Violence and corruption in Russia's legal system could ultimately spell the end for the Russian state as it is today, the jailed tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky said in a newspaper article published on Wednesday.
Khodorkovsky, the former head of Russian oil giant Yukos, is serving an eight-year prison term for tax evasion and fraud after a highly politicized trial seen by many in the West as part of a Kremlin drive to subdue politically ambitious business tycoons.
In the Nezavisimaya Gazeta article, Khodorkosvky wrote that Russia's legal system had in recent years become a "brutal assembly line," but one that could bury the current state by turning Russia's best and brightest against the authorities.
"It is possible to say with certainty that the brutal assembly line that has replaced the judicial system is the gravedigger of the modern Russian state," Khodorkovsky said. "With enviable regularity it turns many thousands of the most active, intelligent and independent citizens against the state. Those, on whose choices the fate of the state ultimately depends."
"It is strange that the Russian political elite... are not afraid of it, that their instinct for self-preservation doesn't work," he added.
Khodorkovsky described his experience of the judicial system over the past five years.
"You don't know anything about the system until you are gripped by it," he said. "The system is in fact a unified combine, whose business is justified violence."
"Different people toil away in this combine, both good and bad, but it is not about the quality of the human material, it is about the underlying principles of the system," he added.
"The system is the assembly-line of a huge plant... And if you have become the raw material for this assembly line... there will always be a guilty verdict at the end of it," he said, adding that the system's main aim is to never let go of you, because it works not to establish the truth but to achieve its own ends.
Khodorkovsky was moved in 2009 from prison in Siberia to Moscow's notorious Matrosskaya Tishina jail to face new charges of embezzling 350 million tons of oil. Since then, his stay in the pretrial detention center has been repeatedly prolonged despite complaints from his lawyers.
In February, a Moscow court authorized keeping Khodorkovsky in pretrial detention until May 17.
Russian officials have consistently denied any political motivation behind the tycoon's conviction, but Khodorkovsky's fate is still viewed by Russia-watchers abroad as an indicator of the state of Russia's judicial system.
MOSCOW, March 3 (RIA Novosti)
