Read The New Nobility of the KGB Online

Authors: Andrei Soldatov

Tags: #History, #Europe, #Russia & the Former Soviet Union, #Political Science, #General, #International Relations, #Security (National & International), #Intelligence & Espionage, #World, #Russian & Former Soviet Union, #Social Science, #Social Classes

The New Nobility of the KGB (10 page)

 
On April 22, 2009, the Nizhny Novgorod District Court refused to eliminate the records and rejected Shimovolos’s complaint on all counts. Although Shimovolos lost, his lawsuit offered insight into the ways that surveillance of law-abiding citizens is carried out.
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Information about Shimovolos made its way into the electronic database of the Interior Ministry known as “Rozysk-magistral,” or the “Wanted Line,” on March 19, 2007. The decision to include his information in the database was made by officers in the organized crime unit in the Nizhny Novgorod District. Shimovolos thinks he was flagged for helping to organize a political opposition march in Nizhny Novgorod.
 
 
INITIALLY, THE INTERIOR MINISTRY’S “Wanted Line” hardware and software suite, known as PTK, was created to assist in tracking criminals on federal and regional wanted lists. The PTK is connected with the “Express” and “Magistral” databases, which receive information about travel tickets purchased in Russia. When a criminal buys a ticket, the information goes to the PTK server and then is sent along to regional transit police, who can intercept the target at the local train station or airport. The Interior Ministry’s overall objective was to cast a wide net in order to apprehend criminals far and wide.
 
But as Shimovolos’s case shows, data about law-abiding citizens was also included in the PTK. The procedure for criminals and ordinary citizens is effectively the same, except that instead of an arrest, policemen receive instructions on how to handle citizens who are not suspected of a criminal offense.
 
Surveillance operations are carried out using new technologies that the Interior Ministry has at its disposal. This includes a portable, handheld terminal with access to all of the ministry’s data on wanted individuals. The device, which resembles a smart phone, weighs less than seven ounces, can transmit photos and videos, and was designed to give police officers real-time access to federal and regional databases like “Wanted Persons,” “Passports,” “Weapons,” “Theft,” and “Automotive Transport Wanted by Interpol,” among others.
 
Practically every large rail terminal and airport in Russia (as well as parts of trains and commuter trains) is now equipped with a face-recognition system known as “Videolock.” (Cameras are located in rail cars, waiting rooms, cash registers, and platforms.) Dobrokhotov might have been detained with the help of such a system. A policeman could receive his image, marked with a special symbol, on the handheld terminal.
 
In 2006, there were 32 million fingerprint dossiers. Two years later, the federal and regional automated fingerprint data banks exceeded 71 million dossiers, for a population of 145.2 million.
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In the last few years, almost all the detainees at protests in Russia were photographed and fingerprinted. According to the Interior Ministry, in 2009 new technological developments enabled police to check fingerprint data in real time and get a rapid response indicating whether a person was in a database.
 
While entering the names of potential extremists into existing databases, the Interior Ministry simultaneously began to develop new, larger, and more sophisticated databases.
 
In 2005 the Interior Ministry started to create a “super” database intended to integrate all police data at the local and federal levels into a single system accessible by each regional office. The system, scheduled for completion in 2011, has already succeeded in linking hundreds of Interior Ministry offices across the country.
 
According to individuals involved in the development of the network, once completed, officers in more than 4,000 units will have access to the database. In time, there will be a single space from which officials can gain instant access to information about an individual—audio, video, photographic, fingerprint, biometric, and text.
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While Russia’s 2008 financial crisis has forced authorities to make numerous budget cuts, it does not appear to have dampened enthusiasm for the surveillance program. Instead, evidence suggests that officials are expanding efforts in this area. In late 2008, with the aid of data from 120 regional situation centers,
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a situation center was established that brought together officials from the Interior Ministry and Federal Migration Service to monitor migration, with the goal of preventing the emergence of social tension.
 
