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The hopeless nature of Russian justice is well known. People disappear, detectives come up with nothing. By February the case was about to be filed under "unsolved". All the forensic work had been done and the evidence put into storage. None of it was of any help to the investigation. It had not even been established that the Gorins were dead. We shall examine the entire sequence of unprecedented forensic distortion and fabrication in the chapter on the preliminary investigation into Pichugin's case.
We shall just note here that long before Pichugin's arrest, in March 2003, the case of the Gorins' disappearance was passed on to the Procuracy General. To me, this is a crucial fact for reconstructing the events that took place inside the Kremlin and inside Yukos.
So, Putin was subjected to Khodorkovskiy's lecture in mid-February. Before long he and the enforcement wing of his administration had decided to remove this obstreperous tycoon for once and for all. A team was put together for the battle ahead (apparently with Sechin at the helm). The opening moves had all the Soviet hallmarks - a trawl through the archives for Yukos people who had figured in criminal cases. For future reference. I do not doubt that there were plenty such cases. And initially Pichugin was just one of the possible candidates to be hauled in and be pumped for incriminating evidence against Yukos's senior managers - especially the company's co-owners.
In a similar way, Korolev screened and rejected his candidates before choosing Gagarin as the one to go into space. How many blameless people avoided Lefortovo prison, we cannot know. God forbid that they should ever find out! It's clear that during the selection process the criterion for each case was whether an arrest could be guaranteed. But they paid no attention to their target's personality and had no idea whether he would provide the required testimony. It was all done in a rush, to deadlines determined by royal anger and the impatience of those who coveted Yukos.
By March the outline of a plan was ready, Pichugin had been convicted in advance, and the case was forwarded to the Procuracy General. And the lead role was assigned to the FSB. Lacking any body of evidence against Pichugin, the investigation tried to exploit the power it had over the facts of the case - through forensic manipulation. To charge Aleksey with murder, they had to prove that the Gorins had been murdered. And it was in April 2003 that the experts from the FSB set about doing just that.
The phoney investigation
Back to June 2003. Burtovoy desperately needed a pretext for the arrest. We know the procedure - the main thing was to put Aleksey inside, because after that they would be sure not to let him out again. In 2001, an Indian engineer flew into Sheremetyevo airport as a transit passenger. During a lengthy customs inspection he protested: "I haven't got a bomb in the bag, you know!" Airport security acted on the only word they understood - "bomb" - and hauled him off to the police, who put him in a cell and forgot about him for two weeks. Lawyer Karinna Moskalenko won his release. Once out of the slammer, he commented that never mind being in Russia, just flying over was risky.
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