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EUROPE | FEBRUARY 9, 1998 VOL. 151 NO. 6 |
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We'll See You in Court Russia's gangster-businessmen are learning to use one vital piece of corporate equipment--lawyers By ANDREW MEIER /MOSCOW
In Boyko's case, Padva has decided to target Moscow's rabid journalistic purveyors of kompromat, the compromising material that has become the coin of the political realm in Russia. Boyko is suing two muckrakers whose reports on a lucrative book deal provoked a scandal, forcing him from high office. Boyko was one of five co-authors of a tome on privatization that netted each $90,000 from a Swiss publisher partly owned by a top Russian bank, whose critics contend had an unfair advantage in several privatization auctions. As Boyko does not deny accepting the royalties his case may not be easy to win. But then, Padva is no ordinary lawyer. The diminutive defender of unsavory bosses of the new Mafiya and the old Communist Party may be Russia's best known criminal litigator. His clients range from alleged mob boss Vyacheslav Ivankov (now serving a lengthy sentence in New York for mail fraud) to Anatoly Lukyanov (communist diehard and co-conspirator in the 1991 attempt to overthrow Mikhail Gorbachev). Padva's colorful client list didn't bother Boyko, a Harvard-educated economist much admired in the West, because Padva, like the rest of the elite legal club, earns his high fees by being successful in court. "We're worth every kopeck," Padva boasts, "because we win." Russia, historically, has had no love of lawyers. A perhaps apocryphal story has Peter the Great boasting during a visit to England: "I have just two lawyers in my entire empire, and I intend to hang one of them as soon as I get home." But in the six years since the demise of the U.S.S.R. Russia has witnessed a dramatic turn in legal affairs from the Soviet era, when lawyers had to toe the party line. "The Soviet state simply used the courts to suppress its own people," says Ernest Ametistov, a liberal Constitutional Court justice. Corporate law, nowadays a cottage industry in Russia's chaotic marketplace, did not even exist when the state owned everything. "Most of us did criminal cases, divorce cases or sat around waiting for the bright future to come," says Padva. During the reformist period of perestroika, however, the "Rule of Law" began to replace Lenin's "People's Justice" as the Holy Grail of Russia's legal system. Now the once-despised profession of legal advocacy is booming. Since 1991 more than 15,000 new lawyers have entered the field in Moscow, while nationally the ranks have nearly doubled. Libel may be the fastest growing legal specialty. Last year, Interior Minister Anatoly Kulikov sued former Security Council head General Alexander Lebed (and lost), while the former Justice Minister, Valentin Kovalyov, sued the tabloid Top Secret for publishing scenes from a videotape it claimed showed a naked Kovalyov relaxing in a banya with prostitutes and organized crime notables (the case continues later this year). Not even Yeltsin has been spared. Alexander Korzhakov, the President's former bodyguard, filed a slander suit arising from his abrupt 1996 dismissal. For his defense Yeltsin turned to Genri Reznik, former prosecutor-turned-defender of dissidents who has risen to the rank of super lawyer. When the case reached Russia's Supreme Court Korzhakov's counsel--a sluggish attorney of the old Soviet school--droned through a soporific rendition of the putative slander that sent the justices into a doze. Then Reznik rose and approached the bench. Lean, with a shock of white hair, he addressed the court in his thunderous bass voice: "Your Honor, it's absurd to say that the President of the Russian Federation is a 'sick old man.' Boris Nikolayevich has long been in top fighting form...as, I believe you'll agree, was proved by his decision to relieve a failed servant, to wit Mr. Korzhakov, of his duties." All eyes (and TV cameras) remained glued on Reznik as he shredded Korzhakov's case and established himself as a post-Soviet Clarence Darrow. Russian celebrity lawyers are growing in power and influence as more attorneys build skills like Reznik's. Russia may still be a long way from Court TV, but with TV crews often crowding Moscow's courtrooms, lawyers like Padva and Reznik have become fixtures on the evening news. The super lawyers "represent something new and important for Russia," says Moscow News legal writer Leonid Nikitinsky. "They've proved the law can work for you." But not all their colleagues are pleased with the boom. Some worry that it has led the profession to the edge of anarchy. Moscow alone has 13 bar associations but no licensing or examining mechanism to test the qualifications of would-be lawyers. "It's hard to tell who's a real lawyer and who's just bought his way in," says Georgi Voskresensky, head of one of the largest legal groups, the Union of Advocates. Those at the top, however, need no vetting and no advertising. "The Rezniks, the Padvas, all of Russia knows them," says Voskresensky. Given Russia's unchecked growth in murder and mayhem, financial chicanery and tabloid journalism, such super lawyers should have more than enough clients to keep them busy--and rich--for years to come.
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hen Russia's privatization chief Deputy Prime Minister Maxim
Boyko was fired recently, he didn't go quietly. He hired a
lawyer: Genrikh Padva, one of the best of a new breed of
celebrity attorneys who have emerged in the post-Soviet era.
These super lawyers can command fees of up to $500 an hour
(about as much as an average retiree gets a year) defending
ascendant moguls or fallen politicians, feuding bankers or aging
ex-apparatchiki. And like their Western counterparts, they
appear on television nearly as often as they do in court.