The career boost Why Russian police are prosecuting more people for treason

Late last month in Krasnodar, another sentence was handed down under statute 275 of Russia's criminal code: high treason. Air-traffic controller Pyotr Parpulov got 12 years in prison for divulging classified information while abroad. Before the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine conflict only three or four cases were tried under this law each year. Now the statute for crimes against the state has become popular, with nearly two dozen such cases under investigation in 2015 alone. This is not the first time a wave of spy-mania has swept Russia—the last one at the end of the 1990s and the early 2000s marked a period during which the Federal Security Service (FSB) extended its influence. In a special report for Meduza, Vera Chelishcheva of the newspaper Novaya Gazeta compares previous cases to the present ones, speaking with the people involved.

Spy-Mania

In late January 2016, a closed session of a Krasnodar court sentenced yet another person under article 275 of Russia’s criminal code (for treason) to 12 years in a maximum security prison. The judge ruled that Pyotr Parpulov, a 60-year-old air-traffic controller from Sochi, had divulged state secrets while on vacation abroad in 2010. Whatever secrets he disclosed remains unknown; all cases under article 275 are classified. Parpulov’s lawyers say there was no substantiating evidence in the case, arguing that all the information he shared while abroad was openly available, including on the website of the popular military newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda.

Relatives of the flight dispatcher had already appealed to President Vladimir Putin in a letter before the sentencing, asking that he be released under house arrest. (Parpulov suffers from congestive heart failure and hypertension.) There was no response to the letter. Prosecutors called for a 13-year sentence, while the judge shaved off a year out of consideration for Parpulov's advanced age.

In the span of 2014–2015, information came out regarding more than 20 such defendants. There's quite a variety among the group: mothers of multiple children, sailors in the Black Sea Fleet, former directors of restricted-access enterprises and defense factories, employees of Russia’s military intelligence (the GRU), and police officers. The widely publicized case of Svetlana Davydova, whom prosecutors wanted jailed for a phone call to the Ukrainian Embassy, was dismissed for lack of evidence. But thanks to the attention that case garnered, it became clear that there are numerous similar ones, in which both the investigation and trial are completely closed and about which virtually no information is available to the public.

Back in August 2015, Meduza reported on Russians accused of treason since the beginning of the conflict in southeast Ukraine. Six months later, some of them have been sentenced, but the majority still await trial. 

Among these people is former police officer Roman Ushakov got 15 years in a maximum security facility for giving CIA agents secret information (the telegram cypher for the Interior Ministry) for a reward of 37,000 Euros ($41,000). According to investigators, Ushakov communicated with CIA contacts using the legendary “spy rock.” 

The 73-year-old former director of the Ukrainian factory Znamia, Yuri Soloshenko, was sentenced to six years for spying on behalf of Ukraine. (He allegedly obtained secret components for the S-300 surface-to-air missile system intended “for the restoration of Ukraine’s air defense.”) 

Vladislav Nikolskii, a former senior researcher at the Russian Navy’s main shipbuilding and weapons design institute, was jailed for eight years at the end of 2015 for spying for Ukraine. He supposedly gave Ukrainian associates technical documentation for the Zubr amphibious assault hovercraft (built in the late 1970s by the Almaz design bureau in St. Petersburg), as well as a classified catalogue of technical standards for Soviet-era military ships.

Evgenii Petrin, a former employee of the Russian Orthodox Moscow Patriarchate’s Department of External Church Relations, awaits trial after being arrested in 2014 and charged with treason for aiding the United States. He calls himself a captain in the Federal Security Service (FSB) charged with working with the church organization “as a cover.” From 2011 to 2013, Petrin really did work for the FSB, before taking the church position. Relatives of the defendant claim he managed to uncover a ring of agents working for the US within the Russian Orthodox Church “to split the Russian and Ukrainian churches.” The FSB ignored the information he gathered, Petrin says, and he was detained, instead.

