In a particularly unique expression of civil discontent, a Moscow theater has staged an unexpectedly successful play based on Magnitsky’s daily journal. Radio Free Liberty/Radio Europe reports:

The small theater stage is the world and all the people on it are to be judged, says the director of a play based on the diary of a Russian lawyer who died in prison last year.

The production — based on the daily writings of Sergei Magnitsky, who died in a Moscow prison in October after awaiting trial for nearly one year — has been running in Moscow for more than a month and is completely booked through August, organizers say.

The venue, Teatr.doc, doesn’t sell the tickets to “One Hour and 18 Minutes” but rather gives them away on a first-come, first-serve basis.

Director Mikhail Ugarov tells RFE/RL he didn’t expect the play to be so successful.

“After each performance we have a sort of discussion [with the audience],” he says. “People stick around and talk -– about the kind of country we live in and what we can do about it. And the thing is, these [discussions] have happened because there is no public forum [in Russia] where people can express an opposing opinion.”

Documentary theater is an uncommon thing in Russia. In fact, this is only the country’s second “documentary play.” The first, also staged by Teatr.doc, was called “September.doc” and was based on notes that appeared on message boards and chat rooms after the tragic school massacre in the Russian city of Beslan in 2004.

This latest play has been reviewed in Russian newspapers and journals, and the government seems to knows about it, too. It has even been watched by the head of the Public Commission for the Supervision of Prisons, Valery Borshev.

Moscow authorities have been silent about it, letting the play run its course.

Ugarov says that doing so is in their best interest: “Any kind of disturbance or outcry would not be advantageous for the authorities.”

In hundreds of letters written while he was in custody, the 37-year-old Magnitsky claimed that his imprisonment on suspicion of tax evasion was a result of his testimony against two Russian Interior Ministry officers who, Magnitsky claimed, had embezzled more than $230 million from the government.

On the day of his death, Magnitsky reportedly suffered horrible stomach pains and repeatedly asked for medical care. As the title of the play reminds, Magnitsky was refused medical aid and died after being handcuffed and alone in his cell for an hour and 18 minutes.

Here’s a passage of the production that comes from an excerpt of the final entry Magnitsky made in his diary:

There they are following the court. I am way too tired to ask. Understand, I don’t need anything — only a glass of water. Understand, I just need a plate of noodles and some medicine. I am in pain — not too horrible — it’s true. But what is the point of this judgment? Remember that according to the law, people are still allowed a hot meal…it’s not right to treat someone like this. Fine. Ok, I’ll pay. I even know how much it costs. Here, take it. Only give me a drop. And the glass? What? It’s not funny…. Into what will I pour the water? There’s no cup? Not even a plastic one? I would pay you more, but I don’t have any more. I gave you everything. I don’t have anything. (Screams).

Ugarov says he has run into critics who say that theater shouldn’t shadow real life events. But he disagrees. He hopes that the play can help lead a new wave of documentary theater productions in Russia.

“You know, it’s hard to create documentary plays,” says Ugarov. “For one, it’s emotional because it’s real. And secondly, there aren’t many examples to follow, so we kind of have to make our own.”

He says that while the success of “One Hour and 18 Minutes” is great for the theater, what he hopes is that documentary theaters offer spaces where the public can openly debate issues often muted in Russian society.

In the fall, the play will travel to St. Petersburg, where, Ugarov expects, it will also play to packed houses and lead to interesting discussions with the audience.

Wednesday’s roundtable was held under the title “Medical Aspects of the Use of Torture.” During the course of discussion, experts gave various accounts of how torture in the Russian Federal Penitentiary Service and the Internal Ministry, which controls the police, had developed into a social norm that the government is not interested in addressing.

Public Council member Andrei Babushkin addressed how torture was employed specifically within the police, arguing that young people who decide to work in law enforcement often get the impression that the results they desire from detainees are fully achievable by simply using their fists.

Andrei Mayakov, deputy chairman of the Committee for Civil Rights, brought attention to the established practice in pretrial detention facilities where detainees are intentionally denied medical treatment for any injuries they might have. Moreover, medical professionals working in these facilities often fail to report instances when they suspect torture is being used against a detainee, he said.

Whereas the use of torture is punishable in many European countries by a significant prison term – up to a life sentence in Great Britain, for example – its maximum term under the Russian Criminal Code is seven years in prison, the experts noted.

Public Council Representative and Moscow Public Oversight Commission head Valery Borshchev noted that human rights advocates had begun to carry out cell-by-cell inspections of detainees located in pretrial detention facilities after the deaths of businesswoman Vera Trifonova and lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, both of whom died this past year in the Moscow pretrial detention facility Matrosskaya Tishina.

