Meningen med Khodorkovskij-saken er at den skal skremme alle til taushet og lydighet. Det kunne vært dem. Det er det viktigste budskapet, og Sovjetunionens historie gjør at det blir oppfattet.

Det skriver Masha Gessen, redaktør av ukemagasinet Bolshoy Gorod, i the New Republic.

In recent months, the old Soviet show trial has been reborn here. When Khodorkovsky was first arrested 18 months ago, a survey conducted by a Moscow newsweekly showed most entrepreneurs and politicians expected him to get away with a slap on the wrist. Now, courtroom reporters are taking bets on whether the oil tycoon will get six, eight, or ten years in a labor camp when the verdict is announced in mid-May–a sentence intended as a warning to anyone who gets too free with his money. Such is the nature of the show trial as Josef Stalin perfected it in the 1930s: Protracted, rigged, well-publicized hearings followed by an extremely harsh verdict aimed less at punishing the particular defendant than at scaring anyone who might challenge the state. The more people empathized with the defendant, Stalin apparently reasoned, the more effective the show trial. By that standard, the Khodorkovsky case, which has brought low Russia’s richest man, has been an enormous success for President Vladimir Putin.

Dette er den mest spektakulære skueprosessen. Det har vært en rekke andre, med vanlige mennesker i tiltaleboksen.

There is also the media show trial. In October, a Moscow court awarded Alfa Bank–one of Russia’s largest–$11 million in damages, to be paid by Kommersant, the leading business daily owned by self-exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky, who has repeatedly criticized Putin’s government. (An appeals court has since reduced the fine to about $1.5 million.) The newspaper had published an article describing a run on the bank’s Moscow offices during a brief financial crisis last July. The remarkable thing about the verdict was that the veracity of the report could not be questioned. Kommersant was one of several media outlets to have reported the panic, and TV footage broadcast by state channels confirmed the crisis. But the bank claimed that the paper’s report in particular damaged its business reputation, and it won the case.

Two major corruption trials also have put many people here on guard. One, which began a year ago, involves seven senior police officers. All were captured in raids to which TV journalists had received advance invitations. The cameras documented opulent suburban houses belonging to officers whose official salaries are less than $1,000 per month, and the footage of Special Forces barging into these homes and apparently finding not only gold and antiques, but also heroin and explosives, was broadcast repeatedly on state television. Such raids have been ongoing within the Russian police force for years, and trials have sometimes followed–but what makes this a show trial is all the advance publicity and the harsh sentences the defendants may face. The general who, the prosecution claims, ran the crooked cops’ gang may face up to 20 years in a labor colony.

Dette illustrerer stalinismens poeng: ikke å utrydde korrupsjon i politiet, men å skremme politiet til lydighet.

Samme fremgangsmåte er brukt overfor medlemmer av det nasjonalbolsjevikiske partiet, som har fått sju års fengsel kun for en fredelig sit-in i resepsjonen på et departement.

Likedan en vanlig bilist som prøvde å bestikke politimannen for en fartsoverskridelse, ble i stedet halt for retten for forsøk på bestikkelse av offentlig tjenestemann.

Utad kan dette kanskje oppfattes som forsøk på å bekjempe korrupsjonen. Men det er noe helt annet som foregår.

What is the point of all these trials? Several weeks ago, an adviser to Putin, Igor Shuvalov, admitted, «The [Khodorkovsky] case was a show trial intended as an example for other companies. … If it hadn’t been Yukos, it would have been another company.» Even Russian journalists, accustomed to dealing with brutally cynical politicians, were shocked by this statement: First, because the Kremlin was admitting that the choice of Yukos as a defendant has been arbitrary; and, second, because the Kremlin was openly using Stalin-era language, admitting that it was staging a show trial. After all, the show defendants of the ’30s also faced patently absurd charges, such as having organized a Trotskyist plot to murder Soviet leaders. These trials were not designed to show Trotskyite saboteurs they would be punished. Rather, the message was that the regime could punish anyone, at random, and the charges would always stick.

Stikkordet er absurd. Anklagene kan være totalt absurde. som i Yukos/Khodorkovskijs tilfelle. Det er hele poenget. De skal oppfattes som vanvittige. Desto større blir skrekken.

MOSCOW DISPATCH
Show and Tell
by Masha Gessen