Two weeks after publication, Soldatov met an officer of the Moscow department of the FSB. The officer, who had been a source in the past, confirmed that a controversy had been stirred up inside the department by the Novikov case. Why, Soldatov wondered, had the FSB recruited Novikov?
The officer replied that Novikov had been a “swindler” who was in debt.
“You know, we have a plan for recruitment,” the officer added. His statement seemed to confirm that Novikov had been an agent. But the source, who was not from the section that might have recruited Novikov, didn’t know much more. He said the FSB had been totally surprised by the story and didn’t know how to react to it.
It was illegal to infiltrate properly registered political movements. But as one FSB officer explained to the authors, it
was
possible to perform so-called intelligence gathering by presenting the agent as an accidental activist.
The information about Novikov’s apparent financial troubles was new to the authors. They contacted another activist in the movement, Mikhail Dmitriev, one of Novikov’s close friends, who knew about the financial problems and confirmed them.
7
Eventually Soldatov called Novikov and asked him directly about the allegations of financial problems. Novikov conceded he had taken a loan for $15,000 and had no intention of returning it. He also revealed he had contacts with criminal gangs from Transnistria and that the FSB was fully aware of these ties.
Now Soldatov and Borogan saw the case more clearly. With his history of debt, Novikov was a more plausible pawn for the FSB: By becoming an informant, he could repay the monies he owed.
Was Novikov’s story true? He was clearly a man who had debts and some kind of criminal past, exactly the kind of person who is easily recruited by intelligence services for infiltration work. He provided Soldatov with accurate information—insofar as it could be checked—about his recruitment and handlers. And he had clearly worked within Kasparov’s organization, which was of considerable interest to the FSB. So he had both motive and opportunity. In the end he tried to make the most of it—as you would expect from an opportunist seeking asylum in Western Europe on the grounds of political persecution.
For its part, the FSB could claim that Novikov came to them with information and that they gave him “expenses” to cover his costs. The sums were never that great. It is hardly surprising that they remained silent when the story broke, as Novikov was a comparatively low-level figure, not regarded by the Moscow FSB as a major asset.
Nor was this the end of the story. In July 2008, the authors were told by a professor at the FSB Academy that the story had triggered a wave of anger at Soldatov in the Moscow department of the FSB. And only the Russian presidential elections of March 2, 2008, impeded action being taken against the journalists.
In March 2009, Novikov, by then in Finland, was refused political asylum, but he decided to stay in the country, fighting to reopen the case. By spring 2010 his future was still uncertain.
8
While Novikov’s case was unusual in that he had decided to go to the media with his story, it offered a glimpse of how stealthily the FSB operated to achieve its goals. Informants, who were compensated for dutifully reporting back to their handlers and were given careful instructions on how to “read” an organization and act within it, were just one of many tools used to monitor Russia for dissident activity.
5
TARGETING EXTREMISM
THE RISE OF “WATCHDOG SURVEILLANCE”
O
N MAY 6, 2009, Roman Dobrokhotov, 26 years old, a liberal opposition political activist who had taken part in numerous street protests against the Kremlin, took a train from Volgograd to Moscow. At the Paveletsky Station, he stepped off the train and was immediately detained by a policeman who had been waiting for him by the exit.
The police officer told Dobrokhotov to follow him to the police post at the train station. Once there, the officer said he had been sent in advance to have a talk with the young political activist, to warn him against participating in street protests that were forbidden by the authorities. Dobrokhotov asked the policeman to explain. The policeman told Dobrokhotov that he was being detained on the advice of a telegram from the Moscow transit police that indicated that Dobrokhotov was on “watchdog surveillance,” a special system to track serious criminals, by the Interior Ministry Department for Countering Extremism. Dobrokhotov then photographed the interesting telegraph with his cell phone. Labelled URGENT, the document indicated that at least three police units had been deployed to track Dobrokhotov’s route. The activist had never been indicted on criminal charges, and he was being detained only for what the authorities called a preventive warning.
1
The warning Dobrokhotov received offers a glimpse into how the Russian security services monitor the country’s citizens. They have begun an ambitious surveillance program to control “extremism,” which has come to include, among other things, political protest against the regime, writings critical of the Kremlin or security services, and participation in independent trade unions and informal youth groups. This broad definition of extremism, embracing participation in activity that challenges the existing political order in Russia, was put in place when the Kremlin was worried that the 2008 financial crisis might ignite popular protests.
On September 6, 2008, Dmitry Medvedev, the newly elected Russian president, made a key change in the structure of the Interior Ministry, which acts as a national police force. Under Medvedev, the department dedicated to fighting organized crime and terrorism was disbanded and a new department established, charged with countering extremism. Similar changes were made through all regional departments. Thousands of experienced police officers accustomed to dealing with bandits and terrorists were redirected to hunt down a new enemy.
The official reason given for Medvedev’s change to the Interior Ministry was offered in February 2009 by Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliev, who declared victory in the fight against organized crime: “There will be no new criminal revolution in Russia. . . . The number of crimes is decreasing. . . . We can state: An epoch of criminal wars is in the past.”
2
On April 15, 2009, at a public meeting, Yuri Kokov, the head of the new department charged with fighting extremism, was more revealing: “The operative situation might get worse under the conditions of the global crisis, [with] deterioration of the social and economic situation.”
