Russia's Dead End: An Insider's Testimony from Gorbachev to Putin

by Andrei A. Kovalev

  Nevertheless, under the pressure of public opinion, on February 8, 2008, Aleksanian was transferred to a specialized clinic, and his trial was halted. But even then the authorities acted with extraordinary cynicism. Aleksanian was chained to his bed, not permitted to shower, and not allowed to say good-bye to his relatives.

  Naturally, the Russian authorities never slackened their obsessive attention to journalists. According to what most likely is incomplete information from the Glasnost Defense Foundation, since Putin came to power the profession of journalism in Russia has become extremely dangerous. The following table, based on data the fund collected about journalists and editors, illustrates this point.

  Year Killed Disappeared Attacks on editors Attacks on journalists

  2001

  17

  3

  102

  2002

  20

  99

  2003

  10

  96

  29

  2004

  13

  73

  15

  2005

  6

  63

  12

  2006

  9

  69

  12

  2007

  8

  75

  11

  2008

  5

  2

  48

  5

  2009

  9

  58

  10

  2010

  12

  58

  6

  2011

  6

  1

  80

  2012

  3

  91

  4

  Punitive psychiatry, that terrible instrument in the struggle against dissent, which had been eliminated with such difficulty under Gorbachev, was also revived. As in the past, there reportedly were numerous such cases.

  Opposition politicians, rights defenders, political commentators, and journalists vanished from television screens and the mass print media. They were regularly replaced, to use Stalinist jargon, by small cogs in Putin’s vertical power machine. The accusations against those who disappeared from public view were not always convincing. The result is that Russians think and vote as the Kremlin wants them to. The people are silent. Unfortunately, they no longer have any interest in these matters.

  The Games That Spies Play

  The revival of an obsession with espionage is always not merely a symptom that things are out of joint in Russia but also an indication that the leaders are beset by a complex of unseemly problems and improper schemes. Here we may recall the Lockhart Conspiracy that the Cheka had concocted as early as the summer of 1918, alleging that the English diplomat R. H. Bruce Lockhart intended to promote a coup d’état by suborning the Latvian riflemen who guarded the Kremlin. Naturally, the Chekist provocateurs “uncovered” the plot, thus averting the coup d’état they themselves had dreamed up. The history of the CPSU was a compulsory subject everywhere, so all students in higher educational institutions in the USSR learned this totally bogus story. It is revealing that the red terror began soon after the “discovery of the Lockhart plot,” this far-fetched attempt on the life of Ulyanov (Lenin). By employing torture the Stalinist investigators and procurators beat the “enemies of the people” into “confessing” that they were working for foreign intelligence services.

  The Leninist-Stalinist tradition of provocations slackened after the death of Stalin, the “Father of Nations,” in 1953. Of course, the West was regularly accused of “terrible provocations.” For example, the police or security service in some Western country might detain a Soviet diplomat or his wife in a store for attempted shoplifting. The Soviet side would immediately lodge a protest about another supposed provocation, although everyone knew that a petty thief had been seized. However, since they enjoyed diplomatic immunity, that was the end of it. Of course, Western special services were engaged in recruitment and the other work that agents do. Several of these cases became known, but as a rule, they didn’t become big scandals. There were other scandals that involved the expulsion of Soviet spies hiding under the cover of Soviet diplomatic representatives and the tit-for-tat expulsion of Western diplomats. Under Gorbachev these scandals subsided and disappeared entirely after the disgrace of the August 1991 attempted coup. Moreover, in late 1991 the USSR informed the Americans about the system of listening devices that had been implanted in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. For a long time the employees of Russia’s secret services were distressed that, as a result, their secret agent network was exposed. The Chekists forgot that their service was merely an auxiliary instrument of politics; that political decisions were made by Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Soviet foreign minister Boris Pankin, and Chairman of the KGB Vadim Bakatin; and that all of these democratically inclined officials had decided this matter unanimously.

  It cannot be denied that the USSR’s intelligence presence in the West was disproportionate and obviously excessive. For example, in 1987 there were sixty-one diplomats in the Soviet Representative Office in Geneva, of whom only twenty were employees of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the USSR, Byelorussia, and Ukraine.22 Moreover, many agents of the secret services were under deep cover as career diplomats, officials of other ministries and departments, scholars, and so forth.

  Despite the break that occurred during perestroika and, especially, in the last months of the USSR, the soil cultivated to manipulate society by using the supposed threat of domestic and foreign enemies remained arable and productive. This was already evident in the 1990s. After Putin came to power even more elaborate games took place that focused on the spy mania and secrecy, obvious signs of a return to the bad old days. This phenomenon was inevitable under Yeltsin because of the struggle between the doves and the hawks who needed to demonstrate clearly the utter insidiousness of domestic and foreign enemies; under Putin it was to justify the hardening of the regime and the elimination of dissenters.

