Meet Russian lawyer Svetlana Bakhmina and her two young children. Arrested on December 8, 2004, she was sentenced to six years in prison for being associated with Mikhail Khodorkovsky. His crime? He dared to consider challenging Vladimir Putin for the Russian presidency.

A second Khodorkovsky attorney,Robert Amsterdam, was expelled from the country when he dared to protest his client’s innocence after he was arrested in October 2003, just as the presidential campaign cycle was beginning.

These two lawyers are just examples of a pattern of persecution aimed at attorneys who are foolish enough to represent clients that the Russian Kremlin doesn’t care for. There are many others.

Human rights crusader Karinna Moskalenko, for example.

Or Mikhail Trepashkin, who represented the select committee that investigated the bombing of apartments in Moscow just before Vladimir Putin invaded Chechnya. The committee wanted to know whether Putin’s KGB might have done the deed to justify the invasion.

And then there’s Boris Kuznetsov, like Amsterdam forced to flee the country for daring to sue the KGB.

Finally, Vasily Alexanyan, another Khodorkovsky attorney — not just arrested but denied vital medical care in prison, in the manner of torture.

Scholar Paul Goble reports that at a recent meeting of the All-Russian Congress of the Union of Lawyers “speaker after speaker said that ‘along with the other problems of the legal profession,’ Russian lawyers who defend people who have been charged with crimes for political reasons are now being persecuted in various ways by the Federal Security Service and other government agencies. The participants reported various incidents of ‘baseless persecution’ of such defense counsel.” They published an open letter condemning this “Soviet-era practice.” Goble writes:

That letter described repeated incidents of “illegal actions” by FSB officers and about the unwillingness of the judges involved to do anything to protect the lawyers and the right of those charged with a crime to effective legal representation. The letter called on a senior judge “to personally intervene and not allow [this] open discrediting of the judicial system.” Other participants in this action said that “the problem of the persecution of lawyers for their professional activity by law-enforcement organs of Russia and, above all, by the FSB of the Russian Federation, [which were discussed at the congress] long ago became a norm of life” in post-Soviet Russia. “Unfortunately,” one of them pointed out, the government has not done anything to halt this or to take the steps needed to prevent the creation of a situation in which “soon there will not be any independent lawyers” in Russia “and citizens will have no one to turn to for their defense when their rights are violated by government officials.

One would think that of all people in a society, the lawyers would be the least likely targets of brutal authoritarian repression, since they would be the most able to defend themselves. But the ease with which Putin’s Kremlin is pushing forward with its obvious plan to obliterate the legal profession says otherwise. In the same way, some thought that Russia’s Internet would be an impregnable bastion of protection from the neo-Soviet state; in fact, however, Putin is destroying the Internet just as easily.

It’s perhaps not too surprising that a proud KGB spy like Putin would pursue such a policy. After all, given Russia’s massive social ills, he need to keep a tight lid on dissent in order to preserve his power. But it is quite shocking that lawyers and bloggers in the West are not rallying to the aid of their compatriots in Russia as much as they should be. One can easily see in this light how the first Soviet dictatorship was able to consolidate its grip on the nation and go on to cause so much trouble.