How They Murdered Me: the Yukos Lawyer Vasily Alexanyan’s Story
29 November, 2020
On the Radio Liberty website, human rights advocate and journalist Vera Vasilyeva discusses journalist Vera Chelischeva’s book “How They Murdered Me: the Yukos Lawyer Vasily Alexanyan’s Story.” This book could be called a chronicle of torture, as it provides documentary evidence of crime. “I wanted Alexanyan’s torturers’ names to remain in history,” Vera Chelischeva says. The book also includes recollections and thoughts of Alexanyan’s friends and colleagues.
Alexanyan worked for the oil company’s legal department and was lawyer for Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Vasily Shakhnovsky and other Yukos Affair defendants. On March 30, 2006, Alexanyan became Yukos Oil Company’s executive vice president, but by April 6, 2006 he was arrested on charges of embezzlement and money laundering. At Moscow’s Matrosskaya Tishina jail, he was diagnosed with HIV that he contracted during a bad blood transfusion following a car accident. According to a forensic medical opinion, the HIV patient could remain in custody on the condition that he receive high-potency antiretroviral medication. But Alexanyan received no treatment – instead, the investigators started blackmailing him, trying to force him to make a “deal”: medical treatment would be provided in exchange for “correct” testimony against former Yukos head Mikhail Khodorkovsky and former Menatep IFO head Platon Lebedev. Alexanyan refused, telling his lawyers “I was sentenced to death, and the sentence is being executed.”
Memorial Human Rights Centre has acknowledged Alexanyan as a prisoner of conscience, pointing to the investigators’ and the court’s cruel and inhumane treatment and failure to provide necessary medical help. Memorial noted: “There are grounds to assume that the defendant is being prosecuted for being part of a corporate group; that evidence of his involvement in crimes is falsified; the length and conditions of his custody do not correspond to the gravity of the crime; he is being prosecuted with clear violations of due process safeguards enshrined in the Russian Federation Constitution and legislation and the European Convention on Human Rights.”
After being held in jail for 2.5 years, Alexanyan was released on a 50 Mln. Rub. bond after the public learned of his tragic situation thanks to a support campaign and several European Court of Human Rights judgments (which Russia initially ignored). By then, then Alexanyan’s illness was terminal, and he was almost completely blind. Had it not been for the monstrous conditions in the investigative jail, Alexanyan may have been saved. He died two and a half years after his release. In a New York Times interview he gave prior to his death, Alexanyan said the authorities pressured him even after the criminal case ended. He said the authorities terrorized whomever was close to him or tried to help him – his parents, his doctors, even his driver. Alexanyan said he was being “held on a hook” as his assets were still frozen even though the case ended in 2010 due to the statute of limitations. Alexanyan died two months before turning 40. He was buried at Moscow’s Khovanskoe Cemetery. November 3, 2020 marks the nine-year anniversary of this death.
With the author’s permission, Radio Liberty is publishing a chapter from the book, which you can read here.
Source: The Radio Liberty, “How They Murdered Me: the Yukos Lawyer Vasily Alexanyan’s Story
