by Bill Browder
Silchenko argued that Sergei was a flight risk and waved around a “report” from Department K as his evidence, claiming that Sergei had applied for a UK visa and had reserved a plane ticket to Kiev. Both allegations were fabricated. Sergei pointed out that he hadn’t applied for a UK visa, which could easily be proven by contacting the British embassy. Sergei then addressed the made-up Kiev reservation, but the judge wouldn’t let him finish. “I have no reason to doubt the information provided from investigative bodies,” the judge said. He then ordered Sergei to be held in pretrial detention. Sergei was hustled out of the court, handcuffed, and put in a prison transport. He spent ten days at an undisclosed location and was then taken to the place where he would be held for at least the next two months, a jail known simply as Moscow Detention Center No. 5.
When he got there, he was put in a cell with fourteen other inmates but only eight beds. The lights were left on twenty-four hours a day and the prisoners slept in shifts. This was clearly designed to impose sleep deprivation on him and the other detainees. Silchenko probably thought that after a week of fighting hardened criminals for a mattress, Sergei, a highly educated tax lawyer, would do anything Silchenko wanted.
Silchenko was wrong.
For the next two months Sergei was moved again and again and again. Each cell was worse than the last. One cell had no heat and no windowpanes to keep out the arctic air. It was so cold that Sergei nearly froze to death. Toilets—which consisted of holes in the ground—were not screened from the sleeping area. Sewage often bubbled up and ran over the floor. In one cell, the only electrical outlets were located directly next to the toilet, so he had to boil water with the kettle while standing over the rank latrine. In another cell, Sergei fixed a blocked toilet with a plastic cup, but it was chewed away by a rat in the night, and so much sewage covered the floor by morning that he and his cellmate had to climb up on the bed and chair like monkeys.
Worse than the physical discomfort for Sergei was the psychological torture. He was a devoted family man, and Silchenko tormented Sergei by refusing to allow him any contact with his family. When Sergei applied for his wife and mother to visit, Silchenko replied, “I reject your application. It’s not expedient for the investigation.”
Sergei then applied for permission to speak to his eight-year-old son on the phone. “Your request is denied,” Silchenko said. “Your son is too young for you to have a phone conversation.” Silchenko also refused a request for Sergei’s aunt to visit because Sergei “couldn’t prove” she was a relative.
The purpose of everything Silchenko did was simple: to compel Sergei to retract his testimony against Kuznetsov and Karpov. Yet Sergei never would, and every time he refused, Silchenko made Sergei’s living conditions increasingly worse, further isolating him from the life he knew and the freedom he had so recently enjoyed.
• • •
It wasn’t until Sergei’s detention hearing in January 2009 that we learned of his horrible living conditions, his complete isolation from his family, and his mistreatment at the hands of Silchenko. It wasn’t until then that we heard of his steadfast refusal to recant. It wasn’t until then that a picture of Sergei’s strength began to take shape.
While most of the information we received that January was extremely grim, there was one bit of positive news. As Sergei was being moved around, he ended up sharing a cell with an Armenian accused of burglary. The Armenian was preparing for trial and desperately needed legal help. Without any law books or other resources, Sergei was still able to write a comprehensive defense for his cellmate. When the Armenian went to court, he was surprisingly acquitted and set free. As news of this spread, Sergei’s stock with the other prisoners shot up like a rocket. Overnight he became one of the most popular and well-protected inmates in the detention center.
The terrible images from Oz at least partially faded from my mind, and I slept a little easier after hearing that Sergei’s fellow inmates were not mistreating him.
Unfortunately, the authorities were.
In late February, Silchenko secretly moved Sergei to a special facility called IVS1. This was a temporary holding facility outside the main detention system where the police could do whatever they wanted to detainees. We suspected this was where Silchenko and the FSB were trying to coerce Sergei into signing a false confession. We had no idea what they did to Sergei there, but we assumed the worst.
For the next two or three months we didn’t hear much more. All we knew for certain was that no matter what Silchenko and the other officers at the Interior Ministry did to Sergei, he refused to sign anything that they put in front of him. When Silchenko told him to expose somebody, Sergei would say, “I will expose those officers who have committed the crimes.” Eventually Silchenko must have realized that he had seriously underestimated this gentle tax lawyer.
The more they did to Sergei, the stronger his spirit became. In a letter to his mother he wrote, “Mama, don’t worry about me too much. My psychological resilience surprises me sometimes. It seems as if I can endure anything.”
Sergei would not break. But while his will was unbreakable, his body was not. In early April he was moved again, this time to a detention center called Matrosskaya Tishina. There, he began to suffer from acute pains in his stomach. The episodes would last for hours and result in violent bouts of vomiting. By mid-June he had lost forty pounds.
Sergei was sick. But with what, we had no idea.
• • •
As Sergei’s detention dragged through the spring, a part of me wished that he would just give the Interior Ministry what it wanted. His doing so might have increased my problems with the Russian authorities, but that would be nothing if Sergei could have gotten out of that hellhole and ended up back in the arms of his family.
