Putin's corruption

WASHINGTON
AFTER NEARLY a professional lifetime of legal battles, first against the commissars and now against the current crop of Russian thugs masquerading as a government, Eduard Safronsky has earned the right to his stark observation: "A totalitarian regime is starting again in my country. That is the Russian reality."

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The previous crowd (1917-91) might have been nominally in the service of an ideology, but Safronsky calls what is emerging under Vladimir Putin (whose good soul President Bush claims to have discovered) is the pursuit of power based on economic greed under the always convenient cover of nationalism.

Safronsky, a quietly intense lawyer, has direct experience to support his contention -- most recently as one of the principal attorneys involved in the human rights mess known as Yukos -- the oil empire that Putin has targeted for confiscation.

If he were in Moscow right now, Safronsky would get tossed in the clink for what he is doing these days -- spreading the word about a case straight out of Kafka on behalf of some of Yukos's bankers. Fortunately, he is safely beyond Putin's reach and has refused to sign a gag order while he was directly on the case. (He had to drop out to battle cancer.)

For months, Americans have seen the Yukos outrage primarily as a matter for the business pages -- a tale of alleged tax crime amidst hints of gangster influence, with possible impacts on the volatile world supply and price of crude oil.

In fact, as the Council of Europe's human rights monitors keep reminding, Yukos is a classic example of what Putin is doing to Russia in the interests of his increasingly powerful clique. The Yukos case should be seen as an integral part of a disturbing pattern -- the brutality associated with the suppression of the Chechnya rebellion, the meddling or worse in Ukraine's recent election, sharply higher military spending, and escalating anti-US rhetoric in Russia's public square, press intimidation, and actions against political opponents. Since early last year, Putin's henchmen have gone after the firm with a purple passion. The reason is officially given as economic crime on a huge scale -- specifically tax frauds so fraudulent that they supposedly involved sums of money that greatly exceeded the net income upon which Yukos is alleged to have avoided taxes. The law involved is even being applied retroactively.

Three of the firm's executives, including founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky, have been held in conditions bordering on the barbaric. Last weekend, the real purpose of all this was crystal clear, as the Russian government attempted to sell off Yukos's largest production operation -- to itself, no less, in what amounts to nationalization -- on the pretext of recovering the evaded taxes.   Continued...