Outpouring Tests Russian Leader
Medvedev's Response to Pardon Request Watched Closely

By Philip P. Pan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, November 17, 2008

MOSCOW -- It began with Svetlana Bakhmina's handwritten letters from prison -- thoughtful, melancholy notes to an old middle school classmate.

"It wouldn't be that bad, if it weren't for the children," Bakhmina, 39, a lawyer and mother of two, wrote a few years into her sentence. "I better not touch on that at all. I can talk about almost anything easily, except the children."

Bakhmina had been convicted of embezzling funds while working for the oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a man who has been jailed and vilified by the Kremlin as a symbol of all that went wrong in Russia in the 1990s.

She wrote of the tedium of prison life, of how it felt to read Solzhenitsyn behind bars, of her despair at being separated from her husband and young sons. She described the joy of being reunited with her family during a furlough in the spring, and the heartbreak of returning to prison afterward. Weeks later, when she learned she was pregnant, she shared that unexpected news, too.

Her classmate Olga Bogdanova always wrote back, quietly offering her support. In late September, she also typed out a note on her blog, appealing to President Dmitry Medvedev to pardon her friend. She didn't expect a response, and she knew much of the public would be unsympathetic.

But days later, someone launched a Web site urging Medvedev to pardon Bakhmina. Then, tens of thousands of people endorsed the petition, including a host of prominent political and artistic figures. In a country where political activism is discouraged, the outpouring of support caused such a stir that even the Kremlin-controlled news media began reporting on the case.

Now, a month before Bakhmina's due date, her request for clemency has emerged as a test of the new Russian president's political character -- and perhaps of his clout.

By issuing a pardon, Medvedev could enhance the liberal image he has tried to foster since taking office in May. But doing so would almost certainly require the acquiescence of his predecessor and patron, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who remains the dominant figure in the Kremlin and oversaw the campaign against Khodorkovsky and his giant oil firm, Yukos.

Bakhmina was a mid-level legal executive in the company, and one of more than 20 Yukos executives jailed in the crackdown. Their supporters say they are victims of a Kremlin vendetta against Khodorkovsky, who was Russia's richest man at the time and had been funding opposition political parties.

Some argue that Bakhmina was arrested in December 2004 because more senior Yukos lawyers had fled the country.

After her conviction, Bakhmina asked to postpone her 6 1/2 -year prison term until her boys, then ages 5 and 9, were older. The courts refused and sent her to a remote prison in Mordovia, about 400 miles southeast of Moscow. Her children have been told she is away on business, and she has seen them once in nearly four years, during the 10-day furlough in March granted for good behavior, friends said.

Bakhmina has served more than half her sentence, making her eligible for parole, and the authorities have described her as a model prisoner. She has also admitted guilt and expressed remorse, her attorneys say. But judges have twice rejected her parole requests, most recently in September, when she was six months pregnant.

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.

But those who have spoken in favor of a presidential pardon for Bakhmina include prominent actors, writers and journalists, as well as a former deputy chairman of the central bank, at least six members of the Russian legislature and former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

Perhaps most significant, a handful of politicians and commentators seen as Kremlin loyalists have endorsed the pardon, and the issue has received coverage in Kremlin-controlled news outlets. One prime-time television program broadcast a debate on the subject, though critics say producers hurt Bakhmina's cause by selecting a strident opposition activist to make her case.

At the same time, contradictory statements from government officials suggest indecision or conflict inside the Kremlin. Weeks after one anonymous official was quoted as saying Medvedev was aware of the pardon request and was considering it, the head of the federal penal service, Yuri Kalinin, told reporters that the authorities had not even received a pardon request from Bakhmina.

Last week, the government's position shifted again, with prison officials telling Bakhmina's attorneys that she had revoked her pardon application. The authorities also announced that she had been transferred from the prison hospital to a regular hospital and signed a statement asking people not to bother her.

Roman Golovkin, one of Bakhmina's attorneys, said the defense team had not been able to contact her to clarify the situation. But he said that when he last spoke with her and told her about the outpouring of support, she "was really excited about it, and surprised."

"We thought people had forgotten Svetlana, but recent events show we were wrong," he said. "It means our people are better than we thought."

Researcher Anna Masterova contributed to this report.