Almost every Friday, the Russian Ministry of Justice adds new names to the list of foreign agents. With the granting of such a status to a new defendant, those who are already in it, and simply sympathetic people, usually begin to congratulate each other. The same thing happens with those who fall on the sanctions lists of Western countries. They receive the same attention from the patriotic public and, at least in public, are proud of their status. How foreign agents and people under Western sanctions suddenly found themselves in the same boat, recounts journalist Ekaterina Vinokurova in her column for Russian media.
First and third
The United States recently extended personal sanctions against the Russians. The lists included Moscow region children’s ombudsman Ksenia Mishonova, DPR ombudsperson Daria Morozova, Russia’s human rights commissioner Tatiana Moskalkova and others, as reported by the US Treasury.
Under the restrictions, among others, Deputy Prime Minister Victoria Abramchenko, presidential aide Igor Levitin and head of the Ministry of Education Sergei Kravtsov. The rector of the St. Petersburg Mining University Vladimir Litvinenko and the assistant to the president – the head of the control department of the head of state Dmitry Shalkov were also on the lists.
I happen to know one of the new defendants on the labor sanctions lists quite well. “Ho are you doing?” I asked and received an unexpected response: “Everyone congratulates me.
Something similar happens on social media on Fridays, when I post lists of upcoming foreign agents. The people involved in these national lists admit it: when the first people were declared foreign agents, everyone was scared. NGOs were looking for national funding, people were refusing grants and fees. Those who signed up on the lists of foreign agents searched desperately for what to do: continue, leave, change their lives? How to make money, who to work with?
When the number of these people exceeded one hundred, the mood clearly changed. In social networks, the newly created foreign agents began to write congratulations and greeting addresses of those who had received this status earlier, and the rest got used to the bad expectation of their names on the lists, resigned to the idea that “we’ll all be there.”
What should have been frightening, as all punctual repressions frighten, became mass, and uselessly mass, began to lose its terrible essence. Moreover, the more the law on foreign agents became tougher, the more it became clear that it could no longer be avoided by simply remaining a critic of the authorities, but by avoiding people who had this status. A link in social networks to a foreign agent, a comment to the foreign media-agent, monetization on Youtube, an advertisement posted by a foreign company on a blog, or even a completely unknown “foreign influence” is enough.
Sharafmaksumov / Adobe Stock
Recently, the Ministry of Justice and deputies of the State Duma also announced the emergence of certain “third parties” who, not themselves being foreign agents, help in one way or another foreign agents to circumvent restrictions, for example on education.
decent people
“You know, congratulations on social media, kind words are fine, but I still sat there for a day in amazement, I only made a few mechanical bubbly comments,” one of the foreign agents.
Checking my guess, I call another friend of mine who is on the sanctions list (not among State Duma deputies, public politicians, defense industry employees, government, etc. .). In a mechanical voice, he reports that he is happy to be on the same list as his acquaintances, with “decent people”, and it is only at the end of the conversation that he says:
We will all be there. You can enter too, even if you haven’t done anything. There are no rules, for example, they say, put a dove of peace on your profile picture or write “No ***” and you will not fall under the penalty. And since there are no rules, you don’t know what can be broken. Well, they went … (i.e. West – author’s note)
But really, what did, for example, the children’s ombudsman of the Moscow region Ksenia Mishonova, who, apparently, is accused of participating in the forcible transfer of Ukrainian children to Russia? She, like children’s mediators from other regions, works in her case in the Moscow region and does not take anyone anywhere. His task, like other regional mediators, is to provide assistance to children who have already been brought to their region. They can’t make any fundamental decisions, and roughly speaking their range of powers is in the “ignore or help improve conditions, heal, don’t leave in the streets” range.
No less strange than, for example, entering the lists of foreign agents of environmental organizations, Western sanctions against various Russian universities that teach students specialties in oil and gas or geological exploration resemble.
Games without rules
@parliament_europeen / Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Sanctions lists are not regulated by any centralized legislation. In addition, the lists of the European Union, the USA, Canada can be quite different from each other. As in the case of a foreign agency, the sanctions are pronounced amicably without the right for a person to explain themselves and sometimes even to understand clearly why they have been punished.
Representatives of the emigre opposition abroad are proud of their draft sanctions lists, and at the same time, anonymous and not very telegraphic channels write public denunciations, demanding that everyone they do not like be recognized as foreign agents.
For example, recently a conservative publicist demanded that I be recognized as a foreign agent for reposting photos from the coronation of Charles III and a separate article on Camilla Parker-Bowles and Lady Diana.
People with similar voices to producer Iosif Prigogine and former senator Farhad Akhmedov also complained about the lack of rules towards each other in a well-known phone conversation. By the way, the latter also fell under sanctions, although he has had nothing to do with Russian politics for many years.
People with these voices expressed to each other a very clear anti-war position, criticized the Russian authorities right up to the country’s top leadership. However, as soon as the discussion turned to the West and the sanctions, they immediately agreed: no, there are no friends there, because all obligations are violated and this what seemed like a citadel of stability has become too unpredictable. It is also characteristic that the Russian opposition abroad is mentioned at all, or only in the context of “traitors”. That is, the only people left with them are themselves and their friends, the same expensive (or cheap) Russians.
From our list to yours
Sergei Karpov / TASS
Western sanctions, as well as domestic “foreign agent” status, were initially designed as an instrument of pressure on various elites, but in both cases it is the Russians who are being pressured. The purpose of Western sanctions was to sow divisions in these elites in order to put pressure on the existing political regime in Russia. The purpose of the national sanctions was to oust the most radical critics from the public sphere.
Both turned out to be a failure, because the authors of the ideas themselves got too carried away. Having taken stock, they began to change their own rules in a hurry, until they were no longer understood by everyone, including themselves. But it made it possible to use such mechanisms to settle personal scores, develop a whistleblower system, and so on. Moreover, the same foreign agents participate in the development of the sanctions lists, and the participants in the sanctions lists try as best they can to multiply the number of foreign agents.
The response to the chaos has been the consolidation of those who fall into certain lists – foreign agents or sanctions – within their group and the unwitting association with them of those who believe that in the absence of rules they will inevitably fall into this group.
The effectiveness of such tools begins to tend towards zero, except for the personal annoyances of the defendants. Perhaps the most interesting political event of the year would be the meeting of foreign agents with those who fell under sanctions in a neutral country to exchange mutual accusations and secrets of survival. However, even if that happened, perhaps its participants would end up with a double status: “foreign agent – is on the sanctions list”.
One of the people affected by the sanctions lists, in response to my question of whether it is possible to challenge this status in court in his case, said to me:
– Listen, ask our mutual friend, Alexei Venediktov * about this!
And then he remembers:
– Oh, yes, he’s a foreign agent…
The opinion of the author may not coincide with the opinion of the editors
* included in the Unified Register of Foreign Agents of the Ministry of Justice of Russia
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