Alexei Bayer: Communism Is Alive and Well in Russia

Alexei Bayer, a native Muscovite, is a New York-based economist.

The Moscow City Court last week reviewed the second trial of former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his business partner Platon Lebedev. It confirmed the verdict but reduced the sentences by one year. Now they will get out of prison in 2016. The ruling comes as Amnesty International recognized the two former Yukos executives as prisoners of conscience, equating them with Soviet-era dissidents and thus drawing a direct parallel between Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the repressive Soviet Union.

Just as both Khodorkovsky and Lebedev trials had been a sham from the outset, the latest review by the court was also complete buffoonery. Given the apparent grudge Putin holds against Khodorkovsky, it is clear that he will stay in jail on one pretext or another as long as Putin remains the country’s most powerful man. But the moment Putin’s rule comes to an end, Khodorkovsky will most likely be promptly released.

Meticulous attention to minute legal details against the background of grotesque miscarriage of justice is an old Soviet tradition. The show trials of the 1930s, while featuring preposterous trumped-up charges such as spying for the British, German and Japanese intelligence services simultaneously, were also carefully staged in a vain attempt to imitate justice. Patently false evidence against millions of Stalin’s victims was gathered into files and stored in police archives. Extra-judicial killings of political prisoners were carried out only with the “legal” sanction by a troika, or an ad-hoc panel of three judges.

Historians still wonder why the Soviet bureaucracy went to so much trouble trying to create a fig leaf of legality for brutal and undisguised state terror...