In 2009, with Khodorkovsky’s scheduled release on the horizon, Russian prosecutors filed new charges against him, even more absurd than the original ones. He was essentially charged with stealing all the oil he was accused of not paying taxes on the first time. Cases like this are why Russians and other people living under totalitarian regimes do not see the writings of Gogol, Kafka, and Bulgakov as fantasy, or even surrealism. The state doesn’t have to be logical or reasonable, it just has to achieve its ends.
Dictatorships feel the perverse need to fulfill protocol, to have elections and trials even though the conclusions are foregone. The free world often rewards these charades with willing suspension of disbelief. Russia pretends to have elections and a justice system; the free world pretends right along with it, occasionally expressing their token concerns, citing irregularities, and attempting to shame the shameless. The dictators take all these background noises as the pathetic appeasement they are, and go on about their business. In the words of that keen observer of the totalitarian mindset, the Polish writer Stanislaw Jerzy Lec, “Is it progress if a cannibal uses a fork?”
— Winter is Coming (Garry Kasparov), Loc. 2346–54