Less than two weeks before Kremlin critic Vladimir Kara-Murza was given 25 years in prison on treason charges last month, in the harshest sentence against a Russian opposition activist in years, his longtime lawyer and friend Vadim Prokhorov fled Russia.
Mr. Prokhorov had given interviews and made statements about Mr. Kara-Murza’s closed trial, seeing himself as a public voice for a defendant without one. But when the prosecutors and judge threatened him with criminal charges, he understood it was time to go.
“I held on as long as I could,” Mr. Prokhorov said in an interview from Washington, D.C. “As a lawyer, I’m useful only inside Russia. But I’m no use at all if I’m in jail.”
Mr. Prokhorov, who has defended major Kremlin critics including slain politician Boris Nemtsov during a 30-year legal career, is part of a small but noticeable exodus from Russia of prominent lawyers who have represented opposition figures and activists protesting the war in Ukraine. In many instances, they served as a last line of defense for them against a legal system they and their colleagues say is being reshaped to punish dissent.
Since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in February last year, outspoken lawyers have been branded “foreign agents” by the state and subjected to extra scrutiny and harassment. Dozens have been stripped of their license to practice law. Some are in jail facing criminal charges relating to their work or criticism of the war.
Lawyers and rights defenders say the departure of lawyers from Russia or the legal profession means there are fewer people able to chronicle the closed trials of President Vladimir Putin’s most committed opponents, such as Mr. Kara-Murza or Alexei Navalny, who is in prison serving a sentence of 11½ years and says he faces new charges that could leave him behind bars for life.
Vadim Prokhorov speaks to his client Vladimir Kara-Murza during a preliminary court hearing.
Photo: MOSCOW CITY COURT/ REUTERSWith access to courtrooms that host secret trials, lawyers can bear witness to the ways the state punishes dissent and can gather evidence for possible future tribunals of Russian prosecutors and judges aiding the Kremlin, they say.
“Their presence and their work are extremely important,” Evgenia Kara-Murza, Mr. Kara-Murza’s wife, said in a phone interview from the U.S., where she resides with the couple’s three children. “They monitor these cases, they put everything down on paper, they lodge appeals with international institutions. That builds a legal basis for prosecuting these people later on.”
Without them, activists or other defendants facing politically motivated charges have to rely on state-appointed public defenders who are often close to state prosecutors and accused of failing to adequately argue their clients’ rights.
Russia’s Justice Ministry didn’t respond to a request for comment on restrictions imposed on lawyers and whether defendants can get adequate representation in the current climate.
Russian lawyers say this situation portends a repeat of the darkest chapters in Russia’s history. Under sweeping political purges carried out under Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin in the 1920s and 1930s, the secret police arrested hundreds of lawyers defending persecuted members of Soviet society including striking workers, Jews and peasants.
In Moscow alone, in the late 1930s, around 160 lawyers were accused of counterrevolutionary plots and sentenced in 15-minute trials to death by execution or long prison terms in remote labor camps. Hundreds more were disbarred. Many of those who remained joined the Communist Party, bolstering the state’s sway over the profession. At a time when show trials were condemning thousands branded enemies of the state, the Soviet regime was acutely aware of the power of the law.
“Lawyers should be kept well in hand and made to toe the line, for there is no telling what dirty tricks this intellectualist scum will get up to,” Vladimir Lenin, Stalin’s predecessor as Soviet leader and a qualified lawyer, once said.
Today’s Russian government holds up the legal system as a paragon of justice. Mr. Putin, a lawyer by training, has advocated for a “dictatorship of the law.” His spokesman Dmitry Peskov and other Russian officials routinely bat away questions about rights abuses and persecution of Kremlin opponents by citing the authority of the justice system.
It couldn’t be determined how many lawyers have left Russia since the invasion of Ukraine prompted a sweeping clampdown on dissent and the detention of more than 20,000 antiwar activists. But half a dozen lawyers interviewed by The Wall Street Journal said many of their colleagues have either fled or are planning to.
Russian political activist Vladimir Kara-Murza and his lawyer Maria Eismont in a Moscow court.
Photo: Moscow City Court Press Office/TASS/Zuma Press“A purge of the legal profession has begun. Because lawyers are the most experienced, savvy, and generally well-organized part of society that stands between civil society and the totalitarian state,” said Mikhail Benyash, a lawyer who has defended Russian refusenik soldiers and was recently declared a foreign agent and disbarred.
