- [Narrator] From Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin,
Russian leaders have attempted to modernize
and mold the nation's judicial system.
But legal and political experts say that time after time,
they've undermined the system by using it
to wage war on their political opponents.
- When they really care about something,
they have no trouble using the laws of blunt instrument,
forbidding criticism of the war,
forbidding people from gathering in numbers on the street.
All those kinds of things are very, very crude instruments.
- [Narrator] Charges like espionage
and treason are among the most powerful weapons.
In recent years, former US Marine, Paul Whelan,
basketball player, Brittney Griner,
and Wall Street Journal reporter, Evan Gershkovich
have all been swept up by the Russian legal system.
- The Russian criminal justice system is incredibly sticky.
Once you're in, it's very, very hard to get out.
- [Narrator] While Griner was released last year
in a prisoner exchange, Whelan is still imprisoned
and considered wrongfully detained by the US.
Gershkovich was detained in late March
and accused of espionage.
Both the US government
and the journal vehemently denied the allegation
and have called for his immediate release.
Here's a look at how Russia's courts have evolved
but why many of its features remain the same.
Joseph Stalin presided over a period known
as the Great Terror, where he used the law
to eliminate opponents and consolidate power.
- There was a provision in the criminal code,
and it was a crime of anti-Soviet behavior.
And the problem was,
is that there was no crisp, clear definition
of what anti-Soviet behavior was,
and so it could be almost anything.
- [Narrator] Historians say millions of Soviet citizens
were executed, died in labor camps,
or were starved to death under Stalin.
After Stalin's death, Soviet leaders
like Nikita Khrushchev abandoned mass terror.
- He and the other people who were surrounding Stalin
made a decision, you know, not written down anywhere,
but a very clear decision that this kind
of mass terror was not productive.
- [Narrator] But that didn't mean
that political arrests were over.
- It just means that they no longer took place
on a mass scale.
- [Narrator] Many trials were closed to the public,
and although people who were arrested
were allowed to have lawyers,
those lawyers had to be approved by the KGB.
When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power,
he attempted to introduce reforms to the legal system.
In 1989, Gorbachev changed the judicial selection process
so that judges were no longer picked by the Communist Party.
He also instituted a jury system
for the most serious criminal cases.
- What he really wants is to fix the existing system.
Now, he did this in a very kind of ham-handed way,
it was destined to fail.
- [Narrator] It was under his watch that Nicholas Daniloff,
a US news and World Bureau Chief,
was arrested by the KGB and accused of espionage.
Daniloff had fallen into a trap set by the KGB.
Eventually, he was released in a prisoner exchange.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a rapid shift
from a planned economy to a market economy,
and Russia's first president
Boris Yeltsin backed a revamp of the courts.
This led to sweeping changes within the legal profession,
lawyers were free to start their own firms
and specialize in certain areas of law.
In 1991, a constitutional court was created,
and in 1993, Russia adopted a constitution
that became the cornerstone of the legal system.
Judicial review was introduced for the first time,
meaning the constitutional court had the power
to declare acts of the legislative
and executive branches to be unconstitutional.
In 1996, Russia joined the Council of Europe,
which gave Russians the right to appeal
the decisions of their domestic courts
to the European Court of Human Rights.
However, Yeltsin still managed to go
after opponents using the courts.
But there was a major challenge
in this era, wealthy oligarchs.
- The emergence of the oligarchs brings
a whole element of big money into the courts,
which is never, never helpful, right?
'Cause in the Soviet period,
it really wasn't that you would go in
and monetarily bribe a judge.
But in the 90s, that definitely happened.
- [Narrator] Yeltsin set the foundation for a division
of power's approach in government,
but his successor recentralized power back to the Kremlin.
In 2000, Vladimir Putin came to power
as president of Russia.
He forged ahead with new reforms
and his supporters credited him
with reigning in the power of oligarchs.
He backed a new code of criminal procedure
that on paper gave defendants
the same rights as those in the West.
However, old Soviet habits reemerged under Putin.
He passed legislation
that consolidated more power in his hands.
One law eliminated direct popular elections
across the country and gave him the right
to appoint regional leaders in Russia.
- If you control the legislature, then what is the law?
The other thing that he gets very good at
is returning to this idea of vague and overbroad laws.
- [Narrator] In 2012, the Russian punk rock band,
Pussy Riot, was arrested for hooliganism
after protesting Putin's growing power.
- They go back to a crime of hooliganism,
which is just a, you know,
who knows what that means, and it can mean anything.
- [Narrator] They were all eventually released.
Then in 2020, Putin passed several constitutional amendments
that consolidated even more power in his hands.
Putin could dismiss the Prime Minister
and Prosecutor General whenever he wanted.
Despite decades of efforts
to evolve Russia's justice system,
Putin has brought back authoritarian control
and many of the elastic aspects
of the Soviet era's justice system.
- We're back to this old Soviet trick
of finding a eternally elastic law
that you can just, you know, can catch anybody.