Entry to the denouement

The name of Alexei Pichugin is rarely mentioned in opposition newspapers. Portraits with his image are not raised in the squares. Even in the framework of the Yukos case, according to which he was sentenced to life imprisonment, the name of Pichugin sounds infrequently. So it happened, one might say, historically.

He was detained on June 19, 2003 - a couple of weeks before the arrest of Plato Lebedev and four months before the legendary military operation at Tolmachevo Airport, during which the special forces tied Khodorkovsky. The case of the head of the 4th Safety Service of Yukos was lost in the shadow of the Great Process of Khodorkovsky-Lebedev, to which all the eyes were riveted. And when Pichugin was sentenced to first by 20, then by 24 years, and then to the Black Dolphin, these verdicts, of course, produced some noise in society, but were forgotten quite quickly. There were reasons for that.

Firstly, the severity of the prosecution: Alexei Vladimirovich was judged for organizing attempts and successful murders. Secondly, the reputation of the department where the convict previously served: KGB. In the consciousness of the democratic community, these letters were easily connected with blood, and if there are still different opinions about the personality and actions of Khodorkovsky in the era of initial accumulation, then the combination of the words “Chekist” and “killer” did not seem a contradiction. Only people from the nearest circle actually stood up for him: famous accomplices, lawyers, relatives.

Meanwhile, the fate of Pichugin, when you reflect on it today, scrolling in the memory of the voluminous case of the "Yukos", is seen by the most tragic among other fate. The most terrible, assuming that he is not cunning, claiming that he was sitting for crimes that he did not commit. The grounds for this assumption are very serious.

Ten years later, the plan of operation to tear out the company Mikhail Khodorkovsky looks quite transparent. The first paragraph in the plan was the defeat of Yukos's power units, and in this sense, the arrest of Pichugin was a very important event with a distant sight: to suspect the leadership of custom -made murders on the way. A little later, the scheme was the arrest of a friend and companion Khodorkovsky, and there, if he did not want to escape, which was also part of the plan. In parallel, it was planned to judge and say almost all the top management, but not only for taxes and “stolen oil”. The state propaganda was supposed to appear in the hands of the main trump card: punishment of the tenderness of capitalist property, but we see the killers in them. So that the leader of the nation can rant with impunity at his press conferences about "blood on his hands" and that Pichugin himself did not organize wet affairs by himself. And by order of Nevznin and Khodorkovsky.

That is why the first arrested in the Yukos case was broken with such frenzy. That is why he was rolled up by "twenty" when he refused to stipulate himself and his leadership. That's why they added more and more, up to the lifelong, when they were convinced that the plan had failed. That is why the witnesses of accusations in these courts were direct monsters from the underworld of the Korovnikov type - there were no others, and it was necessary to punish Pichugin for intransigence. And if we are indignant at wild inconsistencies on the processes of Khodorkovsky-Lebedev, Aleksanyan, Bakhmina, then, thinking about the sentence of Pichugin, we are simply plunged into some kind of darkness. With the most insignificant evidence base, a person was convicted of slow death - and he is forgotten, and almost no one recalls him closer to Strasbourg.

Yesterday, the decision of the ECHR, according to the first sentence, Alexei Pichugin, entered into force, in which European judges urge Russian colleagues to "conduct a new trial or resume production." This means that the convict was illegally put for 20 years and the verdict should be revised. Next in line and the last case of Pichugin - with a lifelong sentence. Of course, this news should not be perceived with excessive optimism - otherwise we do not know how we relate to the decisions of the European Court. However, this decision is of different, very fundamental importance. Now considerable public attention will be attracted to the Pichugin case, because the foundation is collapsed in which the highest authorities and prosecutors erected their prison for the prisoners of Yukos. And without it, the whole building can fly up, if only there was enough time for Zeku to survive until this day and justice was made into terms not provided for by the verdict of the Moscow City Court.