At the same time, the Interior Ministry has begun to develop databases specifically designed to collect information on potential extremists. On April 29, 2009, in Yekaterinburg, Yuri Kokov made his first mention of a system called “Extremist”—a large catchall database of information that could be used in an investigation but has not been included in a formal criminal charge.
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According to the authors’ information, on March 31, 2009, the Sistematica company in Moscow won the state contract to build a “system to automate the line of the fight against extremism.”
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The client is the Interior Ministry, and the sum of the contract is more than $380,000. The system should be completed by November 2010. As stated in the contract, the “automated system is to improve the quality of information support to combat extremist activities.” The development of the system, the document states, will allow for the creation of a database on countering extremist activity, as well as automate the processes of the exchange of information between the Interior Ministry, the FSB, and Federal Protective Service.
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The system will have branches in every regional situation center fighting against extremism and will allow fifty users to work simultaneously. The Interior Ministry has said that it is “currently not possible” to estimate the size of the database: In other words, the ministry cannot say even approximately how many people might be entered into the database and will be subject to monitoring.
 
Russia’s expanded surveillance efforts seem to be directly at odds with the spirit of the 1993 Russian Constitution, which states in Article 23: “1. Everyone shall have the right to the inviolability of private life, personal and family secrets, the protection of honor and good name. 2. Everyone shall have the right to privacy in correspondence, telephone conversations, and postal, telegraph, and other messages. Limitations of this right shall be allowed only by court decision.”
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UNDER RUSSIA’S WATCHFUL eye, individuals as well as organizations have increasingly come under a sophisticated system of surveillance. Those with the earmarks of extremism are put on a watch list, and the details of their personal lives may be scoured by FSB personnel. According to Russian law, public utterances inciting racial, social, or other forms of hate are considered forms of extremism. In 2006-2007, yet under Putin, “extremism” was expanded to include media criticism of state officials—a distinction that in turn required the media to label as extremist any organization the government deemed to be so.
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Another amendment to the law made under Putin extended the definition of extremism to include “public justification of terrorism or other terrorist activity,” but without defining “justification.” Additional amendments regulate the production and distribution of “extremist” material without specifying what constitutes such material and introduce new penalties for journalists, media outlets, and printers found guilty of the offense. Penalties range from fines and confiscation of production equipment to the outright suspension of media outlets for up to ninety days.
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Lyudmila Alekseeva, the head of the Moscow-based Helsinki Group, compares the current situation in Russia to that of the struggle against the dissident movement in the Soviet Union. “There is a sense of déjà vu: the practice of surveillance of dissidents is back, taking people off trains, preventing conversations. The practice not only returned, but is enriched with new means of pressure on the people.”
 
At a press conference on June 16, 2009, human rights activists from the Movement for Human Rights and the Moscow Helsinki Group demanded that Russia disband the Interior Ministry Department for Countering Extremism. In their statement, the groups noted that in creating the new department, Medvedev had established “a system of political surveillance consisting of people who, accustomed to dealing with dangerous criminals . . . were given very broad and vague criteria to include people on the lists of targets to counteract.”
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These measures of surveillance are not precisely comparable with Soviet practice. The Soviet police state tried to control every citizen in the country. The new, more sophisticated Russian system is far more selective than its Soviet-era counterpart; it targets only those individuals who have political ambitions or strong public views. Yet it’s hard not to draw a comparison between the two. Increasingly, Russia’s measures to closely monitor the lives of its citizens reflect an authoritarian hand—one less interested in the goals of civil society and more concerned with maintaining rigid control.
 