3
He was supported by Alexei Sedov, the FSB’s chief of the service for protection of the constitutional system and struggle against terrorism.“We need to consider the consequences of the world financial crisis as a possible catalyst for terrorist activity and increasing extremist manifestations, including violent forms of resistance carried out by all kinds of dissenters, unauthorized opposition, youth, and students.”
4
Under Russian law, public utterances inciting racial, social, or other forms of hate are considered extremism—that is, words, not actions. Yet the Interior Ministry’s official records suggest that extremism is not nearly as big a problem as organized crime. Official data from the Interior Ministry’s Main Information Analysis Center for 2008 show 36,601 incidents that were investigated involving organized criminal groups, but only 460 cases of extremism were registered.
5
In the campaign against extremism, the authorities placed the emphasis on prevention. Nurgaliev, the interior minister, announced that “the function of the department on countering extremism is first of all operative and recruiting work, aimed at the discovery and suppression of crimes, and also the prevention and monitoring of what is going on in the sphere of extremist activities.”
6
Thus the Interior Ministry, which had formerly investigated crime, was driven into the murky area of prevention, which was more traditional for the FSB.
A list of extremist targets was promptly prepared. On December 16, 2008, the General Prosecutor’s Office, the FSB, and the Interior Ministry approved a joint decision on extremism. The document stated that “extremism has become one of the major factors posing a threat to the national security of the Russian Federation.”
At the top of the list is “extremism under cover of Islam.” In most cases this appears to include associations and communities, independent of the so-called traditional Islam that is supervised officially by the Russian government. Next on the list are followers of pagan cults. The list also includes “participants in informal youth groups” and some radical opposition parties and movements. The joint decision prescribed how to work with the target groups, from surveillance methods to criminal prosecution. One of the most important areas of work is “neutralization and disbanding of associations whose members are prone to extremism.”
7
By spring 2009 it was obvious that the security services intended to broaden the list of extremist groups enumerated in the December 2008 order. Now the Interior Ministry is focusing on independent trade unions (lest they launch a wave of strikes) and warning leaders of such groups that they risk being charged with extremism.
In April 2009, Petr Zolotarev, the head of the independent trade union at the sprawling Avtovaz car factory, announced that he was summoned to the prosecutor’s office for the town of Togliatti for “explanations about actions aimed at overthrowing the existing order.” Earlier, Zolotarev had been questioned by officials at the local center on countering extremism.
Any expressions of public protest, by anyone from deceived stock market investors to residents rallying to keep a park in their area, can fall under the umbrella definition of extremism. On June 5, 2009, in St. Petersburg, for example, police detained six protesters—real estate investors claiming they had been defrauded—and warned them that they ran the risk of being labeled extremists.
Bloggers have similarly been targeted in the new anti-extremism campaign. In March 2009, Dmitri Soloviev, leader of the youth opposition group Oborona in Kemerovo, Siberia, faced criminal charges for criticizing the FSB in his LiveJournal blog. Two of the offending headlines on his blog were “FSB kills Russian children” and “Arbitrary behavior of the FSB and military conscription center.” According to experts invited by the prosecution, the information posted by Soloviev “incites hatred, hostility and degrades a social group of people—the police and the FSB.” The charges were eventually dropped.
Savva Terentyev, a 22-year-old blogger from the Komi Republic, faced similar charges for inciting hatred after local journalist Boris Suranov posted a comment on his blog in March 2008 criticizing law enforcement. In July 2009 Terentyev was found guilty and received a suspended sentence of one year.
The Interior Ministry created a special system for tracking targets and set up an electronic database of everything from recorded video surveillance to details about the purchase of plane and train tickets to fingerprint records.
8
The security services and law enforcement agencies meanwhile began to combine special databases on extremists and wanted criminals. Why people are entered into the database remains a state secret.
In May 2007, Sergei Shimovolos, a grey-haired, bearded man who worked as a human rights activist for two decades, traveled from his home in Nizhny Novgorod to Samara to take part in an independent investigation of restrictions that had been placed on public protests during the G8 summit in St. Petersburg the year before.
During his trip, he was checked by transport police in Nizhny Novgorod, in Samara Oblasts (a district), and in the Republic of Mordovia. Each time, an officer of the transport police asked him to explain where he was headed to and what he planned to do upon arrival. The checks were clearly prearranged, but the question remained how they had been organized.
“In Samara I was lucky: the policemen honestly wrote in the report that they were detaining me on the grounds of a telegram they had received, and they were required to question me in line with crime prevention measures for conducting protest actions,” Shimovolos told Irina Borogan.
Shimovolos protested his surveillance in court. “At the court, I received materials that bore witness to the fact that I was put under so-called ‘watchdog surveillance’ by a decision of the Nizhny Novgorod Organized Crime Unit, which allowed them to monitor my movements through the ticket sales database,” Shimovolos recalled. He also learned that in 2007, some 3,865 Russians were under this type of watchdog surveillance. Now their names come up in the very same electronic card files that have data on criminals on the wanted list. Shimovolos asked the court to admit that such measures violate a person’s rights, and urged the Interior Ministry to destroy all such records on citizens like himself, who had not been deemed extremists by a court but had been entered into the database.