Zoya Svetova in Ezhednevny Zhurnal on the those who signed and those who didn’t.

I was wrong when I said that no ‘people of good will’ remained in Russia. They’re still there against the odds. Through the efforts of a number of Russian human-rights activists who’ve never accommodated themselves to the Kremlin, there’s appeared a letter defending the lawyers of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev. Signatures are accumulating on the web, and their number is increasing every day. I love reading the signatures under letters like this. Most of the surnames are of people unknown. Their names don’t sparkle on the pages of newspapers; they’re not shown on TV. But these names tell us more about the development of civil society in Russia than any number of popular discussions on the subject. The letter in support of the lawyers has been signed by real Russian intellectuals - people who still cherish what’s left of the morality sadly abandoned by our contemporaries. The lawlessness of the new charges against Khodorkovsky and Lebedev has been compounded by yet more violations daily - and blatantly - perpetrated by our prosecutors and investigators, some of whom are quite happy to pay no attention to their superiors – the servants of the ‘dictatorship of law’.

In this case, everything is simplicity itself: the authorities are desperate for Khodorkovsky and Lebedev to face another trial. The memory of the demonstrations and protests held near the Meshchansky Court, however, makes a certain someone scowl in irritation. So the court sessions have to be held in semi-secret. But since this is actually against the law, another solution has to be found. Hence the brilliant - though absolutely illegal - decision to move the investigation and legal proceedings to Chita, thousands of kilometres and six whole time-zones from Moscow. Problem solved - minimum press, minimum sympathy. The rest - the court, the verdict - is simply a technical matter. That this is a direct violation of the law, which says that any legal procedure should be held in the place where the crime was committed, is neither here nor there. Nobody’s going to make a fuss about it, except the lawyers. Nobody’s going to risk putting his or her name on the line, for fear of legal hassles.

This is why none of the ‘stars’ of the Russian intelligentsia have been in any hurry to sign this letter championing Khodorkovsky’s lawyers. Nor are any Booker Prize-winners or best-selling authors or national artists hot to write letters of their own. This is - to be fair - perfectly understandable to me. But tell me, how much of a risk to famous writers and cultural figures is signing a letter like this? Not much, I suspect.

In the mid-1960s, when a letter appeared championing Sinyavsky and Daniel, the people who signed it took a serious risk - writers were being kicked out of the Writers’ Union and most of them lost their jobs. Is this in fact a case of genetic memory at work? Is fear hidden under the skin in the post-Soviet human, so that the famous would rather lend their names to safer and, above all, more profitable causes?

Here, for example, is Mikhail Barshchevsky, the President’s representative in the Constitutional Court, creating his own party, Civil Power. He above everyone should understand that, in opening new legal proceedings in Chita, the General-Prosecutor’s Office is breaking the law, and that violations of this sort create serious precedents. Why can’t he, as a jurist in the public eye, express his own opinion and attract the attention of the intelligent electorate to his nascent party? Barshchevsky keeps mum - and in doing so compounds the illegality.

Silence is heard too from Vladimir Lukin - the Russian President’s commissioner for human rights - in his case, per haps, explicably. He has, apparently, before he can respond to a particular human-rights violation, to receive first an application from the victim. Only when he has studied the materials in the case can he decide on his own position.

Last Thursday, a lot of people came to Moscow’s House of Journalists for a meeting championing Khodorkovsky and Lebedev’s defence-lawyers. Every seat in the main hall was taken. The audience was mostly middle-aged or elderly - they were the people who in Soviet times read samizdat and in the 1990s went to democratic meetings. Later they voted for Yabloko or SPS. They are sensitive to lawlessless and go on expressing their belief that they might just represent real civil power in collective meetings. The odds are that they’ll stop voting for Mikhail Barshchevsky, Masha Arbatova, Mark Rozovsky and others, who have underestimated the value of their own names in supporting a puppet party.

Instead they prefer to sign a letter in defence of the oppressed. And their names, though unknown to the general public, will in time to come be more highly valued than the names of those who have failed to understand the passionate words of Alexander Galich’s old song The Prospectors’ Waltz: ‘Here’s how easy it is to become an executioner: Keep silent, keep silent, keep silent!’

(Zoya Svetova, Ezhednevny Zhurnal, 06.03.2007)