So what are we to make of the fact that it was Krizsky, with his associations with Fedulev and others like him, who was the favorite of Ivan Ovcharuk, chairman of the provincial court? What was going on? At every assembly Ovcharuk would emphasize that Krizsky was one of the best judges in the Urals.
The simple truth is that most of us living in Russia were born in the land of the Soviets and, to a greater or lesser extent, lived by the Soviet code of conduct. For Ovcharuk, the Soviet ways of thinking and behaving were second nature. In other words, he was a typical die-hard legal boss. He had been trained not, under any circumstances, to argue with his superiors; he had learned to do as he was told, carry out his superiors’ orders, even try to anticipate their moods, which way their eyebrows would move. This is no journalistic exaggeration but a description of Soviet servility. Ovcharuk is what we have inherited from our past, a man whose career progressed because he never challenged the opinion of his superiors, no matter how lawless or stupid it was.
When the new times came, and democracy and capitalism with it, there was a moment, eyewitnesses tell us, when Ovcharuk panicked. Whom could he serve now?
His perplexity was soon dispelled. A special Soviet flair for sniffing out whom it was most profitable to subordinate himself to, who the new powers were, soon came to his rescue. Ovcharuk chose two new czars. The first was the nascent business world, where capital was accumulating at a vigorous pace. The second was the civil-service bureaucracy, which, however much people complained about it, remained as monolithic and as solid as a granite cliff. For Ovcharuk it was represented by Governor Rossel. Since these twin czars had united in Yekaterinburg in tender friendship and a new Mafia had emerged alongside the old Uralmash, Ovcharuk had no further qualms: he began serving Rossel and Fedulev.
Only at the end of 2001 did Yekaterinburg get rid of Krizsky as chairman of the Verkh-Isetsk District Court. It was a messy business, and the outcome was hardly satisfactory.
The provincial directorate of the FSB was well aware that Krizsky had been servicing Fedulev’s criminal activities in the Urals for many years, but its agents had never caught him red-handed. In the end, covert (and illegal) around-the-clock surveillance was set up, and the chairman of the Verkh-Isetsk court was caught engaging in… pedophilia. The FSB presented its evidence to Krizsky himself, to his patron Ovcharuk, and to Rossel. The outcome? There was no public scandal. Krizsky was not stripped of his judicial status, but he was redeployed, to become the mayor of Yekaterinburg’s legal adviser, and that was that.[9]
BUT WHAT ABOUT those judges who did not want to take part in turning an independent judiciary into one totally subservient to the criminal underworld?
In Yekaterinburg in recent years, a majority of judges have been found to be intractable. Those who chose not to serve the emergent crime syndicates have been dismissed from the bench by the dozens, and have had insult and abuse heaped on them.
Olga Vasilieva worked for eleven years as a judge, a fair stint. Outwardly she was a calm, unfussy person, the kind of judge who refused on principle to rubber-stamp the directives and rulings that Fedulev needed for the games he played. She simply refused. Vasilieva worked in the same Verkh-Isetsk District Court, with Krizsky as her immediate superior, and was subjected to immense pressure, including occasional threats to her life and her family. She remained unbowed, never once gave in, and turned down not only Fedulev but Krizsky when he demanded summary directives from her for the early release of one or another of the judge’s criminal protégés.
The last straw was when Vasilieva accepted a writ against the chairman of the provincial court, Ivan Ovcharuk. Krizsky insisted she should have rejected it in order not to create a precedent. The plaintiffs were citizens of Yekaterinburg whom Ovcharuk had subjected to unreasonable judicial delay, willfully failing to examine their application to the court within a reasonable time because it was directed against the interests of high officials in Governor Rossel’s administration.
For Yekaterinburg, a city under the heel of the Mafia, where everybody knew that stepping out of line in such matters usually ended not in a quarrel but in a shooting, accepting a writ of that kind was revolutionary. Other district courts, in order not to bring major trouble down upon their heads, would refuse even to register such writs, although by law they had no right not to do so.
The system took savage revenge on Olga Vasilieva for acting within the law. She was not only fired; she was endlessly vilified. Complaints were appended to her personal file when it was submitted, in order to have her expelled from the bench. They came from Krizsky’s criminal protégés whom she had refused to release from jail. The complaints were written by inmates on official court forms that they could have received only by Krizsky’s having brought them to the prison himself.
Vasilieva had to start a pilgrimage around official institutions to prove that the accusations against her were false. It took a year for the Supreme Court of Russia to restore her rank, but even then her difficulties were not over. The Supreme Court sat in Moscow, but she practiced in Yekaterinburg, where she was entirely on her own. As soon as she got back home, she handed the Supreme Court resolution to Krizsky, but he refused to allow her to return to work and wrote an official representation against her to the Provincial Judges’ College of Qualifications, an institution of the Russian bench. He advised its members that, despite having been restored to office, Vasilieva “had failed to mend her ways,” a formulation traditionally used in reference to prisoners.
Judges in Russia are required to have their status reconfirmed periodically—in effect, to be reappointed—and hence must obtain a recommendation from the College of Qualifications in their republic or province. Approval from the college leads to more or less automatic reappointment by directive of the president. Now, however, Ovcharuk added his weight to Krizsky’s denunciation, and the College of Qualifications resolved “no longer to recommend” Vasilieva for appointment as a judge.
As might be expected, nobody in this Mickey Mouse College of Qualifications made any attempt to corroborate the facts. These were the very allegations, based on the statements of convicts, that the Supreme Court had just rejected as unsubstantiated.
Olga Vasilieva, a courageous, principled woman, applied once again to the Supreme Court, insisting on her right to justice. Years of her life are being wasted on this exhausting, debilitating campaign, however, and in the meantime she is being prevented from working for the good of the state.
Can we expect the majority to tread the path Olga Vasilieva has chosen? Many Yekaterinburg judges commented, begging me under no circumstances to publish their names: “It is easier for us just to rubber-stamp the rulings Ovcharuk demands than to find ourselves in Vasilieva’s shoes.” They had many harrowing tales about what had happened to colleagues of theirs. The story of Alexander Dovgii, another Yekaterinburg judge, is one such saga.
9
In addition to the pedophilia problem, the prosecutor general’s office also held an inquiry into the allegation that Fedulev’s wife had given a bribe of $20,000 to Judge Krizsky, and into the closing of the case for which he had interceded. The inquiry found the allegation of “thanking” to be valid, but no criminal investigation followed. In accordance with Russian tradition, Krizsky was allowed to “resign at his own request” in order not to cause a scandal. And resign he did, into “honorable retirement” from the bench. Soon afterward, Prosecutor General Skuratov left office, having provoked a public scandal in which corruption figured prominently.