by Bill Browder
Just as we were talking, the Hermitage staff erupted in cheers and started high-fiving each other outside the glass walls of my office. I opened my door and asked what was going on. My secretary turned to me and said, “The Magnitsky Act just passed the House three hundred sixty-five to forty-three!”
This was huge news, but I wasn’t in a state of mind to celebrate. Another person connected to this case had just died. I tried to bottle up my feelings about Perepilichnyy as best I could and joined the team to congratulate them on their hard work. I spent a few minutes talking about the vote and the next steps, but I didn’t want to tell them about Perepilichnyy until I could digest the implications.
I returned to my office, put my head in my hands, and tried to make sense of what I’d just learned. Had Perepilichnyy been murdered? Were his killers still in the United Kingdom? Were they going to come after us? As much as I wanted to start making calls to people who could help me figure all these things out, I couldn’t. I had to be at the New Diorama Theatre in forty-five minutes to host the play about Sergei that was taking place that night.
I went to the theater and attempted to push all my dark thoughts to the back of my mind. I made my way into the lobby, passing the brightest stars of London’s human rights community—MPs, government officials, celebrities, artists, as well as close friends. We all took our seats and watched. The play was moving and powerful, and when it was over, three special guests and I carried folding seats onto the stage and began a panel discussion. The panel consisted of Tom Stoppard, the famous playwright; Vladimir Bukovsky, a former Russian political prisoner; and Bianca Jagger, Mick Jagger’s ex-wife and a respected human rights activist.
Stoppard and Bukovsky shared their story about how Stoppard had written a play in the 1970s that helped free Bukovsky from a Soviet psychiatric prison. Using Sergei’s story, they pointed out that after all this time almost nothing had changed in Russia.
Speaking last, I said to the audience, “Indeed, the situation in Russia is dire, but today there is one small ray of light. Just a few hours ago, the US House of Representatives voted on the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act to sanction the people who tortured and killed him. I’m proud to say that the bill passed with eighty-nine percent of the votes.”
I’d planned to say more, but was cut off by an outburst of applause. One by one, people rose from their seats, and before I knew it, everyone was standing. They were applauding the campaign, but more than that, they were applauding this tiny bit of justice in the world. I couldn’t help but be moved, and I stood and started clapping too, along with everyone else.
I shook hands and accepted congratulations as I made my way out of the theater, but all I could think of was getting home. I’d told Elena about Perepilichnyy on my way to the play, and more than anything I needed to talk to her.
When I got home, I found Elena sitting on the couch staring blankly at the living-room wall. It is never good to see terror in the face of one you love, but that was exactly what I witnessed in Elena that night. We were home, our children were asleep, and we were theoretically safe—but I was sure that Perepilichnyy had thought the same at his house in Surrey.
The next morning, I spoke to my London lawyer, Mary, and we agreed that we should alert the Surrey police as soon as possible. They had to understand that this case involved high-level Russian corruption and organized crime. Perepilichnyy wasn’t someone who just dropped dead.
Mary drafted a letter, stressing that Perepilichnyy was a cooperating witness in a major Russian money-laundering case and might have been poisoned as Alexander Litvinenko had been in 2006. She urged the police to do a toxicology analysis as soon as possible.
Mary faxed the letter on Saturday, heard nothing on Sunday, and followed up on Monday with a call to the Weybridge police station. The duty officer confirmed that they’d received her letter, but strangely told her they had no record of any death involving someone named Perepilichnyy.
I thought that was absurd and asked Mary to get someone more senior who knew what was going on. She made more calls, and this time the police confirmed that Perepilichnyy had in fact died on November 11 on the private road near his house, but they were unwilling to discuss any other details. Mary pointed out that we had information that could be helpful to their investigation, but the police simply took her number and said that they would get back to us if they needed to.
By Wednesday, the police still hadn’t contacted Mary. That day, I heard from Marcel that the initial postmortem results for Perepilichnyy had come back inconclusive. The coroner couldn’t determine a cause of death. No heart attack, no stroke, no aneurysm. Perepilichnyy had just died.
This was worrying for one reason in particular: just before his death, Perepilichnyy had told us that he was on a Russian hit list and had been receiving death threats, making it reasonably likely that a Russian assassin was on the loose in the UK. If he’d gotten to Perepilichnyy, then he could just as easily get to us.
Mary hounded the police for the rest of the week but was continually rebuffed. I was so upset by the following Monday that I asked her what we could do to get them to act. Her advice was simple: “Go to the press.” Normally lawyers advise you to stay away from the press in these situations, but it was such a matter of public interest, and the police were being so unresponsive, that in her opinion we didn’t have any other choice.
That day, I got in touch with an investigative journalist at London’s Independent newspaper and told him the whole story. I provided him with the documentation that Perepilichnyy had given us, and a list of phone numbers that he could use to verify different parts of the story.
Two days later, the Independent ran a story with the headline “Supergrass Who Held Key to Huge Russian Fraud Is Found Dead in Surrey.”1 Perepilichnyy’s face covered the entire front page of the newspaper. Inside were a further five full pages describing every part of the story. The story ricocheted between every television station, radio show, and newspaper in the United Kingdom. Everyone was terrified that Russian organized criminals were settling scores on the streets of London.
