RUTHFULLY YOURS

By GARRY KASPAROV

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former head of the Yukos oil company and once Russia’s richest man, is in the eighth year of a jail sentence.

His crime? Wanting to forge partnerships with Western firms to modernize the industry. The Putin regime wanted to keep natural resources under strict control. When Mr. Khodorkovsky refused to give up his plans, the Kremlin concocted tax evasion charges against him and his colleagues. With its leader behind bars, Yukos was quickly dismantled and its parts handed out to Putin’s closest allies at the state-owned firm, Rosneft.

Nevertheless, the Putin regime is still afraid of Mr. Khodorkovsky, who has added “martyr” to his formidable résumé. And so, with his release scheduled for 2011, prosecutors have brought new charges against him—he’s now accused of stealing all the oil he was originally convicted of not paying taxes on. The latest judicial travesty came to a close on Nov. 2. A decision by Moscow’s Khamovnichesky court is expected on Dec. 15.

Mr. Khodorkovsky’s closing statement at his trial was a powerful indictment of what 10 years of Putinism have done to Russia both economically and morally. “What must be going through the head of the entrepreneur,” Mr. Khodorkovsky said, “the high-level organizer of production, or simply any ordinary educated, creative person, looking today at our trial and knowing that its result is absolutely predictable? The obvious conclusion a thinking person can make is chilling in its stark simplicity: The security services can do anything. There is no right of private property ownership. A person who collides with ‘the system’ has no rights whatsoever.”

There has been little Western coverage of this latest chapter of Mr. Khodorkovsky’s plight. Perhaps this is due to not wanting to embarrass the U.S. administration, whose “reset” with Russia was called “Obama’s central foreign policy achievement” by the New York Times just days after the Khodorkovsky trial ended. The drama of Cold War-style summits and nuclear treaties has made it easy to ignore the values those weapons and treaties were created to defend.

In 2005, Sen. John McCain and then-Senators Barack Obama and Joe Biden co-sponsored a resolution recognizing Mr. Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev (a colleague who was also sent to prison on tax evasion charges) as political prisoners. Now President Obama has regular meetings with President Medvedev—or “my friend, Dmitri,” as he calls him, the man who could free Mr. Khodorkovsky with a stroke of his pen. It is up to the president, who in 2009 called the new charges against Mr. Khodorkovsky “odd,” to live up to his convictions as a senator.

The Obama administration knows the truth. In one of the WikiLeaks documents released this week, Defense Secretary Robert Gates told Herve Morin, the French defense minister, last February that “Russian democracy has disappeared.” But the administration has been afraid to voice this conclusion publicly.

In his closing statement, Mr. Khodorkovsky invoked one of Barack Obama’s campaign themes, which means more coming from someone who has spent seven years in a Siberian prison camp. “I remember the end of the ’80s,” he said. “I was 25 then. Our country was living on hope of freedom, hope that we would be able to achieve happiness for ourselves and for our children. . . .

“I remember too the end of the last decade and the beginning of the present, current one. By then I was 35. . . . We felt hope that the period of convulsions and unrest was behind us at last, and that, in the conditions of stability that had been achieved with great effort and sacrifice, we would be able to peacefully build ourselves a new life, a great country. Alas, this hope too has yet to be justified. Stability has come to look like stagnation. Society has stopped in its tracks.”

Hope is fading, and not only for Mr. Khodorkovsky. Valery Zorkin, the powerful chief justice of Russia’s Constitutional Court, recently condemned the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg for insisting that Russia follow its own constitution. The law, wrote Judge Zorkin in the Rossiiskaya Gazeta newspaper in November, is secondary to the “cultural, moral and religious code” of Russia.

By that, Judge Zorkin must mean the code of impunity and omerta that allows dozens of Russian journalists and activists to be beaten or murdered without a single case solved. He must mean the cult of power that leads to peaceful protestors receiving longer jail sentences than violent criminals.

He could also be referring to the moral code that leaves Mikhail Khodorkovsky to rot in jail while the leaders of the Free World stay silent. They have until Dec. 15 to prove the judge wrong.

Mr. Kasparov, leader of The United Civil Front in Russia, is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal.

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