Diabetics in Saratov Deemed Threat to Russian National Security

insulinc Patriotic Russian diabetics treat their disease only with domestically produced insulin, such as Rosinsulin, pictured here. Photo courtesy of Medsintez Pharmaceutical Plant

For Insufficient Enthusiasm
Court Rules Saratov Regional Organization of Chronic Diabetes Sufferers “Foreign Agents.” Activists “Undermined the State’s Authority” by Questioning Insulin Produced in Russia
Nadezhda Andreyeva
Novaya Gazeta
March 28, 2018

Saratov’s Frunza District Court today concluded its hearing of administrative charges against the Saratov Regional Organization of Chronic Diabetes Sufferers. Judge Maria Agisheva ruled the diabetics had violated the law on “foreign agents.”

The defense had asked for a postponement of the hearing, since Moscow human rights lawyer Nikolai Dronov, who had been representing the diabetics in court the past five months, was unable to travel to Saratov today. In addition, the organization’s president, Larisa Saygina, had not been able to read the findings of a forensic examination of the case, submitted to the court on Friday, May 25. Judge Agisheva rejected the defense’s motion, but announced a half-hour recess so the diabetics could read the findings of court-appointed experts.

The forensis examination was carried out by faculty members at the Saratov State Legal Academy (SGYuA). The court had attempted to engage specialists from RANEPA and the Kazan Interregional Expertise Center, but they had turned down the court’s request on various pretexts. SGYuA had also rendered its expert opinion last year, when the administrative case was in the process of being filed. As we reported earlier, Professor Ivan Konovalov saw signs of the work of “foreign agents” in the activities of the diabetics organization. The forensic examination was performed by his SGYuA colleagues Associate Professor Elena Koloyartseva and Professor Viktor Kupin.

According to SGYuA’s experts, the Saratov Regional Organization of Chronic Diabetes Sufferers was awarded a grant of 712,000 rubles [approx. €9,800] from foreign pharmaceutical companies. The authors of the forensic examination thus concluded the organization had engaged in political activity, namely, it had submitted critical remarks about the work of officials to the authorities. According to the political scientists, the organization’s former head, Yekaterina Rogatkina, had publicly expressed doubts about the quality of insulin produced in Russia, thus undermining the Russian state’s authority. [The emphasis here and elsewhere is in the original article—TRR.]

The experts found it noteworthy the media reported on the filing of administrative charges against the diabetics organization. In particular, the commentary of the organization’s current president, Larisa Saygin, filmed for the Saratov TV program “Open Channel” on a city street, was regarded by the experts as a solo picket. According to SGYuA’s faculty members, the news report had been deliberately aired three months before the presidential election in order to discredit presidential candidate Vladimir Putin.

We should recall at this point it was Nikita Smirnov, the head of Putin’s student campaign headquarters in Saratov, who had filed the complaint against the diabetics with the the local prosecutor’s office.

As the experts emphasized in their findings, opposition leader Mikhail Khodorkovsky offered the Saratov diabetics legal assistance, which likewise testified to the organization’s guilt.

As indicated on SGYuA’s website, Professor Koloyartseva studied in the 1980s at the Saratov State Pedagogical Institute. In 2001, she was awarded a kandidat degree in political science. She serves on the public council of the Saratov Regional Duma. She is also a member of Civic Dignity, a grassroots organization that supports social and civic activism among young people and has been heavily involved in forums on moral and spiritual growth sponsored by the authorities.

According to the website Legal Russia, Viktor Kupin graduated from the Lenin Military Political Academy in 1978, while Saratov media outlets earlier reported he studied at the Engels Air Defense Academy.

Until 2007, Professor Kupin taught a course entitled “Philosophical and Political Problems of National Security” at military academies in Petersburg.

In 2004, Professor Kupin defended his doktor dissertation, entitled “The Geopolitical Imperatives of Global Security.”

In 2014, Kupin was an expert in the trial of Partnership for Development, an environmental organization that had operated in Saratov Region since 1995. The NGO received $42,000 from the US government to encourage civic involvement in the region’s villages and small towns. An anonymous complaint against Partnership for Development was filed with the prosecutor’s office on July 10, 2014. On July 22, an administrative case was opened against the organization under Article 19.34 of the Administrative Offenses Code (“Absence of registration in the relevant registry on the part of an organization performing the work of a foreign agent”).

