Not allowed to rest in peace

The conviction of human rights lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in a Russian court yesterday, despite having been dead for four years, is another example where the rule by law rather than the rule of law applies in Vladimir Putin’s realm.  The siloviki (former officials in the forces and security services) maintain their ascendancy despite making their country look a laughing stock.  Whereas Silvio Berlusconi tries to stretch out his appeal process over being barred from public office until the statute of limitations expires (a ridiculous law that he himself as prime minister introduced), in Russia there seems no statute of limitations, even in death.

Magnitsky accused several members of the deep state of tax fraud and evasion.  Instead of any action towards these men, they arrested Magnitsky and accused him of the same.  Some time later he was found no longer alive in his cell.  Even the Kremlin’s own human rights organisation says he was most likely beaten to death in his cell.  Russians are using the courts in greater numbers than ever but when elite interests are at play, the courts are avoided due to the prevalence of ‘telephone law’.  The US Congress implemented sanctions against 70 Russians suspected of being involved in eliminating the lawyer but they are still free men in Russia.  Magnitsky’s co-accused (and found guilty), a British hedge fund manager in New York, derides Putin over the judgement but it is unclear how much control Putin still has – it seems that he might be a captive of the deep state rather than its master, since the siloviki have said officially on several occasions that Putinism will continue, with or without Putin.

It is all reminiscent of the treatment of Pope Formosus in the ninth century.  A man of exceptional talents and a wily diplomat, he collected enemies like the soldiers of Caligula collected shells on the north coast of Gaul in an abortive invasion of Britannia.  He didn’t help his case with his papal name which means ‘good-looking’.  Though serving for just five years, his legacy was much disputed.  Within a year (after an interlude of a pope with a very short reign), a successive occupant of the throne of St Peter, had the corpse of Formosus exhumed, dressed in the vestments of the pontiff, propped up on the throne and tried for his alleged crimes.

The pope who berated his decomposing predecessor was Stephen VII or VI in the official records (there had been a Stephen II in the seventh century but he had died three days after his election and before he could be consecrated and so it is moot whether he is really a pope or not, affecting all regnal numbers thereafter).  A clerical (literally) error also resulted in John XVI acquiring a number, even though he was an antipope, while further along John XX never existed as John XXI was consecrated even though there had only been 19 previous (including the antipope) Johns and no-one noticed the mistake.  It may be as a result of this embarrassing situation that John XXIII, in 1958, was the first Bishop of Rome to adopt the name since the fourteenth century.  John called the progressive Second Vatican Council that brought the Holy See’s practices more into the modern world.  Now he is being elevated to sainthood alongside John Paul II, despite lacking a second recorded miracle linked to his invocation.  It’s the closest the Roman Catholic Church gets to ancestor worship and is theologically suspect, along with the doctrine of consubstantiation, but at least they are honouring worthwhile people who have passed on rather than denigrating them.