It’s sure been a long time since I last visited Moscow’s courts. But, having visited one today, I saw for myself: nothing’s changed there. A whole bunch of people. One judge over a brief period of time examines several cases. This is called tekuchka in Russian [meaning something like “churning them out” or “assembly-line”–Trans.]. How can you even talk about the quality of the meting out of courts here!

Already at 9 o’clock in the morning beside the courtroom in the Meshchansky District Court of Moscow there were five journalists. By the start of the court session on the lawsuit of the convict A. Kuchma against Mikhail Khodorkovsky on compensation of moral damage for supposedly sexual solicitations on the part of Khodorkovsky there were already 20 journalists. Soon the court bailiff appeared – a pretty young woman – and reported that only seven scribes would be able to enter the courtroom. (I hasten to report that the correspondent of the blog www.robertamsterdam.com was in the number of these seven).