Those of us who have been to Russia already know the drill. Your driver is taking you to the orphanage where the most stressful day of your life awaits, when the car is pulled over by the highway police. Oh, what now, you think. What piece of paperwork have I forgotten to bring?

But the stop has nothing to do with you and everything with what a group of Russian citizens are now saying is wrong with the nation's police force. The road cops are yanking your driver's car off the road purely and simply to extract a little cash. It happened to me once on each of the three trips I made to Russia and even though I knew what was going down, it made it no less easy to deal with. I don't suffer injustice, or fools, easily.

Thankfully, a growing number of Russian citizens have decided they won't either.

Today's issue of The New York Times features a story out of Yekaterinburg, in Siberia's Sverdlovsk Oblast, about what happened when local resident Kirill Formanchuk decided to make a routine trip to the police station to register his car. Formanchuk had apparently made a name for himself by calling rogue roadside cops on the carpet. Instead of registering his car that day, he was treated to a beating so severe that he landed in the hospital with head and skull injuries (beware: the photo on the Times's Web site is pretty graphic).

But instead of shrugging the beating off as one more example of a government out of touch with its citizenry, the citizens of Russia did something extraordinary. They rose up in protest. According to the Times, motorists’ groups have held anti-police rallies not only in Yekaterinburg, but also in Moscow and St. Petersburg; and, and the Times say an Internet posting in support of Mr. Formanchuk (I can't find it) has gotten about 200,000 hits from within Russia. The story has even made Russia's tightly controlled major media outlets. The Yekaterinburg police, who deny any involvement in Formanchuk's injuries, told the Times that he was "not a law-abiding citizen."

I wish Formanchuk a speedy recovery. But if your driver's car is stopped on your adoption journey, do not pick that moment to be an advocate for justice.