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You’re looking at the Kremlin in Moscow.
It’s not a single building.
It’s a walled-in complex, location of some of Russia’s most iconic architecture, and
home to the Russian President.
Its 500 year old walls have been witness to the triumphs and the tragedy of Russian history,
from the global elation of victory over Nazi Germany, to the terror of an estimated half-million
victims of Stalin’s Great Purge.
For her 1762 coronation, Catherine the Great, the most powerful woman in the history of
Russian, made no hesitation to leave St. Petersburg and to receive the Russian crown in the Kremlin.
As Robert K. Massie writes in his book, ‘Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman’: “She
understood the religious and political importance of this solemn act of consecration in Moscow,
the repository of Russia’s national heritage, the holy city where every tsar and empress
had been crowned.”
(Massie, 285-286)
A reader of enlightenment writers like Diderot, Montesquieu and Voltaire, Catherine gave hope
to the vast peasantry of Russia (Massie, 321).
She wanted to be the “benevolent despot”, the “good empress” who would free the
millions from service to Landlords.
But reading is different from ruling.
After a revolt of the peasants and rescue from the noblemen, Catherine came to understand
what many who rule over Moscow come to know: that the arc of Russian history bends between
chaos and authority; that in an instant, small doses of positive progress can disappear behind
the fortified walls of the Kremlin.
Just outside those walls, to the east, lies the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge.
It’s located in one of the most observed areas of the world.
146,000 cameras monitors the streets of Moscow, and several of those record this location.
On the 27th of February, 2015, on this bridge connecting red square to the rest of Moscow,
every single security camera went dark...Well, except, for one.
This lone camera from the Moscow Municipal authority gives us this grainy footage with
an overdone timestamp.
Two companions walk along the bridge.
A snow plow pulls alongside them.
Clearly something has happened because as the plow pulls away, a new figure appears
and runs to a car, while one of the companions lies on the ground.
Apparently the video shows the assassination of Boris Nemtsov, former Deputy Prime Minister.
After dinner with his girlfriend, he opted against a taxi, choosing instead the long
walk past the Kremlin.
Supposedly, that’s what pictured in the video.
The moment the snow plow obscures our view, an assassin enters from a side staircase and
shoots Nemtsov four times in the back.
Afterwards, his killer runs to an escape car while his girlfriend remains with his corpse.
The circumstances of Nemtsov’s death leave many additional questions for you and me.
Who was his killer?
What was their motivation?
And for what reason were all but one of the security cameras in the area turned off?
As a former officeholder in Russia, Nemtsov was well known to the public and his assassination
led to widespread mourning and condemnation.
In the years after he held elected office, Nemtsov became famous for his opposition to
Vladimir Putin.
As a consequence, on Kremlin run television, his liberal pro-Western party, the Union of
Right Forces, was accused of hiring political canvassers with HIV.
He was called a “corrupt bureaucrat”, a “traitor” (NYT).
But smear campaigns would be the least of his problems.
Soon, his run-ins with Russian law enforcement and the judicial system would receive international
attention.
A week before Parliamentary elections in 2007, Nemtsov was arrested for quote ‘unauthorized’
protest in Saint Petersburg.
In 2011, he was arrested for participating in “unapproved rallies” around Moscow.
You’re probably starting to notice a pattern.
Most notably, in 2010, he was sentenced to 15 days in jail for “disobedience of police
orders”, again, during banned protest in Moscow,
In this case the subject of the rally was the government crackdown on peaceful assembly,
even when those gathered had permits.
In other words, arrested for protesting against the government’s restrictions on protesting.
That’s the topic I want to go deeper with: Russia’s regressing judicial system.
It was a Justice of the Peace Court which tried Nemtsov, and that’s because
Justice of the Peace Courts, sometimes called Magistrate Courts are the courts of first
instance in situations with criminal acts with maximum sentences of less than 3 years.
Appeals from these lower courts are actually retried in the next tier, District Courts,
with a judge and a jury.
Appeals beyond this level are handled by Regional Courts, which also see various complex civil
and criminal cases for provincial governments.
The final court of appeals in Civil and Criminal matters is the Supreme Court of Russia.
However, this shouldn’t be confused as a Russian version of the American Supreme Court.
Besides appellate jurisdiction, the American Supreme Court also exercises “judicial review”,
determining the constitutionality of acts of the other branches of government.
For these tasks, the Russian System has a Constitutional Court, 19 judges appointed
by the President and confirmed by the upper chamber of the Russian parliament (Terrill,
419).
Because Bolshevik revolutionaries like Trotsky and Lenin were ill-prepared for their easy
takeover of the Russian Government in November 1917, the Soviet court system retained some
of the Romano-Germanic Structure that existed in the era of the Tsars.
