On Wednesday, the Basmanny District Court will hear a rather curious case of ours against the Investigative Committee over a certain criminal. You remember the incident that had every journalist in an uproar for a week: Czech spy and, at the same time, Investigative Committee chief Bastrykin dragged a Novaya Gazeta journalist into the woods (literally) and threatened to kill him there (also literally).
Really, it wasn’t just journalists who should have been up in arms — it should have been everyone in the country.
After all, this is the head of the Investigative Committee and (in theory) the country’s chief fighter against crime, corruption, and abuse of office. Neither his position nor those handsome gold epaulettes suggest that he would get drunk like a pig and then threaten journalists with murder.
Imagine a situation in which you — as a boss, a state official, with security guards, pistols, and Mercedeses — take someone out to a strip of woodland and tell him: "Your head will be cut off, and your legs will end up somewhere else. No one will find you, and even if they do, I’ll be the one investigating it."
If that is not a crime under Article 119 of the Russian Criminal Code, then what exactly counts as a “death threat”? The only thing left would be to pull out a gun and start shooting at someone’s feet like in cowboy movies.
Of course, the journalist could not help but take this threat seriously, because another fact from the life of Mr. Bastrykin is also well known:
In other words, this is a guy who was given epaulettes and a pistol, who likes to pull out that pistol to threaten people, and then use the epaulettes to wriggle out of responsibility. So, as any law-abiding citizen should, when I learned of a crime having been committed, I filed a formal report about that very crime. And I expected that my report would be reviewed in the proper legal manner. After that, either a criminal case would be opened or a decision would be made not to open one. This was in July of last year. It was obvious that since Bastrykin’s alleged crime was supposed to be investigated by Bastrykin’s own subordinates, they would twist and turn however they could. But reality exceeded expectations:
That is, it wasn’t even, “we checked and found that there was no crime.” It was simply, “we’re not even going to register this — it doesn’t look like a crime to us.” So of course we immediately went to court to appeal this little scrap of paper from Mr. Bastrykin. The complaint landed with Judge Karpov, a figure on the Magnitsky List (the sanctions list tied to Sergei Magnitsky’s case), also known for actively helping the Investigative Committee manufacture the “Bolotnaya case” (the prosecution of protesters after the 2012 Bolotnaya Square demonstrations) and for issuing unlawful detention orders. Karpov set about defending Bastrykin in his own way: the Investigative Committee had not registered our report, and Karpov simply refused to consider our complaint about the Committee’s actions. He said “it’s unclear exactly where the possible crime was committed, so appeal it somewhere — though it’s unclear where”. He dragged this out for several months, until on January 28, 2013, we beat him in the Moscow City Court — Karpov’s ruling returning the complaint was overturned. For this foot-dragging, by the way, we filed complaints against Karpov with the chair of the Moscow City Court and with the Moscow Judicial Qualifications Board. We also filed a complaint concerning the issuance of a knowingly unlawful judicial decision. On February 28, 2013, a hearing was held at the Basmanny District Court before Karpov again (unfortunately) to consider the complaint on the merits. The hearing was adjourned until March 13 at 9:30 a.m. So on Wednesday we’ll find out whether such a trifle as taking a journalist into the woods and promising him, “they’ll cut your head off, and I’ll be the one investigating it,” is enough in this country to trigger an official review. Or whether, if the answer is still “and I’ll be the one investigating it,” then Mr. Bastrykin simply cannot commit a crime on this one-seventh of the world’s landmass (a common Russian reference to the country’s vast size).