Borshchev proposed that a special registry be set up in Moscow’s law enforcement agencies to record the circumstances of how cases of torture were allowed to occur.

“We cannot exterminate this evil, but it is possible to reduce it and make it so that torture ceases to be a norm,” said Borshchev.

Russia has been accused of using torture by a variety of international rights advocacy groups. A report in January by the United Nations blamed Russia for holding detainees in secret prisons that are meant to cover up the fact that torture or other ill-treatment is practiced in such facilities. Amnesty International has accused Russian law enforcement agencies of using torture both in the North Caucasus and throughout the rest of the country. Opposition activists and human rights advocates routinely report cases of torture by the police, and the Russian Internal Ministry itself has admitted that torture is used on a regular basis.

Anatoly Bagmet, head of the investigative department of the Moscow Prosecutor’s Investigative Committee (Moscow SKP), told Interfax on June 11 that an unspecified number of medics are being charged with negligent homicide. They each face up to three years in prison if convicted.

Earlier in the day, Bagmet had stated that Trifonova’s death in the Matrosskaya Tishina pretrial detention facility this past April, which drew widespread comparisons to the scandalous death of Hermitage Capital Management lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, was the result of a medical error. An investigation, he said, had found that medics had forgotten to remove a catheter from the woman’s leg after an operation, which created a blood clot that dislodged and killed her.

Vladimir Zherebenkov, Trifonova’s lawyer, maintains that his client died as a result of the fact that an investigator intentionally denied her access to necessary medical care. The catheter, he believes, was left in place intentionally by doctors in the Vladimirsky Moscow Regional Research Clinical Institute in order to perform the biweekly hemodialysis treatments Trifonova needed to survive.

The Moscow businesswoman was detained last December under suspicion of large-scale fraud and placed in Matrosskaya Tishina. Having been diagnosed with diabetes and chronic kidney failure, she was moved to a Moscow hospital where doctors confirmed that her condition could not be treated at the detention facility. Despite this, Investigator Sergei Pysin moved her back to Matrosskaya Tishina, then to another hospital, then back to the detention facility, where she died of acute heart failure on April 30.

As a result, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev called for a federal investigation of Trifonova’s death. The presidium of the Moscow Regional Court ruled that a lower court decision prolonging her detention in Matrosskaya Tishina had been illegal, and the judge who made that ruling has now stepped down. Several penitentiary service officials were fired, and Investigator Pysin has been charged with neglect of duty.

Zherebenkov maintains, however, that Pysin’s crime was not neglect, but intentional acts that brought about the death of his client. He is currently pursuing a number of cases against figures that he claims had a hand in Trifonova’s death. Most recently on May 27, the lawyer filed a complaint with the Prosecutor General of Russia regarding the fact that one high-ranking Moscow SKP official was fired as a result of Trifonova’s death, but, weeks later, remains at his post.

Moreover, civil rights advocates at the anti-corruption organization Justice noted with concern that the new cause of death – a blood clot – had only been established six weeks after the initial one – acute heart failure. Other critics expressed skepticism as to why it took six weeks before medical experts noticed a catheter in the woman’s body.

After Sergei Magnitsky’s death, President Medvedev fired dozens of penitentiary service officials and signed a law meant to ensure that individuals detained on suspicion of economic crimes not be held in pretrial facilities like Matrosskaya Tishina. While government supporters hailed these measures, their effectiveness has been disputed. Human rights advocates argue that Trifonova’s death is evidence that “practically nothing serious was done after Magnitsky’s death.” In addition, jailed oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky staged a one-day hunger strike last month to draw attention to the fact that judges were blatantly disregarding the new law on economic crimes. President Medvedev held a meeting with court officials days later to attempt to address the disparity – notable particularly because the law was introduced by Medvedev himself. Whatever changes might result from that discussion have yet to be seen.

The ex-CEO of former oil giant Yukos announced his hunger strike in a letter to Russian Supreme Court Chairman Vyacheslav Lebedev; his lawyers published its content on their website Tuesday morning. The letter outlines how a Moscow court ruling to detain Khodorkovsky and his co-defendant, Platon Lebedev, for another three months violates a procedural amendment introduced last month by Russian President Dmitri Medvedev. The two are currently on trial facing charges from the Russian government of embezzlement that they dismiss as obviously untrue and politically motivated.