Something similar happened after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
In a scramble to transition from the USSR to a Federal Republic, much of the structure
of the Soviet judicial system was retained.
However, the purpose and independence of the judicial system is what truly matters.
In Western ideals, judges should hold the government accountable to the same laws as
the citizenry.
Lady Justice is blind because we imagine her rulings to be equal between race and class.
But in the Soviet Socialist Judiciary, the purpose of judges was to extend the dictatorship
of the proletariat- to push the interests of the Socialist state.
If laws violated the written constitution, that was simply the will of the people and
was not the place of bourgeois judges to second guess.
As Andrey Medushevsky writes in his book “Russian Constitutionalism”: “Law under the circumstances
loses its separate value, turning into a form of ideological education and coercion.”
The objective then in transitioning from the Soviet Union to the Russian Federation was
to introduce judicial review and judicial independence.
Therefore, the Russian Constitution of 1993 gives the Constitutional Court the ability
to pronounce laws and actions unconstitutional.
This wasn’t the only positive reform.
Perhaps the crowning achievement of the new system was a separate Supreme Arbitration
Court, which managed commercial disputes for the newly opened Russian markets.
These commercial courts transparently published decisions online, and were openly willing
to rule against the government.
I speak of the Supreme Arbitration Court in the past tense because its independence didn’t
go unnoticed.
In 2013, President Putin spoke openly of forcing a merger between the Arbitration Court and
the much more tamed Supreme Court.
In 2014, the Russian Parliament complied, leaving the commercial courts as a weakened
subset of a subservient section of the system.
In this way, since the Soviet Union’s dissolution, the Russian Judiciary has seen major reform
and some regression.
A 2017 Freedom House report states that, “The judiciary lacks independence from the executive
branch, and career advancement is effectively tied to compliance with Kremlin preference.”
The conservative Heritage Foundation puts it as the Judiciary being “vulnerable to
political pressure and inconsistent in applying the law.”
In an interview with spanish newspaper El Pais, a Constitutional Court Judge (Vladimir
Yaroslavtsev) claimed that, “reforzamiento del autoritarismo hace que los jueces sean
cada vez más dependientes" The New York Times noted the increasing desire
of authorities to quote “work around” jury trials and reduce the number of criminals
acts for which a jury trial would be necessary.
Even though Russia joined the Council of Europe in 1996, subjecting it to rulings of the the
European Court for Human Rights, a 2016 ruling by a Russian Court “rejected international
court decisions” and subsequent decisions have been mixed (freedomhouse, 2017).
The council of Europe writes, “As long as the judicial system of the Russian Federation
does not become more independent, doubts about its effectiveness remain.”
In his book, Russian Government and Politics, Eric Shiraev gives us a more nuanced view.
“Most commentators outside Russia believe that, overall, the legal system is not independent.
Although the Constitution establishes a free judiciary, in reality it is not free, critics
insist...both critics and supporters of the system agree that the judiciary in Russia
is still a developing system, and that it could not have evolved overnight from a Soviet-style
legal system dominated by the Communist Party into one typical of a developed liberal democracy.”
What all this legal talk means for our story is that sometimes, especially in high-profile
trials, political rulings are handed out by the courts.
Case in point, the arrest and conviction of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov after peaceful
protest.
The Economist wrote at the time: “The rally was authorised and he was on his way home
when the police stopped him.
He was charged with disobeying the police and swearing, despite video-footage that showed
him asking the police to “calm down”.
A judge would not admit this as evidence...What is this about?
Presumably it is a display of brute power by Vladimir Putin.”
And the krass crescendo was long from over.
4 years later, still critical of the Russian Government, Nemtsov told a Newspaper that
he was fearing for his life, quote “Not as strongly as my mother, but still…”
He added, "I'm not afraid of [Putin] that much.
If I was afraid I wouldn't be heading an opposition party and do what I'm doing."
He was in the process of organizing a march against Russian activity in Ukraine when he
received the 4 gunshots to the back.
His business and political documents were permanently confiscated by investigators.
The police reported security cameras that might have better recorded the murder- were
down for maintenance.
In December, Putin ominously quipped, “I've known Nemtsov personally, he chose his opposition
path but it doesn't mean he had to be killed.
Those responsible will be found.”
The investigation eventually pinned the murder on 5 Chechens, and each was sentenced to between
11 and 20 years in prison.
Zaur Dadayev, accused of pulling the trigger, claimed his confession came after torture.
I’m going to use some subjective terminology with you in the rest of the video, but I feel
it’s justified.
Like the Judicial System, the Russian Prison System retained much of the Soviet structure,
meaning it often resembles ‘gulag-lite’.
