MOSCOW – “Russia is like a tub full of dough. You push your hand all the way in, pull it out, and right in front of your eyes the hole disappears, and again it’s a tub full of dough”, Nikita Khrushchev once said, assessing the country he was ruling.

The former prime minister – my great-grandfather – who, 60 years ago, denounced Joseph Stalin and his ubiquitous security apparatus, must be turning in his grave. Russia’s legal institutions are always run along the lines of Stalin’s “show trials”.

Following the politically motivated prosecution of former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky and feminist punk rock agitators Pussy Riot, the latest of these cases is the ongoing mock trial of anti-corruption lawyer, opposition activist and blogger Alexey Navalny. A few years ago, Navalny began to denounce the ruling party of “crooks and thieves” – the United Russia of President Vladimir Putin. A charismatic leader, Navalny made headlines in protests against the rigged parliamentary elections in 2011 and Putin’s presidential victory in 2012. Formerly an adviser to the governor of the Kirov region with alleged access to state property, Navalny was accused in April of defrauding the state timber company of Kirovles. of 16 million rubles ($ 530,000) and now faces up to ten years in prison. Last year, investigators ruled the charges false, but recently reinstated them, possibly because Putin is increasingly afraid of Navalny’s growing political clout. His popularity now stands at almost 40% and last month Navalny announced he would run for president in an attempt to topple Putin. No doubt the current president is not happy. And it seems he resorted to the old textbook: after all, accusing anti-corruption activists of corruption has long been a favorite tactic of the Kremlin.

MOSCOW – “Russia is like a tub full of dough. You push your hand all the way in, pull it out, and right in front of your eyes the hole disappears, and again it’s a tub full of dough”, Nikita Khrushchev once said, assessing the country he was ruling.

The former prime minister – my great-grandfather – who, 60 years ago, denounced Joseph Stalin and his ubiquitous security apparatus, must be turning in his grave. Russia’s legal institutions are always run along the lines of Stalin’s “show trials”.

Following the politically motivated prosecution of former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky and feminist punk rock agitators Pussy Riot, the latest of these cases is the ongoing mock trial of anti-corruption lawyer, opposition activist and blogger Alexey Navalny. A few years ago, Navalny began to denounce the ruling party in Russia, made up of “crooks and thieves”, the United Russia of President Vladimir Putin. A charismatic leader, Navalny made headlines in protests against the rigged parliamentary elections in 2011 and Putin’s presidential victory in 2012. Formerly an adviser to the governor of the Kirov region with alleged access to state property, Navalny was accused in April of defrauding the state timber company of Kirovles. of 16 million rubles ($ 530,000) and now faces up to ten years in prison. Last year, investigators ruled the charges false, but recently reinstated them, possibly because Putin is increasingly afraid of Navalny’s growing political clout. His popularity now stands at almost 40% and last month Navalny announced he would run for president in an attempt to topple Putin. No doubt the current president is not happy. And it seems he resorted to the old textbook: after all, accusing anti-corruption activists of corruption has long been a favorite tactic of the Kremlin.

The trial has run off and on over the past month, but the final days of the proceedings have been embarrassing for the prosecution – with damning testimony from his own witness, an official from the Kirov region., who said Navalny couldn’t have stolen wood from Kirovles because he didn’t have the power to do so. The court in turn rejected Navalny’s request to declare illegal the warrantless search of his Kirov office last week. Another witness, the former deputy director of the company, said Navalny was guilty of advising on unfair contracts, but once again (in humiliating testimony for the state) admitted that Kirovles voluntarily agreed his proposals. As the audience started to laugh, the ex-director angrily replied, “Are you in the circus? Indeed, most of the people in the room thought they were, as several other witnesses had already stated that they had no recollection of having dealt with Navalny at all. In any law-abiding state, such a declaration should have been enough to drop the charges.

This is again déjà vu for Russians, who remember the spectacle trials of the 1930s – heavy cases with pre-fabricated guilty verdicts that resulted in thousands of death or gulag sentences. Perversely, the trials were held to demonstrate the “fairness” of the USSR to the defendants, who, terrified for their lives and reputation, aided their own prosecutions, willingly admitting non-existent crimes.

Charges in the purge era ranged from the attempted assassination of Soviet leaders to espionage on behalf of the West. These accusations decimated the Soviet military leadership, dealing a devastating blow before World War II. They engulfed among others Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, the “old Bolsheviks”, who shared power with Stalin after the death of Vladimir Lenin, as well as Nikolai Bukharin, a scholarly editor of Pravda, formerly known as “Lenin’s heir”.

