A decade after Sergei Magnitsky’s death, his legacy lives on

VLADIMIR KARA-MURZA

Sergei Magnitsky did not choose to be a hero or seek the public spotlight. A tax lawyer for a Western investment firm, he led a comfortable middle-class life in Moscow and sought to live by the rules. So when he discovered an illegal scheme that defrauded Russian taxpayers of $230 million – still the largest known tax fraud in the country’s history – he did what any law-abiding citizen would do: he reported the crime to the authorities.

In a kleptocratic state, behaving like a law-abiding citizen is a heroic act. In Magnitsky’s case, the criminals he uncovered and the authorities to which he reported them were synonymous. In November 2008, he was arrested by the very same police officials he had accused of orchestrating the tax fraud. For nearly a year, he was kept in torturous conditions in one of Moscow’s most notorious detention centers, under constant pressure to withdraw his testimony. One after another, judges rubber-stamped extensions of his arrest, ignoring his pleas, his lawyers’ petitions, and reports of his deteriorating health.

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