Russia has the 4th largest prison population in the world.
For any adult convict in Russia, there are two possibilities for imprisonment.
First, there are the traditional celled prisons we would recognize in the west.
More often, there’s the penal colony, sometimes called the corrective colony.
These are by far the most common type of prison and couple imprisonment with forced labor.
Often, rather than direct administration, prison authorities designate inmates as the
internal disciplinarians.
In other words, guards watch the wall, while a few select prisoners impose strict, often
inhumane conditions within the colony (DeutscheWelle).
As is tradition in Russia since the 1500’s, being imprisoned often literally means being
sent far, far away, literally sometimes to Siberia (Piacentini, 2014).
According to the Gaurdian, “The majority of women convicted in Moscow courts are taken
to correctional colonies located between 200km [124mi] and 500km [310mi] from the capital.”
For young women, this number jumps to 600km, or 372 miles.
In the British Journal of Criminology, Laura Piacentini writes that, “Prisoners are spilled
out from the European centre to the east and north...As during the Stalin period, a large
number of penal colonies are inaccessible at certain times of the year.
Some can only be reached by helicopter.
Large numbers in the northern forests are reached by temporary forest roads or prison
service-controlled single-track railways.”
(Piancentini, 2014).
Torture is also systemic part of justice.
In 2010 the European Convention on Human Rights dealt with accusations of torture in 102 of
the 217 cases it heard regarding Russia (Levina, 2013).
This is especially prevalent in pretrial detention during which investigators employ torture
to force confessions and maintain the system’s astronomically high 99% conviction rate (NPR).
Between 2000 and 2010, new slang entered police vernacular.
The “phone call to Putin” is a torture method in which a victim’s earlobes or genitals
are shocked (Newsweek, United Press International).
Also common were beatings accompanied by suffocation, forcing heads into latrines, and sleep deprivation,
Amnesty International found the torture of women to be especially prevalent, including,
sometimes through penetration with foreign objects (Open Democracy, Amnesty International
2009).
As Polina Levina writes in New Criminal Law Review, “Although the presumption of innocence
may exist in principle, in practice, the system perpetuates a presumption of guilt.
The impetus to find the accused guilty is so strongly embedded
within the institutional structure that torture merely becomes the mechanism by which to achieve
this end.”
This all comports with the idea of a weakening Judicial System.
As you might expect, a system like this could lead to improper convictions under political
pressure.
Questionable convictions surround the killings of the journalists you see listed here (journalist
Anna Politkovskaya, Yuri Schkochikhin, Anastasia Baburova, and Nikolai Andrushchenko), and
as we discussed earlier, the murder of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov.
The list of journalists and opposition leaders tried and convicted of crimes like “unauthorized
assembly” or fabricated cases of corruption is simply too long to be covered in this one
single video.
As of the making of this video, the conviction of another notable opposition leader, Alexei
Navalny was thrown out by the European Court of Human Rights calling the proceedings, “arbitrary
and unfair”, but a Russian district court retried and reconvicted him (NYT).
Most recently, Mr. Navalny was attacked with antiseptic green dye outside the offices of
the Anti-Corruption Fund (BBC).
Constant harassment, arrest, and legal complication serve to obstruct the means of a loyal opposition
necessary for a functioning democracy.
Already writing about the growing crackdowns in 2007, an editorial from the New York Sun
described Putin’s Russia like Robespierre’s Republic, “In theory the regime permits
opposition parties to exist.
In practice they are allowed no access to the press, no right to protest, and no redress
in the courts...In Mr. Putin's state, active opposition to the ruling United Russia party
is construed as subversion of the state.”
Ultimately, what opposition leaders like Navalny and Nemtsov represent is instability.
The transitional period in the 90’s from the Soviet Union to the Russian Federation
was racked with inflation, unemployment, and general poverty.
From a Western perspective, the collapse of the USSR and the introduction of the Russian
Constitution were positive developments.
But for many, the democratization and radical measures for survival taken under Boris Yeltsin,
and his Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov, represent suffering and chaos (NPR).
Silence these voices.
Avoid another mess like the 90’s.
One antidote to instability is authority.
What Lenin discovered in 1917 was that national honor was nothing when normal people desired,
“peace, land, and bread”.
What Katherine the Great saw in 1775 was that freeing the peasantry was much less important
to her than keeping the empire intact.
What Vladimir Putin recognized early and took advantage of was what many who rule over Moscow
come to know: that the arc of history in Russia bends between chaos and authority; that in
an instant, small doses of positive progress can disappear behind the fortified walls of
the Kremlin.
Full disclosure with you, when I make these videos, I get the most excited about storytelling
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