Immediately after these stories came out, the Surrey police finally sent two homicide detectives to our office to interview us. Then, twenty-one days after Perepilichnyy died, the police announced they would do a full toxicology analysis on his corpse. In my mind this came way too late. If he’d been poisoned, by now it could be undetectable.
With a major homicide investigation under way and the press all over the case, whoever did this to Perepilichnyy would have been spooked and surely gone to ground. While the threat level was still high, I was no longer in a state of panic and felt comfortable enough to refocus on my responsibilities.
The Senate vote in Washington was now only days away. While I couldn’t be there to witness it, I was going to be in the United States to give a speech at Harvard and to have some meetings in New York.
I flew to Boston on Sunday, December 2, and when I got off the plane, an urgent message from Kyle was on my BlackBerry. I called him as I walked toward immigration.
“Hey, Bill. What’s up?” he said.
“I got your message. Is there something wrong?”
“Possibly. There are a number of senators who are insisting on keeping Magnitsky global instead of Russia-only.”
“What does that mean for us?”
“Well, it’s not just Cardin anymore. There’s a growing group of senators led by [Jon] Kyl and [Carl] Levin who are also insisting on the global version.”
“But I thought the whole Senate was behind it.”
“There’s no question that we have the votes, Bill. But if there’s no consensus on which version to put up, Harry Reid won’t schedule a vote,” Kyle said, referring to the Senate majority leader. “And the clock’s ticking.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
“Yeah. Try to contact Kyl’s and Levin’s people and give them your arguments for why they should go with the Russia-only version.
I’ll try the same with Cardin.”
“Okay. I’m stuck in Boston and New York for the next few days, but I’ll do it.”
I stopped in the hallway before reaching immigration and spoke with Juleanna. She wasn’t as concerned as Kyle, but promised to get in touch with the senators’ foreign policy staffs first thing Monday morning.
I cleared immigration and customs and went to my hotel. The next morning I went to the Harvard Business School to present a case study that the school had written about my experiences in Russia. For the first half of the class, the students took turns telling the professor what they would have done if they had been in my shoes. I sat in the back row quietly watching as they came up with a few good ideas that I wished I’d thought of. The case study brought them to the point where our offices were raided in 2007, so they were only thinking about portfolio management and shareholder activism, not any of the criminal-justice issues. Unless they were following the news, they didn’t have any idea what had happened after.
I took the podium for the second half of the class and told the whole story of the fraud, and Sergei’s arrest, torture, and death. The mood in the room changed as I spoke. By the end, I noticed that some of the students were crying.
The professor, Aldo Musacchio, walked me out of the building afterward and told me that was the first time in his career at Harvard Business School that he’d ever seen students cry after a case study.
I finished my visit to Harvard and made my way to New York. By the end of the next day, and in spite of Juleanna’s and Kyle’s efforts, nothing in Washington had changed. Levin was immovable and Cardin wasn’t showing his hand.
I went to sleep early on the night of the December 4, but woke up at 2:00 a.m. because of jet lag and all the eleventh-hour uncertainty surrounding the Senate. I knew I wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep, so I took a shower, put on the hotel robe, then sat at my laptop and searched for Magnitsky.
The first thing to come up was a press release from Senator Cardin’s office. It had been posted late the night before. I clicked on the link and read it. Cardin had compromised. He had dropped his demand for global. This meant the voting would go ahead.
I cleared my calendar for Thursday, December 6, and brought up C-SPAN on my computer. I sat in my hotel room alone, waiting, pacing, and ordering room service. Finally, around noon, the Senate voted on the Magnitsky Act. It all happened quickly. After half the votes were tallied, it was certain that the bill would pass. The final count was 92–4. Levin and three other senators were the only ones to vote against it.
It was almost anticlimactic. There were no fireworks, no marching band, just a roll call and then on to the next piece of business. But the implications were enormous. Since 2009, 13,195 bills had been proposed, and only 386 had made it out of committee and been voted in to law. We had completely defied the odds.
We had done so because of Sergei’s bravery, Natalia’s heart, Kyle’s commitment, Cardin’s leadership, McCain’s integrity, McGovern’s foresight, Vadim’s brilliance, Vladimir’s wisdom, Juleanna’s savvy, and Elena’s love. It had happened because of Ivan and Jonathan and Jamie and Eduard and Perepilichnyy and countless others, big and small. Somehow, our little idea of sanctioning those who’d killed Sergei had taken root and grown. There was something almost biblical about Sergei’s story, and even though I am not a religious man, as I sat there watching history unfold, I couldn’t help but feel that maybe God had intervened in this case. There is no shortage of suffering in this world, but somehow Sergei’s tragedy resonated and cut through as few tragedies ever do.
More than anything I wished that none of this had ever happened. More than anything I wished that Sergei were still alive. But he wasn’t, and nothing could bring him back. Nevertheless, his sacrifice was not in vain. It pricked the bubble of impunity that ensnares modern Russia, leaving a legacy that he and his family could be proud of.
