That day, Sergei arrived at court in midmorning. He was taken to a hallway and chained to a radiator. As he sat there going over the petitions he’d spent the previous two weeks preparing, Silchenko appeared and said with a smirk, «I’ve given the court the documents you’ve been asking for».
Sergei had requested a number of case documents on five different occasions over the previous six weeks. He needed them to put up a proper defense, but now, with only ten minutes to go before the hearing, Silchenko was finally adding them to the case file, and Sergei would not be able to see them before the hearing got started. Before this could sink in, the guards unchained Sergei, walked him into the courtroom, and put him in the defendant’s cage.
As Sergei sat, he saw his mother and his aunt in the first row of the gallery. He gave them a small wave, trying to put on a brave face. They hadn’t seen him in the two months since his last court appearance.
The judge, Yelena Stashina, brought the hearing to order. Sergei first read his complaint about not receiving adequate medical care. Judge Stashina rejected it. He then read his complaint about the fabrication of evidence in his case file. She rejected this as well. As he began to read the complaint about his false arrest, Stashina cut him off midsentence and rejected it too. In total, she rejected more than a dozen of Sergei’s complaints. When Sergei asked for more time to go over the «new materials» that Silchenko had brought to court, Stashina told him to be silent.
But Sergei wouldn’t be silent. Instead he stood in the cage and, in a booming voice that defied his physical state, accused her of violating the law and his rights. He finished his speech by saying, «I refuse to take part in and listen to today’s court hearing because all my petitions to uphold my rights have been simply ignored by the court». He sat and turned away from the judge, and the hearing proceeded without him. Stashina was unmoved. She went through a few technical issues and then coldly extended Sergei’s detention. The hearing ended and the guards came into the cage for Sergei. He couldn’t muster the strength even to smile at his family as they led him away.
He was taken back to the hallway and chained to the same radiator. Neither his lawyer nor his family was allowed to see him for the rest of the evening. His mother and his aunt waited for hours outside in the cold for the van that would take him back to Butyrka, so that they could try to give him a little wave and tell him that they loved him. But by 9:00 p.m. the prison van had still not emerged. The cold, the despair, the sadness, ate into them. Finally, they gave up and went home.
I found out about all of this the next morning. When I told Elena, she became distressed. «I don’t like this, Bill. I don’t like this one bit».
I agreed.
«We have to get someone to Butyrka», she insisted. «Someone needs to see Sergei — today».
But no one could. His lawyer, who was the only person permitted to see him, was out of town and wouldn’t be back until Monday.
That night, at 12:15 a.m., the voice mail alert on my BlackBerry vibrated. Nobody ever called my BlackBerry. No one even knew the number. I looked at Elena and dialed into voice mail. There was one message.
I heard a man in the midst of a savage beating. He was screaming and pleading. The recording lasted about two minutes and cut off mid-wail. I played it for Elena. Afterward, we sat in bed, unable to sleep, pondering all sorts of gruesome scenarios.
As soon as the sun came up, I called everyone I knew. They were all O'kay. The only person I couldn’t call was Sergei.
On Monday, November 16, 2009, Sergei’s lawyer, Dmitri, went to Butyrka to see him. However, the prison officials said they wouldn’t bring Sergei out because he was «too unwell to leave his cell». When Dmitri asked for Sergei’s medical report, he was told to go to Silchenko. He called and asked for a copy, but Silchenko told him that the report was «an internal matter for the investigation» and refused to give Dmitri any details.
They were deliberately giving Dmitri the runaround; Sergei was more than «unwell». After months of untreated pancreatitis, gallstones, and cholecystitis, Sergei’s body finally succumbed, and he went into critical condition. Although the prison officials at Butyrka had previously rejected his numerous requests for medical attention, that day they finally sent him to the medical center at Matrosskaya Tishina to receive emergency care.
However, when he arrived, instead of being taken to the medical wing, he was taken to an isolation cell and handcuffed to a bedrail. There, he was visited by eight guards in full riot gear. Sergei demanded that the lead officer call his lawyer and the prosecutor. Sergei said, «I’m here because I’ve exposed the five-point-four billion rubles that were stolen by law enforcement officers». But the riot guards weren’t there to help him, they were there to beat him. And they laid into him viciously with their rubber batons.
One hour and eighteen minutes later, a civilian doctor arrived and found Sergei Magnitsky dead on the floor.
His wife would never hear his voice again, his mother would never see his easy smile, his children would never feel the squeeze of his soft hands.
«Keeping me in detention», Sergei had written in his prison diary, «has nothing to do with the lawful purpose of detention. It is a punishment, imposed merely for the fact that I defended the interests of my client and the interests of the Russian state».
Sergei Magnitsky was killed for his ideals. He was killed because he believed in the law. He was killed because he loved his people, and because he loved Russia. He was thirty-seven years old.
31. The katyn principle
In April 1940, at the beginning of the Second World War, a Soviet NKVD[13] officer stationed in Belarus named Vasili Mikhailovich Blokhin was assigned the task of executing as many Polish POWs as he could. To do this efficiently and without alerting the prisoners to their fate, Blokhin had a special shed built at the POW camp. It had an entry door and an exit door and was surrounded on all sides by sandbags. Prisoners were taken into the shed by the entry door one at a time and told to kneel. Blokhin would then hold his pistol to the back of the prisoner’s head and shoot. The corpse would be dragged out the exit door and put into a truck. When the truck was full, it was driven into a forest, where the bodies were dumped into mass graves.
Blokhin was good at his job. He was a night owl and worked tirelessly from sunset to sunrise. When he first started his assignment, he used his standard-issue Soviet service revolver, but later switched to a German-made Walther PPK. It had less recoil and didn’t hurt his hand as much. Over twenty-eight days, and only taking time off for the May holidays, Blokhin murdered some seven thousand Polish prisoners. A prolific executioner, he was nevertheless just one man in a vast Soviet-sponsored and Stalin-directed massacre of Polish servicemen and officers that saw the deaths of twenty-two thousand men. The vast majority of these men were buried in the Katyn forest.
When the war was over and the mass graves were discovered, the Soviets claimed the Germans were responsible for this atrocity. The world knew of all the terrible and unthinkable things the Germans had done during the war, so this lie was eminently plausible. To back it up, the Soviets manufactured evidence, issued official reports, and repeated their allegations so many times and in so many places, including at the famous Nuremberg trials, that their version of events became unchallenged. Only decades later, in early 1990, when the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse and no longer had the fortitude to maintain the cover-up, did they admit the truth of what had happened in the Katyn forest.