Return of the Show Trial

Stalin and the Czars Haunt Khodorkovsky in the Dock

By C. J. CHIVERS

MOSCOW — The defendant begins his day by taking a seat in a small metal cage. A prosecutor in a blue uniform sits across from him in the courtroom and accuses him of criminally undermining the Russian state. On some days the defendant's image is transmitted on television throughout Russia's vastness.

The message is clear: Behold the guilty man.

This unchanging spectacle, reinforced by repetition day after day for more than four months, has become the enduring impression of the case of Russia v. Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, the billionaire businessman who is stuck in a trial that seems without end.

Oct. 25 marked the anniversary of the arrest of Mr. Khodorkovsky a year ago and the beginning of the unrelenting application of state power against both him and the oil company Yukos, which he founded.

Mr. Khodorkovsky faces charges of embezzlement, fraud and tax evasion; Yukos is laboring under an administrative tax case that could lead to insolvency and the redistribution of its assets in a state-supervised sale.

For all the questions the cases have raised about how post-Soviet Russia is evolving - about threats to property rights, the independence of the judiciary, the rights of an accused person and the centralization of power - the cases have a ring familiar in Russian history.

Political analysts say that President Vladimir V. Putin, who is believed to be behind the prosecution of Mr. Khodorkovsky, has placed himself firmly in line with his imperial and Soviet predecessors, using a pliable judiciary to bring his opponents to heel.

One result has been this long-running update on the Moscow show trial - one more Russian regime's demonstration, through procedures that look like law, of the power of the state and the will of its leader.

"In Russia we have some sort of genetic memory," said Leonid Dobrokhotov, an adviser to Russia's Communist Party and a critic of Mr. Putin. "Even when they are not understanding why, political figures are always repeating what was done before."

According to this line of thinking, and given the weight of Russian history, it was almost impossible for Mr. Khodorkovsky to avoid ending up in the cage.

Whatever sort of businessman he was - lucky gambler, ruthless swindler, state-anointed insider who went too far, some mix of the three - by the time he amassed his billions and began speaking out about political pluralism, he had become a challenger to the regime. And that status invoked a residual Russian reflex: the trial whose outcome is apparent long before it starts.

Such trials have long been part of Russia civic life, having been tools of czars and Soviet leaders alike. Mr. Putin has used parts of the old script, with similar goals.

Dr. Richard Wortman, a history professor at Columbia University who specializes in imperial Russia, said the case against Mr. Khodorkovsky has resembled the czarist "use of the judiciary to stigmatize revolutionaries."

In one of the more famous of those cases, in 1862, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, a social reformer, was arrested on suspicion of revolutionary activity after a series of spectacular fires in Moscow. He was exiled to Siberia, where he spent nearly 20 years. It has never been clear that he did anything wrong.

That case was only a hint of what awaited Russians in the 20th century, when the process of manipulating the judiciary for political aims reached its malevolent perfection under Stalin.

After torture and coercion by Stalin's secret police, even the most faithful of the Bolsheviks publicly confessed to participating in terrorist plots that did not exist. Then they were shot.

The show trials of the most famous victims - who were accused of planning the murder of Sergei Kirov, a Politburo member and leader of the Leningrad party structure who was assassinated in 1934 - launched what became known as the Great Terror. The icy spectacle of the party's judiciary moving with unblinking certitude toward each manufactured outcome gave Soviet-style Socialism its sinister stamp. Mr. Kirov's murder was later attributed to orders from Stalin, giving the trials an even darker cast.

No serious critics today directly compare Mr. Putin to Stalin, whose abuses of power and use of fear were of an entirely other order. But some still see strands of the Soviet technique in Mr. Khodorkovsky's dizzying fall.

"Putin is fighting his political adversaries not by political methods, but by using his enforcement agencies," Mr. Dobrokhotov said.

Mr. Putin has been much more selective than his predecessors, of course, and while his motives for punishing Mr. Khodorkovsky may be a mixture of political expedience and personal loathing, he has also skillfully used the man in the cage as a political symbol, a stand-in for the disparity between Russia's poor and its fabulously rich.

This is a potent theme here, and Mr. Putin has used it to position himself as a leader seeking to redress some of the wrongs committed at the public's expense during Russia's murky period of post-Soviet privatization, when Mr. Khodorkovsky enriched himself.

The strategy seems to have worked in the near term. In a survey of 1,500 Russians in late June, pollsters found that people sympathized with the state's position rather than with Yukos's by a ratio of more than four to one.

Still, if history reveals anything, it is that using the Russian judiciary for political showmanship is a sometimes perilous path. Political trials ultimately backfired for the czars, Dr. Wortman noted, in part because the accused often upstaged the accuser.

From his jail cell Mr. Chernyshevksy wrote a political treatise in novel form, "What Is to Be Done?" which became a manifesto among future revolutionaries (Lenin among them) and helped convert many to the cause. And even after years in exile, when the government extended to him the possibility of pardon, Mr. Chernyshevsky refused to make nice.

"It appears to me that I was exiled only because my head is differently constructed from that of the head of chief of the police," he was said to have remarked, according to "The Bolsheviks," by the late Harvard historian, Adam B. Ulam. "How can I ask for a pardon for that?"

Dr. Michael McFaul, a history professor at Stanford University, said that by moving so slowly after Mr. Khodorkovsky's arrest, Mr. Putin has played his powerful hand poorly, creating uncertainty in the financial markets and showing signs of indecisiveness that investors find worrying. "It's been the worst handling of these cases that you can imagine," said Dr. McFaul.

Critics of the cases say that if the trials undermine investor confidence in Russia over the long term, scaring away capitalism's richest fuel - money mixed with ideas - then Mr. Khodorkovsky, like Mr. Chernyshevsky and the innocents accused of murdering Sergei Kirov, might acquire an unexpected meaning: a man whose humiliation by the state guaranteed that the state ultimately weakened itself.

(From The New-York Times, 07.11.2004)