Also awaiting trial are others accused of treason, like Lithuanian national Evgenii Mataitis (who the FSB says gathered information on Russian armed forces), 74-year-old Moscow State Technical University teacher Vladimir Lapygin, and two residents of the Krasnodar region known only by their last names, Nakhatkian and Kesian. Among the new defendants charged under article 275 in late 2015 was also reserve Baltic Fleet Lieutenant-Colonel Fyodor Boriskin, given 12 years for spying on behalf of Poland. Physicist Valerii Selianin, too, was sentenced to 15 years in a maximum security prison for having supposedly given foreign citizens “consultation or other assistance” that was damaging to Russian state security. Yet even Selianin’s state-appointed defense lawyer has stated that the case has “neither the evidence, nor the events for a crime.”

Maksim Liudomirskii, head engineer at a Moscow research and development facility, was held for nine years in a maximum security prison for “giving secret information to a foreign government.”

Former Moscow region police chief directorate worker Evgenii Chistov received a 13-year sentence for “treason in the form of espionage” (the FSB claims he “proactively established contact with the CIA for selfish motives,” after which he worked for three years as an American informant being paid to collect and pass on classified information he had access to through his work).

Former military intelligence (GRU) radio engineer Gennadii Kravtsov was sentenced last fall to 14 years for having submitted a resume for a job in Sweden several years after leaving the GRU. The court ruled that information he’d submitted constituted state secrets. Additionally, another Russian citizen by the name of Viktor Shura was given 12 years in a case about which there is no information whatsoever.

Eight years is rather humane

The reasons for this spike in cases, it appears, is not the activation of foreign intelligence operations inside Russia, but amendments to article 275 of the criminal code passed in 2012, which expanded the definition of treason to go beyond mere sharing of state secrets, to include providing “consultation services to representatives of foreign state.” Judging by what little is known of cases brough under article 275, potential suspects are by no means required to have access to state secrets or possess secret information – it’s enough just to be in contact with foreigners.

The treason cases that state prosecutors and the FSB report on almost weekly share one common characteristic; in most cases it’s impossible for suspects or defendants to exercise their rights to a proper defense. Frequently these cases are handled by state-appointed lawyers, who tend to side with the investigators and counsel their clients to confess their guilt.

For a related story, see
An indefensible public defender system: How Russia’s state-appointed attorneys help prosecutors get convictions

Andrei Stebenev, the lawyer initially assigned to defend Svetlana Davydova, was subsequently stripped of his right to practice for providing his client inadequate legal assistance. Far less widely known, however, is that Stebenev was the lead attorney for yet another defendant charged with treason: Gennadii Kravtsov (the radio engineer who sent a resume to Sweden). In that lawyer’s presence, both Kravtsov and Davydova submitted confessions to investigators. Kravtsov recanted after his case was taken on by private counsel, but that was not enough to save him from the 14-year sentence.

73-year-old Yuri Soloshenko went all the way to trial with a court-appointed defender; his relatives were unable to cope with pressure from investigators, who had assigned the lawyer.

“We are not going to appeal the sentence. Eight years in a maximum security prison colony is a rather humane punishment,” Andrei Riumin told journalists after his appointed client, former naval researcher Vladislav Nikolskii, was jailed.

Yet another common thread between these cases is lawyers’ inability to find a way to defend their clients. Indictments sometimes lack the list of information that allegedly constitutes state secrets, as that list is itself considered to be classified and is thus hidden from defense attorneys, despite being the very basis of the criminal charges.

All trials take place in closed sessions, and defense attorneys are required to sign nondisclosure agreements under penalty of prosecution under statute 283 of the criminal code (divulging state secrets). According to the lawyers, investigators put pressure on the relatives of the accused, intimidating them out of talking to journalists.

The first spy wave

Lawyers and former defendants in cases brought under article 275 surveyed by Meduza suggest the intensity of spy-mania increases in the “troubled times” of economic crises and local conflicts. Russia's first post-Soviet spike in criminal cases for treason started in the late 1990s.

“The FSB underscores its usefulness in only one way: by catching spies. That's the case, though there are virtually zero. That’s why, incidentally, there are never open judicial proceedings on these cases,” says military journalist Grigorii Pasko. “And objectively speaking there’s nowhere for these spies to come from. All this time, they’ve looked for them in intelligence and counterintelligence agencies, within the special services itself. There are special departments for tracking the activities of scientists in [state] institutes.”

