The Senate vote in Washington was now only days away. While I couldn’t be there to witness it, I was going to be in the United States to give a speech at Harvard and to have some meetings in New York.
I flew to Boston on Sunday, December 2, and when I got off the plane, an urgent message from Kyle was on my BlackBerry. I called him as I walked toward immigration.
«Hey, Bill. What’s up?» he said.
«I got your message. Is there something wrong?»
«Possibly. There are a number of senators who are insisting on keeping Magnitsky global instead of Russia-only».
«What does that mean for us?»
«Well, it’s not just Cardin anymore. There’s a growing group of senators led by [Jon] Kyl and [Carl] Levin who are also insisting on the global version».
«But I thought the whole Senate was behind it».
«There’s no question that we have the votes, Bill. But if there’s no consensus on which version to put up, Harry Reid won’t schedule a vote», Kyle said, referring to the Senate majority leader. «And the clock’s ticking».
«Is there anything I can do?»
«Yeah. Try to contact Kyl’s and Levin’s people and give them your arguments for why they should go with the Russia-only version. I’ll try the same with Cardin».
«O'kay. I’m stuck in Boston and New York for the next few days, but I’ll do it».
I stopped in the hallway before reaching immigration and spoke with Juleanna. She wasn’t as concerned as Kyle, but promised to get in touch with the senators’ foreign policy staffs first thing Monday morning.
I cleared immigration and customs and went to my hotel. The next morning I went to the Harvard Business School to present a case study that the school had written about my experiences in Russia. For the first half of the class, the students took turns telling the professor what they would have done if they had been in my shoes. I sat in the back row quietly watching as they came up with a few good ideas that I wished I’d thought of. The case study brought them to the point where our offices were raided in 2007, so they were only thinking about portfolio management and shareholder activism, not any of the criminal-justice issues. Unless they were following the news, they didn’t have any idea what had happened after.
I took the podium for the second half of the class and told the whole story of the fraud, and Sergei’s arrest, torture, and death. The mood in the room changed as I spoke. By the end, I noticed that some of the students were crying.
The professor, Aldo Musacchio, walked me out of the building afterward and told me that was the first time in his career at Harvard Business School that he’d ever seen students cry after a case study.
I finished my visit to Harvard and made my way to New York. By the end of the next day, and in spite of Juleanna’s and Kyle’s efforts, nothing in Washington had changed. Levin was immovable and Cardin wasn’t showing his hand.
I went to sleep early on the night of the December 4, but woke up at 2:00 a.m. because of jet lag and all the eleventh-hour uncertainty surrounding the Senate. I knew I wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep, so I took a shower, put on the hotel robe, then sat at my laptop and searched for Magnitsky.
The first thing to come up was a press release from Senator Cardin’s office. It had been posted late the night before. I clicked on the link and read it. Cardin had compromised. He had dropped his demand for global. This meant the voting would go ahead.
I cleared my calendar for Thursday, December 6, and brought up C-SPAN on my computer. I sat in my hotel room alone, waiting, pacing, and ordering room service. Finally, around noon, the Senate voted on the Magnitsky Act. It all happened quickly. After half the votes were tallied, it was certain that the bill would pass. The final count was 92–4. Levin and three other senators were the only ones to vote against it.
It was almost anticlimactic. There were no fireworks, no marching band, just a roll call and then on to the next piece of business. But the implications were enormous. Since 2009, 13,195 bills had been proposed, and only 386 had made it out of committee and been voted in to law. We had completely defied the odds.
We had done so because of Sergei’s bravery, Natalia’s heart, Kyle’s commitment, Cardin’s leadership, McCain’s integrity, McGovern’s foresight, Vadim’s brilliance, Vladimir’s wisdom, Juleanna’s savvy, and Elena’s love. It had happened because of Ivan and Jonathan and Jamie and Eduard and Perepilichnyy and countless others, big and small. Somehow, our little idea of sanctioning those who’d killed Sergei had taken root and grown. There was something almost biblical about Sergei’s story, and even though I am not a religious man, as I sat there watching history unfold, I couldn’t help but feel that maybe God had intervened in this case. There is no shortage of suffering in this world, but somehow Sergei’s tragedy resonated and cut through as few tragedies ever do.
More than anything I wished that none of this had ever happened. More than anything I wished that Sergei were still alive. But he wasn’t, and nothing could bring him back. Nevertheless, his sacrifice was not in vain. It pricked the bubble of impunity that ensnares modern Russia, leaving a legacy that he and his family could be proud of.
40. Humiliator, humiliatee
I was stunned when the act finally passed.
And another person was too: Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.
For the previous few years, Putin had sat comfortably in the Kremlin, knowing that whatever happened in the US Congress, President Obama opposed the Magnitsky Act. In Putin’s totalitarian mind, this was an ironclad guarantee that it would never become law. But what Putin overlooked was that the United States was not Russia.
In simple terms, the Russian response to the Magnitsky Act should have been a tit-for-tat retaliation reminiscent of a Cold War spy exchange. The Americans sanction a few Russian officials, and the Russians respond by doing the same. End of story.
But that is not how Putin decided to play it. Instead, immediately after the Magnitsky Act passed the Senate, he began a major quest to find ways to lash out and cause America real pain.
Putin’s apparatchiks began floating ideas. The first was a proposed parliamentary resolution to seize $3.5 billion of Citigroup assets in Russia. This would certainly be vindictive, but it was a ridiculous idea. Somebody must have realized that if Russia seized Citigroup’s assets, then the United States would seize Russian assets in America. Our opponents abandoned this and moved on.
The next idea they floated was a blockade of the Northern Distribution Network. This was the route the Americans used to move military equipment through Russia and into Afghanistan. The United States got supplies into Afghanistan in only two ways — through Pakistan or through Russia, and Putin understood perfectly how valuable this route was.
The problem with this idea was that if Russia followed through, officials at the Pentagon would look at a map and ask where they could put down their enormous foot to affect Russia’s strategic interests in a similar way. The obvious place would have been Syria. Putin’s government had invested a lot in propping up Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, and Putin wasn’t going to do anything to jeopardize that investment. So this idea quickly died as well.
Putin needed to come up with something that didn’t involve money or the military but that would still upset America.
That idea surfaced on December 11, 2012, when I was in Toronto to advocate for a Canadian version of the Magnitsky Act. That night I was giving a speech to a group of Canadian policy makers and journalists. During the question-and-answer session, a young female reporter stood and asked, «Today, members of the Russian Duma[16] announced that they are proposing a law that would permanently ban the adoption of Russian children by American families. What is your comment, Mr. Browder?»