ONE year ago today, three Economist journalists sat in a Moscow restaurant discussing the prospects for the Russian economy with a smart Western banker, who argued that our coverage of Russia was far too harsh, and that business was thriving. The smart new restaurant, full of customers, seemed to support his words.



A few hours earlier, Sergei Magnitsky, a corporate lawyer representing Hermitage Capital Management, once Russia's largest portfolio investor, died mysteriously in pre-trial detention after being repeatedly denied medical care and in effect subjected to what in most civilised countries would be considered torture. At the time, few people outside the small world of Russian investors and a few human-rights activists had heard of Mr Magnitsky. A year later, his death has become a symbol of the mind-boggling corruption and injustice perpetrated by the Russian system, and the inability (or unwillingness) of the Kremlin to change it.



Mr Magnitsky's main client was William Browder, a highly active American-born investor who ran Hermitage, traded shares in Russian firms and complained, loudly, about management practices in the firms in which he invested. Mr Browder was also one of the biggest advocates of Vladimir Putin, Russia's former president, now the prime minister, and, along with a few other foreign investors, applauded the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a former Russian business tycoon, in 2003. He saw the move as a sign of the Kremlin's attempt to bring order to Russia and curb the influence of the oligarchs.

Soon, however, Mr Browder himself fell victim to Mr Putin's system, where money and power were fused in a much more sinister way than in the 1990s. Mr Browder's “activism”, his probing into firms such as Gazprom, Russia's state-controlled gas giant, and Surgutneftegaz, a secretive oil producer, did not go down well, and Mr Browder found himself expelled from Russia. The offices of Hermitage and the law firm where Mr Magnitsky worked were raided by police officers. They seized documents, stamps and seals, which were later used to mount one of the most spectacular frauds in Russian history.



The fraud involved three subsidiaries of Hermitage that had paid taxes worth $230m. Soon after the police raid, these companies were fraudulently re-registered under new owners, who applied for, and immediately received, a tax rebate of $230m. The documents were stamped with the seals that had been confiscated by the police. In 2008 Mr Magnitsky launched an official complaint alleging that the policemen who had conducted the raid on Hermitage were involved in the fraud. Soon, Mr Magnitsky himself was arrested—by the same Lt Colonel Artyom Kuznetsov who had led the Hermitage raid and was the subject of Mr Magnitsky's complaint.



Mr Magnitsky was put in pre-trial detention where, for 12 months, investigators and prison officials pressured him to withdraw his complaint and to testify against Mr Browder, his client. When he refused to co-operate, he was transferred from one Moscow prison to another with worse conditions, denied medical care when he was in pain and, evidence suggests, tortured. His letters of complaints and appeals for justice were left unanswered.



A documentary called "Justice for Sergei", made for the anniversary of Mr Magnitsky's death and shown today before six parliaments, including the US Congress and the House of Commons, is a harrowing narrative of an individual's helplessness before a ruthless system. Teatr.doc, a small Moscow theatre, has been staging "One Hour and 18 Minutes", a documentary-style play based on Mr Magnitsky's prison writings. As Mr Magnitsky himself wrote in one of his last letters, “Justice under these circumstances turns into a process of grinding human flesh into mincemeat for prisons and camps, a process in which people can neither effectively defend themselves or even realise what is happening to them. One can only think about when it will end, when one can get rid of this physical and emotional torture.” The torture ended on November 16th 2009.



Mr Magnitsky's death caused an outrage among the Russian elite, and Dmitry Medvedev, Russia's president, ordered official investigations. Several high-ranking prison officials were fired, but the crime ultimately remains unsolved. Last week Transparency International, a corruption watchdog, posthumously bestowed on Mr Magnitsky its Integrity Award. Meanwhile, Russian “law-enforcers” have marked Mr Magnitsky's death in their own way. The investigators involved in Mr Magnitsky's case were rewarded for their services and promoted to higher ranks. Russia's interior ministry also tried to shift the blame for the tax fraud on to Mr Magnitsky, who can of course no longer answer them.