browder’s researchers, the Swiss authorities opened a money-laundering investigation into accounts at Credit Suisse, the bank that handled many of the transfers benefiting those implicated in the case, the Russian authorities launched a clumsy attempt to summons Mr Browder for questioning in Moscow (understandably, he has declined to go). Credit Suisse says it is co-operating with the investigation.
The genesis, course and aftermath of this case exemplify the weakness of the bits of the Russian system that should constrain the powerful and protect the innocent. Appeals to politicians either went unanswered or brought ineffective responses. Russian voters clearly care about the case and believe that an injustice was done. But the political system offers no way to resolve their concern. Attempts to use the parts of the state machinery that offer redress to wronged citizens got nowhere. Civil-society organisations tried to raise the case, but without success. The media barked – bravely in some cases – but could not bite. Only external pressure, belatedly, has inconvenienced the people behind the fraud and murder, who are now (in some cases) unable to travel freely to the West.
The case is a concentrated episode in a much wider story: the ex-KGB’s abuse of power, including murder and looting. The FSB – its main successor organisation – has tried and trusted tools for intimidating individuals and for misusing the instruments of state power to create an alternative reality, in which the innocent are the guilty and justice serves the state’s interest, not the public one. The FSB acts as the Russian regime’s enforcers, punishing the brave and bullying the cowardly in order to head off any credible political or economic challenge. In return, it has a licence to loot, using both the tools of espionage and a veneer of legality in which criminal actions have the force of law. It has placed its trusted officers in parts of the state apparatus that are supposedly independent: public, governmental, or judicial bodies. Hermitage researchers are convinced, for example, that Kuznetsov, nominally an official of the Interior Ministry, is in fact an FSB officer, making sure that his masters’ interests are served there; also in the FSB, they believe, are the people in the Moscow city tax department who supervised the bogus refund (which was by no means the first of its kind). The ultimate blame for Mr Magnitsky’s death reaches even higher than those named here. At the head of the scam, says Hermitage, were top Russian officials including a government minister with a close friend who is a senior official. An analogy comes from the real-estate business: the most senior official is the ‘landowner’; he cuts in a ‘property developer’ to construct the scam, who then buys in whatever brain and muscle-power is needed. The profits from this ‘project’ pay off any troublesome outsiders.
The system that perpetrated the crimes described in this chapter is the epitome of the Russian state machine today. The story of Sergei Magnitsky is not just a human tragedy; it is a political parable. His fate may help calibrate the reader’s moral compass in the pages ahead, which deal with events past and present outside Russia. The people responsible for his death in prison are the heirs of the Soviet KGB, and colleagues of Russia’s present-day spymasters.
Many find it easy to be blasé about Russian spies. Espionage is a grubby business always and everywhere. Spies’ political masters in many countries deploy them for bad reasons as well as high ones. Why are the Kremlin’s lot worse than anyone else’s? For all its undoubted flaws, Russia today is not a totalitarian superpower with ambitions for world domination. Its intelligence agencies are decades away from the mass murderers of the old KGB. Even the Cold War did not deserve the moral clarity that some of its Western protagonists liked to maintain. Indeed, as I myself show in later chapters, cynicism and incompetence blot the record of British and American intelligence in Eastern Europe. For all these reasons, many would argue, it is surely time to grow up, and keep the tiresome but ultimately anachronistic phenomenon of Russ
ian espionage in proper proportion?
A proportionate response is indeed merited. But it should be tougher, not softer, than the West’s current stance. As Sergei Magnitsky’s story shows, the dark threads of murder and mayhem that started with Lenin’s Red Terror after the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 continue to the present day in the heart of Russia’s bureaucracy, with officials swindling their own taxpayers out of a fortune, and then killing the man who tried to expose their misdeeds. The next chapters explain the origins of the corrupt autocracy that rules Russia’s mafia state, its aims, and then its activities in our midst.
2
The Pirate State
The story of Sergei Magnitsky should be a wake-up call to the outside world, revealing the true nature of the regime in Russia. But outsiders have systematically (and in some cases wilfully) misread events since 1999, when the chaotic but pluralist era of Boris Yeltsin gave way to the corrupt and authoritarian rule of the ex-KGB hard men – the Siloviki. Telling the real story of these men’s doings is hard and even dangerous. For Russia’s self-censoring mainstream media, no-go areas include Mr Putin’s private wealth, his sexual preferences, and the mysterious ‘terrorist’ bombings of autumn 1999 that stoked public anxiety, making the unknown stopgap prime minister a shoo-in for the presidency. It is often forgotten that Mr Putin arrived on the national stage as a political cipher: a quiet, grey, timid-looking man, blinking nervously in the unaccustomed limelight. He was the fifth prime minister in the space of twelve months: many at the time thought, wrongly, that his stint in office would be equally brief (as we will see later in the book, the outward appearance of mediocrity can be dangerously deceptive). Now the media admiringly portray Mr Putin and his colleagues as chaste, brave (and in his case virile) guardians of the national interest, not brutes or swindlers. Privately, few Russians believe these political arrangements are fair or efficient. But they see no way of changing them.