The Collapsing Space of Dissent

Monday may be the last day of hearings in the interminable Yukos trial. As it has neared the end, throngs of journalists and the variously curious have resumed going to the court hearings, which were barely attended for most of the last nine months of the trial.

Like many people, I went last week to hear Genrikh Padva, a famous attorney who is defending Mikhail Khodorkovsky, give his closing arguments, which went on for the better part of three days. Like a lot of people, I couldn't get in at first. The best-publicized trial of the decade is consigned to a courtroom big enough to accommodate perhaps a dozen visitors -- about three times this number actually squeeze in. More than half a dozen sentries in and out of uniform guard the entrance to the courtroom and watch over the elaborate entrance and exit procedures.

Journalists and others form a line that acts just like any other line in this country. They try to elbow each other out of the way, devise ways of fooling the system -- one reporter left her coat in the courtroom to ensure she would get back in after the break, but it just meant she was stuck outside, waiting for the hearing to end -- and get into spats with one another.

"Let me through, I'm RIA-Novosti," a reporter from the state news agency says to me.
"But I'm a journalist, too," I say.
"But I'm not just any journalist. I'm RIA-Novosti."
"That's exactly why I'm not letting you through!" I snap.

During breaks, journalists angling for position form an extremely narrow corridor, forcing members of the defense team literally to squeeze through on their way back in. The only thing that makes this feel at all different from the killer lines of the Soviet era is that the attorneys, at least, are understanding and even gracious, despite having to push their way through the throngs of anxious journalists.

At first think, it seems illogical that the Russian authorities would place the best-publicized trial of the decade, one that is designed to be and runs as a show trial, in a tiny courtroom that can't accommodate all the journalists who would write about it. But then you realize that forcing people into confined spaces, and placing the walls too close for comfort, is the best way this country knows of controlling people through humiliation. Inside the courtroom, the journalists and visitors sit scrunched up, struggling to take notes without elbowing their neighbors. Khodorkovsky himself, together with his co-defendant, Platon Lebedev, sits inside a cage so small that when he stretches his legs, he has to stick his feet out through the bars. The fact that Khodorkovsky does so, as though refusing to respect the confines of the cage, is a daily affront to those who put him there. (Lebedev tends to sit upright, his legs crossed well inside the cage.)

That journalists, family members and supporters are forced to jockey for position in the crowded space outside the courtroom is also a familiar and effective gesture. It tells the journalists who is boss. It even makes them suspect that their ability to enter the courtroom may be related to what they publish. As I waited to get into the hearing, I actually watched the marshals and several secret service agents read out loud excerpts from a piece on the Khodorkovsky trial printed in my magazine. They were not pleased, and I found myself hoping they didn't realize I represented this publication. Instinctively, I even looked away when they were discussing the story.

My memory of the Soviet Union -- and I think this is true of many people -- is a series of small stuffy spaces, both physical and intellectual. Never enough room to talk, work or simply be alone. There is a wonderful expression in Russian: "the sense of space collapsing in" (oshchushcheniye skhlopyvayushegosya prostranstva). I remember hearing it about seven years ago, for the first time in years, in Minsk. Lately I've noticed it is resurfacing in Moscow.

Masha Gessen is deputy editor of Bolshoi Gorod.

(From The Moscow Times, 4.11.2005)