  From Yeltsin’s administration forward it was understandable why Russian counterintelligence despised ecologists, given the catastrophic condition of Russia’s environment. For example, they did not appreciate the actions of the retired senior captain Alexander Nikitin, an expert for the Norwegian NGO Bellona Foundation who divulged the environmental hazards of nuclear contamination from aging Soviet nuclear submarines. Charges were filed against him in a local FSB case in Saint Petersburg in 1995. The authorities were likewise displeased with his publication of reports by ecologists about the contamination of northeastern Europe by nuclear waste from the Northern Fleet. This was the basis for accusing him of treason and divulging state secrets. He was tried and eventually acquitted, but it took him five years to clear his name.

  Another spy scandal connected with ecology was the arrest in 1997 of Junior Capt. Grigory Pas’ko, an employee of the paper Boevaia vakhta (Battle station), for cooperating with the maritime bureau of the Japanese television company NHK as well as the Japanese newspaper Asahi. Pas’ko was accused of “high treason.” In the winter of 1995, Japanese television broadcast his video showing the discharge of liquid radioactive waste into the Sea of Japan from the repair and dismantling of Russian atomic submarines. The video unleashed a storm in Japan. No well-informed, reasonable persons believed that Nikitin and Pas’ko were guilty of crimes.

  Several Western countries believed that during Yeltsin’s administration Russia had already significantly boosted its intelligence operations directed against them to Cold War levels. Official Moscow excused itself on the grounds that Russia was within its rights to use its intelligence services in defense of its national security. Moreover, in view of growing international cooperation among the special services, it was wrong to talk about a menacing Russian intelligence presence.

  We must point out several features of the Russian authorities’ espionage games. First is that after the downfall of the USSR, all the necessary material preconditions existed for them to play these games. W
ith the exception of the most enterprising persons who were able to prosper in the new conditions, everyone else, including officials, scholars, and other professionals, became impoverished and were desperate to earn money by whatever means. In order to survive, everybody traded whatever they could: books, crockery, and their bodies, among other things. Information, opportunities, and influence were all for sale. In this context, officials behaved in the most improper fashion, thereby laying the foundation for total corruption. Scholars who were driven to the edge of physical survival had no other recourse since their work, experience, and knowledge were of no interest whatsoever to the new authorities.

  Naturally, it would be the height of naïveté to suppose that foreign intelligence services were not engaged in recruiting Russian citizens. There is another, unquestionably vital side of the question—namely, industrial espionage. But some of the espionage scandals are beyond the bounds of reason.

  As someone who worked for many years in the field of science and understands the research methodology of Russian scholars, the sources to which they have access, and the degree of information they possess, I was struck by the case of Igor Sutyagin, head of the U.S. Defense Technology and Defense Economy Policy section in the Department of Political-Military Studies of the Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies, who was arrested in 1999 and given a sentence of over ten years. As a former employee of a department in this institute concerned with military matters, I was convinced from the outset that the charges against Sutyagin were baseless. The charges included passing information about missiles, military aircraft, the composition of the strategic nuclear forces, the Ministry of Defense’s progress in implementing plans to achieve a unified state of preparedness, and the composition and status of an early warning system in case of a missile attack. Not a single employee of the institute could get anywhere near any documents dealing with these matters, even if he had access to secret materials. Sutyagin lacked such clearance. Moreover, even if, on his own initiative, anyone possessing the highest level of clearance expressed an interest in these or similar questions, he not only would have failed to receive the relevant documents but also would have aroused extreme suspicion on the part of the special services.

  A terrible scandal erupted in the late 1970s when I worked in the Department of Military-Political Studies of the Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies. In an article published in an unclassified scholarly journal, my senior colleague supposedly let slip a vital state secret by revealing the contents of highly classified directives addressed to the Soviet delegation to nuclear missile disarmament negotiations with the United States. How could he have gotten access to the holiest of holies of Soviet policy? He hadn’t. As an honest professional whose job required him to publish articles, he had simply pondered the question of what position the Soviet representatives might take at the nuclear negotiations. His analysis was based on common sense and information from unclassified publications. Even the KGB could find no fault with him. There was raucous laughter in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. What sort of directives were they if their contents could be figured out by an ordinary scholar?

  In the case of Sutyagin, it was perfectly natural that he met, possibly not just on five occasions but many more times, with representatives of the special services of other countries. It is impossible for international specialists not to meet with their foreign counterparts, often with no way of knowing whether they belong to the special services. Another accusation against him was equally absurd: as a teacher at the Obninsk Training Center of the Russian Navy, he supposedly tried to ferret out secret information from the military cadres studying at the center to pass along to foreign agents.

  Of course, it is difficult to say anything definitive when the subject is espionage. This is especially so when the accused is a rather highly placed diplomat who, unlike a researcher at the Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, really may know a lot. However, doubts arose about the validity of the accusations of espionage against Valentin Moiseev, the former deputy director of the First Department of Asian Countries in the Russian Foreign Ministry, when a twelve-year sentence delivered by a Moscow municipal court handed down in December 1999 was commuted to four and a half years by another Moscow municipal court.

