The song and dance performed by the cartoon duet of President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Channel One on New Year's truly shook the world.

The next day, excited fellow journalists began calling me at home, wondering what it meant. Was it the dawn of a new period of glasnost or a cunning sleight of hand of official propaganda masquerading as satire? Major international and domestic press outlets joined the discussion: The New York Times, the Financial Times, Ekho Moskvy, Moskovsky Komsomolets, Kommersant, Novaya Gazeta, Izvestia and The Moscow Times.

But something even more important unfolded over the New Year break, and it involved another media outlet: an open letter addressed to President Dmitry Medvedev. When a Moscow court ordered the arrest of businessman Peter Vins on charges of tax evasion in mid-December, he wrote an open letter to Medvedev.

Vins, a former Soviet national who now holds U.S. citizenship, described in his letter attempts by inspectors to extort bribes. He wrote: "At the first stage, when the authorities have only first entered the office, the issue can be resolved with a payment of $10,000 to $20,000. At the second stage, when they have conducted a search and seized documents, the matter can be settled during the next few days for $20,000 to $30,000. At the third stage, when a formal review of the company's financial and economic activity has been launched, the problem can be resolved with a payment of $50,000 to $100,000." Defending a business from constant extortion threats by law enforcement agencies is rampant.

Vins is a remarkable person. He comes from a well-known family of dissidents that Sakharov helped free from the gulag in 1979, during Leonid Brezhnev's rule. Vins returned to Russia in 1994 and established the VinLund logistics and shipping company. He founded the award for investigative reporters in 2001 in memory of Andrei Sakharov, to whom he owes his freedom.

The problems began in September 2007, when agents from the Interior Ministrys economic crimes department searched the VinLund offices and assaulted three employees. At one point, the case was closed for lack of evidence of any wrongdoing, but then reopened, closed and reopened again. But this is the first time that an order of arrest has been made. The targeted individual had no option but to leave Russia yet again.

Considering himself a conscientious taxpayer, Vins refused to pay off the authorities and instead appealed to the president with a request to conduct a fair public investigation into the matter. That is, he chose not to be intimidated when the normal response is to pay up and shut up.

Vins told me in a recent phone conversation: "I understand perfectly well that little can be achieved in the fight against corruption working only from the top down unless there is also resistance from below. Let it be the case that I am alone, or that 10 of us are fighting it. But for us to number 100 or 1,000, we need to feel some protection from those who have called on us to defeat corruption."

With a dissident businessman taking that type of position, the matter automatically becomes politicized. After all, the criteria by which today's political system must be judged is not whether it allows the airing of a television program that uses cartoon characters to parody the president, but whether it can live up to the lofty goals that it has proclaimed: ending corruption and enforcing the rule of law.

Alexei Pankin is the editor of WAN-IFRA-GIPP Magazine for publishing business professionals.