About two weeks before his criticism Kremlin Vladimir Kara-Murza was sentenced to 25 years in prison on charges of treason, his longtime lawyer and friend Vadim Prokhorov left Russia.

When the prosecutor’s office and the judge threatened him with criminal charges, Prokhorov realized that it was time to leave. “I stayed as long as I could. As a lawyer, I am useful inside Russia. But I am completely useless if I am in prison,” he said.

In early April, Prokhorov learned that the Prosecutor General’s Office would most likely prepare an indictment against him. Then he decided to leave. He has collected his belongings, various documents and audio recordings of court hearings, which he says he intends to release as evidence in what he calls a “mock trial.”

His fears of arrest were not unfounded. Several Russian lawyers have been arrested since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.. Timur Idalov, a lawyer with ties to a human rights group critical of the Kremlin, has been in prison since last month on charges of threatening a government official. Another lawyer, Dmitry Talandov, has been in detention since June 2022 on charges of spreading false information and slandering the Russian military.

Ever since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the state has branded lawyers like Prokhorov as “agents of foreign interests.” Dozens of people have been banned from practicing, and several are in jail on criminal charges related to their work or criticism of the Kremlin.

This fact means that fewer and fewer lawyers can defend dissidents and write down what happens in these processes. “Their presence and their work is essential,” Yevgeniya Kara-Murza said in a telephone interview from the US, where she lives with her three children. “They monitor these cases, record everything, submit appeals to international bodies. This creates a legal basis for the subsequent prosecution of prosecutors and politicians.”

Without them, activists rely on state-appointed lawyers who apparently don’t do their jobs on their own.

Russian lawyers say the situation could herald a repeat of the darkest chapters in the country’s history. In the massive purges carried out under Joseph Stalin in the 1920s and 1930s, the secret police arrested hundreds of lawyers defending dissidents.

In Moscow alone in the late 1930s, about 160 lawyers were accused of counter-revolutionary conspiracies and sentenced to death or long terms of exile in remote labor camps. Hundreds of others were disenfranchised. Many of those who remained were forced to join the Communist Party.

“Lawyers should follow the party line because no one knows what dirty tricks these intellectual dregs are doing,” Vladimir Lenin, Stalin’s predecessor in the Soviet leadership, once said.

“The liquidation of lawyers has begun. This is because they stand between civil society and a totalitarian state,” said Michael Benyas, a lawyer who was recently declared a foreign agent and had his license revoked.

The chances of dissidents being acquitted are also slim. An analysis by Russia’s Nezavisimaya Gazeta last week showed that only one of 300 verdicts handed down by Russian courts last year was acquittal. Some lawyers defending Kremlin critics say the best they can hope for is getting better terms for their clients.

According to the Wall Street Journal