Jailbird Moms: Anna Shavenkova vs. Yulia Kruglova

21 Aug 2010

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Anna Shavenkova (left) & Yulia Kruglova (right)

It was just last April when Dmitri Medvedev approved revisions to Article 74 of the federal criminal code, supposedly eliminating pretrial detention for persons accused of nonviolent offenses. The stimulus for that move was the death of Sergey Magnitsy, a lawyer representing William Browder’s Hermitage Capital, which was the victim of a massive theft and extortion ring. This was meant to usher in an era of more humane treatment when it comes to “economic crimes,” as they’re called in Russian.

Skip ahead to the present time, when the 2010 summer’s sun is setting over a horizon of wildfire ash and subsiding heat-waves. Two court cases in recent weeks have given Russia’s bruised citizenry a few additional reminders that the world is a cruel, extremely stupid place to live. Both these cases involve mothers of young children, but the similarities pretty much end there. I’m talking, of course, about Anna Shavenkova and Yulia Kruglova.

For those unfamiliar with Ms. Shavenkova, please see my February 2010 post about her story here. In a nutshell: she is the young girl who splattered two pedestrians with her car on a cold afternoon in Irkutsk late last year. A somewhat inexperienced driver, she apparently confused the gas and brake pedals. After crushing two people, she somehow also confused her own dented vehicle with the dying human beings lying nearby, as she devoted her entire attention to the former, while the latter soaked in their own blood.

Yulia Kruglova only came to my attention in the last couple of days. She was born in 1974 (making her thirty-six today) and is the mother of four not-entirely-adorable children. More importantly: she is currently seven-months-pregnant. Back in July, Mrs. Kuglova was convicted of stealing roughly 16 million rubles (522,000 USD) from “Oranta,” the insurance company where she worked as Director. There are the additional tidbits — almost lost in the mayhem of her prison sentence and the comparisons to Shavenkova — that the Tol’iatti court convicted Kurglova without any witnesses and without any material evidence. At any rate, the local court sentenced her to three years of prison time, presumably minus the pretrial detention time she’s already served (though one wonders why she was in the СИЗО at all, given the nonviolent nature of her crime). The sentence begins immediately.

Shocked? You haven’t even heard the worst parts yet! As it turns out, Yulia suffers from a medical condition that puts her at special risk in her next labor. Prison physicians in Samara examined her and declared in a signed letter dated August 5, 2010, that she has a scar on her uterus (caused by one of her four cesarian sections) that dramatically increases the likelihood of a premature baby. In an unprecedented letter from the prison’s administration, state prosecutors and prison officials asked the court to release Yulia from custody, for her safety and the baby’s. The court refused.

Yulia’s husband Georgy, who was recently forced into early retirement and now subsists on a pension, has written letters to President Medvedev, Supreme Court Chief Justice Lebedev, the general director of “Oranta,” and others. So far, only the local oblast’ court answered his messages, and it was to say that it won’t be able to review his request until mid-September (by which time, the Kruglovs’ baby will already be born — dead or alive). Georgy has started a website dedicated to freeing his wife. The site hosts the full text of his many public appeals and the appeals of the family’s new legal advisor, Svetlana Bakhmina (an infamous former-pregnant-inmate herself). The site also advertises a pubic petition “in support” of Yulia Kruglova. As I write this, 2,078 people have signed the petition. (For comparison, the “Putin must go” petition has now collected more than 56,000 signatures.)

Now let’s return to Anna Shavenkova. Just a few days ago, on August 17, 2010, the Kirov District Court of Irkutsk sentenced twenty-eight-year-old Anna to three years in a penal colony for a violation of Section 3, Article 264, of the criminal code: endangering road safety. (The law carries a maximum penalty of five years imprisonment.) And now for the best part: Shavenkova was granted an Article 82 exception — a fourteen-year delay before she has to serve any prison time. The reason? Anna has a newborn daughter.

Needless to say, the public’s reaction to these two cases has been overwhelmingly negative — and indeed that negativity has been magnified by the obvious comparisons between Shavenkova and Kruglova.

And there are indications that the authorities actually realize this.

Two days ago, attorney Anatoly Kucherena announced on Vesti radio that the Public Chamber (an outfit not unlike the largely decorative advisory committee Ella Pamfilova used to head) would be reviewing Shavenkova’s case. Kucherena suggested that she might be retried under Article 125, “abandonment in danger,” which carries significant financial penalties, but only three months maximum incarceration. He also indicated that, though the Article 82 exception was available to the courts, they need not necessarily have applied it to this particular case.

Regarding Yulia Kruglova, United Russia’s website posted an interesting article today that cites world fencing champion Olga Slutsker, titled “Children Shouldn’t Have to Suffer for the Mistakes of Their Mothers.” (Slutsker joined United Russia in April last year and later became leader of the party’s physical education program. She’s quite a figure to have in one’s corner. She looks like this.) In the text, she criticizes the Tol’iatti court for failing to administer any kind of delay in Kruglova’s sentence (like the one Shavenkova received). “This woman committed an economic crime,” Slutsker says, “and poses no threat to society.”

In an op-ed published in Vedomosti, Svetlana Bakhmina acknowledged the manic depression at work in the public’s reactions to these two cases: the hatred of Shavenkova for getting off easy and the disgust that Kruglova wasn’t offered the exact same break. “Many have recently begun discussing the possibility of [Shavenkova's trial] as a legal precedent in Russia. One such precedent would bring such harm that it’s difficult to imagine,” she writes, adding, “I already hear comments like ‘now anybody who’s pregnant or has kids can kill anyone without paying for it.’” Bakhmina later explains that she thinks financial penalties are the better solution for nonviolent and accidental crimes (though she hints that Shavenkova might be an exception, given her murderous conduct on the highway).

Bakhmina’s piece gets at the central issue of these twin scandals: the public wants to see the powerful get justice and the weak spared from injustice. Unfortunately, reality usually supplies the opposite. Instead, outrage eventually reaches a fever pitch, and the authorities are driven to some kind of reaction — the likes of which we see today in the publicity stunts of Kucherena and Slutsker. Rather awkwardly, however, their recent initiatives seem to be operating at odds: one side seeks to overturn an Article 82 exception, and the other wishes to extend one. Because Russian officialdom has failed to articulate a uniform understanding of what the law is in these matters (or, rather, it has failed to enforce the vision encapsulated by Medvedev’s various legal reforms), the public now sits in anticipation of what will come next. Whatever the outcomes for Shavenkova and Kruglova, they will be the results of individualized conflicts now tied up in identity politics: the framed entrepreneur versus corrupt business interests, and the privileged apparatchik daughter versus her ruined victims.

This kind of justice does very little to improve the predictability and stability of legal systems. It is explosive. Russian judges, law makers, and law enforcement should do more and do better to prevent things from reaching this point in the future.

Update (September 3, 2010): Today a Samara court agreed to defer Kruglova’s sentence until 2022, when her currently in-utero child will be twelve-years-old. The decision is being hailed as a victory for human rights workers and common sense.

Free to go home to her family.

By: Kevin Rothrock Category: Personal Observations, Russian Politics Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,