Tomorrow will mark the fifth anniversary of the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Today Robert Amsterdam has an opinion article published in the Wall Street Journal in commemoration. Also see an article published earlier this week about the case by the New York Times.

Russia’s Jailed Bellwether A CEO’s fate shows Moscow’s true colors By Robert R. Amsterdam Five years after his arrest on Oct. 25, 2003, Mikhail Khodorkovsky is in a Siberian prison, his eligibility for parole denied by Russian courts. The former Yukos CEO’s Kafkaesque trial, conviction and banishment to the gulag have been accompanied by the rise of a corrupt cadre of state officials who have reshaped the country’s politics and quietly generated enormous personal wealth. Since Mr. Khodorkovsky’s arrest, Russia has been moving away from free-market principles, away from public-sector reforms, and away from the rule of law. Even for those who may have believed the Khodorkovsky case had some basis in law, illusions were dispelled by the inability of the state to engineer a credible trial. Matters were not helped by the state’s fencing of Yukos assets, or by the unconscionable treatment of the accused.