Arrested in ‘89, Defendants Get No Pity From Bench

Six pale, weary prisoners shuffle into an oblong cage against the wall of a courtroom. They sit in a row on a bench. The cage door locks, and their trial, now in its fifth year, resumes.

Their crime: borrowing from a Soviet bank to import computers, in competition with firms tied to the Soviet KGB, and defaulting on part of the loan. The defendants argue that only their arrests in 1989 kept them from repaying in full.

The offended Soviet Union and its KGB no longer exist, and thousands of entrepreneurs it jailed for “speculation” now work freely in the new Russia. But the trial of the Tellur Cooperative drags on--an example of judicial sluggishness that is turning the country’s pretrial prisons into overcrowded infernos.

One reason is that the original Soviet investigators are still on the case for Russia’s Interior Ministry. Six judges thought the charges too flimsy to hear; one threw them back at the ministry, only to be overruled by the Supreme Court. Hearings are often interrupted for up to four months.

“The trial is intentionally delayed to force those who are still in prison to plead guilty,” charges Alexander Morozov, one of five original defendants who were freed after falling ill (Morozov from a hunger strike) but are still on trial.

The defense is now focusing on ailments of the six jailed defendants. Alexander Golushko rises in the cage and describes how cellmates saved his life with a chest massage after his heart stopped. Judge Tamara F. Savina declines to free him.

Alexander Andreyanchenko gets up and declares a hunger strike. He calls the judge a “puppet” of the Interior Ministry. She sends him back to jail.

Vladimir A. Kopylov, 47, director of the Tellur Cooperative, blows a kiss from the cage to his wife, who manages a few words describing their daughter’s recent 15th birthday party.

“He’s rotting alive,” his wife says later. He has 107 cellmates in 67 square yards of space. He’s losing his hair, his eyesight and his spirit, she says. “He’s already an old man.”

Savina is not impressed.

“What do you want us to do about prison conditions?” the judge replies to a reporter’s question. “Close down all the prisons and let the criminals go free?” She laughs. “Go back to America and pry into your own judicial affairs.”