Professor Kupin’s expert finding was ready the very same day. As he explained in court, he wrote the five pages of text in several hours, since he had been asked to do it “as soon as possible.” According to Professor Kupin, Partnership for Development showed clear signs of carrying out the “political orders of a foreign state, orders meant to undermine social stability, generate political tension in the region, expand the base of political influence on public opinion [sic], and implement US geopolitical interests.”

“The interest in Saratov Region was occasioned by its special place and exceptional geopolitical position in Russia as a lynch pin in the emergent Eurasian Union of Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan,” wrote Professor Kupin. “[Partnership for Development’s] activity runs counter to the security interests of Russia, which opposes the uni-polar dictatorship of the world, headed by the US.”

Less than a month after the prosecutor received the anonymous complaint, a court ruled Partnership for Development was a “foreign agent.” It was fined 300,000 rubles. Its chair, Olga Pitsunova, was also personally fined 100,000 rubles. Partnership for Development closed up shop.

At today’s hearing, Judge Agisheva denied the defense’s motion to summon its own expert witnesses to the trial. The diabetics were fined 300,000 rubles [approx. 4,100 euros]. The organization’s ex-president, Ms. Rogatkina, told us the diabetics would appeal the ruling.

“We are discouraged. This case was absurd from the outset. We consider it a miscarriage a justice.”

Putinist youth activist Nikita Smirnov. Photo courtesy of Novaya Gazeta

Last year, Mr. Smirnov, a student at the Saratov Medical University and head of Vladimir Putin’s student campaign headquarters, asked the Frunza District Prosecutor’s Office to verify whether the work of the diabetic organizations was covered by the law on “foreign agents.”

As the future physician told us, he had “read on the internet that the organization was financed by foreign companies, I don’t remember which.” He had felt it was his “civic duty” to “send a signal.”

Translated by the Russian Reader

The FSB’s Tall Tales

FSB Head Talks of Terrorist Attacks Prevented on Election Day
Russian Security Services Have Prevented Six Terrorist Attacks So Far This Year, Including at Polling Stations on Election Day and a Mall in Saratov
Yeveniya Malyarenko
RBC
April 10, 2018

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FSB Director Alexander Bortnikov. Photo by Sergei Guneyev. Courtesy of RIA Novosti and RBC

During the first quarter of 2018, the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) prevented six terrorist attacks. FSB director Alexander Bortnikov made this claim during a meeting of the National Anti-Terrorist Committee (NAC), reports TASS.

According to Bortnikov, all the attacks were stopped in the planning stage. However, Bortnikov intimated that insurgents had hoped to carry out some of the attacks at polling stations in Ingushetia and Bashkortostan during the March 18 Russian presidential election. Thus, in February, as part of a counter-terrorist operation in Ingushetia’s Nazran District “that encountered armed resistance,” Bortnikov said, “two bandits who were supporters of Islamic State” (an organization banned in Russia) were killed while planning an attack.

In March, FSB officers detained two members of a “radical right-wing group” in Bashkortostan. As Bortnikov stressed, both individuals were planning to carry out terrorist attacks at polling stations in Ufa. Subsequently, two “high-powered” homemade explosive devices were seized in the homes of the detained individuals.

In addtion, as Bortnikov reported, FSB officers eliminated several members of another IS cell while trying to detain them.

“They were planning to carry out a terrorist attack at a shopping mall in Saratov,” Bortnikov explained, stressing the security services had discovered weapons and a homemade explosive device containing the equivalent of nearly three kilos of TNT in the possession of the alleged terrorists.

Translated by the Russian Reader

NB. When reading this account of the FSB’s alleged successes in preventing terrorist attacks, it is hard not wonder whether its stats for the first quarter of 2018 included the yeoman’s work the agency has done in unmasking the would-be terrorists of the so-called Network and the New Greatness movement, two organizations that were, allegedly, planning nothing less than armed insurrection nationwide.

The only problem is all the real evidence points to the FSB’s having fabricated these terrorist organizations from whole cloth, in the first case, torturing eight utterly harmless antifascists in Penza and Petersburg into confessing their nonexistent guilt and, in the second case, embedding undercover agents in a tiny, loosely aquainted group of people, who were just as harmless, and actively encouraging them to establish an equally fictitious “militant group.”

When you know the gory details of these stories, you find it is plausible that Director Bortnikov’s tales of the FSB’s derring-do in Ingushetia and Bashkortostan are convenient fictions, too.