“The Khamovnichesky Court, by ruling on May 14, 2010, to extend my arrest, blatantly disregarded the changes recently incorporated into article 108 of the Criminal Procedure Code [UPK] of the Russian Federation,” says the letter. The changes referred to allow those charged with economic crimes to be released on bail except for under a limited number of circumstances: if their identity cannot be established, if they lack a place of residence in Russia, or if they have attempted to flee the country or hide from investigators. None of these circumstances apply to Khodorkovsky or Lebedev, who have been sitting out their 8-year prison terms in Siberia since 2005 as the result of a fraud case that was also widely viewed as politically motivated. Their lawyers had reminded the court of these amendments, which were introduced in response to the scandalous death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in pretrial detention last November, before the verdict was reached on Friday.

Nevertheless, Khodorkovsky goes on, “the court did not even consider it necessary to explain the reason for not adhering to the law.” Moreover, he said that he knew of other cases where the new amendments had been similarly disregarded. He stressed that while he the ruling had little effect on his own situation, his hunger strike was geared towards protesting the precedent that it would set.

“I can’t agree to something where the creation of a precedent in such a high-profile case would go unnoticed by the country’s administration, since it will immediately be replicated by corrupt bureaucrats in hundreds of other, less high-profile cases,” explained the former Yukos CEO.

Khodorkovsky said he wants “President Medvedev to know exactly how the law that was adopted altogether a month ago by his initiative… is being put to use, or, more accurately, is being sabotaged.” Therefore, he intends to strike until he gets confirmation that the president has received “exhaustive information” on the precedent being set by the Khamovnichesky Court in failing to adhere to existing law.

Supreme Court Chairman Vyacheslav Lebedev said that he has received Khodorkovsky’s letter and promised to look into the allegations and provide a response. Sources in Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service told RIA Novosti that they would be keeping track of Khodorkovsky’s health, but issued no official comment. President Medvedev has so far given no response.

Vadim Klyuvgant, a lawyer for Khodorkovsky and Lebedev, reiterated his client’s sentiment that the Khamovnichesky Court ruling is a “sign of catastrophe” that “is not so bad for our clients as it is for the entire country and for its president.”

“Because if such sabotage is possible in a situation when the people wouldn’t be released anyway, then what can we expect or say in regards to any other person who could and should have been released as a result of this law?” said Klyuvgant.

In comments obtained by the Christian Science Monitor, political analyst Andrei Piontkovsky explained how Khodorkovsky’s decision “is a direct challenge to Medvedev to separate himself from the Putin era and enforce the laws that he himself has sponsored.” As Piontkovsky elaborated:

“Khodorkovsky is making it necessary for Medvedev to define his position,” says Andrei Piontkovsky, director of the independent Institute for Strategic Studies in Moscow. “His challenge is very clever, legally and politically. He isn’t demanding that he be freed, rather just for confirmation that Medvedev has been made aware of his case. . . The ball is now in Medvedev’s court. Will he choose to follow the logic of the law, and risk a damaging split with Putin? He will have to make a choice, and that could determine Medvedev’s own political future.”

Additional reading:
• Who Fears a Free Mikhail Khodorkovsky? – NY Times Magazine

Vladimir Markin, official representative of the Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor General of Russia, said that investigator Sergei Pysin has been charged with neglect of duty. If convicted, he faces up to five years in jail.

Trifonova, who suffered from diabetes and chronic kidney failure, died of heart failure in Moscow’s Matrosskaya Tishina pretrial detention facility last Friday. The businesswoman had been detained since December 2009, when she was arrested on suspicion of massive fraud. Her lawyer alleges that Trifonova was intentionally denied medical care so that she would die, immediately giving rise to comparisons in the Russian press to the case of Hermitage Capital Management lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. The lawyer died last November, also in Matrosskaya Tishina, and also allegedly due to intentionally denied medical care. Russian Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) officials admitted partial responsibility in that case.

After Magnitsky’s death, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev had ordered massive layoffs from FSIN. Among those, says FSIN head Aleksandr Reymer, was supposed to have been Matrosskaya Tishina manager Fikret Tagiev. The newspaper Vedomosti reported on Tuesday, however, that Tagiev remains in charge of the facility to this day. FSIN officials in Moscow did not confirm whether or not this was the case.

President Medvedev ordered a federal investigation into Trifonova’s death on Saturday. In the meantime, at least two people have been fired in connection with the incident – Deputy Manager Aleksandr Filippov at Moscow’s regional investigative agency (and one of Pysin’s supervisors) and Valery Ivarlak, who also worked at the agency.

