Putin generally ignores protests, but he couldn’t ignore this one, because it was big and it focused on saving children. The government couldn’t repeal the law, but after the «March Against Scoundrels» it announced that Russia would invest millions in the state-run orphanage system. I was sure that the money would never find its way to its designated recipients, but it did show how rattled Putin was.
However, this whole affair cost Putin something much dearer than money: his aura of invincibility. Humiliation is his currency — he uses it to get what he wants and to put people in their place. In his mind, he hasn’t succeeded until his opponent has failed, and he can’t be happy until his opponent is miserable. In Putin’s world, the humiliator cannot, under any circumstances, become the humiliatee. Yet this is precisely what happened in the wake of the adoption ban.
What does a man like Putin do when he is humiliated? As we’d seen so many times before, he lashes out against the person who humiliated him.
Ominously, that person was me.
41. Red notice
At the end of January 2013 I found myself back in Davos at the World Economic Forum. On my second day there, as I was trudging through the snow outside the conference center, I heard a chirpy female voice call out, «Bill! Bill!»
I turned and saw a short woman with a big furry hat walking briskly toward me. As she got closer, I recognized her. It was Chrystia Freeland, the reporter who’d broken the Sidanco story so many years ago in Moscow. She was now an editor-at-large for Reuters.
She stopped in front of me, her cheeks flushed by the cold.
«Hey, Chrystia!»
«I’m glad I spotted you», she said urgently. Normally, she and I would have kissed on both cheeks and caught up, but she apparently had something important to tell me.
«What’s going on?»
«Bill, I just came from an off-the-record briefing with Medvedev, and your name came up».
«That doesn’t surprise me. I’m not too popular with the Russians these days».
«That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I need to tell you what he said — hold on». She dug a reporter’s notepad out of her pocket, flipped through the pages, and stopped. «Here it is. Someone asked about the Magnitsky case, and Medvedev said, quote, Yes, it’s a shame that Sergei Magnitsky died, and Bill Browder is running free and alive». She looked up at me. «That’s what he said».
«Was that a threat?»
«That’s how it seemed to me».
Panic pooled in my stomach. I thanked Chrystia for telling me and made my way into the conference center with this ominous information hanging over my head. I continued with my meetings, and throughout the day four other journalists who’d been at the same briefing pulled me aside and repeated Chrystia’s story.
I’d been threatened many times by people from Russia, but never by the prime minister[17]. I knew my life was in danger, but this ratcheted the danger to a new level. As soon as I returned to London, I called Steven Beck, our security expert, and substantially increased my personal protection.
The threat also indicated the mind-set of Putin and his men. I took it as a signal that they didn’t want to harm me just physically, but in any way they could.
The first bit of this nastiness came when the Russian authorities announced the date that they were going to begin my trial for tax evasion in absentia. They’d been using the threat of this fabricated case for years to try to intimidate me and get me to back down, but the passage of the Magnitsky Act had pushed them over the edge.
Putting me on trial when I wasn’t in Russia was highly unusual. It would be only the second time in post-Soviet history that Russia would try a Westerner in absentia. But that wasn’t the worst part. Their truly unbelievable move was to also try Sergei Magnitsky.
That’s right. They were going to put the man they had killed on trial. Even Joseph Stalin, one of the most zealous mass murderers of all time, a man responsible for the deaths of at least 20 million Russians, never stooped to putting a dead man on trial.
But in March 2013, that is exactly what Vladimir Putin did.
Putin was creating legal history. The last time a dead person had been prosecuted in Europe was in 897 CE, when the Catholic Church convicted Pope Formosus posthumously, cut off his papal fingers, and threw his body into the Tiber River.
The nastiness didn’t stop there, though. Days before the trial was set to begin, NTV, the state-controlled television station, began aggressively advertising a one-hour, prime-time «documentary» about me called The Browder List.
I didn’t even bother to watch it when it aired, but Vladimir called to give me a summary: «It is pure paranoid fantasy, Bill». He told me that by the time it was over, not only were Sergei and I accused of tax evasion, but I was also responsible for the devaluation of the ruble in 1998; I was guilty of stealing the $4.8 billion loan that the IMF had made to Russia; I had killed my business partner Edmond Safra; I was a British MI6 agent; and I had murdered Sergei Magnitsky myself.
I might have been upset by this, but their fabrications were so amateurish that no person watching this show could possibly believe a word of it. However, it wasn’t clear that credibility even mattered to the Russian authorities. Everything they did came from a well-worn playbook. The same NTV crew made a similar «documentary» trying to tarnish the protest movement after Putin’s reelection in 2012. They made another one about the famous anti-Putin punk band, Pussy Riot. After both films, their subjects were arrested and imprisoned.
Our trial began on March 11 at the Tverskoi District Court with Judge Igor Alisov presiding. Neither the Magnitsky family nor I would have anything to do with it, so the court appointed a pair of public defenders against our wishes. Both tried to withdraw when they realized they weren’t wanted, but both were threatened with disbarment if they didn’t carry on.
Every Western government, parliament, media outlet, and human rights organization viewed this as an appalling miscarriage of justice. We all stared in awe as the trial began and the prosecutor droned on for hours in front of an empty cage.
Everyone wondered why Putin was doing this. The cost to Russia’s international reputation was enormous, and the upside to him seemed limited. There was practically no chance that I would end up in a Russian prison, and Sergei was already dead.
But this had a twisted logic. In Putin’s mind, if he had a court judgment against Sergei and me, his officials could then visit all the European governments that were considering their own version of the Magnitsky Act and say, «How can you put a piece of legislation in place that is named after a criminal convicted in our court? And how can you listen to his advocate, who has been convicted of the same crime?» Pesky details such as the fact that Sergei had been dead for three years and killed in police custody after exposing a massive government corruption scheme never entered into Putin’s equation.
17
After serving as president, Medvedev returned to the office of prime minister in May 2012.