Paul
Goble
Staunton, April 18 – Yesterday, a
Kaliningrad military court sentenced four activists of the Baltic Avantgarde of
the Russian Resistance (BARS) to lengthy prison terms: eight years in the case
of Aleksandr Orshulevich, six years each to Igor Ivanov and Aleksandr Mamayev,
and three years to Nikolay Sentsov, who was released because he, like the others,
has been in detention since the fall of 2017.
BARS, SeverReal journalist Yuliya
Paramonova reports, is a marginal group of monarchists who follow the Russian
Orthodox Church Outside of Russia. They’ve been accused of various things,
including owning weapons and explosive substances, but the chief complaint is
that they want to seize power and join Kaliningrad to the EU (severreal.org/a/30559840.html).
After initially trying them in open
court, the authorities closed the hearings because the defendants reported how
the authorities were inventing evidence and using false witnesses via the
Internet. Their supporters continue to speak out on their behalf but have not been
able to attend the trial since February.
The BARS activists were arrested during
the peak of the anti-Germanism campaign the authorities in Kaliningrad launched
four years ago, and they were immediately labeled fascists. But there is no
evidence of that: their actions have been exclusively within the law and against
issues like corruption.
The activists do call themselves Russian
nationalists but they also want to restore the historic name Koenigsberg to
Kaliningrad and rebuild the German Royal Castle in the center of the city that
was torn down in Soviet times. Their
lawyers say they will appeal their sentences as soon as they are given copies
of them.
Over the last three years, this case
has followed many twists and turns, although it has only rarely attracted
attention in Moscow and the West. That
is unfortunate, Mikhail Feldman, a Kaliningrad journalist argued last fall,
because it shows that Kaliningrad, long a testing ground for economic reform,
now is playing “the very same role in criminal practice.”
In the past, he observes, the
authorities there and elsewhere generally felt compelled to follow the letter
if not the spirit of the laws but this case shows that they do not any longer
feel any need to do that. And consequently, this case may prove a bellwether
for how the authorities will behave elsewhere (region.expert/bars/).
And that in turn means, he argued, on
the basis of his analysis of what the powers that be in Kaliningrad have been
doing in the case of the Baltic Avantgarde of the Russian Resistance, it is
entirely correct to describe the Russian state as a terrorist organization that
has become fundamentally illegitimate.
Since the BARS activists were
detained in 2017, Feldman points out, they have been the victims of tortures,
threats, blackmail, and all the kinds of things associated with a criminal
group but not with a normal government. Worse, the absurdity of the charges
which keep changing is that what is going on is clearly an act of revenge, a
mafia not state action.
But if the tactics the Russian
authorities have used over the last 30 months have changed little, he wrote, there
have been three major shifts in overall strategy that should be noted and
suggest a serious deterioration in what used to be called law enforcement by
the powers that be in the Russian Federation.
First
of all, the BARS members have been charged and mistreated not for actions they
have taken but on the bases of unconfirmed charges about their intentions. That opens the way for anyone under the power
of the Russian state to become a victim if it suits the purposes of those in
charge.
Second, two years ago and in most
cases at that time, Feldman said, the police and the courts at least nodded in
the direction of trying to come up with semi-plausible charges and to follow
established procedure. Now, the authorities feel they can act however they like
with impunity, again opening the way to a Hobbesian world or a totalitarian
one.
And third, the sentences that
prosecutors have demanded and the courts are now handing down are increasingly
draconian, far out of proportion to the crimes that the individuals supposedly
have thought about committing but that the powers that be lack the ability to
prove. They simply assert guilt and expect that to be accepted.
Taken together, these shifts mean
that the powers that be have shifted from trying to punish people after they
act to “preventive frightening of society” so that no one will think about
acting against the power vertical. Such actions are those of a criminal or
terrorist group, not those of a state that follows its own declared laws.
Moreover, the increasing proclivity
of the authorities to detain someone and then extend and extend their period
behind bars supposedly while an investigation is going on is little more than
the taking of hostages, again the action of terrorist groups or mafia-type
organizations rather than a legitimate state.
But perhaps most disturbing is that
the Russian pseudo-state is increasingly adopting laws that in and of
themselves violate the constitution but that allow the powers that be to say
they are acting legally and thus should not be condemned for their violations
of the rights and freedoms of their citizens.
That pattern, however, Feldman
concludes, is confirmation of Cicero’s observation that “the closer to the
collapse of an empire, the more insane its laws become.”
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