Trifonova’s lawyer, Vladimir Zherebenkov, told the newspaper Gazeta that charging Pysin with negligence would sidestep his actual crime.

“I’m going to insist that it wasn’t negligence; there was clearly a direct intent here,” said the lawyer. In an earlier statement to the advocacy group Justice, Zherebenkov detailed how Pysin removed Trifonova from a Moscow hospital against doctors’ orders and sent her to a hospital 75 kilometers outside of Moscow that lacked the equipment she needed to survive. “I’m going to demand that he be charged with abuse; he knew perfectly well where he was sending her, and he should answer to the fullest extent,” he told Gazeta.

Zherebenkov said that he plans to have the proper documentation prepared by next Tuesday to request that Pysin be charged with abuse of his official authority – an offense punishable by up to ten years in prison.

Also on Tuesday, a group of prominent human rights advocates from the Russian Association of Independent Observers addressed a letter to President Medvedev demanding that those responsible for Trifonova’s death be brought to justice. The signatories included Lyudmila Alexeyeva, Andrei Babushkin, Valery Borshchev, Lev Ponomarev, and Aleksandr Goncharenko.

Speaking to the online news site Kasparov.ru, Borshchev lamented that “practically nothing serious was done after Magnitsky’s death. This allowed the situation to happen again.” He added that there was more blame to go around than just on Investigator Pysin. Odintsovsky City Court Judge Olga Makarova, for one, had stated publically that she wouldn’t grant Trifonova’s bail request unless she plead guilty.

The letter also includes a list of illnesses and asks the president to authorize a ban on allowing anyone suffering from them to be held in a pretrial detention facility. Right now, the list only applies to convicted criminals.

According to Russian Federal Penitentiary Service representative Sergei Tsygankov, the 53-year-old Vera Trifonova died at 12:35 pm on April 30, 2010, in the intensive care unit of the hospital at the Matrosskaya Tishina criminal investigation detention facility (SIZO) in Moscow. Local police were called to the scene, established that there were no signs that the death has been violent, and have launched an investigation.

Trifonova’s lawyer, Vladimir Zherebenkov, told the rights organization Justice that his client was refused proper medical care to such an extent as to constitute an intent towards her “physical destruction.”

According to a press release from the organization, medics had diagnosed the businesswoman with severe diabetes and had determined that she had only one working kidney.

Zherebenkov explained that Trifonova’s health began to sharply declined when she was arrested in December 2009 and placed in Matrosskaya Tishina. When she complained that her lungs were filling with liquid, she was brushed off and told to “sleep standing up.” After demands by her lawyer, Trifonova was eventually moved to a Moscow city hospital, where she immediately recovered. Doctors at the hospital confirmed that Trifonova required specialized treatment that included regular cleansings of her blood – a procedure not possible at the detention facility.

At that point, says the lawyer, Investigator Sergei Pysin told Trifonova that she would get different accommodations if she plead guilty to the fraud she was charged with. The woman refused, and despite doctors’ orders that Trifonova not leave the hospital even for investigative proceedings, Pysin brought her back to Matrosskaya Tishina.

Zherebenkov believes that Pysin had at that point prepared a medical document from Matrosskaya Tishina doctors declaring Trifonova’s condition to be stable and fit for investigative proceedings. On the basis of that document, he says, Odintsovsky Court judge Olga Makarova turned down Trifonova’s April 16 request to be released on bail, and instead extended her detention for another three months.

That same day, the press release goes on, a decision was made to move Trifonova to a female penal colony in Mozhaysk, seventy miles west of Moscow. Officials at the penal colony refused to admit her, however, and she was taken to the Mozhaysk city hospital. According to Zherebenkov, doctors at the hospital did not know how to help the woman because they lacked the proper equipment to cleanse her blood, a procedure that she needed two to three times a week.

In the days that followed, the investigator repeatedly promised the Zherebenkov that they would find some way to move Trifonova to a hospital outfitted for her condition. But in the meantime, the businesswoman’s condition was quickly deteriorating. On April 26, the lawyer resorted to using an ambulance rented by Trifonova’s relatives to bring her to a local medical institute to undergo treatment.

Trifonova was finally brought back to Matrosskaya Tishina on April 29, and was supposed to have been brought back to the original hospital in Moscow today. As is now obvious, it was already too late.

“They purposefully destroyed her, and sent her to the Mozhaysk prison so that she would die there,” says Zherebenkov. He believes that the investigator “filled the order” of one of Trifonova’s business partners who owed her several million dollars.

