Some thoughts on the trial

Grigory Pasko, journalist

At the trial in the case of the theft of all the oil in Russia, they are reading the text of the bill of indictment – 14 volumes of 300 pages apiece. I’m familiar with this: both with the crazy quantity of volumes of the charge, and with the standard selection of pages per volume. And also with that drivel the investigators usually write when they don’t have evidence or don’t have enough of it…

The first thing that jumps out at you in this charge – the vagueness of the formulations. By the way, both the lawyers for Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev, and the defendants themselves, have already spoken about this numerous times. They have spoken justly, because that is what the law demands. According to the Code of Criminal Procedure, a charge – this is an assertion about the commission by a specific person of an act prohibited by law. If the person is not established (indicated is a supposedly organized criminal group, under which the prosecution has in mind just about 15 thousand employees of the company YUKOS), then what concreteness can be spoken of?.

Second. If they are charging Khodorkovsky and Lebedev with founding
an organized criminal group, then it is stupid, absurd and illogical
not to include in this organized criminal group ALL the employees of
YUKOS – without them, after all – and this is evident – they would not
have stolen ALL the oil of the company! Besides this, if the stolen oil
in so doing was directed to consumers at ministries and agencies (in
particular, the ministry of defense and the ministry of emergency
situations), then it would be logical to see the accomplices from these
structures on the defendants’ bench as well. When they «lock up» a
thief, while at the flea market they catch a seller of the stolen rags
red-handed, the seller too gets thrown behind bars, not just the thief.

Third. If Khodorkovsky during the time of the commission by him of
the crime discussed the topic of oil – the object of the crime – with
Putin, Kudrin, Sechin, and hundreds of other high state officials and
businessmen, then it is unlawful not to summon these to court for
questioning in the capacity of witnesses. This is demanded by the
interesting of the fullness of the judicial investigation and the
interests of defending the rights of the accused.

The moot situation with the translation of a text from English to
Russian, when as the result of such a translation there appeared the
dates of 32 and 38 December, was characterized by the defense as «the
replacement of established business expressions by phrases with a
criminal tinge». The fact is that this – is a time-honored form of
amusement for repressive machinery, first and foremost the KGB. Having
their psychology and abilities, you can write any text with such a
spin. And the KGB has succeeded at this. Let us take , as an example,
such a phrase: «The child went to school with classmates». The wizards
from «the office» would have written it thus: «Having as an objective
the commission of a particularly grave crime in the composition of an
organized group, ignoring the law and hoping to elude the deserved
punishment, the defendant N. at an unestablished time in an
unestablished place committed acts associated with locomotion to the
place of the commission of the crime…» And so on. Funny? Even from this
side of the bars – not very.

In general, we need to have in mind that the investigators from the
KGB have a rather unique sense of humor. Precisely for this reason,
they are incapable of brevity in expressing their thoughts. For brevity
assumes the presence of talent, while talent – is the presence of
thoughts. Evidently, things are somewhat tight with both the one and
the other. Hence – 14 volumes of 300 pages each in just the bill of
indictment alone.

Photo: People with a rather unique sense of humor: Procurators
Dmitry Shokhin and Valery Lakhtin (L-R, bottom) and their prime movers
(Photo collage by Grigory Pasko)

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