Judge for yourself. Or, if you don’t believe me or the two dozen translated articles listed below, read about the Penza-Petersburg “terrorism” case in Newsweek. TRR

Petersburg Activists Rally in Support of Saratov Antifascist Sergei Vilkov

Petersburg Activists Rally in Support of Saratov Antifascist Sergei Vilkov
David Frenkel
Special to The Russian Reader
June 1, 2015

On Saturday, May 30, activists from the Russian Socialist Movement (RSD) organized a theatrical protest rally, entitled “#I Am Sergei Vilkov, or Pinning Labels,” on the Field of Mars in central Petersburg.

Socialist activists rallying in support of Saratov journalist Sergei Vilkov in Petersburg, May 30, 2015. The placard on the far right reads, “Antifascism is not a crime, journalism is not extremism. I am Sergei Vilkov.”

The activists demanded an end to the persecution of Sergei Vilkov, an independent journalist and antifascist in Saratov, who was physically assaulted in January of this year by two unknown assailants and has been accused by various local authorities of “extremism.” In one particular instance in April of this year, Vilkov was fined 1,000 rubles by a Saratov court for having posted, in November 2011, a caricature on his personal page on the VKontakte social network that fused the logo of the ruling United Russia party and a swastika.

Vilkov has blamed his troubles on Saratov businessman and Saratov Regional Duma deputy Sergei Kurikhin. Earlier, Vilkov had published articles in the local monthly news magazine Obshchestvennoe Mnenie (Public Opinion), exposing Kurikhin’s dubious political and business dealings.

Activists at the rally on the Field of Mars held placards demanding prosecution for the persons who, allegedly, assaulted Vilkov in January and decrying censorship.

Symbolizing the alliance between the authorities and business, two activists were dressed as a judge and a “new Russian,” who wore a crimson jacket, popularly regarded as typical attire for gangster businessmen during the “wild nineties” in Russia.

“New Russian” and “Judge” at Saturday’s protest rally

The “judge” and the “new Russian” brought with them a criminal case file full of labels, such as “foreign agent,” “atheist,” “fifth columnist, “tolerast” (an insulting slang term applied to people regarded as having excessively politically correct values), “forbidden by censorship,” and “offends religious sensitivities.” These labels and epithets are typically applied to critics and opponents of the current Russian authorities.

The two men hung and pinned these labels to the other activists who were present in order to “make them feel like Sergei Vilkov.”

“Judge” labels activist a “tolerast” at Saturday’s rally.

The socialist activists are convinced that Vilkov’s case is not an anomaly. Travesties of justice in the courts, political crackdowns against opposition activists, censorship, corruption, and the fusion of political authority and business are rather typical of Russia, they argue.

All photographs by and courtesy of David Frenkel

Saratov Anti-Fascist Sergei Vilkov Accused of “Nazi Propaganda”

Journalist Sergei Vilkov Accused of Nazi Propaganda at Alexander Lando’s Request
February 25, 2015
Obshchestvennoe Mnenie (om-saratov.ru)

Today, Obshchestvennoe Mnenie journalist Sergei Vilkov, a member of the anti-fascist movement, was charged by the regional directorate of the Center for Extremism Prevention (Center “E”) under Article 20.3 of the Administrative Code (“Propaganda of Nazi symbols”). The charge was based on a November 2011 cartoon, featuring the logo of the ruling United Russian party and a swastika, that denounced links between the authorities and nationalist movements. The cartoon was posted on the VKontakte social network in connection with the fact that Saratov City Hall issued permission for a march by right-wing radicals on November 4th.

Saratov journalist and anti-fascist Sergei Vilkov

Charges were filed after Center “E” followed up on a public request by Alexander Lando, head of the Saratov Regional Public Chamber, to check the contents of Sergei Vilkov’s social network accounts.

Foreign Agent

What the Center for Social Policy and Gender Studies in Saratov, Russia, did to get branded a “foreign agent” by a local court: it ran a research project entitled Reexamining Social Policy in the Post-Soviet Space: Ideologies, Actors and Cultures, and it published a book entitled The Critical Analysis of Social Policy in the Post-Soviet Space. Don’t let it happen to you.

There are more details on this particular case here (in Russian). And here is Wikipedia’s helpful summary of the Russian foreign agent law, and RIA Novosti’s roundup of its own English-language articles on the topic.

Photo: Graffiti (“Foreign agent!”) painted on the wall outside the offices of the human rights group Memorial in Moscow (courtesy of Memorial’s web site).