As each day passed, I became increasingly desperate to get him out of jail. Since I had no capacity to do anything in Russia, my only option was to pull out all the stops in the West.
The British government had made it clear that it was going to do next to nothing to help Sergei, so I began looking for international organizations that might be able to help. The first solid lead came from the Council of Europe, a multilateral organization that dealt specifically with human rights issues. Headquartered in Strasbourg, France, it was composed of forty-seven European countries, including Russia. A German MP and former justice minister, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, had recently been appointed by the Council to conduct an investigation into Russia’s criminal justice system, and she was looking for high-profile cases for her report.
We were aware that we were competing with many other Russian victims for her attention. At the time, there were roughly 300,000 people who had been unjustly imprisoned in Russia, so we didn’t have high hopes, but our lawyers contacted her office and she agreed to a meeting. Prior to that meeting, I spent a week putting together a presentation outlining each step of the crime and how it led to Sergei’s being taken hostage and mistreated in detention. When she saw the facts laid out so clearly and with so much evidence, she immediately agreed to take up his case.
In April 2009, she approached the Russian law enforcement agencies with a long list of questions. It was a positive development because the mere process of the Council of Europe asking the Russian government about Sergei could potentially free him—or at least get him better conditions.
Unfortunately, it did neither.
The Russian authorities refused a face-to-face meeting with Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, so she was forced to send her questions in writing. After a long silence, she received her answers.
Her first question was simply, “Why was Sergei Magnitsky arrested?”
The answer: “Sergei Magnitsky was not arrested.”
Of course he was arrested. He was in their prison. I couldn’t imagine what the Russians were thinking when they said this to her.
Her second question was, “Why was he arrested by Interior Ministry officer Kuznetsov, who he testified against before his arre
st?”
She got an equally ridiculous answer. “The officer with such a name doesn’t work in the Moscow Interior Ministry.”
We had proof that Kuznetsov had worked in the Interior Ministry for many years! They must have thought Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger was stupid.
Nearly all the other answers were similarly absurd and untrue.
Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger would put all of these lies and absurdities in her final report, but a draft wouldn’t be ready until August, and Sergei didn’t have the luxury of time. I continued to canvass other organizations and found two powerful legal groups that might get involved: the International Bar Association and the UK Law Society. After hearing Sergei’s story and reviewing our documentation, each organization sent letters to President Medvedev and to General Prosecutor Yuri Chaika, asking for Sergei’s release.
Again, I had high hopes that these interventions would help, but again they fell flat. The General Prosecutor’s Office replied to the Law Society by saying, “We considered your application and found no grounds for prosecutorial intervention.” The Russian authorities didn’t even bother to reply to the other letters.
Continuing my search, I looked to America. In June 2009, I was invited to Washington, DC, to testify in front of the US Helsinki Commission, an independent government agency whose mission is to monitor human rights in former Soviet Bloc countries. At the time, it was headed by the first-term Democratic senator from Maryland, Ben Cardin. The purpose of the hearing was to decide which cases would go into President Obama’s briefing package for an upcoming summit with President Medvedev.
This was the first opportunity I’d had to share Sergei’s case with such a high-profile group in the US political arena. I made my presentation, and the senators and congressmen were appropriately shocked by Sergei’s ordeal. Unfortunately, one of the staffers at the Helsinki Commission, a young man named Kyle Parker, decided not to include Sergei’s story in the commission’s letter to President Obama. Parker thought too many other issues were more pressing.
After this I realized that what we needed most to get Sergei’s story above the fray was media attention. Only a handful of articles about Sergei had appeared, and all of them were written shortly after his arrest. As much as I tried, journalists simply weren’t interested. With all the evil going on in Russia, they didn’t see the newsworthiness of a story about a jailed lawyer. Any attempt to share the complicated details of Sergei’s case just made journalists’ eyes glaze over.
I’d exhausted my list of Russia correspondents when I hit upon a young Washington Post reporter named Philip Pan. Unlike the others, he was new to Moscow and wasn’t jaded. He immediately recognized the resonance of Sergei’s story.
From early July until August 2009, he interviewed members of our team, verified our documents, and tried as best as he could to get the Russian authorities to respond. By early August, he had put together a truly damning exposé.
On August 13 the Washington Post published his feature story, entitled “3 Lawyers Targeted After Uncovering Seizure of Firms.” He accused the Russian government of a major financial fraud and explained how it had targeted Sergei, Eduard, and Vladimir to cover up the crime.
Normally, a corruption exposé like this would cause a big stir, but in this case, there was dead silence. The Russians were totally unmoved and unashamed. Even worse, the Russian press didn’t pick it up at all. Journalists in Russia seemed too scared to write about anything to do with me. I was simply radioactive.
At roughly the same time that the Washington Post article came out, Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger published her report. Like Pan, she went step-by-step through all of the Russian lies, the tax-rebate fraud, and how Sergei had been falsely arrested and mistreated in Russian custody. She concluded, “I cannot help suspecting that this coordinated attack must have the support of senior officials. These appear to make use of the systemic weaknesses of the criminal justice system in the Russian Federation.”
