RUTHFULLY YOURS

If you thought Russian dictator Vladimir Putin was concerned last week as race riots swept the Russian capital of Moscow, think again.  He was grinning from ear to ear.

Putin has two reasons to be delighted by race violence.

First, Putin himself is a virulent racist.  He is surrounded by white men, and has never once spoken out in support of the notion that dark-skinned people are the equal of white Slavic Russians, not even as dozens fall victim to race murder each year.  To the contrary, Putin’s rabidly nationalist rhetoric has clearly fanned the flames of race violence.  There’s nothing strange in this; Russia is a racist country, as any dark-skinned person who has ever lived there can readily attest.  Racism is popular, it wins votes.

Second, riots beget calls for more dictatorship.  Valery Zorkin, Chief Justice of the Russian Constitutional Court, stated in the wake of the riots it was “no longer a dystopia” to believe that “the state will no longer be able to protect its citizens from mass violence.”  This means only one thing:  the state must become even more powerful if it is to crush these outbursts as was done in Soviet times.

In other words, race riots help Russians ignore people like Arkady Gontmakher.

In September 2007, the Seattle resident and American citizen was arrested in Moscow.  The CEO of Global Fishing Inc., a leading worldwide purveyor of arctic crab, was accused of poaching millions of pounds of king crab from Russian waters, a charge that could draw a two-year prison term.

Under Russian law, prosecutors were not required to put Gontmakher on trial for eighteen months after his arrest, and they were not required to offer him reasonable bail while he awaited trial.

This meant that on the day he was arrested, Gontmakher was also, for all practical purposes, convicted and sentenced without trial to three-fourths of the maximum sentence allowable under the law, unless the prosecutor chose to show mercy.

Unsurprisingly, they didn’t.

But that draconian measure was not enough for Russian prosecutors.  They ignored their “speedy trial” obligation and the jury did not come in on Gontmakher until more than three years after his arrest and a full year after the prosecutor’s right to commence the trial (which had begun in May) had expired.

In other words, even if the jury had convicted him, Gontmakher would at that moment already have served one-third more time in prison than his maximum sentence could have imposed.

Gontmakher was not, however, convicted. Days ago, he was acquitted by the Russian jury on all counts.

Far from being ashamed of having held an innocent man in prison for three years and apologizing, however, the Russian prosecutors were still out for blood.  Without allowing Gontmakher to even leave the courtroom, the prosecutor had Gontmakher re-arrested on essentially the same charges.  Double jeopardy, like reasonable bail, is a concept largely foreign to the neo-Soviet “justice” system presided over by Vladimir Putin.

This is the same tactic they used with dissident businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky, although in the latter case prosecutors were extending the sentence on a prior conviction rather than attempting to secure a first.  In fact, even as Gontmakher was being re-arrested Khodorkovsky was awaiting judgment on his second trial on the same charges, timed perfectly to conclude just as his first sentence (to multiple years in Siberia) was winding down.

The Gontmakher case also calls to mind the sensational persecution of attorney Sergei Magnitsky, who perished in prison when his critical medical condition was ignored after being arrested for taking a stand against Kremlin corruption. Gontmakher suffers from a heart condition and has been repeatedly hospitalized.  He may well die behind Russian bars.

These wanton actions against Gontmakher were taken by the Kremlin despite the glare of a worldwide spotlight shining on his case.  In January 2010 the Wall Street Journal highlighted his plight, the family created a website demanding justice, and both Gontmakher’s Senator (Democrat Patty Murray) and Representative (Republican Dave Reichert) wrote to the Obama administration demanding intervention.

Needless to say, Obama turned a deaf ear to these protests, just as he has done in regard to all human rights and security issues where Russia is concerned.  Instead,  Obama convened the infamous “cheeseburger summit” with his counterpart Dmitri Medvedev and carefully avoided raising any human right issues, much less the wantonly illegal persecution of an American citizen, now proven innocent.

The reason?  American values, and American lives, mean nothing to Barack Obama.  All he cares about is packing his political resume full of bogus “achievements” in foreign policy, like a sham nuclear arms deal with Russia, which can be used to score points in elections. He is willing to sell our allies in Eastern Europe, and within Russia itself, right down the river to achieve his crass political ends.

So maybe the people of Russia aren’t to blame after all. If the President of the United States won’t stand up for American values, why should they?

Kim Zigfeld is a New York City-based writer who publishes her own Russia specialty blog, La Russophobe. She also writes about Russia for the American Thinker and for Russia! magazine and is researching a book on the rise of dictatorship in Putin’s Russia.