Alexey Pichugin: 18 years
Today marks the 18th anniversary of Alexey Pichugin’s arrest. On the Radio Liberty website, journalist Vera Vasilieva talks about what befell Russia’ longest-serving political prisoner.
June 19, 2021
Grim Changes. Vera Vasilieva’s on Alexey Pichugin’s 18 years
June 19 marks the 18th anniversary of Alexey Pichugin’s arrest. Memorial Human Rights Centre (forcibly listed by the government as a “foreign agent”) and some other human rights organizations consider him a political prisoner, while the European Court of Human Rights twice ruled that fair trial principles were violated with regard to the former Yukos Oil Company security division’s economic security department head. The Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers made numerous demands that the Russian authorities release Pichugin.
18 years is how long it takes to become an adult. While Alexey was in prison, an entire new generation grew up. Life changed beyond recognition, and I don’t mean just socio-political or technological changes, or changes in daily life. We’ve all come to know Instagram, Facebook, and iPhone… In my letters to Alexey, I sometimes have a hard time describing things that seem so commonplace to me but that he’s never seen.
In Stalinist times, the writer and political prisoner Evgeniya Ginzburg spent 18 years in the GULAG [prison camp system]. Evgeniya Solomonovna recalled her panic attacks continuing even after she left prison. Alexey Pichugin has now been in prison four years longer than the Count of Monte Cristo. However, unlike the literary protagonist, Alexey, whose personality can be discovered by people exchanging letters with him regularly, would never dream of spending what’s left of his life on revenge. But his persecutors, apparently being driven by totally different feelings and motives, seem to find this hard to believe.
It was Pichugin’s case that earmarked the start of the demolition of Yukos, although early on those at the disgraced oil company probably didn’t fully realize that Pichugin’s case was part of a massive attack and not a standalone event. But the essence of what occurred [over the past 18 years] is not just about Yukos, and it’s not just about the fact that Russia (whose TV channels and statesmen try to highlight to the world the USSR’s contribution to WWII victory and space exploration) is now famous for something entirely different – the well-known “Basmanny justice” which came to be during the Yukos Affair trial.
What I believe changed radically in the last 18 years is our country’s world view. Because those who perpetrate lawlessness today aren’t aliens. Any way you look at it, they are our countrymen, and among them are the investigators who fabricate criminal cases and the judges who rubberstamp guilty verdicts. We’ve all heard and read about “telephone justice” and censorship, and some of us have encountered them firsthand. But today, it seems to me, courts don’t always issue unjust guilty verdicts on the basis of orders from above. The fact that there is a pitifully small – less than a 1% – acquittal rate isn’t always due to the fact that judges were pressured, intimidated, forced, etc.… Sometimes it’s due to simple momentum of sorts, habit, just like the self-censorship practiced by some members of the writers’ fraternity: you’ve come to know how to write or what kind of verdict to issue. If a person is in jail, then he is guilty.
When Alexey Pichugin is released, he’ll find himself in a wholly new environment. New not just in the sense of changes in high-tech, or even changes in law and their application in the courts – after all, Alexey has firsthand experience with the court machinery, as it was in the Yukos Affair that “Basmanny justice” principles and tactics were honed and boundaries of what’s allowed were tested and set. What changed most is that Russia is now different in mentality, worldview and social behavior, and these changes are grim. But I don’t think it’s totally right to split us into the “good us” (unhappy and suffering in the current situation) and the “bad them” (who have usurped the power). I’m thinking that whoever cares about the future has to ask himself this key question: “Why do we allow ourselves to be treated this way?”
Source: Radio Liberty, Grim Changes. Vera Vasilyeva on Alexey Pichugin’s 18 years.