Her report was definitive and damning, but it also had no impact whatsoever. The Russians met it with more deafening silence. The people tormenting Sergei simply didn’t care.
We had a big debate internally about what to do next. We were getting nowhere with traditional advocacy tools and running out of ideas. But then our twenty-four-year-old secretary popped her head in my office and said, “Sorry to interrupt, but I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation. Have you guys ever thought of doing a YouTube video?”
I barely knew what YouTube was in 2009, so she brought in her laptop and showed us how it worked.
Given our lack of success elsewhere, it seemed worth a try. We organized our information about the fraud, wrote a script, and produced a fourteen-minute video. It explained in simple terms how the police and criminals had succeeded in stealing $230 million from the Russian Treasury, and how they’d arrested Sergei when he exposed the crime. We made two versions—one in Russian and one in English. It was clearer and more understandable than anything we’d done before, and I suspected it would make a big impression when we released it.
I was keen to get it online as quickly as possible, but first I needed Sergei to approve it, since he was the one who was most exposed to any repercussions. I passed a copy of the script to his lawyer and waited anxiously to hear whether I had his blessing.
But Sergei was dealing with more pressing issues.
• • •
By the summer of 2009, Sergei’s health had seriously deteriorated. The doctors in the medical wing of Matrosskaya Tishina diagnosed him with pancreatitis, gallstones, and cholecystitis. They prescribed an ultrasound examination and possible surgery for August 1, 2009.
One week before this scheduled exam, however, Major Silchenko made the decision to move Sergei from Matrosskaya Tishina to Butyrka, a maximum-security detention center that in Soviet times had been a way station to the gulags. The place was infamous throughout Russia. It was like Alcatraz, only worse. Most significantly for Sergei, Butyrka had no medical facilities that could deal with his illnesses.
What Sergei was forced to endure at Butyrka was worthy of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago.
As soon as he passed through the doors of Butyrka on July 25, Sergei asked the prison authorities to arrange for the medical treatment he was supposed to receive. But they simply ignored him. For weeks, he languished in his cell, the pain growing steadily with each passing day.
Then, at 4:00 p.m. on August 24, the pain in his stomach became so acute that he couldn’t lie down. Every position sent fiery pains through his solar plexus and chest. The only respite came when he pulled up his knees and rolled into a ball, rocking from side to side.
At 5:30 p.m. that day, his cellmate, Erik, returned from an interrogation. Sergei was on the bed in this balled-up position, whimpering quietly. Erik asked what was wrong, but Sergei was so consumed with pain that he couldn’t respond. Erik shouted for a doctor. The guard heard him and promised to find one, but nothing happened. Half an hour later, Erik banged on the bars to get the guard’s attention, but still there was no response.
An hour later, Erik heard some male voices: “Which cell?”
Erik shouted, “Two sixty-seven! Please come now!” But no one came.
Sergei’s pain became even more excruciating over the next few hours. He was holding himself tight, tears streaming down his face, when, finally, at 9:30 p.m. two guards showed up, opened the cell door, and took him to the infirmary.
When he arrived, he was made to wait for half an hour while the nurse slowly finished her paperwork. He crouched with his knees close to his chest to alleviate the pain. When the nurse was finally done, she barked in an accusatory tone, “Okay. Why are you here?”
Sergei was practically shaking, and through clenched teeth he said slowly, “I’m in unbearable pain. I’ve asked over and over, but no doctor has examined me since I arrived last month.”
The nurse was visibly annoyed. “What do you mean you haven’t been examined? You were examined
at your previous detention center!”
“Yes, and they prescribed treatment and surgery. But nothing has happened here.”
“When did you come to us? Only one month ago! What do you want? To be treated every month? You should have had treatment when you were free.”
“I wasn’t sick when I was free. I developed these illnesses in detention.”
“Don’t tell me fairy tales.” She then dismissed him, without providing any treatment. Her final words were, “If you need medical attention, write another letter to the doctor.”
The guards took him back to his cell. Eventually the pain subsided and he was able to drift into a fitful sleep.
It was now clear that the authorities were deliberately withholding medical attention from Sergei. They were using illnesses he had contracted in detention as a cudgel against him. They knew that gallstones were one of the most painful conditions anyone could suffer from. In the West, you might last two hours before you crawl to the emergency room, where the doctors will immediately give you a dose of morphine before treating you. Sergei, though, had to deal with untreated gallstones for four months without any painkillers. What he had to endure was unimaginable.
Sergei and his lawyer wrote more than twenty requests to every branch of the penal, law enforcement, and judicial systems of Russia, desperately begging for medical attention. Most of these petitions were ignored, but the replies he received were shocking.
Major Oleg Silchenko wrote, “I deny in full the request for a medical examination.”
A Tverskoi District court judge, Aleksey Krivoruchko, replied, “Your request to review complaints about withholding of medical care and cruel treatment is denied.”
