Tomorrow at 10:00 a.m., the magistrate’s court in Moscow’s Basmanny District will announce the verdict in one of the most astonishing cases we have had the chance to follow — the case of journalist Pavel Nikulin.
You probably remember that marvelous moment in the Moscow mayoral campaign when deputies from the A Just Russia party personally stormed the apartment of the “Navalny brothers” and cut through the door with an angle grinder in search of illegal campaign materials.
Only later did we learn that there were no “illegal campaign materials” in the apartment at all. They found a couple of rolls of stickers and that sort of thing. Only later would all of Moscow decide that the lawmaker-burglars were idiots. Only later would candidate Levichev receive 2.7% of the vote, finish last in the election, and have one of the main reasons for that failure attributed to precisely these antics with “Levichev’s angle grinder.” But at the time, the little deputies felt very tough, barked orders at the police, and swung their fists at everyone around them. And so Pavel Nikulin, a correspondent for *Russkaya Planeta*, ended up on the receiving end of these “servants of the people.” Four people attacked him at once, threw him to the floor without explanation, and one of the attackers punched the reporter in the face. The police officers looked on approvingly. The man who struck him was Ruslan Tatarinov, an employee of the central apparatus of the A Just Russia party.
You can read more about the story here. Nikulin, naturally, filed a police report and... ended up becoming the accused himself in a countersuit filed by Tatarinov. His certificate documenting the “beating” was issued by a midwife. Meanwhile, Nikulin’s witnesses described what happened that day in the apartment building entrance, and Pavel himself underwent a polygraph test that confirmed the truthfulness of his testimony. During closing arguments at the Basmanny court, Tatarinov’s defense asked that the beaten Nikulin be sentenced to corrective labor and argued that he had undergone all those examinations only to prove his innocence — and if he was trying to convince everyone he was innocent, that meant he was guilty.