Following its introduction, a small army of Russian activists descended on Capitol Hill, pushing for the bill’s passage. The revised bill was officially introduced on May 19, 2011, less than a month after we posted the Olga Stepanova YouTube video. With those extra sixty-five words, my personal fight for justice had become everyone’s fight. Those new words said that in addition to sanctioning Sergei’s tormentors, the Magnitsky Act would sanction all other gross human rights abusers in Russia. After a dozen or so of these visits and letters, Senator Cardin and his cosponsors conferred and decided to expand the law, adding sixty-five words to the Magnitsky Act. They had inadvertently discovered a new method for fighting human rights abuses in authoritarian regimes in the twenty-first century: targeted visa sanctions and asset freezes. The senators quickly realized that they’d stumbled onto something much bigger than one horrific case. After the bill was introduced they came to Washington or wrote letters to the Magnitsky Act’s cosponsors with the same basic message: “You have found the Achilles’ heel of the Putin regime.” Then, one by one, they would ask, “Can you add the people who killed my brother to the Magnitsky Act?” “Can you add the people who tortured my mother?” “How about the people who kidnapped my husband?” And on and on. Many other victims of human rights abuses in Russia saw the same thing. I wasn’t the only one who recognized this. “While these tactics were aggressive and crude, they confirmed that our legislation had touched a nerve.

Bill browder red