In 1997, then Captain Second-Rank Pasko—in parallel with his work for the Pacific Fleet’s newspaper Boevaya Vakhta—was paid for freelance work with the Russian Far East bureau of the Japanese TV channel NHK, as well as the Japanese newspaper Asahi. The FSB branch for the Pacific Fleet brought criminal charges against him, accusing the journalist of taking money from the Japanese in exchange for secret information about Russia's defense capabilities. In 2001, a judge found Pasko guilty and sentenced him to four years behind bars.

“Everybody, including the chekists [a nickname referring to the first Soviet secret police], knew I was no kind of spy,” says Pasko. “But they needed to convict a journalist for disobeying the FSB and investigating something he wasn't supposed to: radioactive waste, decommissioned ships, corruption in the Navy high command. Even Putin, when we met in November 1999, said ‘of course there was no divulging of state secrets, but an order from the minister of defense was violated.’ [Pasko refers to orders No.10 and No.55 of the last Soviet defense minister, Dmitrii Yazov, which banned military personnel from interacting with foreigners and established certain information as classified within the army.] Nobody explained to Putin—a lawyer—that the law overrides any order. And that in this case the law was not broken.”

In a conversation with Meduza, lawyer Mikhail Trepashkin attributed the wave of espionage cases in the 1990s to an influx of new people into the security services who were unfamiliar with state secrecy practices. These concepts were well-ingrained for future lawyers and intelligence agents under the USSR, but not in post-Soviet Russia, he explains.

A former KGB and then an FSB agent, Trepashkin is among those who allege security service involvement in the 1999 apartment bombings in Moscow and Volgodonsk. That same story was supported by another FSB agent, Aleksandr Litvinenko, who fled Russia and later died of polonium poisoning, as well as another London émigré, oligarch Boris Berezovsky. (The two men collaborated on the production of a book, banned in Russia as extremist, and a film, “Blowing Up Russia.”) Trepashkin gained fame after a legendary 1998 press conference, in which he, Litvinenko, and several other active FSB employees (some of them in masks) announced they’d been given orders to take out Berezovsky. In addition, Trepashkin worked as an aide to Berezovsky, when the oligarch was a deputy in the State Duma.

In 2002, after he gave another “whistleblower” interview, Trepashkin was subject to a search that turned up documents related to his service from 1984 through 1997. Investigators considered Trepashkin’s handoff of wiretap reports on the phone conversations of members of the Golyanovsky crime syndicate [a notorious Moscow-based gang in the 1990s] to his former colleague, FSB Colonel Viktor Shebalin, to qualify as divulging classified information. Trepashkin was sentenced to four years for disclosing state secrets and for the unlawful possession of munitions that he says were planted.

“In the USSR, it was clearly established what was to be considered a state secret and what was treason: activity that inflicted or could inflict damage on the security of the state. And that damage had to be real,” Trepashkin says. “And there were criteria according to which such damage was assessed. Then came new personnel, who knew as much about these criteria as a pig knows about pineapples. They took the list of information that could cause damage if disclosed, and began to judge it purely mechanically. Scientists, for example, were always a reliable contingent; the never objected to government missteps in political or economic matters. But they often seek material for their work in foreign sources, consulting with their foreign colleagues. And state security organs have started to focus on this in particular since the late 1990s.”

Grigorii Pasko adds that among the sweeping reforms of nearly all Russian state institutions in the early 1990s, perhaps the most “primitive and vague” was the “FSB law” in 1995. “[After being released,] I worked as an assistant to [Duma deputy] Sergei Yushenkov, and my job consisted of preparing amendments to article 275 of the Russian criminal code, followed by draft legislation on lustration [a process of screening and dismissing civil servants on the basis of past Soviet activities]. Later [in 2003] Yushenkov was killed. It’s a rhetorical question: who has even proposed the notion of a law on lustration in the last decade?” Pasko says concepts of enemy action and damage to state interests, on which charges under article 275 should be based, remained unclear in the most widely-known cases of that era: those of the ecologist Aleksandr Nikitin, researcher Oskar Kaibyshev, East Asia specialist Valentin Moiseev, physicist Valentin Danilov, Academy of Sciences’ Institute for US and Canadian Studies scholar Igor Sutiagin, and many others. They were convicted just the same, and most were given long sentences. Nevertheless, the need for proof of damage and anti-state intent became a real sticking point for the FSB. “Even the FSB experts from their own security directorate said that my actions did not cause and could not have caused harm,” Trepashkin recalls.

