The decision today to convict Alexei Kozlov on fraud charges and sentence him to 5 years in a labor camp, seemingly as retribution against his wife, the activist journalist Olga Romanova, raises a crucial issue in terms of Russian reform. I appreciate that I am unfashionable in being mildly optimistic about police reform in Russia and the prospect that — over years, not overnight — it might lead to the emergence of a force concerned less with protecting the interests of the state and the elite and more with upholding the law and providing security for all. However, that will be impossible or meaningless without a corresponding change in the nature and culture of the Russian court system. If the courts are corrupt and/or subject to undue political influence, then police reform will be largely irrelevant: the guilty can arrange for themselves to be released, even if arrested, through bribery and blat (influence, connections), while the innocent who fall foul of the state or the elite will still be at risk. As is, time and again the courts appear to be — as in Soviet times — nothing more than instruments of factional and elite interest, from denying environmentalists their rights to characterizing efforts to confront homophobia as ‘extremism.’

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