  Another case that raises serious questions is that of Anatoly Babkin, the director of the Department of Missile Technology at the Bauman State Institute of Technology in Moscow, who was taken into custody in April 2000. It should be emphasized at once that the Bauman Institute is an extremely important organization that is involved in extraordinarily sensitive issues. The name of the department that Babkin headed speaks for itself.

  This is a dark tale from beginning to end, since Babkin was initially the chief witness in the troubled case of the American citizen Edmond Pope and at first gave testimony confirming his espionage activities. Later Babkin recanted his testimony, saying it had been given under the pressure of the investigations and that he himself was on the verge of a heart attack.

  The story of Edmond Pope, who was arrested in April 2000, handed a twenty-year sentence, and then pardoned by President Putin in February 2001, merits inclusion in a textbook for beginning provocateurs. But that is not our focus here. After Pope returned to the United States, an accusation was leveled against Professor Babkin. The sentence of the court in his case, delivered in February 2003, deserves a round of applause. The court found Babkin guilty of transmitting information to the American spy Pope on the technical specifications of the Shkval high-speed submarine torpedo and sentenced him, in accordance with the article on high treason in the Criminal Code, to an eight-year suspended sentence. A single comment is in order: in Russia a suspended punishment for espionage happens only for espionage that never occurred.

  The list of pseudo spy scandals is extensive. For example, in January 2006, a spy scandal erupted around a stone. In brief, it was alleged that supposed agents for the United Kingdom, working under the cover of Great Britain’s embassy in Moscow, secreted espionage equipment under a rock in one of Moscow’s squares and then collected information from portable computers carried past it. No one had seen this rock, so a representative of the FSB triumphantly demonstrated a full-scale model of it. The FSB declared that it arrested the Russian agent and that he had started to confess. However, before long everyone, including the FSB, forgot about this. Moreover, the names of the four English evildoers, exposed through the heroic efforts of the FSB, were widely disseminated, but for some reason the “plotters” were not expelled from Russia. One of the main charges against the employees of the British Embassy was their participation in financing NGOs in Russia. This financial assistance also was presented as the main evidence of espionage activities on the part of the NGOs themselves.

  The Russian special services traditionally take an extremely jaundiced view of NGOs, especially those with links abroad. Chekist paranoia contends that Georgian and Ukrainian NGOs, using foreign funds and acting on the orders of their foreign sponsors, were behind the Rose and Orange Revolutions, respectively, in 2003 and 2004. With considerable experience in falsifying election results in Russia and planning to do it again, the Putinocracy could not help being scared by their own invented fears regarding the “subversive character” of NGOs, especially those financed from abroad. As a result of this phobia, in April 2006 new legislation took effect that severely hampered the work of NGOs and virtually empowered the government to shut down any of them at its own discretion. In addition, the needlessly complicated system of overseeing NGOs mandated by this legislation grants authorities the right to veto the financial and work plans of the NGOs. The NGOs also face pressure from the law regarding the struggle against extremism, as discussed earlier. In other words, any activity, not only of NGOs but also of private persons engaged in the defense of human rights, immediately becomes actionable as a manifestation of extremism, just as it was in the period from Lenin through Chernenko.

  Contrary to expectations, the
new legislation did not become the pretext for the mass elimination of NGOs; they were simply shown their place. Russians, already accustomed to a lack of freedom, began to play by the new rules of the game that were actually the traditional rules for Russia. But as noted previously, the law requiring those NGOs receiving funds from abroad to register as foreign agents threatened their very existence.

  In these ways, the Russian authorities applied themselves to uprooting the last shoots of a nonexistent civil society. Long before they reined in the Kremlin, the Chekists had achieved their goal of blocking the emergence of civil society. Their espionage games had succeeded.

  In 1875 Nikolai Nekrasov, the liberal Russian writer and critic, wrote that there had been worse times but none so base as the present. Even an outline of the Stages of the Great Path that, since the downfall of the USSR, Russian authorities have followed in restoring control over the people and in establishing their absolute power demonstrates that Nekrasov’s words apply even more to contemporary Russia than when they were written.

  The opportunities available to the Kremlin gods have increased immeasurably compared to any time in the past. Many factors are responsible. First is that the authorities completely ignore the law. Second is the submissiveness of the people. Here the view of the psychologist Liubov Vinogradova, executive director of the Independent Psychiatric Association of Russia, is worth considering. She observes that only around 15 percent of the Russian population engage in inquisitive behavior—that is, the ability to consider various options in order to improve one’s position. From this she concludes that, Russia “is a country of persons with ‘ingrained powerlessness.’” It is very easy to provoke persons in a state of ingrained powerlessness to engage in any kind of aggression.23 They are easily manipulated because they are not free. Finally, new technology enables the authorities to establish an unprecedented degree of control over persons and groups of interest to them.