Khodorkovsky: A Race Against Time

The Moscow Times reports that the process of the judicial appeal of Russian businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who in May was sentenced by a Moscow court to nine years in prison ostensibly on charges of fraud and tax evasion, but actually, as is becoming increasingly clear, for overtly political reasons, got off to a shaky and chaotic start Wednesday after the only lawyer authorized to defend him failed to turn up due to poor health.

The three-judge panel at the Moscow City Court eventually ruled to reconvene the hearing Monday. Their decision came after hours of stop-start proceedings in which the judges tried to figure out where Khodorkovsky's defense team was and mulled the delicate question of whether they could proceed without any defense counsel in the biggest trial in post-Soviet history.

State prosecutor Dmitry Shokhin accused Khodorkovsky of stalling for time, and asked the judges to go ahead with appeal after the jailed tycoon's sole defense counsel, Genrikh Padva, failed to show up. "This is a banal attempt to drag out the court hearing," Shokhin told the judges in the well-appointed courtroom in the new Moscow City Court in northeast Moscow.

Outside on Bogorodsky Val, riot police with nightsticks formed a cordon around the building as small groups of demonstrators, for and against Khodorkovsky, held banners and tooted horns.

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Wednesday's adjournment means that the appeal process is likely to drag on for several weeks, rather than be wrapped up and rejected in a period of a few days, as his lawyers feared.

Khodorkovsky's lawyers have claimed the appeal process has been deliberately speeded up to prevent him from running for a seat in the State Duma in a Moscow by-election scheduled for Dec. 4. If the court rejects his appeal, he will not be allowed to run. Khodorkovsky has until Oct. 29 to register as a candidate.

Khodorkovsky said Wednesday that the rush to set the appeal in motion meant that Padva had been the only one out of nine lawyers on his defense team who was fully briefed, while the others had had time to study only part of the trial record. The defense team has filed a motion calling for the proceedings to be postponed, on the grounds that the appeal was improperly scheduled and that the trial record supplied to the defense by the court was incomplete and shot through with discrepancies.

Meanwhile, Masha Gessen comments on the results of a recent Levada center poll which showed that 28 percent of the people in Moscow's Universitetsky District were ready to vote for Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and wishes they had kept quiet about it.