A guaranteed promotion

The FSB scored a serious institutional victory in 2012, when amendments to article 275 removed the requirement of proving enmity or that someone had actually inflicted damage. “Treason” could now describe consulting, financial, technical, or material assistance to foreign organizations “if their activity is oriented against national security.”

“The norm became elastic, and it allows virtually anything to be interpreted as treason,” says lawyer and former state prosecutorial investigator Andrei Grivtsov. “You won’t find a more ambiguous or fuzzy phrasing,” remarks lawyer Ivan Pavlov. “Treason could be understood to include simply helping another government.”

Since the late 1990s, Ivan Pavlov has specialized in protecting the public's right to access official information, and he's defended citizens charged with disclosing state secrets.

It was Pavlov who, along with a group of journalists and rights activists, challenged a presidential decree on the classification of Defense Ministry reports of military losses in peacetime before the Russian Supreme Court in spring 2015. The court upheld the decree, and now anybody trying to prove the participation of Russian armed forces personnel in the conflict in eastern Ukraine by using data on casualties can be charged with treason.

The current search for spies, according to Pavlov, is connected exclusively to the events in Ukraine. “Like many of my colleagues, I am certain that the issue is the militarist rhetoric of the authorities. There are external enemies, and by the logic of the security services in such a complex time there must also be internal [enemies]. Article 275 is aimed at them,” the lawyer contends.

The sharp rise in charges brought under article 275 began in March 2014, after the beginning of the armed conflict in Ukraine.

In all, as of December 2015, more than 20 people had been arrested and charged with treason. According to statistics from the judiciary department of the Supreme Court, the number of sentences under the statute has tripled since 2014 in comparison with years prior.

In addition, investigators in these “spy cases” seem to show particular zealotry, as such work is almost always a guarantee of promotion in position and rank. “I have witnessed it personally in the cases I take on; investigators and operational staff just see their careers skyrocket,” Pavlov says.

Former investigator Andrei Grivtsov says yet another cause for the increase in cases under article 275 has been their exemption from review in jury trials. Russian jurors were given that right in 2003, after which the first wave of cases quickly died off. And yet, five years later, the FSB ushered a law through the State Duma that prevented jury trials in cases relating to treason and espionage.

“Jury trials worked as a sort of filter,” Grivtsov explains. “Investigators always treated them with greater responsibility, more meticulously gathering evidence. In the event of doubts about a case’s outcome, they would agree to reclassify the alleged actions of the defendant under less severe charges. Now, though, investigators have no fear of classifying the actions of suspects under article 275, because they are sure that a professional judge—unlike jurors—will always be on the side of the prosecution.”

According to Ivan Pavlov, it was difficult to litigate these cases. In the 1990s, having just started his practice, the situation was somewhat different. “At the end of the 1990s, court proceedings in treason cases were only partially conducted in closed sessions. Now the court procedures are completely closed and all materials that form the basis of the allegations against a client are classified. I am not even permitted to read the regulations which the defendant is accused of violating.”

The attorney says he has to sign a nondisclosure oath for preliminary investigation data each time. Even then, the issue is not the documentation containing the state secrets, but more generally concerns any documents whatsoever—up to and including, in many cases, a ban on publicly naming his clients.

Lawyers don't expect a decline in article 275 cases any time soon. “We’ve had a falling out not just with our distant, but with even our closest, neighbors,” says Trepashkin. “Wrapping ourselves once more in a cocoon, we want to isolate ourselves from the outside world and give the impression that we’re encircled by enemies. It’s the ideal atmosphere for seeking out spies.”

“Just look at how our regional elites react to the liberal opposition in Russia, calling specific people ‘traitors’ and members of ‘fifth column.’ When you have that kind of demand in society, you'll always be able to find people in law enforcement who are ready to offer satisfaction,” Pavlov concludes.