Video of Robert Amsterdam speaking at the University of Illinois about the political-symbolic nature of Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s prosecution for fraud in 2005. The transformation of the Khodorkovsky trial into a grotesque perversion of justice is enormously revealing about the nature of the Russia Putin has made. That’s because the government had good evidence against him, and because Khodorkovsky was a person who aroused little public sympathy, having profited enormously from shady dealings during the hardships of the immediate post-Soviet privatization era. Yet these are the lengths to which a state goes when its purposes are not the enforcement of the law, but the creation of a new political order designed specifically to deliberately subvert it.