The intervention will not hurt

It happened: the American Senate approved the "Magnitsky Law". Three weeks ago, this document was adopted by the lower house of Congress, and now only one instance remained. It is expected that Barack Obama will sign it before the end of the year.

About what will happen next and how the new law will affect the relations of Moscow and Washington, today you can only guess.

It is not entirely clear which of our compatriots will be punished by the Americans: the law implies a fairly wide interpretation. It is not clear what the Russian authorities have in mind when they promise a “tough reaction”, as well as various answers - both symmetrical and asymmetric. But this is all the still rather abstract matters that will gradually be filled with specifics. The other is much more interesting.

Sergei Magnitsky died in prison three years ago, and during this time our leadership had all the possibilities to not allow overseas politicians and them, I would have expressed so much to the henchmen to intervene in our internal affairs. It was easily possible to give them all hands and, if you use a beautiful metaphor, to tear out a poisoned sting from the Gosdepov snake. In short, it was not difficult to chop off the heads of the American hydra.

To do this, it was enough to carry out a tough, with elements of a bloody television show, an investigation that we can do so well when it comes to disagreements or officials who did not take the rank. And if the people who brought Magnitsky to prison, and the jailers who tortured him to death suffered a well -deserved punishment, no one would have brought any bills anywhere - neither in America nor in Europe. I’m not talking about the fact that the unfortunate lawyer of the Hermitage Capital did not have to arrest the Hermitage Capital - but these are, of course, overstated requirements.

It happened differently. None of those who adorize the famous list were practically injured. But in full swing, contrary to relatives’s protests, there is an investigation against Magnitsky himself, and if the deceased has not yet begun to be judged, then only because his lawyers refuse to cooperate with prosecutors. That is, the Russian government has done everything possible for the "Magnitsky Law" without interference to pass in both wards of Congress. Putin drove Obama into a corner.

A natural question arises: why? Due to natural cruelty? Stupidity? Or for the good reason that in the Kremlin, as under Tsar Ivan, under Nicholas I, under Stalin and under Andropov, they are sacredly convinced that the Russian state can exist only in an atmosphere of lies and lawlessness? What is the punishment of all involved in the death of Magnitsky, especially under pressure from the West, shakes the foundations of this power?

The topic is worthy of consideration.

The "Magnitsky Law" inherits the amendment of the Jackson-Vanik, who defended the rights of Soviet citizens to emigration. The borders opened up - and the Soviet Union collapsed in a case: such, perhaps, from the point of view of individual former KGB officers, the mechanism of the "main geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century." These are probably their ideas about history and geopolitics. Freedom and legality, in their opinion, lead the country to death. On the contrary, stubbornly defending the law of the state to create with its citizens everything that will pleases is the key to the stability and indestructibility of the authorities. And massive violations of the rule of law, as in the previous centuries, or point, as in the case of Magnitsky, is already unimportant. The sequence is important. And impunity, especially if a scream is raised in the West.

And when the famous enemy of Russia John McCain calls the adopted law "pro -Russian", adding that our citizens supposedly "value democratic values", it is clear why he says this. He dreams of the collapse of our state - at the same time the few, fortunately, agents of the State Department in the Russian Federation who dream of the same. About democracy, which carries collapse and chaos.

I must admit, this is a rather harmonious ideology. Based on the centuries -old tradition of suppressing human dignity and uninterrupted operation of the oak -up state machine. On the low experience of democratic reforms, which were always broken. On the fear of changes owning both the authorities and the population. You won’t find samples of a worthy life in the past, and they have never tried to come from if they really have never tried. The authorities did not allow.

And in this sense, the "Law of Magnitsky" inspires certain hopes. The fact is that for the first time in the history of the long -suffering relations of Russia with the West, the legal norm comes into operation, which is not directed against the economy, but against the very authorities that still does not manage to kill. Moreover, in that unique situation for the country, when all the thoughts of the collective batch of crooks and thieves are directed to the West, where real estate is bought, accounts are stored, children study. That is why the effectiveness of the new law can be much higher than that of trade restrictions in Brezhnev times. And if the skins in the Russian elites prevail, then the country will follow the democratic path. In a paradoxically, surviving and shaking those patriots-states who promised her inevitable death. As well as insidious Americans.