* * *
1 Supergrass is British slang for “informant.”
40
Humiliator, Humiliatee
I was stunned when the act finally passed.
And another person was too: Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.
For the previous few years, Putin had sat comfortably in the Kremlin, knowing that whatever happened in the US Congress, President Obama opposed the Magnitsky Act. In Putin’s totalitarian mind, this was an ironclad guarantee that it would never become law. But what Putin overlooked was that the United States was not Russia.
In simple terms, the Russian response to the Magnitsky Act should have been a tit-for-tat retaliation reminiscent of a Cold War spy exchange. The Americans sanction a few Russian officials, and the Russians respond by doing the same. End of story.
But that is not how Putin decided to play it. Instead, immediately after the Magnitsky Act passed the Senate, he began a major quest to find ways to lash out and cause America real pain.
Putin’s apparatchiks began floating ideas. The first was a proposed parliamentary resolution to seize $3.5 billion of Citigroup assets in Russia. This would certainly be vindictive, but it was a ridiculous idea. Somebody must have realized that if Russia seized Citigroup’s assets, then the United States would seize Russian assets in America. Our opponents abandoned this and moved on.
The next idea they floated was a blockade of the Northern Distribution Network. This was the route the Americans used to move military equipment through Russia and into Afghanistan. The United States got supplies into Afghanistan in only two ways—through Pakistan or through Russia, and Putin understood perfectly how valuable this route was.
The problem with this idea was that if Russia followed through, officials at the Pentagon would look at a map and ask where they could put down their enormous foot to affect Russia’s strategic interests in a similar way. The obvious place would have been Syria. Putin’s government had invested a lot in propping up Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, and Putin wasn’t going to do anything to jeopardize that investment. So this idea quickly died as well.
Putin needed to come up with something that didn’t involve money or the military but that would still upset America.
That idea surfaced on December 11, 2012, when I was in Toronto to advocate for a Canadian version of the Magnitsky Act. That night I was giving a speech to a group of Canadian policy makers and journalists. During the question-and-answer session, a young female reporter stood and asked, “Today, members of the Russian Duma1 announced that they are proposing a law that would permanently ban the adoption of Russian children by American families. What is your comment, Mr. Browder?”
It was the first I’d heard of this. I had a hard time processing the question, but after thinking about it for a moment, I responded, “If Putin is putting Russian orphans in the middle of this, it’s one of the most unconscionable things he could possibly do.”
This move complicated my psychology. Up until that moment, my fight with the Russians had been black-and-white. Picking sides was entirely straightforward: you were either on the side of truth and justice or you were on the side of Russian torturers and murderers. Now, by coming to the side of truth and justice, you might be causing harm to Russian orphans.
Putin’s proposed ban was significant because over the last decade Americans had adopted over sixty thousand Russian orphans. In recent years Russia had restricted most American adoptions to sick children—those with HIV, Down syndrome, and spina bifida, among many other disorders. Some of these children wouldn’t survive without the medical care they would receive from their new American families.
This meant that in addition to punishing American families who were waiting for Russian children to join them, Putin was also punishing, and potentially killing, defenseless orphans in his own country. To say that this was a heartless proposal doesn’t even qualify as an understatement. It was evil, pure and simple.
Putin had hit his mark. He’d found something that Americans wanted and that he could take away without any threat of retaliation. More than
that, he’d found a way to create a moral cost for supporting the Magnitsky campaign.
While Putin expected a bad reaction from the United States, he had no idea what kind of hornet’s nest he’d stirred up in his own country. One can criticize Russians for many things, but their love of children isn’t one of them. Russia is one of the only countries in the world where you can take a screaming child into a fancy restaurant and no one will give you a second look. Russians simply adore children.
This didn’t stop Putin, though. The adoption ban law was given its first reading in the Russian Parliament on December 14, the same day that President Obama signed the Magnitsky Act into law.
The initial blowback inside Russia came from the most unexpected quarter. After the law was proposed, some of Putin’s most senior confidants started to break ranks. The first was Olga Golodets, the deputy prime minister for social issues, who told Forbes that if this law was passed, “children with serious illnesses who require expensive operations will lose the opportunity to be adopted.” Then Anton Siluyanov, Russia’s finance minister, tweeted, “Logic of tit for tat is wrong because children will suffer.” Even Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, who carried out some of Putin’s most odious policies around the world, said, “It is not right, and I am sure that eventually the Duma will make a balanced decision.”
Because Putin ran such a tight ship, given this unprecedented display of dissent I started to assume that he must not be behind the adoption ban himself. I hoped and prayed that was true and that cooler heads would prevail. Defenseless children had to be taken out of this fight.
Putin rarely projects his intentions and is one of the most enigmatic leaders in the world. Unpredictability is his modus operandi. While he does this to keep his options open, he also never backs down from a fight or shows any weakness. Therefore, it was impossible to predict what he was going to do, but we were about to get a clearer view when Putin took the podium for his annual four-hour press conference on December 20, 2012.