According to RIA Novosti, officials from the Federal Penitentiary Service responded to the lawyer’s accusations that Trifonova was denied medical care by referring to the fact that the paperwork ordering her to undergo medical evaluation had needed to be signed by the investigator “who disappeared somewhere and we were unable to get in touch with him.”

Zherebenkov says he plans to file a criminal suit against Pysin and appeal to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. “Vera Trifonova repeated the fate of Sergei Magnitsky, because our SIZOs are instruments of torture and a means to pressure people,” he said.

The press release from Justice, the main source of information for this article, is available in Russian by clicking here.

Russian prisons have a historically high rate of violence, in part resulting from the rare practice of housing convicts together without regard for the severity of their crimes. While the government has finally decided put that practice to an end, the deputy prosecutor general said that facility reviews ordered by President Dmitri Medvedev exposed a significant number of cases where prison guards have abused both their own authority and the rights of prisoners.

“In facilities in the Omskaya, Orenburgskaya, Sverdlovskaya, and Chelyabinskaya regions, as well as several others, personnel have been using physical force and tactical equipment in ways that are not always lawful or well-founded,” said Zabarchuk.

When asked about conditions regarding prisoners’ health, the deputy painted a grim picture of the situation: In 2009 alone, 4150 prisoners had died in Russian correctional facilities. “What’s worrying is not only the high rate of disease, but the depressing death rate among convicts,” he said. “This is a problem that I would particularly like to single out, since the basic prison contingent is not made up of very old men or young children, but able-bodied people who are, you could say, in the prime of their lives and strength. Nevertheless, many of them do not live out their sentences, or they leave disabled.”

One reason for the mortality rate was the failure of correctional facilities to provide prisoners with proper medical care. And even when they do, said Zabarchuk, medical equipment is outdated and medical personnel often lack the proper education for their jobs.

However, said Zabarchuk, a series of recent prison reforms have succeeded in decreasing the number of prisoners overall. This was a key task for the penal system’s management, as a sharp increase in female prisoners has recently contributed to the already overwhelming overcrowding of Russia’s facilities. A recent decision by the Russian Supreme Court regarding procedures for bail, house arrest, parole, and other lighter forms of punishment has allowed more convicts to carry out their sentences outside of correctional facilities. As a result, the number of prisoners in Russia was 861,687 prisoners as of Spring 2010 – 29 thousand less than a year ago. Zabarchuk said that the decrease can be credited to the fact that, for the first time ever, the problem of abuse in Russian correctional facilities was being dealt with at the highest levels of government, with president Medvedev in particular pushing for reform.

Even so, the situation in Russia’s prisons remains dire, and not all reforms necessarily have any chance of success. Zabarchuk blamed the Federal Penitentiary Service itself for “ineffectively exercising departmental control” over rampant corruption. “Therefore, the negative situation that has developed is not changing,” he concluded.

Russian prisoners themselves have made a number of recent attempts to draw attention to the conditions of their treatment. In January 2010, prisoners in the southern Rostovskaya region announced an indefinite hunger strike in response to what they said were irresponsible medical personnel and other rights abuses. In November 2009, five prisoners in the Chelyabinskaya region wrote a letter to law enforcement agencies alleging continuous beatings and psychological abuse from prison guards, and also went on hunger strike.

In an interview with reporters on Wednesday, Former Captain Yevgeny Romanenko claimed that the management of Nizhny Novgorod Detention Facility No. 1 made the decision to fire him because employees of the prison were frightened of working with a Buddhist.

After returning to work on January 1 from vacation, Romanenko learned that another employee had called him a cult member at a year-end meeting for facility personnel. Two weeks later, prison head Colonel Vladimir Marmur called Romanenko into the guards’ locker room and found pictures of Buddhist iconography, including a left-facing swastika symbolizing perfection, among Romanenko’s personal belongings.

The colonel took the symbol for a Nazi swastika, and “that was the last straw,” said Romanenko.

The captain was then taken to Deputy Chief Konstantin Ivanov, who explained that workers in the facility were frightened of Romanenko and he would therefore have to be fired.

“Romanenko, we’re afraid of you,” Ivanov told the captain. “We’re not going to work with you. You have two alternatives: either immediately write a letter of resignation on your own accord, or we’ll attribute you as having contact with prisoners outside of your duties.”

It was not the first time Romanenko had faced discrimination for his religion. Colonel Marmur often expressed surprised that he abstained from using alcohol and tobacco. “Something’s not right about you,” Romanenko recalled the colonel saying.

Romanenko wrote a letter of resignation and is currently attempting to work with regional officials from the Federal Penitentiary Service to rectify his situation.