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LIVING OFF THE FAT OF THE LAND
 
THE NEW ELITE
 
 
 
 
I
N SOVIET TIMES, loyalty to the secret police was enforced by fear. Stalin-era purges touched the secret police as well—many in the service and the leadership were executed or sent to jail. But service could be well rewarded. In the KGB, the rank and file received bonuses and free apartments, sidestepping long waiting lists. Generals enjoyed being chauffeured in official black Volgas—the roomiest Soviet sedan, used by the upper-echelon bureaucracy—and they qualified for country homes on the elite Rublyovka Road. But it was well understood by the recipients of these privileges that they were only good as long as one held on to one’s position. The real owner of the dachas and cars was the KGB itself. Agents, first and foremost, were servants of the state.
 
In the years after the Soviet collapse, the servants of the state once again developed a taste for luxury. Old-fashioned Volgas were replaced by the largest, most prestigious black Mercedes, BMWs, and Audis, specially equipped with plates, lights, and sirens that allowed drivers to cut through Moscow’s enormous traffic jams. (The lights and plates also give the driver the right to roar down the wrong side of the road at high speed, and have become one of Russia’s most visible symbols of privilege.) In Moscow alone, the FSB has ninety-five such vehicles at its disposal, while Foreign Intelligence has only fourteen and the Ministry of Defense has nineteen.
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In the 1990s, with unconstrained capitalism in Russia, officers were more focused on money and perks than their predecessors had been. They wanted higher salaries and pensions, and they saw it as their right to benefit from the privatization of state property, including valuable lands along the gold coast of the Rublyovka. This corridor, a collection of villages along the Rublyovo-Uspenskoye Road, has, since the imperial era, been a route for the elite. It was unofficially called the “Road of the Tsar” because Ivan the Terrible used it when he went falcon hunting. And in Soviet times, the pleasant summer homes, or dachas, were reserved for members of the Politburo and Central Committee of the party, famous artists, scientists, and people close to the Kremlin. But the socialist system demanded that these dachas be given to all of them temporarily, with no way of transforming them into personal property. Part of this land was set aside for the KGB’s dachas.
 
After the fall of the Soviet Union the Russian elite continued to occupy the area. The famous villages on Rublyovka—Barvikha, Zhukovka, Nikolina Gora, Usovo, and Gorki became a refuge for enclaves of the newly wealthy and powerful. Yeltsin’s family enjoyed a compound in the Rublyovka village of Barvikha. Vladimir Putin chose the state residence near Usovo; the former tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky and former prime minister Victor Chernomyrdin built their mansions in the village of Zhukovka; and Russian president Dmitry Medvedev preferred the state residence in Gorki-9.
 
Construction in the forests surged in the 1990s, and accelerated in the Putin decade. Traditional wooden dachas were replaced by mammoth, columned brick-and-stone mansions. The Rublyovka turned into Russia’s refuge for oligarchs and powerful officials. One hundred square meters in a dacha in the Rublyovka was valued at around $200,000.
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The FSB ended up a very rich landowner. Although the KGB’s dachas on Rublyovka were officially state owned, they had been managed by state security for so long that they were considered to be entirely at the FSB’s disposal.
 
 
ONE OF THOSE who witnessed the advent of pricey mansions on Rublyovka was Viktor Alksnis, a onetime colonel in the Soviet Air Force whose grandfather had been a founder of the Red Army air force. Alksnis had served in Latvia, but when the Soviet Union collapsed, the military was forced to leave and Alksnis came to Russia, where he lived in a small village outside Moscow. At the time Russia was steamrolling toward democracy and free markets under Yeltsin, Alksnis was a voice from the past, steadfastly opposed to what the new Russia was attempting to become—a capitalist democracy. Alksnis, with wavy grey hair and a calm, self-confident manner, served in the Congress of People’s Deputies, the Soviet parliament that was elected in 1989, as one of the leaders of Soyuz, a parliamentary group formed with the goal of preserving the Soviet Union at all costs. Later, he twice served in the new Russian parliament, where he openly criticized the West, capitalism, and liberal ideas. In 2003, he was elected to the State Duma from the district that included the Rublyovka, and he never ceased to be outraged by the rise of the million-dollar mansions.

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