For those who remain, chances of victory in a Russian court are vanishingly small. An analysis of recent verdicts in Russia’s Nezavisimaya Gazeta newspaper last week found that only one in 300 verdicts passed in Russian courts last year was an acquittal, a statistic that chimes with other studies.
Some lawyers who defend Kremlin critics say the best they can hope for in the current climate is to secure more favorable conditions for their clients or improve their lives by visiting them in jail and passing on messages from friends. Their arguments in court might help persuade a judge to soften a draconian sentence by a year or six months, said Maria Eismont, who replaced Mr. Prokhorov as Mr. Kara-Murza’s main lawyer after he fled.
For many Russian lawyers, the activists being arrested and put on trial are friends. Mikhail Biryukov, a lawyer based in Moscow, became close with opposition politician Ilya Yashin when both served on a Moscow district council before the war. When Mr. Yashin was arrested in June for antiwar posts, Mr. Biryukov took on his case. In December, Mr. Yashin was sentenced to 8½ years in prison.
“There’s much more pressure when you’re defending people you know so well,” Mr. Biryukov said. “Because it makes all the more obvious how little you’re actually able to do.”
Lawyer Mikhail Biryukov says he feels even more pressure when defending people close to him.
Photo: Sergei Bobylev/tass/Zuma PressMr. Prokhorov said he decided to leave Russia amid mounting pressure on him to stay silent. During visits to the U.S. and U.K. embassies in Moscow on behalf of Mr. Kara-Murza, who holds British citizenship and U.S. permanent residency, Mr. Prokhorov said he was tailed by Russia’s Federal Security Service. Plainclothes officers would sit at adjacent tables in cafes, not ordering anything but observing him closely.
He said he twice refused to sign a court-imposed order to not speak publicly about the case against Mr. Kara-Murza, whom he represented for over a decade. After court hearings, Mr. Prokhorov would appear before the courthouse to share new developments with the press, often excoriating Russia’s justice system and the prosecutors involved in the trial.
In one of the final hearings before Mr. Kara-Murza’s conviction, Mr. Prokhorov said the judge, Sergei Podoprigorov, threatened a criminal case against him for disclosing what investigators said were state secrets while discussing the trial.
“What’s the point in me being part of the defense team if I can’t talk about what kind of lawlessness is taking place there? What’s the point then of taking part in the process at all?” he said in an interview. “The most important thing is to be the defendant’s connection with the outside world.”
Through a spokesperson, Mr. Podoprigorov declined to comment on Mr. Prokhorov’s statements.
In early April, Mr. Prokhorov was warned that the prosecutor general’s office could be preparing an indictment against him. It was then that he made the choice to leave. He packed not only his possessions but various documents and audio files from court hearings relating to Mr. Kara-Murza’s trial, which he says he plans to publish as evidence of what he calls a sham trial.
His fears of arrest weren’t unwarranted. Since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a number of Russian lawyers have been detained for charges connected to their work. Timur Idalov, a lawyer affiliated with a human-rights organization critical of the Kremlin, has been in jail since last month on charges of threatening a state official after prosecutors said he lost his temper during a court hearing, which he denies.
Another lawyer, Dmitry Talantov, has been under arrest since June 2022, charged with disseminating false information and discrediting the Russian armed forces in a series of Facebook posts criticizing the war that investigators said “undermine the authority of the army and state.” He faces 15 years in prison.
Against this backdrop, lawyers say the legal profession is under pressure from the state to openly back the war. The Federal Bar Association, which collects monthly membership payments from lawyers across the country, discussed at its annual meeting last month the possibility of donating part of its budget to Russia’s war effort.
At least one regional branch of the bar association has already sent money for the cause, according to a document it published on its website. Svetlana Denisova, the president of the Federal Bar Association, declined to comment for this article. Several lawyers interviewed by the Journal said they were appalled by the idea of donations toward the military campaign in Ukraine.
Mr. Benyash, the lawyer branded a foreign agent, said he expects the pressure on lawyers to toe the line to grow. He left Russia in April after months spent in fear of arrest, handing over the cases he had been working on to colleagues and ending 20 years of legal practice.
“I used to defend opposition activists in court, and visit them in police stations and jails. Now I’m banned from doing anything for them,” he said. “Soon, there’ll be no one at all left to defend these people.”
Write to Matthew Luxmoore at matthew.luxmoore@wsj.com
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