Mr. Medvedev's Test

Will the Russian president who swore to defend the rule of law allow another Moscow show trial?

IT'S BEEN nearly a year since Dmitry Medvedev took office as Russia's president following a much-publicized vow to attack what he called the "legal nihilism" of his country. His record so far is not looking good: Murders of Kremlin opponents have continued, both at home and abroad, without any action against the perpetrators -- even though two of the suspects named by foreign police agencies sit in the Russian parliament. Mr. Medvedev raised some eyebrows when he met privately this year with the editors of the newspaper Novaya Gazeta following the broad-daylight murder of a reporter just blocks from the Kremlin. He told President Obama that he was concerned about the beating of human rights activist Lev Ponomarev on the night before last week's summit meeting. But Mr. Medvedev's words have yet to be followed by any tangible actions.

Now the former law professor faces a test that should settle whether he is capable of altering the authoritarian regime established by Vladimir Putin. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former oil magnate whose 2003 arrest and subsequent trial marked Mr. Putin's pivot away from Russia's experiment with liberalism, is on trial again. As in the Soviet era, the case is both a blatant setup and a grand piece of political theater intended to demonstrate the regime's ability to crush its opposition. If Mr. Medvedev allows it to go forward to its scripted conclusion -- a lengthy extension of Mr. Khodorkovsky's sentence to a Siberian prison camp -- the point will be proved that Russia still has no rule of law but only a ruler.

The charges against Mr. Khodorkovsky are so convoluted, the defendant said in his opening statement this week, that "I was completely deprived of the right . . . to know what I have been charged with." In his previous trial, Mr. Khodorkovsky and co-defendant Platon Lebedev were accused of directing tax evasion by their Yukos oil company, which was eventually confiscated and sold off to state companies. Now they are charged with "embezzling" the same oil that they supposedly failed to pay taxes on. If they are convicted, they could be sentenced to another two decades in prison.

Mr. Khodorkovsky's first trial did much to damage Mr. Putin's image in the West and to poison his relations with Western governments. So why another show trial? One reason is that Mr. Khodorkovsky's current sentence is due to expire in 2011, just before Russia's next presidential election -- in which Mr. Putin, now prime minister, may reclaim the nominal top post. Another is that the European Court of Human Rights, which Russia belongs to through the Council of Europe, has agreed to hear an appeal of Mr. Khodorkovsky's earlier case and could conceivably rule in his favor.

But it may also be that Mr. Khodorkovsky's trial is a means of crushing any reformist impulses Mr. Medvedev might have. If so, the president has the means to fight back: He could call for the charges against the defendants to be dropped or issue pardons to Mr. Khodorkovsky or some of his associates. If he does nothing, those in Russia and the West who have looked to this president as a liberal alternative will know that such thinking was wishful.