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.

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.

William Browder, CEO of the investment advisory firm Hermitage Capital Management where Magnitsky had worked, said at the hearing that the lawyer’s persecution and death came as a direct result of his testimony against corrupt officials in the Russian Internal Ministry and other federal agencies. While detained, the CEO told the commission, Magnitsky was asked to alter his statements that officials had appropriated $230 million from the Russian government, and was tortured when he refused.

Browder asked the rights commission to support an effort by US Senator Benjamin Cardin to ban 60 Russian civil servants connected with Magnitsky’s death from obtaining visas to visit the United States. As Cardin put it, the officials “remain unpunished and in a position of power,” and said that the State Department reserves the right to deny a visa to anyone “engaging in, or benefiting from, corruption.”

Browder also asked that the United States Treasury freeze all assets kept in American banks by the civil servants in question, and asked that the United States work with other countries to do the same.

While many of the civil servants included in Cardin’s list are high-ranking officials, their names are largely unfamiliar to the Russian public. Among the most notable is Aleksei Anichin, head of the Internal Ministry’s Investigative Committee, as well as Moscow City Police Lieutenant Colonel Artem Kuzhetsov, who oversaw Magnitsky’s case.

In response, committee chair and US Representative Jim McGovern promised that he would introduce legislation that would not only ban the 60 officials from obtaining visas, but would also prohibit them from making US investments.

“One of the things that I would like to do is we’ll not only send a letter to Hilary Clinton, but I think we should introduce legislation and put those 60 people’s names down there and move it through the committee and make a formal recommendation from Congress, pass it on the floor, and say to the administration, ‘This is a consequence. You have to do this. Because if you don’t, nothing’s going to happen,'” said the congressman.

McGovern said that banning visas is the very least the United States should do in response to “serious human rights violations.” “People who commit murder,” he said, “and I think that’s what happened in that case, should not have the right to travel here and invest in business here and make money here and there should be a consequence. If we can’t get the consequence to happen in Russia, well then maybe there’s something we can do here [and] maybe other nations can do the same thing.”

Washington’s discussion of Magnitsky’s case has coincidentally coincided with the death of Russian businesswoman Vera Trifonova in a pretrial detention facility on April 30. Trifonova, who was detained in December on charges of fraud, was reportedly denied medical attention after refusing to plead guilty to investigators. Her lawyer contents that she was “purposefully destroyed” per request of a business partner who owed her a large sum of money. Since Trifonova died in the same facility as Magnitsky – Moscow’s Matrosskaya Tishina – her case is widely being seen as a repeat offense on the part of the penitentiary service.

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.