By Ariel Cohen

Harvest season is wrapping up in Russia, where the nation’s leaders are producing yet another bumper crop of irony.

Case in point: a recent online article, "Forward, Russia!" by President Dmitry A. Medvedev challenging Russians to fight corruption and create a workable modern justice system. Yet as this plea on Gazeta.ru hits home pages, Medvedev and his political mentor, Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin, continue to countenance a second show trial of Yukos oil company founders Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev.

Yukos was once the largest and most transparent Russian energy company. It was taken over by the government in 2003, and its assets were sold off to state-owned Rosneft.

The current legal proceedings, now entering the crucial defense phase, demonstrate how the Kremlin leadership is willing to resurrect the Soviet era, when "judges" did the bidding of Communist Party bosses to punish enemies of the state.

This looks like the new version of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s famous reset button: Backward, Russia!

Last month marked the sixth anniversary of the distorted case that illustrates the sorry state of Russia’s criminal-justice system. After getting arrested by state agents at gunpoint in 2003, Khodorkovsky and Lebedev were convicted of evading taxes on oil profits. Never mind that months earlier, Russian tax inspectors and independent Western auditing firms had established that Yukos had paid every penny it owed the Kremlin.

Just as Khodorkovsky and Lebedev were about to end their prison terms in a Siberian labor camp, Russian prosecutors, fulfilling the Kremlin’s orders, charged them again - this time with stealing the same oil they were convicted of not paying taxes on! How one can steal a quarter of Russia’s oil output - more than two million barrels a day - nobody knows.

Businesses worldwide are taking note. They are fleeing Russia amid the forced expropriations, bribery, and tax scams. Two weeks ago, confidence fell further after the death while in custody of Russian corporate counsel Sergei Magnitsky, 37, a key witness in another legal battle over absurd tax-fraud allegations.

The case pitted the Kremlin against Hermitage, once Russia’s top investment fund. The international bar association and the U.K. Law Society decried Magnitsky’s death, which occurred in prison after the government ignored repeated calls for his release.

The Russian people are becoming numb to the legal spectacle unfolding over Khodorkovsky and Lebedev. The fate of the independent judiciary for which Medvedev supposedly yearns rests on the outcome of these Kafkaesque proceedings.

This new edition of Moscow show trials prompts several questions. Will Russia keep trying defendants a second time on charges for which they have already been convicted? Will it apply so-called telephone justice, in which regime officials call in the verdict and sentence, instead of allowing judges to make independent rulings based on the law?

Are Russian courts going to enforce decisions handed down by arbitration courts in London, New York, and Stockholm? Will the state continue to spend massive amounts of resources trying innocent businesspeople, while ignoring incontrovertible evidence of bribery, extortion, fraud, and even murder? Will Medvedev and Putin restore property rights and enforce legitimate contracts?

Without a transparent and independent system of justice, Medvedev can forget the alternative economic-development model he has proposed. And Moscow’s chances of being integrated into the global economic community will vanish.

Instead, there will be a corrupt petrostate, in which leading business owners such as Khodorkovsky and Lebedev are prosecuted, while the well-connected politicians and the siloviki (military and secret-services honchos) control the exports of natural resources and line their already-bulging pockets.

Medvedev is right about one thing: Russia deserves better. The Obama administration should watch the development of the rule of law in Russia like a hawk. It is easier to deal with transparent and well-run countries where the judiciaries are doing their job.

The first steps in the process of improvement? Freedom for Khodorkovsky and Lebedev. There also should be arrests and prosecutions of those who ordered the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, a brave investigative journalist, and many others like her.

Such steps would signal that the era of contract killings, arbitrary prison sentences, and kangaroo courts are over and that a new era in Russia has begun.

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