Outpouring Tests Russian Leader

The ruling prompted Bogdanova to post the letter on her blog urging Medvedev to pardon her classmate.

"Dmitry Anatolyevich, I know that the courts in our country are independent bodies. But I am certain you have the power to return a mother to her children," she wrote, using the president's patronymic. "Whether she is guilty or not doesn't matter now. In either case, she has been punished enough and has already been made an example of. But the children are being punished now -- two boys who lived without her for four years, and one yet to be born."

Bogdanova, a television producer, had barely kept in touch with Bakhmina before her arrest but began writing to her in prison because she remembered her as the principled one in their class at Moscow's School No. 43 and could not imagine her doing anything wrong. "Svetlana is a rare kind of person, and she never changed," Bogdanova said, recalling that she showed up at their last reunion in an old, beat-up car despite her success.

But the public did not know Bakhmina as she did, and she expected little response to her plea on behalf of a woman convicted of stealing more than $300 million from a state oil company. So she was surprised when her letter spread quickly across the Internet. In less than a week, readers posted nine pages of comments on her blog.

Among those moved by her letter was a 40-year-old Moscow businessman named Valery Balikoyev. "I was struck especially by my own powerlessness, by my inability to do anything about it," he recalled.

Balikoyev had never been involved in politics, but he had invested in Internet ventures, and he decided to set up a Web site for people to appeal to the president to pardon Bakhmina. He wrote the petition, focusing on the request for clemency instead of the question of her guilt.

"We aren't saying she is innocent," he said. "In the letter, I tried to make it as clear as possible that this is a matter of mercy. Here is a woman who is suffering. Why? We have too much suffering in our country already."

Balikoyev set up the site to require e-mail confirmation before displaying the names of supporters, and he hoped to gather a few hundred signatures. But supporters quickly flooded the site, forcing him to move it to a more powerful computer. In less than seven weeks, more than 84,000 people endorsed the appeal.

"This movement is very unusual for Russia," said Anton Nosik, a prominent Internet entrepreneur and founder of one of the country's top search engines, Rambler. "People write petitions every day, and some get hundreds or maybe thousands of signatures. But the number of signatures in this case is unprecedented."

He attributed the petition's success to the politically neutral wording but said it was an example of how rising Internet use is making it easier and cheaper to organize a grass-roots campaign in Russia.

"If Medvedev were alone, the way Putin was alone in power, I'm sure he would have pardoned her long ago," Nosik said. "But he's not alone, and the other guys surrounding him are precisely the ones who jailed Bakhmina and refused to parole her."

Some have spoken out against Bakhmina. A Web site anonymously established to oppose her pardon request has gathered about 2,600 signatures, and a prominent television talk-show host, Maria Arbatova, has urged Medvedev to deny the appeal, arguing that female convicts "breed like rabbits" to gain access to better prison conditions.