On Tuesday in Moscow the first hearings will be held for the so-called “second trial” of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, though to use such language of legalism may be misleading in describing this process.  In the preliminary hearings leading up to this week, so far observers have been treated to a rerun of the basic and regular violations of the first trial:  a catalogue of show trial hijinks contributing to a fraudulent scheme by certain elements of the Russian government to produce another photocopy of the prosecutor’s indictment (some may recall that during the first trial, the judge’s cut-and-paste decisions often contained not only the same language but also the same typos as the prosecutor’s submissions).

The open cruelty of this scheme was echoed by the banishment of Khodorkovsky to Siberia, the deportation or attempted disbarment of his lawyers, the threatened indictment of a broader net of allies, and ultimately by the torture and vicious assault on his former lawyer, Vasily Alexanyan.  In this “legal” case, one of the most important in post-Soviet Russia, we have prosecutors withholding anti-retroviral drugs and painkillers while this man was held in inhumane conditions, to the point that Alexanyan was weakened to full blown AIDS and lymphatic cancer, tuberculosis and near blindness.  Alexanyan’s only real crime was his refusal to perjure himself to advance an overtly criminal case.  Criminally conceived and criminally executed to justify the lockup of a political threat, a massive theft of private assets and the destruction of hundreds of lives connected to the once great company -dare I say the name -Yukos.