Violence and corruption in Russia"s legal...

Khodorkovsky, the former head of Russian oil giant Yukos, is serving an eight-year prison term for tax evasion and fraud after a highly politicized trial seen by many in the West as part of a Kremlin drive to subdue politically ambitious business tycoons.

In the Nezavisimaya Gazeta article, Khodorkosvky wrote that Russia"s legal system had in recent years become a "brutal assembly line," but one that could bury the current state by turning Russia"s best and brightest against the authorities.

"It is possible to say with certainty that the brutal assembly line that has replaced the judicial system is the gravedigger of the modern Russian state," Khodorkovsky said. "With enviable regularity it turns many thousands of the most active, intelligent and independent citizens against the state. Those, on whose choices the fate of the state ultimately depends."

"It is strange that the Russian political elite... are not afraid of it, that their instinct for self-preservation

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