Bukharin had dared to challenge Stalin’s supreme leadership by questioning the government’s lack of transparency, a crime that elicited a sneaky response. In a well-known story from 1937, the Grand Dictator saw Lenin’s heir stand alone in the Kremlin. “Why are you alone, Bukharchik?” The chief asked softly, “Come closer, you are one of us.” Bukharin enthusiastically agreed, but Stalin was only playing games with him – a week later, Bukharin was arrested, questioned for months and, after confessing to having threatened Stalin’s life, was executed for trying to introduce capitalism in Russia.

Khrushchev, alongside Stalin, himself enthusiastically participated in the spectacle trials, including that of Bukharin. After coming to power in 1953, the prime minister attempted to atone for his own despotic past by posthumously releasing or rehabilitating many Gulag prisoners. In 1954-56 alone, the number of “politicians” in Soviet prisons rose from at least half a million to 100,000, but the deaths of the former Bolsheviks – Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin and others – is remained silent.

Driven from the Kremlin in 1964, Khrushchev regretted his procrastination and, according to my mother, once said at home: “I should have rehabilitated them. There was no guilt! But I didn’t want to embarrass Communist leaders abroad. They were on their knees begging me to be quiet.

My grandfather reflected on these questions as the spectacle trials began to make a comeback under his successor, Leonid Brezhnev. In 1965, writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuly Daniel were arrested and, after a heated trial, were sentenced to a Gulag forced labor camp for publishing their anti-Soviet works abroad under the pseudonyms Abram Tertz and Nikolai Arzhak.

Fast forward another half a century – through Mikhail Gorbachev glasnost when Bukharin and all the others were finally rehabilitated, through the chaotic post-communist period where the gulags were firmly seen as a thing of the past – and we find ourselves again watching, or rather living in, the “full tub of Khrushchev paste “. ”

Following Stalin’s example in perverse “justice”, Putin recently weighed in on the Navalny affair: “People are condemned not for their opinions or political actions, but for having abused the law … And this case and ‘others should be treated extremely objectively.

But while Stalin’s show trials sparked fear among observers and atonement from the accused, the current leader’s “objectivity” is misleading only a few. Up to 52% “don’t think the trial is objective”.

A new opinion poll shows that more than half of the country considers Putin’s party hopelessly corrupt. And all in all, it is a great irony that Putin, who during his dozen years in power is said to have amassed a fortune of $ 70 billion, judges Navalny and before him Khodorkovsky (once the most rich from Russia), for having abused the law. In 2010, Putin said of the former Yukos leader: “A thief should stay in jail. But it was not the theft that caused Khodorkovsky’s disappearance; it was his generous contributions to opposition parties. Since 2003 he has endured numerous public trials and is now exiled in a gulag in northern Russia until 2016. Recently his sentence was reduced due to changes in the law on economic crimes, but many are skeptical about his release.

Likewise, in 2012, Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova from Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years in prison.
iet era camps.

Indeed, in Russia, history repeats itself – in a twist on Karl Marx’s saying – as a tragedy and a farce at the same time. The cases are decided by whim of the authorities, because with us the power is subjected to inertia with an apathetic public which traditionally gives in to the paradox of the tyranny of the country: a weak state functions like strong by depriving the citizens of fundamental freedoms. In the absence of the rule of law, Russians see themselves as subordinate to the state rather than as citizens acting in an independent civil society. This de facto surrender creates a fertile environment for despotism, crushing most political initiatives.

And yet we evolve, slowly. The Russians took to the streets after the rigged parliamentary elections of 2011; they opposed the 2012 presidential elections, which “unfairly” and “not freely”, as the protest slogans indicate, brought Putin back for his third term as head of state. Today, only 26% of the country say they would support Putin in his fourth presidential term in 2018. And the new trials show evidence of change underway. Neither Navalny nor Khodorkovsky admitted their guilt. Instead, they continue to speak out from prison cells and courtrooms.

Are we almost free from the stagnant “dough”? Khrushchev has repeatedly stated at home and wrote in his memoirs that his own experience of despotism – it was only after Stalin’s death that he repented; and he denounced the man, not his system – taught him that focusing on the leader rather than on functioning institutions was only half the victory.

Stolen elections do not start with manipulated ballots or banned alternative candidates. They start when people allow the legal system to go wrong. And Russia has remained silent for nearly a decade as Khodorkovsky has been repeatedly denied justice. The truth is, we have the legal system we deserve. The question today is not whether Navalny is acquitted by the courts; that’s how angry we’ll be when he’s not.