The Real Russia. Today. 25 years since Russia’s deadliest post-Soviet earthquake, plus data journalism proves judicial deference to the FSB

Wednesday, January 6, 2021

• 25 years ago, an earthquake destroyed the town of Neftegorsk in Russia’s Sakhalin region and killed two thousand people.
• Outside feature story: Novaya Gazeta data journalist shows how Russian courts bow to FSB secrecy in residency cases
• News briefs: Sputnik V on the march, and putting rich Russians’ tax rubles to use

Feature stories

🕯️ ‘Everything that could fall had already fallen’ (4,200 words)

In the fall of 1995, Neftegorsk was officially declared dead — only a memorial, a chapel, and a cemetery were left standing. Earlier that year, on the night of May 28, 1995, the deadliest earthquake in modern Russian history completely destroyed the town. According to official data, 2,040 people were killed — more than half of the town’s residents. Meduza correspondent Alexey Yurtayev spoke with survivors of the earthquake, visited the site where the city once stood, and reconstructed the tragic events in detail.

Feature stories from other outlets (summaries by Meduza)

⚖️ Who are judges to judge? (260 words)

Daria Talanova, data journalist — Novaya Gazeta

If Russia’s Federal Security Service wants to deport a foreigner by seeking the revocation of his or her residency permit, judges will almost always oblige. When the FSB isn’t involved (Russia’s Interior Ministry is the agency actually responsible for filing these lawsuits and usually handles these cases itself), courts are far likelier to uphold someone’s residency permit. The most crucial factor is the presentation of evidence: by law, the Interior Ministry has to make its case, except when relying on the conclusions of the FSB, which typically claims state secrecy and asks judges to take it on faith.

Randomly selecting 100 lawsuits between 2012 and 2019 where trial courts across Russia refused to challenge the FSB’s findings in residency cases, Talanova mapped the patterned formulas judges use in their rulings to accept the FSB’s conclusions without question, “indirectly confirming a violation of the legal system’s independence.” She identified three different recurring arguments: (1) the court lacks the right to assess the FSB’s conclusions, (2) the FSB’s refusal to present evidence isn’t grounds to reject its conclusions, and (3) the court accepts the FSB’s conclusions because it has no right to demand the agency’s evidence. Some of these arguments are more popular in certain regions, while others pop up all over the country.

Most of the foreigners who lose their residency in cases featuring this formulaic language are from Central Asia, but Chinese, U.S., and Turkish citizens are exceptions. Talanova says the FSB is able to conceal its “true motives” (which often amount to geopolitically-motivated discrimination) by claiming (without sharing evidence) that someone presents a national security threat.

Other news in brief

• 💉 More than a mil now. (210 words.) More than one million people in Russia have been vaccinated against the coronavirus with “Sputnik V,” the vaccine’s developers announced on Twitter on Wednesday. (According to a public opinion survey conducted by the independent Levada Center in December 2020, 58 percent of Russians don’t want to be immunized with the Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine.)
• 💰 Eat the rich. (300 words.) President Putin announced the creation of a foundation to support seriously ill children. The state is funding the initiative with taxes raised on high-earners

🎂 Tomorrow in history: 59 years ago tomorrow, on January 7, 1962, political analyst and fascist philosopher Alexander Dugin was born in Moscow. In the West, Dugin is known (rather foolishly) as “Putin’s Rasputin” and “Putin’s brain.”